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Nationalism and Modernism

In light of its remarkable resurgence in the last two decades, how do we explain
the continuing power of nationalism today? Why do so many people remain
attached to their nations? Are nations and nationalism recent phenomena, or
can we trace their roots far back in history?
These are some of the questions addressed in Anthony Smith’s thought-provoking
analysis of recent approaches and theories of nations and nationalism
...
In the second part
he presents the critics of modernism and their alternatives, from the
primordialisms of van den Berghe and Geertz to the ethno-symbolic approaches
of Armstrong and Smith, as well as the contributions of, among others, SetonWatson, Greenfeld, Horowitz, Connor, Reynolds and Brass
...

The first comprehensive theoretical survey of the subject of nationalism for nearly
thirty years, Nationalism and Modernism provides a concise and balanced guide to
its often confusing debates, revealing a rich and complex field rent by deep
disagreements and rival paradigms
...


Anthony D
...
His previous publications include
Theories of Nationalism (1971, 1983), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), National
Identity (1991) and Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (1995)
...
Smith

London and New York

First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003
...
Smith
All rights reserved
...

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Smith, Anthony D
...
Smith
p
...

Includes bibliographical references and index
...
Nationalism
...
Title
...
N5388 1998
320
...
Whereupon West, we
are told, replied that
the event intended to be commemorated took place on the 13th September
1758 [actually 1759] in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and
Romans, and at a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their
costume, any longer existed
...
If, instead of the
facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood
by posterity!
(John Galt, The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esquire,
London, 1820:2, 46–50, cited in Abrams 1986:14)
Nationalism, in West’s understanding, is not the exclusive property of the ancients,
nor is heroic self-sacrifice for one’s country
...
When the painting was finished, Reynolds, we
are told, relented, and predicted that West’s painting would ‘occasion a revolution
in the art’
...

Of course, we are privileged with the hindsight of that posterity to which
Benjamin West, and the new age of which he was a child, had begun to appeal
...
Yet, when we look at his painting, it
seems as old-fashioned as it is revolutionary
...
His painting, like that of Marat Assassiné by David,
looks back to a Christian past, even as it looks forward to the modern age of
secular nationalism
...
The recent upsurge of ethnic
nationalism in many parts of the world has only made more acute questions
about the origins, nature and consequences of nationalism
...

Since the unravelling of the Soviet Union, some twenty new states have been
created, claiming to represent ‘nations’ which had been suppressed within empires
or federations
...
Elsewhere, a score or more
movements of ethnic protest have generated more or less hidden, and more or
less hopeless, insurgencies and wars, and it is not difficult to find many other
instances of uneasy coexistence of ethnic communities in both old and new
states around the globe
...

Such a remarkable resurgence has spurred an equally unprecedented increase
in the number of investigations into the phenomena of ethnicity, nations and
nationalism
...
But well into the 1980s, scholarly attention had been devoted to other
kinds of ideology and social movement, and in particular the varieties of Marxism
and communism
...
All
this changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet
Union
...
Indeed, even as I was writing
my conclusions, several new books appeared, including Adrian Hastings’ The
Construction of Nationhood (1997), Craig Calhoun’s Nationalism, (1997), Sian Jones’
The Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997), Lyn Spillman’s Nation and Commemoration (1997),
Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour (1998), as well as the new Ethnicity Reader
by Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex (1997), not to mention several edited
collections of essays on nations and nationalism
...

Yet for all this scholarly activity, the theory of nations and nationalism has been
much less well served
...
Compared to
the 1950s and 1960s—the period to which I devoted attention in my first overview
of theories of nationalism—there has been a marked increase in the number of
general approaches and theories
...

The present book aims to provide a critical survey of recent explanatory theories
and approaches to nations and nationalism
...

Though there have been some reviews of more recent theories in article form,
there has been no recent comprehensive book-length attempt to provide a
theoretical survey of the field, with the partial exception of Paul James’ thoughtprovoking Nation Formation (1996) and the shorter evaluations of some theories
of nationalism in Thomas Eriksen’s equally stimulating Ethnicity and Nationalism
(1993)
...
In particular, I aim to
examine in some detail the varieties of what remains the dominant orthodoxy
in the field, namely the ‘modernist’ approach to nations and nationalism, while
giving due weight to the many criticisms of modernism and to the main theoretical
alternatives in the field
...
While I hope to have indicated both the strengths and the
weaknesses in each approach or theory, as a partisan in the theoretical debate,
I make no pretence to a value-free stance vis-à-vis the various theories and
perspectives that I explore
...
Instead, I have sought
to give students new to the field some feel for the debates and intersecting
monologues with which they are confronted, and to provide some kind of
map by which to orient themselves in what must appear to be a particularly
confusing intellectual terrain
...

The last chapter proved to be particularly problematic
...
However, not to have included
some analysis of the most recent general scholarly trends in the field, would
have left students with a decidely incomplete, and therefore one-sided overview

Preface

xiii

of the contemporary field
...
In the end, I compromised by focusing on four major trends,
briefly describing their contributions, with special emphasis on their theoretical
relevance or lack of it to an overall understanding of nations and nationalism
...
I have confined myself, for the most part, to analysis of perspectives
and theories of nations and nationalism, concentrating on books in the first place,
and using articles only where they seemed to provide more succinct and
accessible statements of the theory
...
I have excluded, as far as possible, separate analysis of other
major sources of cleavage and identity—racial, gender, class and religious—
except where these sources are invoked by the theories of nationalism
themselves; not because I thought them unimportant or irrelevant, but because
to have treated them in any depth in their own right would have muddied the
primary focus of the book and greatly extended its scope and length
...
Similarly, I have omitted the many important
and fascinating normative debates which have developed over the last decade
in political science and international relations, over the compatibility or
otherwise of liberal democracy with mainly civic forms of nationalism
...

I am all too conscious of the many other omissions, to some of which I
allude all too briefly in the text or notes
...
My reasons, apart from
considerations of space, are twofold
...
Second, while analyses of these issues are vital and immensely
valuable in their own right, it is by no means clear that they can further the task
of explaining the origins, development and nature of nations and nationalism,
or that they seek to do so
...

I am also aware of failing to give due space to all the theories considered
here, and of having done less than justice to the views of some authors
...
If this has meant that I have treated cursorily,
or overlooked some contributions—which is inevitable in a field that is expanding

xiv

Preface

so fast—then I hope the authors concerned will accept my apologies for these
omissions and for any errors, for which I take full responsibility
...
I owe a great
debt to my students, who in both good and difficult times have worked with me
through many of the issues explored in this book, in our many absorbing and
fruitful discussions in our Workshop on Ethnicity and Nationalism, in the master’s
course on Nationalism and in the conferences and seminars organised by The
Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of
Economics
...

Anthony D
...
Emerging fitfully in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England and Holland, it rises bright and clear in late
eighteenth-century France and America
...
In its wake come protest and terror, war and revolution, the inclusion
of some, the exclusion of many
...

The name of the red line is nationalism, and its story is the central thread
binding, and dividing, the peoples of the modern world
...
The story of its progress is one of emergence and
decline, the rise and fall of nations and nationalism
...

The rise and decline of nationalism?
At the outset, nationalism was an inclusive and liberating force
...
Its appeal was popular and democratic
...
Throughout the
nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, nationalism was found wherever
native elites fought to overthrow foreign imperial and colonial administrations,
so much so that for a time it seemed indistinguishable from popular democracy
...
6)
...
The large-scale mass-democratic nationalisms of the earlier
nineteenth century were later joined by a host of small-scale mini-nationalisms
led by intellectuals who appealed to language and cultural differences
...
And these again
were shadowed, ominously, by nationalisms that appealed to ‘race’—to cranium,
blood and genes—and to violence and the cult of brutality, the cradle of fascism
...

In the revulsion which this has engendered in Europe, at least, there arose a
desire among many to put an end to internecine conflicts and build a
supranational continent free of national lines of division
...
Of course, in other parts of the world, the red lines of nationalism
still mark the violent antagonisms of ethnic cleavages, which threaten to dissolve
the fragile unities of new territorial states
...
In this respect, the advanced
industrial societies only hold up a mirror to the future of the planet, when nations
and nationalism will be revealed as transient forces which are fast becoming
obsolete in a world of vast transnational markets, power blocs, global
consumerism and mass communications (Horsman and Marshall 1994)
...
The idea that nations are real entities,
grounded in history and social life, that they are homogeneous and united, that
they represent the major social and political actors in the modern world—all this
no longer seems as true as it did thirty and even twenty years ago
...

Whatever their other differences, scholars and theorists of nationalism seemed
to agree on the psychological power and sociological reality of nations and
nation-states
...
It was a
question of institutionalisation, of getting the necessary norms embodied in
appropriate institutions, so as to create good copies of the Western model of
the civic participant nation
...
This was the way to replicate
the successful model of the Western nation-state in the ex-colonies of Africa
and Asia
...
Not
only have the early democratic dreams of African and Asian states not been
realised; the developed countries of the West too have experienced the rumblings
of ethnic discontent and fragmentation, and in the East the demise of the last
great European multinational empire has encouraged the unravelling of the
cosmopolitan dream of fraternity into its ethno-national components
...
As a result, the old models have been discarded
along with much of the paradigm of nationalism in which they were embedded
...
The deconstruction
of the nation foreshadows the demise of the theory of nationalism
...
This is the conception that nations and nationalism
are intrinsic to the nature of the modern world and to the revolution of
modernity
...
This model had a wide appeal in the social sciences
in the wake of the vast movement of decolonisation in Africa and Asia, and it
had considerable influence on policy-makers in the West
...
In its wake there emerged a variety of
other, more comprehensive and sophisticated models and theories, all of which
nevertheless accepted the basic premises of classical modernism
...

As we shall see, the story of the rise and decline of nations and their nationalisms
in the modem world is mirrored in the recital of the rise and decline of the

4

Introduction

dominant paradigm of nations and nationalism, together with all its associated
theories and models
...
4 Though the theory of nations
and nationalism has been less well served, there have also been several important
new approaches to and models of ‘nationalism-in-general’
...
These approaches and
theories possess a number of features which the majority of scholars and theorists
in the last three decades took for granted, including:
1

2

3

4

5

a sense of the power and unpredictability of nationalism, the idea that the
ideology and movement of nationalism was one of the dominant forces in
the modern world and that because it took many forms, it was not possible
to predict where and when it could erupt;
on the other side, a sense of the problematic nature of the concept of the
nation, the difficulty in pinning it down and providing clearcut definitions,
but also a feeling that established historical nations were sociological
communities of great resonance and power;
a belief in the historical specificity of nations and nationalism, that these
were phenomena peculiar to a particular period of history, the modern epoch,
and that only when that epoch drew to a close would nations pass away;
a growing emphasis on the socially created quality of all collective identities,
including cultural identities, and hence an understanding of the nation as a
cultural construct, forged and engineered by various elites to meet certain
needs or cater to specific interests;
and therefore a commitment to sociological explanations which derive nations
and nationalism from the social conditions and political processes of
modernity, with a concomitant methodology of sociological modernism and
presentism seeking data drawn mainly from the recent and contemporary
worlds
...
But there is sufficient convergence among
many theorists to mark off the dominant paradigm of modernism from its critics
...
And in its wake, shadowing reality, we can
trace the rise and gradual decline of its intellectual reflection, the dominant
paradigm of the modern nation, classical modernism
...
Its purpose is fourfold
...
Second, it offers an internal critique of
these approaches and theories on their own terms, and evaluates the strengths
and limitations of the paradigm which they all share
...
A few of these critics have turned their backs entirely on the
dominant paradigm, but most have accepted some of its premises while rejecting
others and supplementing them with ideas drawn from a perennialist paradigm
...

The book is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the varieties and
problems of the modernist paradigm, the second to its critics and the alternatives
they propose
...
The first chapter
briefly describes the rise of classical modernism as it shook off the assumptions
and limitations of older ideas of the organic nation, and then sets out the main
features of the classical paradigm in its heyday in the 1960s
...
These include:
•

•

•

•

the sociocultural version associated with the later views of Ernest Gellner,
which links nations and nationalism to the needs of generating a ‘high culture’
for modernisation and industrial development;
the socioeconomic models of Tom Nairn and Michael Hechter, which derive
nationalism from the rational workings of the world economy and the social
and economic interests of individuals;
the more political versions of theorists like Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens,
Michael Mann and John Breuilly, which look at the relationship of nationalism
to the sources of power, notably war, elites and the modern state;
and the ideological versions of Elie Kedourie, and more recently Bruce
Kapferer and Mark Juergensmeyer, which tend to see nationalism as a belief
system, a form of religion surrogate or secular religion, and to link its
emergence and power to changes in the sphere of ideas and beliefs
...
The main theories in question,
those of Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, can be regarded both as
Marxian varieties of classical modernism, but also as moving beyond some of

6

Introduction

the assumptions of that paradigm
...

Part II explores the various critiques of classical modernism and its later
developments
...

Among the latter, the most prominent are those that stress the ‘primordial’ quality
of nations and nationalism, including the sociobiological versions represented
by Pierre van den Berghe which have experienced a recent revival, and the
cultural primordialism associated with Clifford Geertz, which has been criticised
by ‘instrumentalists’ like Paul Brass
...
Another group of critics is represented by
those like John Armstrong and Steven Grosby, who cast doubt on the intrinsic
modernity of nations and thereby revive the debate about the ‘perennial’ presence
of nations
...
It then examines the work of John
Hutchinson, John Armstrong and myself, who stress the cultural and ‘ethnosymbolic’ nature of ethnicity and nationalism
...

The final chapter of Part II provides a brief critical sketch of some of the
many recent developments in the field, including analyses of the fragmentation
and increasingly hybrid nature of national identity and the uses of ‘situational’
ethnicity; feminist accounts of gendered national projects, female national
symbolism and the relations between gender and ethnicity; debates about the
civic or ethnic nature of nationalism and its relations with liberal democracy;
and the discussions about the demise of the nation-state in an era of both
‘supranationalism’ and globalisation processes
...

A brief conclusion spells out the main theoretical problems and suggests that,
while no unified theory is likely in such a complex and divided field, significant
progress has been made in a number of directions, with the result that our

Introduction

7

understanding of these elusive and protean phenomena has been greatly enriched
and deepened
...


1

The rise of classical
modernism

Three main issues have dominated the theory of nations and nationalism
...
It concerns the role of the nation in
human affairs
...
It concerns the social definition
of the nation
...
It concerns the place of the nation in
the history of humanity
...
As we would expect, they often overlap
and intertwine, and it is not unknown for theorists to take up clearcut positions
on one issue, only to ‘cross over’ to the unexpected ‘side’ in one or other of the
debates, to hold for example that nations are recurrent and immemorial yet
means to other ends, or that they are social and political communities but
constitute absolute values
...
As we shall see,
this conflation of issues makes it difficult to adhere to any simple characterisation
of theorists or classification of approaches and theories in the field
...

Such a classification reveals the main lines of debate in the field in recent decades,
though it can serve only as an approximation to understanding of the logic at
work behind particular approaches and theories
...
Michelet, for example, viewed the nation
as the best defence for individual liberty in the era of fraternity
...
At the same time,
he shared the naturalist assumption of Sieyes and others for whom nations existed
outside the social and legal bond, in nature
...
For Acton, the continental idealist view of
nationality does not aim at either liberty or prosperity, both of which it
sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and
measure of the State
...

(Acton 1948:166–95)
Acton’s conservative analysis nevertheless vindicates multinational empires, like
the Habsburg, on the ground that, unlike the national state, it can ‘satisfy different
races’
...
2
Perhaps the most influential of these early analyses was that contained in a
lecture of 1882 by Ernest Renan, which he delivered to counter the militarist
nationalism of Heinrich Treitschke
...
Renan starts with a contrast that is to

10

The rise of classical modernism

have a long history: between the fusion of ‘races’ in the nations of Western
Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe
...
A nation is a great solidarity, created by the
sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and of those which one
is disposed to make in the future
...
The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every
day, as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life
...
This was left to the next generation
...
The racist
schema of biological struggle for mastery of organic racial nations was only
one, albeit the most striking and influential
...
In judging nationalisms
by their revolutionary uses, Marx and Engels had also been swayed by their
German Romantic and Hegelian inheritance, with its stress on the importance
of language and political history for creating nation-states and their animus against
small, history-less, as well as backward, nations
...
3
We can see this ambivalence on all the major issues—ethical, anthropological
and historical—in the work of the Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer
...
In this conception, the principle of nationality is both an absolute and a
proximate value, both an evolved ethno-cultural community and a classconstructed social category
...
4

The rise of classical modernism

11

Even among the nationalists themselves, we find the same permutations and
inconsistencies
...
Others were less consistent,
believing with Mazzini that, though geography, history, ethnic descent, language
and religion might determine much of the character and situation of the nation,
political action and the mobilisation of the people were essential if the nation
was to be ‘reawakened’ and recalled to its sacred mission
...
5
Intellectual foundations
It is during this period, at the turn of the twentieth century, that we can discern
the intellectual foundations of the classical modernist paradigm of nationalism
...
I shall deal briefly with the contribution
of each to the formulation of a coherent modernist approach to the understanding
of nations and nationalism
...

In the case of the Marxist tradition, this might be ascribed to the early
period in which the founding fathers wrote; though in the world of 1848,
nationalism was already a powerful, if limited, force in Europe
...
This in turn meant that, in relation to the
explanatory role attributed to class conflict and to the contradictions in the
mode of production in the successive stages of historical development, ethnic
and national principles and phenomena had to be accorded a secondary or
even derivative role, becoming at most catalysts or contributory (or
complicating) rather than major causal factors
...
Given the inbuilt propensity of human evolution to
self-transendence through stages of political revolution, and given the
fundamental role of class conflict in generating revolution, there was no
place for any other factor, especially one that might impede or divert from
the ‘movement of history’, except insofar as it might contribute to hastening
that movement in specific instances
...
It was from this perspective that Marx and Engels
passed favourable judgments on Polish and Irish nationalism, as they were

12

2

The rise of classical modernism

likely to weaken Tsarist feudal absolutism and British capitalism respectively
and hasten the next stage of historical evolution; whereas nationalist
movements among the ‘backward’ small nations of the western and southern
Slavs could only evoke their contempt or disapproval, as they were judged
likely to divert the bourgeoisie or proletariat from their historic task in the
evolution of Europe (Cummins 1980; Connor 1984)
...
It was in this context that the ‘formalism’ associated with Marxist
analysis became prominent: the idea that nations provided the forms and
vessels, while class formations and their ideologies provided the content
and ends to which the next stage of history aspired
...
6
Equally important for the legacy of the early Marxist tradition has been
its historical and global emphasis, and its Eurocentric bias
...
They were to be understood as
manifestations both of European capitalism’s need for ever larger territorial
markets and trading blocs, and of the growing distance between the modern
capitalist state and bourgeois civil society and the levelling of all intermediate
bodies between state and citizen characteristic of advanced absolutism
...
But it is fair to say that
with the rediscovery of the early Marx’s writings and their debt to Hegel
and the Left Hegelians, they assumed a new importance at the very moment
when a significant number of scholars were increasingly turning their
attention to the theory of nationalism
...

The influence of the second tradition of crowd psychology and Freud’s
later social psychological work has been more pervasive but also more

The rise of classical modernism

3

13

limited
...
On the other hand, many of their insights have
permeated the thinking of recent scholars of nationalism
...
But we can also discern the influence of an earlier crowd
psychology in some of the functionalist analyses of mass-mobilising
nationalism as a ‘political religion’ in the work of David Apter, Lucian Pye
and Leonard Binder, and of crowd behaviour in social movements in the
work of Neil Smelser
...
7
What these approaches have in common is a belief in the dislocating
nature of modernity, its disorientation of the individual and its capacity for
disrupting the stability of traditional sources of support
...
More generally, social psychological assumptions drawn from
a variety of sources can be found in the most unexpected places—among
social anthropologists and sociologists as well as historians and political
scientists—but these are not confined to those who adhere to the modernist
framework (see Brown 1994)
...
Strongly
imbued with the prevailing tide of German nationalism, Weber never
managed to produce the study of the rise of the nation-state which he
intended to write; yet his writings contain a number of themes that were to
become central both to classical modernism and its subsequent development
...
But
what has most marked out the Weberian path of analysis is its emphasis on
the role of political action, both generally in the formation of ethnic groups
and specifically in the evolution of modern European nations
...
D
...
1)
Insofar as Weber’s huge corpus of writings touches on issues of ethnic
identity and nationalism, it ranges far and wide in time and place
...
Again,
Weber emphasises the importance of political action and political memories:
‘All history’, he writes, ‘shows how easily political action can give rise to
the belief in blood relationship, unless gross differences of anthropological
type impede it’
...
Of
the latter, Weber writes:
This sense of community came into being by virtue of common political
and, indirectly, social experiences which are highly valued by the masses
as symbols of the destruction of feudalism, and the story of these events
takes the place of the heroic legends of primitive peoples
...
In this, they receive strong support from Weber’s well known definition
of the nation:
A nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest
itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally
tends to produce a state of its own
...
For Weber the modern
state is a rational type of association, the apogee of occidental rationalism
and one of the main agencies of rationalisation in history, whereas the nation
is a particular type of community and prestige group
...
: 176; see Beetham
1974)
Indirectly, then, the elements of Weber’s writings on nations and
nationalism that have had greatest influence have served to support the
different versions of political modernism which stress the role of power, and
especially state power, in the definition of the nation and the explanation of
nationalism
...
8
The final source of influence on the classical modernist paradigm is probably
the most important: the legacy of the Durkheimian emphasis on community
...

Yet, in a sense, the idea of the nation as a moral community with its conscience
collective is the guiding thread of his entire work, and it is made explicit in
his analysis of religion and ritual in his last major book, The Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1915; Mitchell 1931; see A
...
Smith
1983b; Guibernau 1996: ch
...

Much of what Durkheim has to say which bears on ethnicity and
nationalism has a timeless quality about it
...
In this respect, he claims, there is no
difference between Christian or Jewish festivals, and
a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral
or legal system or some great event in the national life,
(Durkheim 1915:427)
as occurred, most memorably, during the French Revolution when
under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely laical in
character were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these
were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason
...

(ibid
...
This was his analysis of the transition from ‘mechanical’
to ‘organic’ solidarity
...

(Durkheim 1964:278)
bring men together, in modern, industrial societies these forces decline, along
with tradition and the influence of the conscience collective, and their place is
taken by the division of labour and its complementarity of roles
...
This is
exactly what has happened in the advanced industrial societies of the West
...
Here Durkheim
foreshadows the theme of ethnic revival which has become an important
element in some modernist theories of nationalism (Durkheim 1964; Nisbet
1965; Giddens 1971)
...
What the classical modernists understood Durkheim to be
saying was that modern societies required a new principle of cohesion and
reintegration, after all the dislocations and strains of modernisation, and
this was to be found in the idea of the nation and the mobilising power of
nationalism
...


Historians and social scientists
If the pre-1914 sociological and social psychological traditions provided the
framework for the paradigm of classical modernism, the immediate impetus to
its construction and much of its historical content was provided by the labours
of sociologically inclined historians from the 1920s
...
In this they were not entirely successful
...
H
...
There was also a tendency to treat nationalism as an
ethical issue and the nation as an ambivalent means to nobler ends
...
Perhaps the best known example is Hans Kohn’s
influential distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms—east and
west of the Rhine: in the West, in England, France, America and Holland, a
rational, voluntaristic version of nationalism emerged, whereas in the East, in
Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and Asia, an organic, determinist variety found
fertile soil
...
9

The rise of classical modernism

17

Two aspects of these early historical analyses have been particularly important
for the growth of classical modernism
...
Again, the most obvious case is that of
Hans Kohn
...

States and areas with strong bourgeoisies tended to opt for a rationalist and
voluntaristic version of the ideology of nationalism, which required everyone to
choose a nation of belonging but did not prescribe a particular nation; whereas
states and areas with weak bourgeoisies tended to spawn shrill, authoritarian
nationalisms led by tiny intelligentsias who opted for organic nationalisms which
prescribed the nation of belonging for each individual from birth
...
H
...

The second aspect is the provision of detailed evidence for the modernity
and European origins of nationalism, the ideology and movement
...
Kohn
placed it in the English Revolution, Cobban opted for the late eighteenth century
following the Partitions of Poland and the American Revolution, while Kedourie
placed it in 1807, the date of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation
...
They also concentrated on charting the
evolution of nationalism, the ideology and movement, within modern Europe
...
Such analyses served to reinforce the conviction that
nationalism was a manifestation of a particular Zeitgeist, and tied to a specifically
modern and European time and place
...

This was to have profound implications for the paradigm of classical modernism
and the theory of nationalism
...
It was only in the 1950s,
with the acceleration of the process of decolonisation and the rise of the new
states in Africa and Asia, that their work began to be supplemented and then to
some extent overtaken by a spate of political science and sociological analyses of
Third World anti-colonial nationalisms
...
This
was also the moment when the classical paradigm of modernism took shape
(see A
...
Smith 1992c)
...
It was a perspective well attuned to
the optimistic, heady temper of the decade, and it marks the classical expression
of what I have termed the modernist paradigm of nationalism
...
This was evident in their language, which
often equated the idea of ‘race’ with the concept of the nation, which saw in
national characteristics the underlying principles of history, and which tended
to judge international events and relations in terms of national actors and
overriding national interests
...
We may term
this the ‘perennialist’ perspective
...
More serious historians were content to recount the
activities of national leaders and aristocracies in antiquity and the medieval era,
thereby demonstrating the centrality and durability of the idea and manifestations
of the nation in history
...
For
these scholars, the propositions on which perennialism was based were either
unverifiable or erroneous
...
This was an assumption
unwarranted by any documentary evidence and as such an act of faith in
the antiquity of a modern cultural collectivity;
nations were in no sense givens, let alone existing in nature or in the first
time
...


This was a decidedly anti-historicist and rationalist critique
...

It was also markedly optimistic in tone and activist in spirit, arguing that
nationalism created nations and that the activities of national elites served to
promote the needs of social and political development
...

The activist, interventionist character of classical modernism accounts for
the way in which it construes the older perennialism
...

Classical modernism was bitterly opposed to what it saw as the naturalism and
essentialism inherent in the older perspectives, the belief that nations are elements
of nature, existing before time, and that we possess a nationality in the same
way as we have eyes and speech, a view that it regarded as responsible for the
extremist emotions and mass following of nationalism
...
12
It was equally opposed to the non-rational and passive character of
perennialism
...

Nationalism can never on this view be a rational strategy employed by individuals
for their individual or collective interests, nor an expression of deliberate choice
and judgment
...

Nation-building
In contrast, the main tenets of the modernist paradigm, and especially of its
classical nation-building model, stressed the political nature of nations and the

20

The rise of classical modernism

active role of citizens and leaders in their construction
...
They were
sovereign, limited and cohesive communities of legally equal citizens, and
they were conjoined with modern states to form what we call unitary ‘nationstates’;
nations constituted the primary political bond and the chief loyalty of their
members
...
They were
real sociological communities disposing of the political weight of the world’s
populations and the sole legitimating and coordinating principle of interstate relations and activity;
nations were the constructs of their citizens, and notably of their leaders
and elites, and were built up through a variety of processes and institutions
...
;
nations were the sole framework, vehicle and beneficiary of social and
political development, the only instrument for assuring the needs of all
citizens in the production and distribution of resources and the only means
of assuring sustainable development
...


For their examples, the theorists of nation-building had no need to look further
than the contemporary processes of decolonisation in Asia and Africa
...
These so-called ‘state-nations’ (territorial states attempting
to create cohesive nations out of heterogeneous ethnic populations) testified to
the importance of ‘nation-building’, revealing the limitations of territorial
sovereignty and pointing the way forward through the mobilisation and
participation of an active citizenry (see Deutsch and Foltz 1963)
...
Some stressed
the role of social mobilisation and social communication, others of mobility and

The rise of classical modernism

21

empathy, still others of interest aggregation, political religion and systems of
mass mobilisation
...
This emphasis on civic participation was indicative
of the modernism of their outlook
...
e
...

The modern era was the first era in which self-government of the people could
be conceived and achieved (see Bendix 1996)
...

It was necessary because the nation was the ideal agent and framework for
social development, and the modern era was the first era in which sustained
social development could take place
...
In a non-developmental
era, there was no need, no room, for nations
...
With the erosion of traditional religions and the rise of nations,
national self-government was the only way to harness the social and political
resources necessary for social development
...
Without independence, as Engels had realised
long before, there could be no sustained economic development, because there
could be no real commitment and self-sacrifice demanded of those who were
not masters of their own destinies (Davis 1967)
...

Broadly speaking, it contended that:
1

2

3

nations were wholly modern—modern in the sense of being recent, i
...
since
the French Revolution, and in the sense that the components of the nation
were novel, i
...
part of the new age of modernity, and so modern by
definition;
nations were the product of modernity, i
...
their elements were not only
recent and novel, but also could only emerge, and had to emerge, through
processes of ‘modernisation’, the rise of modern conditions and modernising
policies;
nations were therefore not deeply rooted in history, but were inevitable
consequences of the revolutions that constituted modernity and as such
tied to their features and conditions, with the result that, once these features

22

4

5

The rise of classical modernism

and conditions were transformed, nations would gradually wither away or
be superseded;
nationalism likewise was embedded in modernity, or more accurately, in
the processes of modernisation and the transition to a modern order, so
that when these processes were completed, nationalism too would wane
and disappear;
nations and nationalisms were social constructs and cultural creations of
modernity, designed for an age of revolutions and mass mobilisation, and
central to the attempts to control these processes of rapid social change
...
Modernism objected to the assumptions of naturalism and
immemorialism held by the older generation of scholars on political as well as
intellectual grounds
...

They systematically opposed the assumptions which underlay perennialist
accounts of the role of nations in history, and sought to demystify national identity
and counteract the claims of nationalism by revealing its inherent absurdity as
well as its historical shallowness
...
For the modernists the nation is a territorialised political
community, a civic community of legally equal citizens in a particular
territory;
For perennialists, the nation is persistent and immemorial, with a history
stretching back centuries, if not millennia
...
For modernists, the nation is a creation
...

For perennialists, the nation is a popular or demotic community, a community
of ‘the people’ and mirroring their needs and aspirations
...

For perennialists, belonging to a nation means possessing certain qualities
...
For modernists, it means possessing certain resources
...


The rise of classical modernism

6

7

23

For perennialists, nations are seamless wholes, with a single will and character
...
) social groups, each with their own
interests and needs
...
For modernists, the principles of national solidarity
are to be found in social communication and citizenship
...
Not all the scholars who hold in
general terms to the perennialist and modernist paradigms would subscribe to
all the elements of ‘their’ paradigm, as listed above
...
In fact, a number
of theorists have evolved permutations which cross the lines of these paradigms,
combining elements from both paradigms in often unexpected ways
...
This is not just opportunism
...

There is a further and critical point
...
Not
all perennialists would regard themselves as primordialists or accept primordialist
assumptions
...
Instead they would simply argue from what they saw as the historical
record, and regard nations as recurrent and/or persistent phenomena of all epochs
and continents, but in no way part of the ‘natural order’
...


24

The rise of classical modernism

From a logical standpoint, however, these dichotomies underlie many of the
positions adopted by theorists of nationalism
...
In each case, the logic of these paradigms and their dichotomies
requires the theorist to clarify the arguments and produce the evidence that has
led him or her to adopt a particular standpoint in the debates about nations and
nationalism
...
Scholars as different in their theoretical
persuasions as Elie Kedourie, J
...
Kautsky, S
...
Eisenstadt, W
...
Smith, Peter
Worsley and Ernest Gellner all adhered to the modernist paradigm, and stressed
the role of active participation, elite choice and social mobilisation in the building
of modern nations, factors which Karl Deutsch and the communications theorists
had popularised
...
15
In the following chapters I propose to examine in more detail the main varieties
of classical modernism—sociocultural, economic, political and ideological—as they
were developed during the 1970s and 1980s
...


Part I

Varieties of modernism

2

The culture of industrialism

Perhaps the most original and radical statement of classical modernism was that
of Ernest Gellner in the seventh chapter of Thought and Change (1964)
...
Likening modernisation to a great
tidal wave that sweeps over the world from its West European heartlands, hitting
successive areas at different times and rates, Gellner traced the rise of nationalism
to the new role of linguistic culture in the modern world
...
Dislocated and disoriented in the anonymous city, the new
impoverished proletariat of uprooted peasants no longer possessed anything on
which to rebuild communities and stave off anarchy except language and culture
...
Hence the growing
importance of a critical and ambitious intelligentsia, the producers and purveyors
of these linguistic cultures
...
That in turn required a new kind of schooling,
mass, public, standardised schooling, supervised and funded by the state
...

But there was another side to uneven development
...
Conflicts between the waves of newcomers and the urban old-timers, between
the urban employed in the city centres and the underemployed proletariat in their
shanty-towns on the edge of the cities
...

But in some cases social conflict became ethnic antagonism
...
In such cases the
urban old-timers resorted to cultural exclusion and ethnic job reservation
...
7)
...
Rather, nationalist
movements define and create nations
...

(ibid
...
Men become nationalists, Gellner concluded, out of ‘genuine, objective,
practical necessity, however obscurely recognised’, because ‘it is the need for
growth that generates nationalism, not vice-versa’
...
: 160, 168)
...
They included:
1

2

3

4
5

6

the problems presented by ascribing a unifying role to language, including
the recognition that language sometimes failed to fulfil that role, for example,
in Spanish Latin America or the Arabic states;
the unassimilability of certain cultural groups by and in the ‘transition’, that
is, the failure of modernisation to integrate various groups, notably those
based on pigmentation and scriptural religion;
the prolongation of the processes of modernisation and the failure of the
concept of proletarianism to account for the conflicts in its later stages, as
well as the doubtful causal relationship between industrialisation and the
rise of nationalism;
the importance of divisions within the intelligentsia, and their impact on
the very different paths to modernity taken by various nations;
the problem of how modernity and its literate cultures are sustained, and
the need to find an institutional base for its maintenance rather than merely
a social group;
the problem of accounting for me absence of nations and nationalism in
pre-modern societies, in contrast to their well nigh universal presence in
modern, industrial societies
...
1

The culture of industrialism

29

‘Nation’ and ‘nationalism’
The hinge of the new version was the role of mass public education systems in
sustaining ‘high’ cultures in modern, industrial societies
...

The logical starting-point of Gellner’s second version is his definition of the
concept of the nation
...
The reason is the same: they both bring in far too rich a
catch
...
Similarly,
to define nations in terms of shared culture, when there are and have been so
many varied and rich cultural differences in the world, will not help us: cultural
differences only sometimes coincided with the boundaries of political units, and
the fact that they are increasingly doing so only reveals the very special conditions
that bring culture and politics together in the modern age (Gellner 1983: ch
...

Put another way, of the perhaps 8,000 language groups in the world, only a
small proportion (about 200) have constituted themselves as nations with their
own states, with a somewhat larger proportion (perhaps 600) of others striving
to attain their own states, making some 800 in all
...
: 43–50)
...
Only then, under the peculiar conditions of the age, can we
define nations as the product of both will and culture
...
It is a theory of
political legitimacy,
which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones,
and in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state…should not
separate the power-holders from the rest
...
: 1)
National sentiment is the feeling of anger or of satisfaction aroused by the violation
or fulfilment of this principle, while nationalist movements are ones actuated by
this sentiment
...
For Gellner, there have been three main
stages in history: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian and the industrial
...
In the first, the hunter-gatherer stage, there was no polity
or state, hence no possibility of nations and nationalisms, given Gellner’s
definition of nationalism
...
Here there is a possibility for
nations and nationalism to emerge, though it is in fact never realised
...
2)
...
But they are also highly stratified societies
...
At the apex of
these societies are a series of small, but powerful, elites, arranged in horizontal
strata, including the military, bureaucratic, priestly and aristocratic castes, who
use culture—their culture—to separate themselves from the rest of society
...
These small communities of peasants are turned inwards
by economic necessity, and their local cultures are almost invisible
...

As a result, culture tends to be either horizontal as social caste, or vertical, defining
small local communities
...
Indeed, the only stratum
that might have an interest in such cultural imperialism, the clerisy, is either
indifferent to seeing its norms and rituals extended throughout society (like the
Brahmins) or has neither the resources nor the practical possibility of doing so
(as with the Islamic ulema)—since most people must look after the sheep, goats
and camels! For the other elites, the gulf between themselves (and their lifestyles)
and the rest of the population (and their folk cultures) must be maintained, and
even fortified by theories of ‘blood’ and hallowed descent (Gellner 1983: ch
...

The contrast with industrial societies is striking
...
A high culture pervades the whole of society,
defines it, and needs to be sustained by the polity
...

(ibid
...
Just as everything has to be
analysed into its constituent parts before causal relationships can be explored,
so all persons and activities in modern society are to be treated as equal,
commensurable units so that they can then be conjoined in mass societies, or
nations
...
This is why, unlike hierarchical and stable pre-modern societies,
modern societies are necessarily egalitarian, in their ideals, if not always in practice
(ibid
...
3, esp
...

Work in pre-modern society was essentially manual
...
It is a society with a high degree of specialised labour, but the
work is strictly standardised and its precondition is a degree of literacy on the
part of every member
...
The generic education
in basic numeracy and literacy enables everyone to be in a position to become
specialists; without that generic education in semantic labour, they could not be
so trained
...
Unlike the minimal,
contextual education given to children in pre-modern societies, usually by the
family and village school, education in a modern society is a public affair and of
far greater importance to the operation of society
...
3)
...

Only a large and complex system could educate great numbers of people to be
‘clerks’, and only clerks can be useful citizens of a modern state
...
It also means that mass education alone can endow its citizens
with self-respect and a sense of identity:
Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he
may say, but to a culture
...
Only the modern state is large
and competent enough to sustain and supervise a system of public, mass
education, which is required to train everyone to participate in the literate ‘high’
culture of an industrial society
...
In the past, the links between state and culture were thin,
loose and fortuitous
...
2
From ‘low’ to ‘high’ cultures
The transition from an agroliterate to an industrial society is marked by the
replacement of ‘low’ by ‘high’ cultures
...
These he calls ‘garden’ cultures, to distinguish them from the
‘wild’, spontaneous and undirected cultures found normally in agroliterate
societies, which require no conscious design, surveillance or special nutrition
...
They
are sustained by specialised personnel and to survive, must be nourished by
specialised institutions of learning with numerous, dedicated, full-time
professionals (ibid
...

Now, many of the low, ‘wild’ cultures fail to make it into the industrial era
...
So they generally bow out without a struggle and fail to
engender a nationalism; while those with prospects of success fight it out among
themselves for the available state-space
...
On the other
hand, those that do engender nationalisms and attain to states of their own are
much stronger than before
...

What then is the relationship between the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ cultures? For
Gellner, cultures in the sense of systems of norms and communications have
always been important, but they were often overlapping, subtly grouped and
intertwined
...
That is the main reason for the impossibility of nations and
nationalism before the onset of modernity
...
The cultures now seem to be the
natural repositories of political legitimacy
...
: 55)
These new, pervasive high cultures are so important for the smooth running of
industrial society that they must be constantly sustained and controlled by each
state
...
The water and the atmosphere in these tanks
are specially serviced to breed the new species of industrial person; the name of
the specialised plant providing this service is a national educational and
communications system (ibid
...

What happens, typically, is that the successful new high culture of the state
is imposed on the population of that state, and uses whatever of the old ‘wild’
cultures that it requires
...
Nations have not
existed from eternity, only to be awakened by the call of the nationalists
...

(ibid
...
It means the generalised diffusion of a
school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements
of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication
...
That is what really happens
...
: 57)
Further light is thrown on the relationship between the old ‘low’ and the modern
‘high’ cultures when Gellner vigorously separates the principle of nationalism
(‘nationalism-in-general’) from the particular manifestations of nationalism
(‘specific nationalism’)
...
As he explains:

34

Varieties of modernism

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round
...
Dead languages
can be revived, traditions invented, quite fictitious pristine purities restored
...
The cultural shreds and
patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions
...
But in no way does it
follow that the principle of nationalism, as opposed to the avatars it happens
to pick up for its incarnations, is itself in the least contingent and accidental
...
The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions,
or are modified out of all recognition
...
: 55–6)
Gellner concedes that nationalism may not be so far from the truth when the
people are ruled by officials of an alien, high culture, and they must first be
liberated
...

(ibid
...
This was not the result
of any material calculations or manipulation by an intelligentsia
...
This experience
taught them to love (or hate) their own culture, and the culture in which they
are taught to communicate becomes the core of their new identity
...
There is a second principle, which
Gellner terms the inhibitors of ‘social entropy’
...
This means that it becomes impossible to assimilate individuals who
possess the entropy-resistant trait, for example, those with genetic traits like
pigmentation or with deeply engrained religious-cultural habits which ‘frequently
have a limpet-like persistence’—especially peoples with a scriptural religion and
a special script, sustained by specialised personnel
...
They
stand on the other side of the great ‘moral chasms’ which open up between
groups with counter-entropic traits and the host society, creating the possibility
of new nationalisms and nations (ibid
...
6, esp
...
4
Nationalism and industrialism
In many ways, this later version of Gellner’s theory presents a much fuller and
more elaborate picture of the causes of nationalism and its links with modernity
than the earlier formulation
...
For another, it distinguishes
earlier and later phases of industrialisation, and suggests why the later phases
may give rise to movements of ethnic secession
...
Above all, in the distinction between
‘low’ and ‘high’ cultures, it grapples with the ambivalence of nationalism, its
backward-looking as well as modernist impulses, and spells out the nature of
the cultural transition that must be traversed at the threshold of modernity
...
The earlier
version had highlighted the role of language as the medium of instruction, and
the cement of a modern society
...
Similarly,
the earlier formulation had emphasised the role of the critical intelligentsia as
one of the two ‘prongs’ of nationalism, the other being the proletariat
...
This is part of a wider move away from agents of
modernisation (classes, professional strata, etc
...
Not
only have individuals and their choices become irrelevant, group actors and
their strategies have become at best the products of the interplay of ‘structure’
and ‘culture’, their movements preordained in the drama of the transition from
‘low’ to ‘high’ cultures
...
Their earlier
secessionist role is replaced by the unevenness of the processes of development,
which in and by themselves ensure that there can be no modern empires, and
that national units are the norm of industrial society
...
5
The original core of Gellner’s theory, however, remains intact
...
Nations, argues Gellner, are functional
for industrial society
...
This can only be
achieved by creating a uniform body of competent, substitutable citizens, and

36

Varieties of modernism

this in turn requires a large-scale public mass education system funded and
controlled by the state
...

This remains a powerful and relevant thesis, which seeks a deep and
underlying cause for the impregnability of nations and the recurrence, and
proliferation, of nationalisms in the modern world
...
We might start by asking, with some historians, whether there is indeed
such a phenomenon as ‘nationalism-in-general’, as opposed to the specific varieties,
or even instances, of nationalist movement
...
Of
course, this still leaves open the question of whether a particular instance, or
even a whole group of instances, should properly be subsumed under the general
concept
...

More important is the problem of causation
...
This is not just a question of the logic of explanation
...
In Serbia, Finland, Ireland, Mexico,
West Africa and Japan, to take a few cases at random, there was no significant
industrial development, or even its beginnings, at the time of the emergence of
nationalism
...
In the most striking case—Japan—the Meiji rulers sought to inculcate
nationalist values and myths in order to modernise a country emerging from
semi-feudal isolation
...
6
In Gellner’s theory, it is the logic of industrial social organisation that
determines the movement from ‘low’ to ‘high’ culture and the rise of nations
...
This impression arises out of Gellner’s polemic against the self-image
of nationalism
...
Nations and nationalists are, on this view, devoid of independent
activity and volition; rather they constitute the form of industrialism, the way in
which its workings become manifest in the phenomenal world
...
Given the plurality of routes taken by different

The culture of industrialism

37

countries as they move from a ‘traditional’ community to a more ‘modern’ type
of society, given the varying interests and needs of elites and classes in each
society, given the many guises in which nations appear, is it plausible to assume
that in their actions, societies and their sub-groups all follow the same ‘logic of
the transition’, and that the transition itself is, with a few minor variations, the
selfsame road to be trodden by one and all? Gellner would argue that it was
quite possible to accommodate the many variations of process and style, so long
as the end-point of the transition, the goal of modernity with all its requirements,
was retained
...
Whatever variations elites
may execute, the dance remains essentially the same
...
Suffice it to say that:
1
2
3
4

there is both lack of clarity, and considerable dispute, about the concept of
modernisation and its relationship with industrialisation or development;
there is no agreement on the validity or utility of the underlying distinction
between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and their alleged concomitants;
there are many instances where ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ elements coexist
and indeed intertwine;
there is a clear danger of ethnocentrism in most of the meanings associated
with the concepts of modernity and modernisation
...
On the one hand, the concept of modernisation
seems to refer to economic growth or industrialisation; on the other hand, it has
wider connotations, referring to everything that accompanies industrialisation
(its trappings and anticipations), notably westernisation
...
Nationalisms emerge in all kinds of socioeconomic
settings and social systems
...
The attempt to impose a
single, abstract ‘pure type’ of modernity (and modernisation) on the rich variety
of historical processes, so as to illuminate the underlying logic of the contrast
and transition between a state of ‘tradition’ and one of ‘modernity’, exaggerates
the historical gulf between them and denies important continuities and
coexistences between elements of both
...
7
Nationalism and ‘high cultures’
The main new concept employed by Gellner in his second formulation is that of
‘high culture’, that is, a literate, public culture inculcated through a mass,
standardised and academy-supervised education system, serviced by cultural

38

Varieties of modernism

specialists
...
For Gellner national identity is simply
the identification of citizens with a public, urban high culture, and the nation is
the expression of that high culture in the social and political spheres
...

There are a number of problems here
...
Is it the case that all ‘high’ cultures
are embodiments of power, whether of powerful elites, powerful states or powerful
peoples? Is the achievement of a high culture for a particular population also an
act of empowerment, whereby the population enters, as it were, into the political
kingdom and becomes a ‘subject’ of history? Such an implication seems to follow
from Gellner’s assumption that you need a high culture to ‘swim in the sea of
industria’ and that cultures that fail to become literate, specialist-serviced, educationnourished ‘high’ cultures are doomed in a modern, industrial era
...
But this only sharpens the problem of accounting for the ‘submerged
peoples’ and the way in which their savage ‘low’ cultures have managed to become
literate, sophisticated, education-nourished and serviced by specialists (Plamenatz
1976; Gellner 1983:99–100)
The problem is magnified for Gellner whenever he emphasises the
discontinuities between the older ‘low’ and the modern ‘high’ cultures, whenever
he highlights the modern roots of the latter, and the ways in which they answer
to modern needs
...
Of course, this is just what
happened with increasing frequency at the level of the individual
...
8
There is a further problem
...
His point is that we identify with the public taught culture
in modern society, not with our culture of origin or of family
...
Are we to believe that within a single generation peasants
become French patriots simply because they have been processed through a
common educational curriculum and school system, and because of this are

The culture of industrialism

39

prepared to the en masse for the patrie en danger? Is the sacrifice for the fatherland
really a defence of an educationally sustained high culture? The problem becomes
even more acute in authoritarian states—especially for non-dominant ethnic
communities—as we have been so often reminded in recent years
...
But that of itself cannot explain the often intense commitment
and passion for the nation which characterises so many people in all parts of
the world
...
Even investment in their
linguistic education by an intelligentsia cannot fully explain the ardour of their
nationalism
...
That was very
much the role assigned to the new standardised system of mass education in the
French Third Republic
...
In history, for example,
the standard textbook by Lavisse was circulated for all French schoolchildren at
various grades, and its message of French grandeur and territorial integrity
became an important element in French national consciousness for succeeding
generations
...
10
There is little doubt that the leaders of new states (and some older ones)
have taken the civic role of public education very seriously
...
These public, mass education systems and their values are the product,
not the cause, of the nationalist movement once it has come to power
...
In fact, they are more likely to be products of a traditional
village education or of some other system of public education—usually of a
colonial or imperial variety—within ‘their’ territories, or of both
...

Partly through a desire to imitate and compete with such systems, the first

40

Varieties of modernism

nationalists on coming to power make it their business to establish and maintain
a mass public education system of their own which will reflect and express their
system of national values (see Argyle 1976; A
...
Smith 1983a: ch
...

The same argument can also be applied to the mass of the adherents of these
early nationalists, whom Miroslav Hroch has described as the patriotic agitators
of phase B of the nationalist movement
...
In other words, the nationalist movement
predates both the new high culture which it helps to create and the new public,
mass education system which it establishes in the territory after independence
...
Rather, all these are products of
nationalism and its programme of national regeneration (Hroch 1985, 1993)
...
Mass civic education
frequently failed to attain the national and political goals for which it was framed,
and which nationalist theorists from Rousseau and Fichte to Gökalp and BenZion Dinur expected it to achieve
...
But, though influential in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, this
is by no means the only kind of nationalism, and even in these cases it has
proved a singular failure in its own terms
...
Most states are in fact plural, so the drive for cultural
homogeneity has rarely been able to attain its goal in liberal or democratic states
...
Other
models of nationalism have set greater store by territorial and political unity
than cultural homogeneity—in the West as well as Africa, Latin America,
Australasia and parts of Asia
...
12
In fact, in liberal and democratic states, the aim of a national mass education

The culture of industrialism

41

system has been not so much to homogenise the population as to unify them
around certain shared values, symbols, myths and memories, allowing
minorities among them to retain their own symbols, memories, myths and
values, and seeking to accommodate or incorporate them within the broad
public culture and its national mythology
...
Instead, attempts have been made within the mass education
system by the most advanced industrial societies to cater for a variety of ethnoreligious cultures either tacitly or more overtly through the ideal of
‘multiculturalism’, using the resulting cultural diversity to enhance the quality
of a more composite ‘national identity’
...
The first concerns the ‘understanding
co-national’
...
Rather,
the circumstances of modernisation dislocated the Ruritanian peasants, and forced
them to migrate to Megalomania in search of work and to come up against an
often hostile bureaucracy
...
In these circumstances, the
uprooted peasants soon learnt
the difference between dealing with a co-national, one understanding and
sympathising with their culture, and someone hostile to it
...

(Gellner 1983:61)
Here, the culture they are taught to be aware of appears to be their indigenous
‘low’ culture, not the cultivated ‘garden’ variety associated with industrialism
...
This in turn suggests
that the nation and nationalism pre-exist the transition to industrialism, that the
particular new high culture has not yet been created, at least, not by understanding
co-nationals, and that the actual distance between low and high cultures may
not be as great as the theory assumes
...

There is, in fact, plenty of evidence that it is these low cultures which inspire
such ardent loyalties
...
The links between
Ukrainian peasant culture and that of Kievan Rus many centuries earlier are
equally obscure, as are those between Slovak peasants and their shadowy heroic
ancestors over a millennium earlier
...
14
This is one variation of the Gellnerian model
...
Here we may wonder whether it is the
needs of industrialism that explain and underlie the new high culture, or whether
the shape and content of that culture is not better explained and derived from
the old elite high culture of a dominant ethnie
...
The point at issue is how far the
modern, mass public culture of the national state is a modern version of the premodern elite high culture of the dominant ethnie, or how far it simply uses
‘materials’ from that culture for its own quite different, and novel, purposes (see
Fishman et al
...

As we saw, Gellner returns several times to this question
...
This is all part of the
repertoire of nationalism and its cavalier use of the past
...
Historical precedents may be
useful for nationalist rhetoric, as well as nationalist reformers who want to push
through painful new measures to strengthen the nation
...
The past can undoubtedly be put to good use and serve as a
quarry of cultural materials for didactic illustration
...
In this Gellner subscribes to the modernist view of the past being
shaped by present needs and circumstances (see Gellner 1997, ch
...
15
But can ‘the past’ be ransacked in this way? Is it composed only of exempla
virtutis, moral tableaux worthy of emulation? And can nationalists make use of
ethno-history in such instrumental ways? That they have tried to do so, sometimes
successfully, is not in dispute
...
But, once unleashed, the emotions generated by such
interpretations of the heroic past have deep and lasting consequences that bind
instigators and followers into a framework and tradition not of their own making,
as the recent troubled history of India demonstrates
...
In other words, nationalists can
sometimes use the ‘ethnic past’ for their own ends, but not in the long run: they
soon find themselves locked in to its framework and sequences, and the
assumptions that underlie the interpretations of successive generations
...
On the contrary: as groups and strata within the community are
emancipated, new interpretations of the past are generated and, after a time,
become part of a more complex overall image and understanding of ‘our ethnic
pasts’
...

Even in the case of the major revolutions, there is often a gradual return to
some of the older collective interpretations and values after the violent stage of
the revolution has run its course
...

There is always therefore a complex interplay between the needs and interests
of modern generations and elites, the patterns and continuities of older cultures,
and the mediating interpretations of ‘our’ ethnic pasts
...
In
other words, the process of selection from communal traditions and their
interpretations cannot be simply reduced to the interests and needs of particular
elites and current generations
...
17
It also omits the role of nationalism in relating the different generations, past,
present and future, and their respective needs and achievements
...
Briefly, everything that is popular, authentic and
emancipatory contributes to the renaissance of the nation, while all that is
sectional, cosmopolitan and oppressive must retard its rebirth
...
But autonomy requires collective unity
and a distinctive identity
...
Hence the
foundation of collective autonomy must always be sought in the unity and
distinctiveness of the community; and its distinctiveness or individuality in turn
is gauged by the quantity and quality of elements that are peculiarly ‘its own’,
which belong to, and are attributes of, that community and no other
...
The main task of the nationalist is
to discover and discern that which is truly ‘oneself and to purge the collective
self of any trace of ‘the other’
...

Of these three, the process of ‘authentication’ or sifting elements of the corrupting
other from those of the pure and genuine self, is pivotal: and as a rough guide,
that which is ‘of the people’ is pure and genuine
...

For Gellner, of course, this is all part of the deception and self-deception of
nationalism
...
The nationalists may in reality practice
urban modernity while extolling the agrarian life and its folkways, but their
model of the nation and their inspiration for its regeneration is derived from
their belief in the ideal of national authenticity and its embodiment in ‘the people’
...
It is this flexibility, coupled with its
ardent belief in the people as touchstone of national authenticity, that enables
nationalism to ‘correct itself and alter official or received versions of the national
past and national destiny, while remaining true to its basic goals of collective
authenticity, unity and autonomy (see Hutchinson 1987: ch
...

Hence nationalism’s recurrent appeal to ethno-history, to an authentic past of
the people, is no mere posturing or cavalier gesture, nor is it just popular rhetoric
disguising the pain behind its true intentions
...
In this respect, one can see nationalism
as a bridge between the distinctive heritage of the ethnic past and its ‘irreplaceable
culture values’, and the necessity for each community to live as one nation
among many in the increasingly bureaucratised world of industrial capitalism
...


The culture of industrialism

45

Nationalism and the ethnic past
The problem of national historical continuity is closely bound up with the vexed
question of the relationship of ethnicity and nationalism
...
For others,
ethnicity signifies a cleavage within a nation, usually within a national state; like
regionalism, it is regarded as a ‘sub-national’ phenomenon
...
This imprecision and lack of attention to ethnic
phenomena is of a piece with his cursory and ambivalent treatment of the
relationship of nationalism to the past
...
18
But, as I shall go on to argue, ethnicity, like history, is crucial to an adequate
understanding of nationalism
...
It also encourages a
curious discussion of the strength or weakness of nationalism in terms of the
number of ‘cultures’ (ethnic groups) that fail to ‘awake’ and strive to become
nations (‘determined slumberers’, in Gellner’s words)
...
To assume that a localised collection of people who speak similar
dialects, observe the same customs and worship in the same liturgy, form an
ethnic community and should therefore spawn a nationalism, if nationalism is
to be regarded as ‘strong’, is to miss out vital stages of ethno-genesis, and bypass
the search for factors that turn a loose ethnic category into an ethnic association
and thence into an ethnic community, let alone a nation (see Handelman 1977;
Eriksen 1993)
...

Ethno-history is no sweetshop in which nationalists may ‘pick and mix’; it sets
limits to any selective appropriation by providing a distinctive context and pattern
of events, personages and processes, and by establishing frameworks, symbolic
and institutional, within which further ethnic developments take place
...

The nationalist appeal to the past is therefore not only an exaltation of and
summons to the people, but a rediscovery by alienated intelligentsias of an entire
ethnic heritage and of a living community of presumed ancestry and history
...
But these myths,

46

Varieties of modernism

symbols, values and memories have popular resonance because they are founded
on living traditions of the people (or segments thereof) which serve both to
unite and to differentiate them from their neighbours
...
To achieve success, the nationalist presumption must be
able to sustain itself in the face of historical enquiry and criticism, either because
there is some well attested documentation of early ethnic origins or because the
latter are so shrouded in obscurity as to be impervious to disconfirmation and
refutation
...
In this sense,
the ethnic community resembles an extended family, or rather a ‘family of
families’, one which extends over time and space to include many generations
and many districts in a specific territory
...
These are themes on which
I shall enlarge in Part II
...
The result is to debar their accounts from dealing with questions
about which nations and nationalisms were likely to emerge, where and on
what basis
...
For answers to those kinds of question, we need to turn elsewhere
...
These are the forces of capitalism and nationalism
...
This is the central thrust of the various
socioeconomic variants of classical modernism
...
Here I want to consider some
recent models which make these connections and assess the strengths and
limitations of such approaches
...
Briefly, Marx and especially Engels
tended to define modern nations, in the German Romantic tradition, as
communities of ‘language and natural sympathies’, hence as in some sense
‘natural’, at least in form
...
For Marx and Engels, the national
state was the necessary terrain for the establishment of market capitalism by the
bourgeoisie; only a nationally unified territorial state could ensure the free and
peaceful movement of the capital, goods and personnel necessary for large-scale
production, market exchange and distribution of mass commodities
...
Only in highly developed nations was it possible to envisage
the social revolution which would lead to the overthrow of the national
bourgeoisie within each nation and the establishment of socialist regimes by the
proletariat, a class that was both universal but also the true embodiment of the
nation and its culture
...
1
47

48

Varieties of modernism

As far as more immediate strategies were concerned, Marx and especially
Engels tended to divide nationalisms into ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’,
according to whether they were likely to hasten the social revolution and further
the socialist development of the ‘historic’ nations
...
For this
reason he was especially committed to Poland’s independence struggle, and
because he felt it would weaken the great bastion of reactionary feudalism, Tsarist
Russia
...
Several themes were developed in this context, amid heated
arguments among the protagonists:
1

2

3

4

the petit-bourgeois nature of nationalism, its locus in an intelligentsia
increasingly squeezed between big capital and the great proletarian
movements;
the use of nationalist ideologies by a triumphant but nervous bourgeoisie to
induce ‘false consciousness’ and thereby divide and divert the masses who
threatened their position;
the progressive nature of anti-colonial liberation movements, i
...
of
nationalisms led by a nascent colonial bourgeoisie against the exploitation
of imperialist capitalists;
the right of all genuine nations to secede from larger polities, especially
semi-feudal empires, until such time as a socialist regime was established in
the area
...
Apart from the Austro-Marxists, who
sought to recognise the role of culture and community as independent variables
in the evolution of nations, the classical Marxists adhered to a largely economistic
analysis which either explained or reduced nationalist struggles to the workings
of the particular stage of capitalism (early, late, monopoly, imperialist, etc
...
As modern components of
the political and ideological superstructure, nations and nationalism had, in
principle, to be derived from the economic contradictions of capitalism and to
be explicable largely, if not wholly, in terms of its class configurations and struggles
(see Orridge 1981; Nimni 1994)
...
We see this ambivalence especially in the work of
Tom Nairn
...
Two are derived from the Marxist heritage and
have been briefly indicated: Lenin’s idea of capitalist imperialism and colonial
nationalist liberation movements, and Engels’ adaptation of Hegel’s theory of
historyless peoples
...
3
Nairn starts by placing nationalism within the context of political philosophy
...
Nairn concedes that there have been nationalities and ethnic identities
before the modern period, but seeks to limit his analysis historically by focusing
on the specifically modern and global phenomenon of nationalism
...

In this context, the key factor is not capitalism per se, but the uneven development
of capitalism
...
From that date, at least, the world can
be divided into capitalist centres in the West, and underdeveloped peripheries
outside
...
This inequality derives from the uneven, and often violent
and discontinuous, imposition of capitalism by Western bourgeoisies on
undeveloped and backward regions of the world, and their exploitation and
underdevelopment of successive peripheries in the interests of the further
development of the centres
...
: 336–7)
...
The jagged nature of
capitalism’s advance across the globe, its tendency to affect successive areas at
different times, rates and intensities, necessitates the underdevelopment and
exploitation of the peripheries, and the consequent relative helplessness of their
elites in the face of the massive superiority of the colonial capitalists in technology,

50

Varieties of modernism

wealth, arms and skills
...
The only resource left to them is people, masses of people:
People is all they have got: this is the essence of the underdevelopment
dilemma itself
...
: 100)
But the elites may be able to turn the tables and achieve development ‘in their
own way’, if the masses can be mobilised against the exploitation of imperialism
...

(ibid
...

(ibid
...
: 101, 340)
...

(ibid
...
It is also inevitably
populist as well as romantic
...

(ibid
...
This is what they proceeded to do with such
success in nineteenth-century Europe, starting in Germany and Italy, and what

Capitalism and nationalism

51

they continue to do in the recent ‘neo-nationalisms’ of the West—in Scotland,
Catalonia, Quebec, Flanders and elsewhere
...
: 127–8, 175–81)
...
His basic purpose still derives from the
Marxist project of explaining nations and nationalism in terms of the
contradictions of political economy and the class struggles which they engender,
but he has placed this traditional mode of analysis in a new spatial framework
which combines elements from dependency models and Gellner’s theory
...

But does the synthesis work? Can it encompass the rich variety of nationalisms
which Nairn underlines? Will it tell us why, on his own account, the Welsh
movement is so romantic and culturally oriented while the equivalent Scots
movement is so practical and hardheaded? Will it help us to fathom why some
nationalisms are religious, others secular, some are moderate, others aggressive,
some are authoritarian and others more democratic?
Nairn might well reply that such refinement is not part of his purpose in
furnishing a political economy theory of nationalism
...

At this global level, two main problems require close scrutiny: the
characterisation of ‘nationalism’, the dependent variable, and the nature and
effectiveness of the explanatory principle, the ‘uneven development of capitalism’
...
But, as we saw, he characterises it as
the creation of a ‘militant, inter-class community rendered strongly (if mythically)
aware of its own separate destiny vis-à-vis the outside forces of domination’
...

Nationalism supplies a myth: that of the separate destiny of an inter-class
community
...
There are some observations about pre-existing ‘mass sentiments’
and peasant ethnic cultures which the intelligentsia must use; but we are offered
no theory of ethnicity or history
...
In practice, this elides
two forms of nationalism in Africa and Asia: the civic, territorial form based
upon the colonial territory and the colonial experience, which would fit Nairn’s
model better, and the more ethnic, genealogical form based upon pre-existing
popular ethnic communities whose rivalries with other ethnic communities had
been sharpened by colonial urbanisation, for which Nairn’s analysis is less
apposite
...

The ‘masses’ as such play no part in the drama of nationalism
...
For Nairn, nationalism’s
populist character is not the result of a popular movement
...

‘The people’ remain a Klasse an Sich
...
This blanket, definitional
characterisation makes it impossible to distinguish, as Nairn wishes to do in the
cases of Scotland and Wales, between nationalisms that were genuinely populist,
and those that paid lip-service to the people and remained largely middle-class
in inspiration and following, such as early Indian nationalism
...
The myth of the
self-aware and self-determining nation, as well as of its class unity, is the product
of the romanticism of the intelligentsia, because only romanticism can create a
‘national culture’ and hence a nationalist movement
...

The first is a matter of historical fact
...
Yes, they all look back to
(or assume) some heroic past, which they doubtless idealise, but the nationalism
of the French and American Revolutions, as well as strong currents within Scots
and Catalan nationalisms, were (and are) of the more practical, ‘sober bourgeois’
variety
...
D
...
9)
...
This
assumes that national cultures are latterday artefacts collected and put together
by the intelligentsia from the variety of folk cultures in a given region, because
of their idealisation of the ‘folk’
...
A Nasser, a
Sukarno and a Nehru, while eulogising ‘the people’ in the abstract, was more

Capitalism and nationalism

53

concerned with trying to create a new public ‘high culture’ which would unite
the diverse ethnic and religious groups within their new states, than with the
romanticisation of popular cultures which would be likely to weaken and divide
the fragile unity of the state which they had inherited
...
6
What this line of reasoning appears to assume is that the German Fichtean
version of nationalism which was largely romantic, in the sense of idealist and
subjectivist, provides the ‘true’ standard of all nationalisms
...
While I would concede a ‘romantic’ element in every
nationalism (in that they all seek to measure the present by reference to a heroic
past for moral purposes), this does not mean that they are all equally imbued
with ‘idealism and subjectivism’ or that the national culture which accompanies
their emergence may not have some ‘objective’ basis in pre-modern ethnic ties
...
In fact, the earliest nationalisms were
firmly metropolitan, as Liah Greenfeld’s detailed recent study demonstrates
...
Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Burke,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sieyes and Jefferson laid the foundations for the secular
forms of nationalism in the eighteenth century, some of them even before Herder
and well before Fichte, Schlegel and Muller
...
The creation of a national culture in these
early national states was certainly the work of intellectuals and professionals,
but it owed little to romanticism and underdevelopment (Greenfeld 1992;
Kemilainen 1964)
...
The core of his theory is the link
between romanticism, backwardness and the periphery
...
This is
because the centre had no real need of romanticism, as the bourgeoisie possessed
the self-confidence that comes with successful social and economic development
...
By contrast, that periphery had to adopt nationalism because its
underdevelopment, its helplessness, required mythical compensations
...
As with
Kohn’s ‘Eastern’ nationalisms, too, the intelligentsia play a pivotal role in the

54

Varieties of modernism

periphery, where the small bourgeoisie lacks the necessary confidence to beat its
own path to self-sustaining growth
...
Hence the strength of
idealist and subjectivist components in peripheric nationalisms (see Kohn 1967a,
esp
...
7; also Kohn 1960)
...
The romantic movement was, in its eighteenth-century origins, a British
(English, Irish, Scots and Welsh) movement, and was developed by both the
French and the Germans from the 1770s onwards
...
‘Underdevelopment’
characterised Brittany and Wales, but also parts of the north of England, well
into the twentieth century, whereas parts of Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Silesia)
were relatively developed
...
7
To which Nairn might reply that this only goes to demonstrate his basic
theorem, the uneven, discontinuous way in which capitalism has spread across
the globe, creating conflict between relatively enriched and relatively impoverished
regions
...
What they question are the consequences of uneven
development for the incidence of nationalism
...

Relatively well developed Silesia and Piedmont, for example, did not develop
separate nationalist movements, despite some regional sentiment
...
Given the
failure of so many socioeconomic ‘regions’ to coincide with particular ‘ethnic
communities’, regional economic disparities are unlikely to be translated into
nationalist movements
...
6)
...
It is only in circumstances where regional economic
disparities are conjoined and coterminous with particular ethnic communities that
there is a likelihood of a nationalist movement emerging in that region
...
In other words, the
economic disparities and social deprivations are placed in the service of the wider
political purposes of ethnic communities, or of their elites, which the relevant state
authorities have suppressed or marginalised
...
D
...
2)
...
True to the ‘economic
last instance’, Nairn is forced to place culture and ethnicity in the ‘ideal’ realm
and so attempt to ‘derive’ them from the economic contradictions of global
capitalism
...
The fact that, as so often in the
broad Marxian tradition, ethnicity and uneven ethno-history are never accorded
a place alongside class struggle as independent explanatory principles, seriously
undermines the chances of constructing a more multi-causal theory, one which
can be sensitive to the ‘which’ and ‘where’ as well as the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of
nations and nationalism
...
One of the striking facets of nationalism, so often
remarked upon, is its explosive unpredictability
...
At the same time, even if
there can be no mechanical, one-to-one relationship between the uneven
development of global capitalism and that of nationalism, the turbulence generated
by both helps to generate further exploitation, underdevelopment and nationalist
mobilisations
...
An ‘imitative-reactive’ nationalism
may spur economic growth through the perception of collective atimia
...
8
All of which suggests that a protean phenomenon like nationalism cannot
easily be tied to any particular processes such as relative deprivation and
underdevelopment, however powerful, pervasive and global
...

The social base of nationalism
One of the central issues raised by Nairn’s analysis is the social composition of
the ideological movement of nationalism
...
They occupy

56

Varieties of modernism

a pivotal role in the analyses of Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, J
...
Kautsky,
Peter Worsley and Anthony D
...
9
There is considerable truth in this characterisation
...
Intellectuals furnish the basic definitions
and characterisations of the nation, professionals are the main disseminators of
the idea and ideals of the nation, and the intelligentsia are the most avid purveyors
and consumers of nationalist myths
...
Even in continents like Latin America, North America
and Southeast Asia, ‘printmen’ and professionals played an important role in
the dissemination of national ideals (see Anderson 1991: ch
...

In a sense, this is a truism
...
They require the skills of oratory, propaganda, organisation and
communications which professionals have made largely their preserve
...
2)
...
This is what Nairn was attempting
to characterise and place at the nerve centre of nationalism’s success
...
Like
Peter Worsley before him, Hroch sees a chronological progression from elite to
mass involvement in nationalist mobilisation
...
First, an original small circle of intellectuals rediscovers the
national culture and past and formulates the idea of the nation (phase A)
...
Finally the stage of popular involvement in nationalism creates a mass
movement (phase C)
...

But can such a sequence be generalised? And are ‘the people’ always involved?
It is tempting to see nationalism as a river of wave-like movements starting out
as a trickle in its cultural heartlands and gaining in power and extent of

Capitalism and nationalism

57

involvement as it gathers pace
...
But it can also be misleading and Eurocentric
...
This latter scenario can be
found in the Eritrean and Baluch struggles for independence, where only later
was there any attempt to give cultural substance to an essentially social and
political movement of liberation from oppression
...
To some extent this depends on tactical
considerations of the leaders
...
10
Nevertheless, even if the east European pattern is not universal and cultural
nationalism sometimes occupies a subordinate role, at least initially, it can still
be convincingly argued that for a new nation to achieve lasting popular success
and maintain itself in a world of competing nations, intellectuals and professionals
have an important, perhaps crucial role to play
...
Only they know how to present the nationalist
ideal of autoemancipation through citizenship so that all classes will, in principle,
come to understand the benefits of solidarity and participation
...
This is not to deny the importance of other elites or strata like
bureaucrats, clergy and officers, who can exert a powerful influence on the cultural
horizons and political directions of particular nationalisms
...

When intellectuals and professionals split into rival nationalist organisations
fighting each other, the whole movement is weakened and jeopardised (see Gella
1976; A
...
Smith 1981a: ch
...

Internal colonialism
Some of the same class insights and structural problems can be encountered in
a very different variant of socioeconomic modernism
...


58

Varieties of modernism

Hechter’s first and probably his best known formulation arose from his detailed
study of the political and economic development of the British Isles from the
Tudors until the 1960s
...
The first is
immediate and political, the growing resistance of ‘the Celtic fringe’ to incorporation
by the British state in the 1960s, as evidenced in the growth of power of the
Scottish National Party and, to a lesser extent, Plaid Cymru, and the early troubles
in Northern Ireland
...
A third level is industrial-global: the possibility
of explaining the growth of peripheral protest and resistance in the advanced states
of the West as the result of the unequal division of labour within an advancing
industrial capitalism (Hechter 1975: ch
...

To this end, Hechter traces the relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’
within Britain to the expansion of the ‘strong’ Tudor state in the early sixteenth
century
...
For Hechter, this process
was always unequal: England was variously preponderant or oppressive in
political terms (ibid
...
3–4)
...
This state of affairs emerged
with the spread of industrialisation from its English heartlands to the peripheries
...
Until the
advent of industrial capitalism, the colonial situation was latent and obscured;
thereafter it became clear and manifest (ibid
...
5)
...

Analogous to relations between the Indian cultural peripheries and the core
collectivity in Latin American societies, internal colonies in an industrialised
Western Europe possess many of the features found in such overseas colonial
situations
...
Credit is similarly monopolised
...
The peripheral economy is forced into complementary
development to the core, and thus becomes dependant on external markets
...
The movement of peripheral labour is determined largely by forces
exogenous to the periphery
...
Economic dependence is reinforced through juridical, political, and
military measures
...
There is national discrimination on
the basis of language, religion or other cultural forms
...

(ibid
...
Thus,
colonial development produces a cultural division of labour: a system of
stratification where objective cultural distinctions are superimposed on class
lines
...

(ibid
...
What is clear is that, in contrast to class relations in the advanced
core, the backward periphery is characterised by status group solidarity
...

(ibid
...
In which case, the reverse situation may later develop:
if at some initial point acculturation (sc
...
This
accounts for the cultural ‘rebirths’ so characteristic of societies undergoing

60

Varieties of modernism

nationalistic ferment
...

(ibid
...
What is also required is adequate
communication among members of the oppressed group
...
So the
internal colonialism model predicts, and to some extent explains, the
emergence of just such a ‘cultural division of labour’, and therefore the
likelihood of ethnic persistence and ultimately of political secession
...
: 42–3)
To this structural model, Hechter adds a more ad hoc explanation for the postwar
revival of ethnic nationalism in the Celtic periphery of the United Kingdom
...
This
persisting situation sapped people’s faith in the all-British class-based party system
so that by the 1960s,
Nationalism has reemerged in the Celtic periphery largely as a reaction to
this failure of regional development
...
: 265)
And even more specifically:
The most recent crystallisation of Celtic nationalism may ultimately be
understood as a trenchant critique of the principle of bureaucratic
centralism
...
: 310)
But, ultimately, it is the structural situation of systematic dependance of the
periphery that explains the persistence of regional sectionalism, and thereby
encourages its members to resist an incorporation and assimilation that had
previously been refused them
...
It places the revival of nationalism,
and the persistence of ethnic ties, firmly within the transformations of the whole
social structure, deducing these outcomes from the situations to which those
changes give rise
...
It demonstrates how those very processes of penetration
necessarily engender sharp political reactions on the part of the besieged peripheral
communities
...

But how well does the model of ‘internal colonialism’ fit the many instances
of exploited and impoverished regions in the industrialised West? Take the case
of Brittany
...

Without proper communications and infrastructure, Brittany showed all the signs
of a depressed region and ‘internal colony’, reinforced by decades of cultural
discrimination and disdain by the French core
...
D
...
1, 9)
...
In a note, he weighs up the question of how many of these features
internal colonies must exhibit (ibid
...
1)
...
This leads him to amend his thesis by
distinguishing a special ‘segmental’ division of labour from the more usual
‘cultural’ division of labour
...
The point,
of course, is that regions like Scotland retained ‘considerable institutional
autonomy’ since the Union, and so cannot be regarded as proletarian nations or
depressed internal colonies tout court (Hechter and Levi 1979:263–5)
...

By separating the cultural division of labour from the spatial relationships of
core and periphery, it makes it possible to analyse the consequences of cultural
stratification within regions like Wales, with its progressive industrial south and

62

Varieties of modernism

its agricultural north
...
12
Even with this amendment, there are other difficulties
...
Why did Scottish and Welsh political nationalism appear
only in the late nineteenth century, and full middle-class support only in the
1960s, when industrialisation had appeared much earlier in the nineteenth
century? In fact, Hechter’s later model abandons an explanation in terms of
relative deprivation, which was ambiguous, preferring instead a political argument
to explain the timing of ethnic separatism, namely, the nature of state policies
(ibid
...

Second, there is the problem of ‘overdeveloped’ regions
...
While the political correlates of internal colonialism fit
these cases, it is hard to assimilate them to depressed ‘internal colonies’ of larger
states
...
Conversi
1990 and Connor 1994: ch
...

But perhaps most important is the failure of the internal colonialism model
to do justice to the ethnic basis of separatism
...

But this misses the point
...
But the fact that culture provided
the basis for exclusion of the periphery by the core over decades and perhaps
centuries through the cultural division of labour, tells us that ‘culture’ and ‘history’
pertain not just to the creations of ‘high culture’ and ‘reappropriated pasts’ by
nationalists and others, but to the shared origin myths, experiences and memories
of generations of the excluded, the history and culture of ‘the people’
...

But perhaps the basic trouble with the thesis of ‘internal colonialism’ is its
conflation of region with ethnic community (or ethnie)
...
Again, the thesis is rendered more plausible

Capitalism and nationalism

63

because of the nationalist demand for ‘land’
...

Land is indeed vital to ethnic separatists, but not simply for its economic and
political uses
...
Ethnic nationalists are
not interested in any land; they only desire the land of their putative ancestors
and the sacred places where their heroes and sages walked, fought and taught
...
In other words, the territory in question must be
made into an ‘ethnoscape’, a poetic landscape that is an extension and expression
of the character of the ethnic community and which is celebrated as such in
verse and song (A
...
Smith 1997a)
...

Neither is reducible to the other
...
We may go even further
...
He enumerates a range of historical and
contemporary cases which reveal the power of ethnicity independent of economic
situation
...
There seems
to be no easily identifiable pattern to the relationship between economic factors
and ethnic nationalism, and on the other side, there is clear evidence of ethnic
sentiment and activity emerging independently of other, especially economic,
factors (Connor 1994: ch
...

Ethno-regional movements, then, are just one of several sub-varieties of ethnic
nationalism which emerge from the historic cleavages in the affluent, developed
states of the West
...
It follows that the internal colonialism
model is of limited applicability and represents a special case within the broader
type of politically disadvantaged ethnic communities in national states
...

Elite strategies of ‘rational choice’
This is clearly the problem that has increasingly puzzled Hechter and others:
why should people join ethnic and nationalist movements led by elites who are
acting on their behalf, when they can so easily avoid doing so in modern societies?
As Hechter asks:

64

Varieties of modernism

If collective action is facilitated when the individual members of a group
share common interests, then why does it occur so rarely? How can we
explain why some people in the same structural position are free riders
(Olson 1965), while others are not?
(Hechter 1988:268)
This for Hechter is the chief merit of the rational choice approach: while giving
due weight to structural constraints, it starts from a methodological individualism
that seeks to explain collective outcomes in terms of individual behaviour
...
13
Rational choice considers individual behaviour to be a function of the
interaction of structural constraints and the sovereign preferences of
individuals
...
Within these constraints, individuals
face various feasible courses of action
...

(ibid
...
People join ethnic groups or
nationalist movements because they think they will receive a net individual benefit
by doing so
...
First,
they are the major source of the private rewards and punishments that
motivate the individual’s decision to participate in collective action
...

(ibid
...
They mould the preferences of their members by applying
sanctions to deviant individuals (such as free-riders and criminals) and by
controlling the information that comes to them from outside the group—as, for
example, the Amish communities in Pennsylvania, or the Gypsies in many lands,
have done for generations (ibid
...

Hechter and his colleagues have applied this solidaristic theory of social order
to a number of topics
...
With regard to
secession, Hechter has outlined a systematic, step-by-step account of the strategies
taken and options open to elites on the road to secession, defined as
a demand for formal withdrawal from a central political authority by a
member unit or units on the basis of a claim to independent sovereign
status
...
Secession occurs only
in constituted national host states, where there are regions with populations
who have either common production or common consumption interests, or both
...
Where these
common interests are superimposed, where class and culture coincide, and where
there are intensive communications networks, the sense of a separate region is
likely to emerge
...
Nevertheless, rational
choice theory, which starts from the preferences of individuals, is more likely to
cover the majority of nationalisms, since it predicts that ethnic and national
groups will closely monitor and sanction their members and control their access
to information, thereby preventing free-riding for what is a collective good,
namely, sovereignty
...
: 273–5)
...
Only where
it is perceived to be weak and unable to benefit regional groups, and constitutional
reforms and repression have failed, as occurred during the last years of the Soviet
Union, is there a chance of success for secessionists
...
All this makes
secession a highly improbable outcome
...

(ibid
...
Here again we should prefer an analysis based on individual desires
for wealth, status and power, to one based on unknowable value commitments
...
To prevent free-riding, these groups

66

Varieties of modernism

will monitor and control their members, and create group solidarity
...
That institution is the state, whose functions are
to protect productive solidary groups from predators (e
...
criminal gangs) and
from ideological oppositional groups (e
...
secessionists) who aim to weaken or
dismantle the state
...
This is where
nationalism enters the scene:
There is ample evidence that nationalist groups employ violence strategically
as a means to produce their joint goods, among which sovereignty looms
large
...
What this suggests is that
violence is most likely to break out when a weakly solidaristic nationalist
group confronts a strong state apparatus having high domestic and
international autonomy
...
The escalation
of violence is most likely to be sustained, therefore, in the context of a weakened
state facing a highly solidary nationalist group
...
: 64, original emphasis)
Interest and passion
This may well be true, but what, one may ask, has it to do with nationalism? It
is perfectly possible, and useful, to specify the conditions in which low and high
levels of group violence are likely to occur, but they apply to all kinds of
oppositional social movement and every type of belief system
...
The problem thereby disappears; and we are left
wondering why it is that the nation and nationalism have stirred so much passion
and moulded the modern world in their image
...
Is it not just as valid and economical to
assume a link between professed beliefs and subsequent actions, and explain the
latter, at least in part, in terms of the former? Might not at least some of the
actions of nationalists, and those the most intense and impassioned, be explicable
through comparative analysis of belief systems and their consequences? In

Capitalism and nationalism

67

omitting entirely the role of beliefs and ideas, Hechter has altogether elided the
problem of why people appeal to the nation
...

There is a related problem
...
Values, he claims, cannot readily be imputed from
behaviour; we cannot know if a specific item of consumption behaviour, hungry
Hindus refusing to eat beef, for example, is due to fear of sanctions or deeply
held beliefs
...
By dismissing
values, we are left only with preferences which, of themselves, can never really
explain the intensity and passion which give rise to nationalist self-sacrifice
...

There is a further omission in rational choice theory: the problem of memory
...
Similarly,
Hitler’s war of extermination of every European Jew, even in the last desperate
days of the Reich when all manpower and weaponry was needed for the war on
two fronts, is not easily explained by the strategic calculations of members of
solidary groups
...
Such
memories need not be so consistently dark; the commemorations of the glorious
dead, fallen for their motherlands in battle, stir the living to emulation, enjoining
a morality of and for the nation of citizens
...
2; Gillis 1994)
...
Hechter is right to remind us of the need to specify the
mechanisms of any explanation that we invoke, and he has performed an
important service in demanding more rigorous attention to the logic of such
explanations
...
The great number of
permutations of explanatory factors, the sheer variety of historical cases, above
all the elusive complexity of definitional features of concepts of the nation and
nationalism, renders the search for certainty in the explanation of ethnic and
nationalist phenomena, and the attempt to reduce their variety to a single pattern
of preferences, implausible and untenable
...
At most, such strategies operate within tightly circumscribed limits
...
In other words,
structural constraints determine a large part of the answer to the question of
whether secession is a possibility
...
This
does not seem to be so very different a kind of explanation from a good many
others, including some perennialist ones, as we shall see later; and it demonstrates
the critical importance of these conditions for secession, without invoking rational
choice
...

This is very much what Donald Horowitz has in mind, in his typology of the
logic of secession movements
...
Basing himself on a theory of group esteem (to
which I shall return), Horowitz analyses the stereotypes of ethnic groups held
by the colonial power, and taken over by their ethnic neighbours, in the colonial
state
...
The latter
type of group has benefited from advanced educational levels and non-agricultural
employment, while backward groups tend to have lower levels of education,
income and employment (Horowitz 1985: chs 4–5)
...
The most common basis, he argues, is found
among backward groups in backward regions, for they have little to lose:
They conclude rapidly that they have a small stake in preserving the
undivided state of which they are a part
...
: 236–40)
This is not just a matter of selfish elite manipulation; it is also a result of genuine
and widespread grievances such as the importation of the dominant ethnic group’s
civil servants into the region
...
‘Where backward groups are early seceders, advanced
groups are late seceders’ (ibid
...
In fact, as population exporters, they tend
to secede only as a last resort, as the cases of the Ibo and the Tamils demonstrated;
it is their diasporas and the nationwide opportunities open to them, that inhibit
secession, until violence persuades them otherwise
...
Secession is also infrequent among
backward groups in advanced regions, mainly because they tend to be
numerically weak
...
: 249–59)
...
One may disagree with
Horowitz’s empirical predictions (for example, it did not take long for advanced
groups in advanced regions such as the Ibo, Latvians and Estonians, or in more
backward regions such as the Bangla Deshis, to mount powerful secession
movements), but his analysis is surely more illuminating in respect of those
structural conditions that Hechter consigns to his initial category of ‘structural
constraints’
...
15
Pure instrumentalism, it seems, is a limiting case in this field
...
It tells us a good deal about the
strategies of elites, and makes us remember how much rational calculation exists
even within what so many have assumed is the subjective phenomenon par
excellence
...
But as so
often, human motives are mixed, frequently obscure and hard to disentangle
...
Rational choice
theory omits the way in which collectivities, once created through individual
experience and action, can operate if not exactly on their own, then at least
independently of each individual in every generation
...
Over and
above the analysis of preferences and rational strategies, a general theory in this
field would also need to consider these processes and mechanisms, if it was to
give a more rounded and convincing account of nations and nationalism
...
From the time of the
French and American Revolutions, the ‘nation- state’ became the predominant,
and soon almost the only legitimate form of political organisation, as well as the
dominant vehicle of collective identity
...
Colonialism has also been the primary source of nationhood
in Latin America, where the administrative provinces of the Spanish and
Portuguese empires formed the basis, and provided the boundaries, for the
subsequent post-colonial states and hence for their nations
...
It is this third, political variant of classical modernism
that I wish to explore
...
To begin with, the Weberian emphasis
on relations of domination provided a classical definition of the state as the
political organisation where its ‘administrative staff successfully upholds a claim
to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its
order’ within a given territory
...
For Weber, bureaucracy exemplified the spirit and actions of the
modern, rationalised state; hence its intimate association with, and
interpenetration of, the state (Weber 1948)
...

The levelling of intermediate corporate bodies in the era of capitalism and the
growing power and impersonal rationality of the state have left individuals as
citizens exposed, and often opposed, to the bourgeois state, just as capitalism
70

State and nation

71

has alienated the mass of wage workers and left them at the mercy of the small
capitalist class of property owners
...
2
A third influence contributing to this view is the idea, traceable to Simmel, of
endemic conflict between states and societies
...
The modern world is one of national
competition and warfare; as a result, military factors and militarism assume an
increasingly central role in the distribution of resources and the formation of
political communities and identities (Simmel 1964; Poggi 1978; cf
...
D
...

Finally, there is the whole idea of modernity as a revolution in administration
and communications, one which requires new kinds of human associations that
will be able to operate effectively in such an environment
...

Stemming from the work of both Weber and the ‘communications’ theorists,
notably Karl Deutsch, this view sees in the modern state a monitoring and
reflexive institution that requires for its success a political community and identity
moulded in its image (Deutsch 1963, 1966; Tilly 1975)
...
The rise,
‘nature and consequences of the modern nation-state forms the core of the second
volume of his Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, entitled The NationState and Violence
...
Nevertheless, the
passages allotted to them allow us to gain a clear idea of Giddens’ theoretical
position vis-à-vis nations and nationalism
...
The formation of the nation-state and the nation-state system is ‘an
expression of the dislocations of modern history’, which since the advent of
industrial capitalism has witnessed extraordinary change (ibid
...
Both the
nation and nationalism ‘are distinctive properties of modern states’; indeed, a
nation Giddens defines as
a collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject
to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state
apparatus and those of other states
...
: 116)

72

Varieties of modernism

Nationalism, in turn, Giddens regards as primarily a psychological phenomenon:
the affiliation of individuals to a set of symbols and beliefs emphasising
communality among the members of a political order
...
: 116)
But nationalism per se is not at the centre of Giddens’ concerns
...
It is the nation-state in its unique administrative, military and territorial
properties that commands his attention:
The nation-state, which exists in a complex of other nation-states, is a set of
institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly
over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being
sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external
violence
...
: 121)
In other words, what distinguishes the nation-state from other polities, and
nationalism from earlier kinds of group identity, is the rise of stable administration
from fixed capital cities over well defined stretches of territory
...
In the modern epoch, in contrast,
nations were formed through processes of state centralisation and administrative
expansion which, through the reflexive ordering of the state system, fixed the
borders of a plurality of nations
...
: 120)
...
Indeed, it is only insofar as it is linked to
the state that Giddens considers it to be sociologically significant
...

(ibid
...
Similarly, national symbols such as a
common language can provide a sense of community and hence some measure
of ontological security where traditional moral schemes have been disrupted by

State and nation

73

the modem state
...

More fundamentally, however, nationalism figures in Giddens’ theory as
the cultural sensibility of sovereignty, the concomitant of the co-ordination
of administrative power within the bounded nation-state
...
: 219)
Given the vast increase in communications and coordination of activities, we
can most usefully regard the nation-state as a ‘conceptual community’ founded
on common language and common symbolic historicity
...

In most cases the advent of the nation-state stimulates oppositional nationalisms
...
This leads
Giddens to conclude that ‘all nationalist movements are necessarily political’,
because nationalism is ‘inherently linked to the achievement of administrative
autonomy of the modern (sc
...
: 220)
...
This is not only the case in the West; we find it in perhaps
its most naked form in the ‘state-nations’ of Africa and Asia, that is, those postcolonial states striving to become nations on the basis of their ex-colonial territorial
boundaries and their administrative format
...
The nation that the leaders of these liberation movements envisaged was
equally grounded and defined by a statist ideal inherited from the West and
adapted by the immediate post-colonial generation of political leaders
...
To begin with, not
all nationalisms have in practice opted for independent statehood; most Scots
and Catalans, for example, have not to date supported their movements and
parties which sought outright independence, and have instead settled for a large
measure of social, cultural and economic autonomy within their borders
...

Perhaps more important is the problem of cultural nationalism
...

But, as John Hutchinson has convincingly shown, cultural nationalism is a force
in its own right, and one that exists in a contrapuntal relationship with political
nationalism
...
Hutchinson documents this extensively in the Irish
case, showing for example, how the fall of Parnell in 1891 effectively put an end
to the Irish home rule political movement, while at the same time encouraging
the cultural nationalists to come forward and propagate their Gaelic ideals and
a vision of a new Irish moral community, until such time as a new wave of
political nationalism, drawing on the work of the cultural nationalists, could
take up where Parnell had left off
...
4)
...
Historically, Giddens sees the nation-state as a historical
phenomenon which emerged out of European absolutism
...
In Western Europe, it is true, the nation tended to emerge
together with, and out of the crucible of, the bureaucratic state, while Western
nationalisms, too, can be seen in large part as state-oriented movements,
ideological movements for consolidating and enhancing state power (though
even here, we may recall that Dutch, Irish, American and even French bourgeois
nationalism in the Revolution were oppositional movements directed against
the state authorities)
...
Attempts to modernise the administration of the
Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman empires were certainly a factor in the genesis
of ethnic nationalisms within their borders, but the nationalisms they helped to
engender, as well as the nations that became the objects of their aspirations,
were not just ‘oppositional’
...
If the West is generally characterised by a ‘state-to-nation’ trajectory,
that of Eastern Europe and parts of Asia can be more convincingly analysed in
terms of a ‘nation-to-state’ model
...
D
...
4
There are two more general criticisms
...
Giddens insists with others that nationalism, and the nation, are really
only significant insofar as they are linked to the state, that is, to attaining and

State and nation

75

maintaining state power; and further that the nation has no independent
conceptual status outside of its link with the state
...
The nation is subsumed within
the concept of the nation-state, and in both theory and practice the emphasis
throughout falls on the ‘state’ component
...
By the same logic, Scotland cannot become a ‘nation’ until the
majority of Scottish voters agree with the Scottish National Party’s platform and
vote for an independent Scottish ‘nation-state’
...
What the statist formulation omits, then, is the ubiquity of this sense
of a community of like-minded people with whom we feel intimate, even though
we cannot know most of them, and for whom we are prepared to make real
sacrifices (see James 1996:166–7)
...

In The Nation-State and Violence, Giddens drops his earlier suggestion that nationalism
feeds upon and reconstitutes an attenuated form of ‘primordial sentiments’ (in the
Geertzian sense) and opts instead for a view derived from Fredrik Earth which
emphasises the importance of exclusionary sentiments based on social boundaries
between ethnic groups
...
In fact, Giddens does acknowledge the importance of
cultural ties such as language and religion; but he fails to link these with the new
kind of ‘borders’ created by the reflexive nation-state, or see how they can be
symbolically reconstituted to form a basis for the modern nation
...

By characterising ‘nationalism’ as a purely subjective, psychological phenomenon,
Giddens reduces its importance to that of a prop for the nation-state, and thereby
fails to see how it symbolically defines and infuses with passion the national identities
to which the nation as community gives rise
...
D
...
3; James 1996: ch
...

This is one example of a more general problem affecting all variants of political
modernism
...
Yet the concept of
the nation embraces far more than the idea of a political community, or vehicle

76

Varieties of modernism

for state power, even one with fixed borders: it refers also to a distinctive culture
community, a ‘people’ in their ‘homeland’, a historic society and a moral
community
...

Nations and the inter-state order
The centrality of political institutions was also recognised by Charles Tilly in
his work on the formation of national states in Europe
...
Yet he also distinguished between
those nations that were forged by the economic and military activities of modern
states, mainly in Western Europe, and those later nations that were created, as
it were, ‘by design’ by diplomats and statesmen through international treaties
following long periods of protracted warfare, as after the Thirty Years or
Napoleonic Wars
...
For Tilly, it is the modern state that is
sociologically paramount, as it is historically prior; the nation is merely a
construct, dependant upon the state for its force and meaning, and is treated
adjectivally
...

This inter-state system emerged in a Europe perennially at war, a Europe
unable to refashion the Roman empire
...
For Charles
Tilly, it is, above all, war that ‘makes the state’, just as it is the state that ‘makes
war’
...
But, after warfare has left the parties exhausted, diplomacy is called
in to fashion a new international order of ‘national states’ in accordance with
the balance of power between the leading states, first in Europe and then globally
(Tilly 1975: Introduction, Conclusion)
...
He argues that the conventional ‘substantialist’
accounts of nationalism reify the nation and treat it as an enduring collectivity
...
A recent book by Julia

State and nation

77

Kristeva bears the English title Nations without Nationalism; but the analytical
task at hand, I submit, is to think about nationalism without nations
...
Nationalist practices were formed by Soviet political institutions, and,
given the occasion, the events of ‘nationness’ created the successor states
...

(ibid
...
: 25)
...
But to say that it also constitutes both interests and actors, in
accordance with the postulates of the ‘new institutionalism’ in sociology, seriously
limits the field of theoretical analysis and precludes alternative possibilities
...
It is the social reality of
those consequences that has persuaded analysts to treat nations as real (albeit
also imagined) communities, alongside other kinds of felt and lived community
...
Even rational choice theory
operates with ‘organisations’ and ‘corporations’ of interest
...
Rogers Brubaker is right to remind us that there, and elsewhere, the
‘nation’ (like the ‘state’) is a concept, but to confine its referents to form, practice
and event is to strip it of those attributes that give it so much of its potency and
appeal
...


78

Varieties of modernism

The impact on such nations of the inter-state system is a large topic
...
For sociologists, Deutsch’s nation-building
model needed to be placed in a wider context of international economic, political
and cultural linkages
...
In this vein,
Andrew Orridge sought to delineate the complex social and historical bases of
recent autonomist and secessionist movements in Europe
...
1972; Orridge 1981, 1982; Tivey 1980)
...
The new
state-based world order, first codified at Westphalia in 1648, underlined the
naturalness of hierarchy in a world of princely states in which warfare was
regarded as a legitimate institution of sovereign states
...
Posen 1993; Snyder 1993)
...
At the same time, it widened and
deepened the role of warfare
...
Liberal nationalists were men of peace and hoped a world of free
states would eliminate this scourge
...
Along with the vast increase in industrial production
and the technology of mass destruction, this ideal has encouraged the shift to
total warfare in the twentieth century
...
Navarri in Tivey 1980)
...
The
result was the creation of over 100 new states and the development of the
first truly global international society the world had known
...
The principle of national self-

State and nation

79

determination which was built into the new system turned out to be much
less permissive, or popular, than attention to its philosophical origins and
meaning might lead one to expect
...

(ibid
...
The UN principle of national self-determination
was in practice amended to include only states created by the process of
decolonisation of empires, and not ethnic secessionist movements seeking their
own states by withdrawing from duly constituted national states
...
: 61–9)
...
But this
has been mainly the result of the break-up of two empires, the Soviet and the
Ethiopian
...
This still leaves open the question
of the early European recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia:
were these exceptions to the rule, or do they betoken a deeper change in
international emphasis? Given the worldwide and often unpredictable explosions
of ethnic conflict and nationalist sentiments, can we be so sanguine about the
stability of an international community of sovereign states? Moreover, are not
international organisations, in the name of human and minority rights and under
the impact of widespread ethnic nationalism, eroding the sovereign powers of
individual states? (Mayall 1991, 1992; cf
...


The state and war
The role of war in the creation of ethnic and national communities can, of
course, be witnessed in pre-modern epochs
...
But it is in the modern epoch that warfare has had its most profound
impact; and this is largely because, as Michael Howard has so vividly
documented, the early modern revolution in warfare had become closely linked

80

Varieties of modernism

causally to the administrative efficiency of the modern state (see Howard 1976;
A
...
Smith 1981b)
...
Mann, like Tilly and Giddens, is a convinced
‘modernist’: in the first volume of The Sources of Social Power, he argues that though
there may have been loose ethnic networks in antiquity and the Middle Ages,
they could not, and did not, serve as the basis of polities
...
Nevertheless, Mann is ready to concede that not
only military-political, but other factors played some part in the emergence of
modern nations and nationalism (Mann 1986:527–30)
...
He defines
a nation as
an extensive cross-class community affirming its distinct ethnic identity and
history and claiming its own state
...
Second, from around 1700, state expansion and commercial capitalism
widened the scope of discursive literacy to a broader class through a variety of
institutions from contracts and army manuals to coffee house discussions and
academies, encouraging a limited sense of ‘civil citizenship’ among the upper
classes (ibid
...

These two phases brought into being what Mann calls ‘proto-nations’, whose
consciousness was largely elite-based
...
Prior to 1792, the military revolution had
profoundly affected geopolitical relations in Europe, producing a series of fiscal
crises in several European states
...
Through the growing demands by propertied classes for
representative government and political citizenship, intensive, pre-existing familial
networks of ritual and literacy were linked to the extensive power networks of
an enlarged and more aggressive state, albeit as yet on a limited scale among the
elites
...
So,

State and nation

81

Cross-class nations were propelled forward more by the states’ military than
by their capitalist crystallisations
...

(ibid
...
Mann 1995)
In the post-1792 period, under French revolutionary and Bonapartist military
pressure, regimes all across Europe began to penetrate the intensive, familial
networks and link them more directly to extensive state and military networks,
and on a much broader scale
...
This was the work of a radical intelligentsia,
invoking universal principles which crossed all boundaries—whether of
knowledge, social class or social practice
...
At these key
ideological ‘moments’, the ‘nation-state mobilised greater collective power than
old regimes could muster’ (ibid
...

In Germany and Austria, it is true, the lack of fit between language and
political boundaries made the first romantic stirrings of scholarly nationalism
curiously ‘cultural’ and apolitical
...
Under the impact of
French militarism, national stereotypes were accentuated, whole peoples were
pitted against one another, and radical patriot societies, some of them appealing
to ‘the people’ in their local languages, multiplied
...
: 238–47)
...
The universal desire for industrial capitalist growth vested the state with
ever greater powers of social coordination
...
Of course, this might stir up opposition based on language or
religion, subvert the existing state or become the basis for new national states; but
the trend to national homogeneity and popular nations of the middle classes,
peasants and workers encouraged a more passionate, aggressive nationalism
resulting from the tighter links between intensive, emotional spheres and the
militarist, capitalist state
...
Mann concludes by
emphasising the close links forged between state and nation, arguing that:
In the industrial capitalist phase the state-reinforcing nation can be simply
represented as three concentric circular bands: the outer one circumscribed

82

Varieties of modernism

by and attached to the total national state, the middle more linked to the
inner circle, the statist core
...
: 734)
This is a complex and nuanced modernist account of the rise of nationalism in
Europe, which locates it in the historical context of the growth of classes and
class conflict in the shadow of the modern, militarised state
...
But then, as he intimates, so does the militarist
state
...

A political theory of nationalism?
In apparent contrast, Michael Mann later proposed a starker ‘political’ theory of
nationalism and its excesses
...
This comes out when he claims that
the ‘key lies rather in the state’
...
As people fought back, they demanded
political citizenship of the ‘people’ and the ‘nation’ (Mann 1995:47–8)
...
He is prepared
to admit that regional-ethnic, as well as religious components enter into the
picture, especially in the early phases of establishing larger spheres of discursive
literacy
...
Yet, he continually returns to ‘political’ explanations
...

(ibid
...
The presence or absence of regional administration
offers a much better predictor
...

(ibid
...
But can such an explanation be
supported in the case of Central Europe? How does such an explanation fare in
Germany and Italy? Shouldn’t we have expected a Prussian and Piedmontese
nation to emerge, rather than the ‘Germany’ and ‘Italy’ that eventually took
their seats in the concert of ‘nations’? Why was the fight for democracy and
representative government ipso facto a movement for a German and an Italian nation?
Mann may be right to say, in partial reply, that nationalism is part of the wider
movement for democracy (whatever its subsequent manifestations may have
been); but that hardly explains why democratisation is also everywhere nationalist,
why it is the nation that must be democratised and why democracy must be
realised in and through the nation
...
He does so by claiming that nationalism originated
in protest against the exactions of authoritarian, militarised states which invaded
the private spheres of the family, religion and education and linked them to
the militarised state
...
After all, as Tilly argued, the
modern, rationalised state emerged before nations and nationalism; so they can
only be understood in a European context of inter-state diplomacy and warfare
...
3)
...

What is crucial for nationalists is the sense of a ‘homeland’ and of historic, even
sacred territory, not just boundaries
...
It is the relationship,
emotional as well as political, between land and people, history and territory,
that provides one of the main motive forces for national mobilisation and
subsequent claims to title-deeds
...
8
In the same way, the nationalists emphasise the uniqueness of a vernacular
culture
...
We need to explain why so many people followed the
nationalists in emphasising their distinctive cultures and desiring to belong to
‘unique’ nations—especially those peoples who did not possess their own state
...
9
One might also question Mann’s assertion that failure by national states to
institute democracy, especially in what he calls the post-1918 ‘modernist’ phase,
resulted in extreme aggressive nationalism, and especially fascism (ibid
...

One could equally argue that the failures of orthodox nationalisms to live up to
their promises—economic, cultural and political—opened the way to much more
radical ‘solutions’, which ultimately undermined the very concept of the vertical
nation, substituting the idea of horizontal racial castes
...
The state may be the target of their aspirations, but it is not always the
source of their discontents (A
...
Smith 1979: ch
...

State and society: bridging the gulf?
An attempt to come to grips with some of these problems while upholding the
idea of the state as the focus and goal of nationalism is central to the most
elaborate and comprehensive ‘political’ theory of nationalism
...
For Breuilly,
The term ‘nationalism’ is used to refer to political movements seeking or
exercising state power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments
...

(b) The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other
interests and values
...
This usually requires
the attainment of at least political sovereignty
...
: 5)
...
This leads him to exclude the American colonies’ Declaration
and War of Independence in 1776
...
At the same
time, Breuilly is prepared to concede, à propos the goal of creating a German
nation in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–9, that, in place of an ethnic

State and nation

85

criterion, nationalism may base its claims on ‘an historical-territorial concept
of the nation’ (ibid
...

Nevertheless, Breuilly is not prepared to accept an extreme voluntarist position:
to base national identity purely on individual choice would be to abandon any
idea of a culturally specific nation, even in the eyes of nationalists
...

In fact, in many of these cases, cultural themes loomed large: modern anticolonial movements opposed an allegedly superior Western culture to ‘accounts
of their own, non-western cultures’
...
Or they may operate at a
‘sub-nationalist’ or ‘tribalist’ level and refer to specific ethnic identities (ibid
...

John Breuilly is really interested only in politically significant nationalisms,
rather than with ideology or ideologies per se
...
The principle of classification will, therefore, be based upon the
relationship between the nationalist movement and the state which it either
opposes or controls
...

(ibid
...
g
...
Of course, cases like nineteenth-century Polish
nationalism were directed against both kinds of state, and aimed to separate
from, unify and reform in quick succession
...
Hence a political typology is illuminating and ‘the only starting
point for a general understanding of nationalism is to take its form of politics
seriously’ through comparative historical investigation
...
: 12–14)
...
Because it performs
the functions of social mobilisation, political coordination and ideological
legitimation so effectively, nationalism has spread across the globe, drawn in a
variety of social groups and remained a powerful force for the last two centuries
...
Under this heading,

86

Varieties of modernism

Breuilly includes middle-level bureaucrats, officers, professionals, traders and
intellectuals
...
At times even the peasants and workers have been
drawn into the nationalist cause, though left to themselves manual workers tend
to place class solidarity above the nation, as Marx and Engels claimed
...

Workers have also tended to become nationalistic wherever labour competition
between workers of different ethnic groups has become acute, as occurred in
late nineteenth-century Bohemia
...
: 36–46)
...
Given their discursive skills, status interests and
occupational needs, professionals have been particularly strong adherents of the
nationalist cause
...

Similarly with the intellectuals, who are often held to be the central proponents
and adherents of nationalism
...
At the same time, such abstraction and autonomy are
the hallmarks of all modern ideologies; and intellectuals like others are subject
to all kinds of social constraints and must operate within pre-existing political
networks
...
It is to the politics and political
contexts of social groups rather than their ideas that we must look to grasp the
nature and functions of nationalism (ibid
...
12
If nationalism cannot be seen as the politics of intellectuals, does this mean
that ideology is unimportant? With certain qualifications, concludes Breuilly,
ideology can still be regarded as a powerful force which was essential to the
work of co-ordination, mobilisation and adding legitimacy to what was
carried out by a nationalist movement
...
: 70)
However, the claim to link cultural distinctiveness to the demand for political
self-determination had to be related to specific interests, and it worked only in

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87

particular sorts of political situations
...
The modern era of capitalism, bureaucracy and secularism saw a
growing split between ‘state’ and ‘society’, the growth of an absolutist realm of
politics on the one hand, and of a private realm of ‘civil society’ on the other
...
At this point, Breuilly takes Herder’s arguments as representative
of what he regards as the essentially historicist vision of nationalism
...

Thought, therefore, like language, was group-specific and unique; so was every
other cultural code—dress, dance, architecture, music—in tandem with the society
in which it developed
...
The task of the nationalist is clear: to
restore his or her community to its natural, authentic state
...
Hence the call for national self-determination,
which means reintegrating society with the state, by securing for each unique
nation its own territorial state
...
e
...
: 55–64)
...
At the same time,
he concedes that nationalism sets out to tackle a real problem: the split between
state and society which modernity opens up
...
The
quality that sets nationalism apart from other ideologies is its unabashed
celebration of the community itself
...

(ibid
...
The
symbolism of liberation and victory was successful in mobilising a sense of
Afrikaner destiny (though not immediately of political unity) a century later,
when the Ossawatrek was instituted through a re-enactment of the Great Trek
...
The aim is to return to the
heights of the past, though in a transformed fashion
...
: 67–8)
Breuilly ends by conceding, reluctantly, that
the self-reference quality of nationalist propaganda and the theme of the
restoration of a glorious past in a transformed future has a special power
which it is difficult for other ideological movements to match
...
: 68)13
The bulk of John Breuilly’s massive study is devoted to historical elucidation of
the forms and conditions of nationalisms in each of the six categories (reform,
unification and separation nationalisms in nation-states and non-nation-states)
both in Europe and in Africa and Asia
...
The modern absolutist state, at once territorially bounded
and globally universal, came to be increasingly challenged and checked by a
private domain of ‘civil society’ based on advancing capitalism, which constituted
the growing political community
...
The concept of the nation
‘related principally to the institutions of the political community that sustained
the monarchy’ (ibid
...
When the opposition to the monarch and the state
began to be based on historic or natural rights, the first step towards nationalism
was taken
...
This is the moment when
nationalism emerges
...

(ibid
...
More generally, the
development of nationalism was closely bound up with the nature of political
modernisation in nineteenth-century Europe and in areas of European settlement
and imperial rule overseas
...
It is ‘a peculiarly modern form of
politics which can only be understood in relation to the way in which the modern
state has developed’ (ibid
...

Identity and politics
But can we specify so precisely the nature and limits of nationalism? Breuilly’s
lucid, tightly-argued case for a political definition of nationalism is bought at
considerable cost, of which he is well aware
...
His arguments for rejecting
the idea of nationalism as a language and ideology of cultural identity are twofold
...
We should concern ourselves exclusively with nationalism
as a form of politics, because only that kind of definition is amenable to historical
and social analysis
...
Can we extrude all reference to ‘culture’ from the definition of a
concept whose specificity resides exactly in the relationship it proposes between
culture and politics? And if we include ‘culture’, is it not because culture is
supposed, in nationalist ideology, to define a collective identity? Precision and
rigour should not be bought at the cost of excluding a concept’s key elements
and its differentiating characteristics
...
Breuilly feels that its inclusion would
lead us back to the unacceptable primordialism of an irrational need to belong
and an atavistic appeal to forces erupting in history
...
He continues:
People do yearn for communal membership, do have a strong sense of us
and them, of territories as homelands, of belonging to culturally defined
and bounded worlds which give their lives meaning
...

(ibid
...
But John Breuilly is being perfectly consistent with his premises: exactly
because there are ideas and sentiments the historican cannot explain, we must

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Varieties of modernism

stick to those elements that are amenable to explanation
...
In particular, the interpretive
method stemming from Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie will continue to be used to
analyse the subjective motivations of both individuals and communities, without
resorting to a primordialist approach
...
One of the goals of nationalism is the
attainment and maintenance of cultural identity, that is, a sense of a distinctive
cultural heritage and ‘personality’ for a given named population
...
Of course, this presupposes a more ostensive definition
of nationalism than the stipulative one offered by Breuilly; but even he concedes
in his initial definition of the concept of nationalism that the nation is credited with
‘an explicit and peculiar character’ in the nationalist doctrine
...
Indeed, there have been ‘pure’ cultural nationalists who have either
rejected or remained silent about the state and the need to capture state power
...
But not only does this fly in the face of the cultural, religious or
linguistic nationalists’ own self-description and understanding; it makes it very
difficult to do justice to the role of influential cultural nationalists like Yeats,
Achad Ha’am or Aurobindo, or of movements for cultural renewal and moral
regeneration such as the Irish Gaelic revival or the Finnish literary renaissance
(Branch 1985; Hutchinson 1987)
...
Several nationalisms have eschewed the road to outright independence,
preferring to attain maximum cultural, social and economic autonomy for their
homelands and peoples within a wider, federal sovereign state
...
This may, of
course, change, but to deny them the label of ‘nationalism’ because their
oppositional movements have not been bent on capturing state power is to overlook
the centrality of national cultural and social regeneration in their movements, an
ideal that is common to so many other ‘nationalisms’
...
It proposes
a form of culture based on ‘authentic’ and unique experience which aims to
regenerate societies by uncovering and releasing their inner rhythms and energies
...
It offers a
kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions,

State and nation

91

but given a new activist social and political form through political action,
mobilisation and institutions
...

Intellectuals and nationalist ideology
Similar problems beset his explanatory paradigm
...
Indeed, nationalism is an attempted, though specious, political
solution to this very real problem of modernity
...
The political level needs to be considered in its own
right, and its vaunted autonomy restored
...

Breuilly is not, however, oblivious to the role of non-political factors
...
If ‘national identity’ is the object of enquiry,
then clearly these cultural and social psychological factors must receive far greater
attention
...
But is this proposed division of
labour satisfactory? Can we so easily separate the political movement of
nationalism from the growth of a sense of national identity? Are they not
intimately conjoined, not just on occasion, but in all cases? After all, the fostering
of such a sense of national identity is a prime objective of nationalist movements;
but can nationalist movements emerge without some sense of national identity
among the elites? If nationalism creates ‘nations’, does it not also create ‘national
identities’, or does it presuppose some sense of national identity among its
adherents? (Breuilly 1993:379–80)
...
As Breuilly notes, in one sense, every
political movement must have its intellectuals and professionals to promote and
help organise it; in another sense, nationalist movements vary as to the extent
of involvement of intellectuals and professionals in their ranks
...
It is their imagination

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Varieties of modernism

and understanding that gives the nation its contours and much of its emotional
content
...
Without that imagery and representation, the political movement would be merely an anti- (or pro-) state
movement; it would lack the directive guidance that the specific ideal of the
nation furnishes (see Argyle 1969, 1976; Anderson 1991: ch
...

This in turn means that ‘ideology’, which Breuilly rightly takes to be essential
as a cognitive map in a modern world of abstractions, has a special role in
nationalist movements
...
Without them, nationalisms
would be bereft of that self-reflexive quality which Breuilly, like Giddens, concedes
is the source of much of their unique power
...
The ability of nationalism to portray and
forge a collective cultural identity is integral to its state-capturing capacity, for it
seeks state power in virtue of its unique cultural values
...
For Breuilly, territory is treated largely
instrumentally, as the necessary arena and format of state power and hence
nationalist aspiration
...
Like Anderson,
Breuilly sees the modern state as the force that shapes the attachment to and
identification with a territory, through censuses, maps and plebiscites and all the
paraphernalia of centralised bureaucracy and political penetration
...
The most dramatic case of this is Zionism
...
It has required
the imagery and symbolism of nationalism to turn a territory into a homeland
(Anderson 1991: ch
...
Breuilly 1993: ch
...
19
Political modernism and ethnic history
This brings us back to the underlying premise of the political modernists’
perspective
...
For

State and nation

93

John Breuilly, it is the alienation consequent on the split between state and society
that fuels nationalism, and such a rift can only occur under modern conditions
of state sovereignty, centralisation and capitalism
...
Breuilly is not
alone in drawing attention to the specifically political dimensions of the ensuing
crisis of alienation felt by so many in this situation
...

Not only in Central Europe, but in the European colonies, it was the educated
urban classes who, doubly marginalised by the West and their own traditional
societies, were unable to climb the bureaucratic ladder and whose education,
talents and merits were spurned by an impervious but intrusive colonial state
(see Crowder 1968; Kedourie 1971: Introduction)
...
But by
no means all nationalisms seek to do so
...
At moments of crisis and danger, the nationalist
state often invades the private sphere, even in national states where civic ideals
are well established, as occurred in Western countries during the two world
wars
...
In these cases, nationalism as a political movement may
be latent, but as ideology and language it has long done its work: national
sentiments are widely diffused and the private domain flourishes within the
cradle of the nation (Billig 1995)
...
What these cases suggest
is that civic nationalisms which accomodate and balance state and society rather
than overcoming the one in terms of the other, presuppose a long history of

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Varieties of modernism

cultural and social ties which are often based on some presumed common ethnic
bonds
...
Of course,
the state was itself a factor in this process of unification, through its taxes, its
wars, its courts and the like
...
D
...
6)
...
Even if in a more
distant past these populations originated from several ethnic strands, as occurred
in England and France, circumstances—including political action—had welded
them sufficiently together to endow them with a sense of cultural community
which in turn formed the basis of state power and state institutions
...
2; Hastings 1997: chs 1–3)
...
Here, ethnicity and language
provided an alternative basis for mobilising populations in opposition to the
state
...
For these, the nationalists
had to turn back to a vernacular culture and a putative ancestral past, one which
could unite and energise the different interest groups and strata of the designated
population
...
The question that always returns to
haunt this kind of analysis is why these reappropriations have such widespread
popular appeal
...

Conclusion
There is much to commend a modernist political approach in the study of nations
and nationalism
...
Clearly, there are few, if any, parallels for the inclusion of most individuals
in a given territory as participant citizens of the state, possessing equal rights

State and nation

95

and duties; and the ideology of nationalism, insofar as it mobilises the population
and legitimates its political role, underpins this crucial political development
...
The nation is a spatially
finite category, a nation among nations, each defined in the first place by a set
of clearcut and internationally recognised borders
...

Of equal importance is the political modernists’ emphasis on the primary
role of political elites and political institutions
...
Their vested interests in the state are legitimated as
custody of the ‘national interest’ over and above sectional pressures, and as
disinterestedly pursuing the ideals of the nation in opposition to party factions
...
They supply much of the organisation and tactics of
struggle, and are often among the first to feel the alienation consequent on
exclusion from office by the ruling power
...

Finally, political modernists can point with much historical justification to the
role of the state as a central element in nationalist ideologies worldwide
...
From the beginning, independent
statehood came to be seen as an intrinsic part of every nation’s aspirations, and
as the sole bearer of the nation’s cultural values—in large part because of the
spectacular success of the Anglo-French model, and its first imitators in Germany,
Italy and the United States
...
It proved unable to
resolve questions of cultural identity, collective memory and the homeland, of
the ethnic past, authenticity and destiny, or even of economic autarchy and
national unity
...

If the stress on political elites is a strength of the political modernist approach,
it is also a limitation
...
If nationalist elites appeal
to ‘the people’, strata within the latter can and do reshape the nationalist ideology
in their own image
...
To omit the perceptions and role of non-elite

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Varieties of modernism

strata is to miss this underlying drive of so many nationalisms and the source of
their direction
...

This is a large subject to which I shall return
...
Here the strength of political
modernism is also its weakness
...
As a result, the study of nationalism becomes truncated
and shorn of much of its content
...
As an ideology and movement,
nationalism is modern
...
It is, therefore, a product of the discontents of modernity
...
Nationalism is the natural response of human beings
whose social world, with its stable groupings, has collapsed; yearning to belong
to a durable community, they turn to the transhistorical nation as the only
available replacement for the extended family, neighbourhood and religious
community, all of which have been eroded by capitalism and westernisation
...
They saw nationalism in the new states of Africa
and Asia as a religion of modernisation, a political version of traditional religion
...
But in the new states, the needs of social integration and economic
development took on special importance in view of their ethnic heterogeneity
and lack of resources
...
The virtues of patriotism, commitment, hard work,
frugality and self-sacrifice had to be inculcated in the newly enfranchised citizens
...
In this way, the state, and its one-party or military regime, came to
97

98

Varieties of modernism

embody the seamless unity of the nation, which was endowed with the
characteristics of a faithful church
...
Nationalism, in other words,
substituted the nation for the deity, the citizen body for the church and the
political kingdom for the kingdom of God, but in every other respect replicated
the forms and qualities of traditional religions
...
Nationalism here is really a modern, secular ideology which serves as
a ‘civil religion’, performing the same functions for individuals and groups as
did traditional religion, although springing from secular, non-traditional sources
...
A religion tended to become
established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts
...

Traditional worship of God or gods may have been superseded; but the deeper
roots of religion, the need for cults to distinguish the sacred from the profane,
the need to express the dependance of human beings on a powerful society, will
always remain
...
They are
adherents of an ideological version of modernism
...
In order to forge modern
nations, elites in the new states resort to what Apter termed ‘mobilisation systems’,
and invent a symbolic mythology and civic religion to persuade the masses to
make the necessary sacrifices
...
Lerner 1958;
Smelser 1962; Eisenstadt 1965)
...
This is a sequel
to his earlier influential Nationalism
...
It
was the merit of Fichte and other German Romantics like Schlegel, Muller,
Schleiermacher, Arndt and Jahn to marry Kant’s individualist doctrine to
Herder’s cultural populism in such a way that autonomy was now predicated
of pure linguistic communities, in which, to realise their true freedom,
individuals must absorb themselves
...

Kedourie went on to sketch a brief social explanation of why this romantic
version of nationalism (which he assumed was the only true version of the
doctrine) arose in Germany
...
Excluded and
alienated from politics, these intellectuals became restless under the impact of
Enlightenment rationalism and sought in romantic fantasies a solution to their
discontents
...
Young
Italy, Young Poland, Young Hungary and the like, children’s crusades against
the old order, attested to a European Zeitgeist of revolutionary messianism that
could only end in terroristic nihilism and ethnic hatred, especially in ethnically
mixed areas like the Balkans (ibid
...
6)
...
Colonies, he argued, had not been established
for the export of capital in an age of finance capital, as Hobson, Hilferding and
Lenin had claimed; their economic returns were negligible compared to their
strategic and psychological benefits
...
These strategic considerations
were abetted by the nineteenth-century imperialist desire for ‘glory’ in a period
of colonial political annexation which for Disraeli and his generation signified

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Varieties of modernism

the original political meanings of the terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’
(Kedourie 1971:4, 8, 10–14)
...
To begin with,
colonial administration tended to pulverise traditional society and regiment the
colony through its bureaucratic measures
...
Hence the economic basis of
village life, which accounted for the vast mass of the population, collapsed
...
Mass literacy undermined traditional religious authority and
customary ways, and, along with Western research into the ethnic traditions
and cultures of the colonies, prepared the way for alternative conceptions and
new leaderships in the African and Asian colonies
...

(Kedourie 1971:27)
Among the many ideas that spread to African and Asian colonies, the most
appealing to the marginal men was nationalism, the doctrine that
holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known
by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate
type of government is national self-government
...
: 28)
As a doctrine, nationalism is utterly alien to the political traditions of Asia and
Africa, with their great empires and tribal kingdoms respectively; it is a product
of the history of Europe, with its abiding tendency to ‘require and enforce
uniformity of belief among the members of a body politic’ (ibid
...
From
Theodosius in 379 AD through the Crusades and the Wars of Religion right up
to Rousseau’s ‘civil religion’, the drive for religious and cultural homogeneity in
a polity has reappeared regularly in Europe
...
: 34–6)
...
Korais had imbibed Western ideas
and languages under the auspices of a Dutch clergyman, and stayed several
years during the 1770s in Holland; after returning for a brief sojourn in his
homeland, he spent the rest of his life in France
...
In his conclusion, Korais emphasised that modern Greeks
are the descendants of the ancient Greeks, and as such must be worthy of them;
only by accepting this, would the regeneration of Greece become possible (ibid
...

For Elie Kedourie, love of the ancient past feeds on hatred of the present
...
The same European metamorphosis of
beliefs and assumptions invaded the Ottoman Empire, which, from being ‘the
work of the House of Osman laboring in the triumphant cause of Islam’, became
‘an achievement of the Turkish, or more generally the Turanian, genius’, both
‘Turk’ and ‘Turanian’ being nineteenth-century European philological and
historical inventions
...
For the foremost Turkish theorist of nationalism, Ziya
Gökalp, indeed,
The country of the Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan
...
Later,
however, the Turks ceased to be ‘Turanians’: for Tekin Alp in the 1930s they
had become beautiful, tall specimens of the Aryan race’, in line with the new
interest in racial and fascist doctrines (ibid
...

In Iran, Pakistan, India and Africa, Kedourie finds the identical processes of
Europeanisation of thought and the same transvaluation of values
...

(ibid
...
In order to transform
the ‘heap of loose sand’ which is all that is left of a traditional society pulverised
by Europe into something ‘solid and powerful’, it is necessary to arouse a sense
of national identity, appeal to the ethnic past and ‘restore’ traditional morality as
the cement of national solidarity
...
: 70)
...
For Bipin Chandra
Pal, too, popular Hinduism, being partly spiritual and partly social, could easily
and naturally furnish the basis for a civic religion of India, through the
politicisation of what were originally purely religious ideas
...
: 70–76; cf
...
3)
...
Indeed, they
fervently desired to remake their own societies in the likeness of Europe
...
This was especially true of access to European
imperial institutions
...
There was also the influential
case of Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1926) who was dismissed from the British
civil service for a lesser offence, travelled to London for a fair hearing but was
refused reinstatement, and launched in consequence a nationalist lecture

Political messianism

103

campaign, persuaded as he was that ‘the personal wrong done to me was an
illustration of the impotency of our people’ (ibid
...

Similar slights, frustrations and rejections by the higher echelons of the civil
service were experienced by Western-educated Arabs like Edward Atiyah and
George Antonius, and they once again revealed the profound gulf between
imperial pretensions to impartiality and fairness and imperial practices of racial
discrimination
...
Their reply was a strident assertion of self in a collective mode unknown
to their forbears, and, in revulsion against Europe and its bloody internecine
wars, an appeal to the ‘dark gods’ of ethnic tradition (ibid
...

A millennial opiate
Or was it revulsion? Perhaps, argues Kedourie, the appeal to the dark gods and
their rites was really an imitation and adaptation of European ideas, not only
the idea that every nation must have a past, preferably heroic and glorious, but
also the previously hidden but now manifest European tradition of progress of
which the idea that the nation must have a great and splendid future is one
variant
...
The term ‘everlasting gospel’ figured in the title of a work
published in Paris in 1254 by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who was in turn
inspired by the writings of a Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (c
...

Joachim speculated about the imminent advent of the millennium, basing himself
on apocalyptic texts in the Book of Revelations such as:
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the
second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ,
and shall reign with him a thousand years
...
: 94–5, citing Revelations 20:6)
Joachim speculated that the age of law (the Father) had been followed by the
age of grace (the Son) and that this would now give way to an age of love (the
Holy Spirit), the ‘new heaven and new earth’ of the prophecies of St John the
Divine
...

In all these examples, the political style of millennialism is clear:

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Varieties of modernism

The millennial hope is of the inauguration and institution of a totally new
order where love reigns and all men are brothers, where all distinctions and
divisions, all selfishness and self-regard are abolished
...

(ibid
...

(ibid
...
The idea of progress is a ‘secularised and
respectable version of the medieval millennium’
...

Nationalism as it appears and spreads in Europe is one of the many forms
of this vision of a purified society in which all things are made new…
...

(ibid
...
The glorification
of Kali, goddess of destruction, is the counterpart of Bakunin’s regrouping of
‘this world of brigands into an invincible and omni-destructive force’ and
Robespierre’s conjunction of virtue and terror
...

(ibid
...

Mau Mau, Ethiopianism, the cult of Black messiahs, and the popularity of
millenarian varieties of Christianity alike testify to the disturbance and
disorientation which contact with Europe brought and which practices and
beliefs of this kind promised to assuage and relieve
...
: 127)
From this disorientation and the religious fervour which it breeds, the nationalist
movement can fashion a formidable weapon, provided it can be channelled and
focused onto a few slogans and symbols
...
For the
emotional link between leaders and led, which satisfies the leader’s will to power,
fosters the ‘pathetic fallacy’, namely, that
there is no difference between them and those whom they rule, that their
interests, their preoccupations and their aims are exactly identical
...
: 131)
This makes the political tie a ‘private, amorous relation, in which the body politic
is united by love’; indeed for Michel Aflaq, the ideologue of the Syrian Ba’ath
Party, nationalism is love
...
Nationalists, on the
other hand, ‘feel with the people’
...
Hence the celebration of violence by Fanon
and the nationalisation of the proletarian struggle by Sultan Galiev, for whom the
class struggle becomes a conflict between the white and the coloured races
...
‘Theory’ has
indeed become the opium of the masses
...

As the Old man of the Mountain—whose ‘theory’ was so potent that legend
has transmuted it into hashish—could have told him, the drug may also excite
its addicts to a frenzy of destruction
...
: 147)

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Varieties of modernism

Colonialism and the intellectuals
The idea that nationalism is a product of ‘marginal men’ or uprooted intellectuals
caught between tradition and westernisation is not an original one
...

But in Elie Kedourie’s hands, this thesis is charged with a new emotion and a
deeper meaning
...
His penetrating
exploration and rich illustration of these arguments gives Kedourie’s analysis a
singular power and originality, and makes it the most compelling statement of
ideological modernism (Kohn 1967a: ch
...

Two considerations frame Kedourie’s arguments
...
Unlike Gellner, Nairn or Hechter, Kedourie rejects the idea
that he aims to offer any kind of theory; indeed, he argues that such theoretical
understanding is impossible and undesirable
...
All we
can hope to do is to understand a particular doctrine or movement in its context,
as an expression of a particular Zeitgeist, all the historian is concerned with are
the ways in which specific ideas and practices emerge and are developed in a
particular social and cultural milieu
...
Common to both is the solvent of cultural
westernisation and social modernisation, which undermines traditional
communities and breaks the age-old transmission of political habits and ideas
(see S
...

The second consideration is normative
...
For Kedourie, nationalism is a particularly virulent, because selfdestructive, species of the more general Western ideal of progress; its violence
stems from its frenzied attempts to realise unattainable ideals in an imperfect
world
...
Taking off from the
assumptions of their intellectual progenitors, the Cartesian rationalist philosophers
from Descartes to Kant, they add a pitiless impiety to their overweening arrogance
by seeking moral perfection in an imperfect world
...
3; Viroli 1995)
...
That overall
framework is the diffusion of ideas under the impact of a discriminatory
colonialism
...
With many an incisive example, Kedourie illustrates
their predicament: their fervent embrace of an apparently superior civilisation
with its ideals of impersonal merit and impartial justice; their subsequent bitter
disappointment on finding themselves excluded both in the metropolis and at
home; their tendency to see in their individual rejection the impotency of their
people to which racial discrimination in the imperial bureaucracy lends credence;
their ensuing self-doubt and identity crisis; and their search for a political solution
to their alienation
...
Wallerstein
1965; Crowder 1968; Gouldner 1979; A
...
Smith 1981a: ch
...

But is this diffusionist framework helpful in accounting for the rise of
nationalism in Africa and Asia? Diffusionism in itself is always theoretically
inadequate; it can never account for the reception of ideas that are transmitted
from one centre to another
...

The general picture that Kedourie paints is one in which traditional societies
are pulverised and regimented by colonial modernity, leaving the intellectuals as
the only social group able to respond to the onslaught
...
In fact, as we know,
colonialism’s impact was highly variable
...
Where the French, for example,
tended to assimilate an African or Indo-Chinese elite, leaving the rest of the

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population uneducated and second-class citizens, the British colonial authorities
preferred a policy of ‘indirect rule’, working with and through traditional but
subordinated indigenous authorities
...
These are only some of the reasons
why many traditional elements—ways of life, customs, beliefs, symbols, myths—
persisted in varying degrees in Asia and Africa, even after decades of colonial
rule (Crowder 1968; Markovitz 1977; cf
...

Now, the important point about colonial rule is that it provided, in relation to
pre-colonial cultures and social structures, the crucible in which nationalist movements
emerged
...
These social and cultural groups are partly formed by the activities
of colonial officials, traders and missionaries, but they are also derived from precolonial ethnic communities and polities, and from traditional social strata like
chieftains and traders, tribal castes and Brahmins, which have taken on a new
life in the colonial setting
...
Kedourie indirectly admits this, but
sees the process as one-sided, a manipulation of the inert masses by messianic
elites; whereas, in fact, the cultural resources and ethnic outlooks of peasants
and traders, tribesmen and lower castes, also helped to shape the particular
versions of nationalism that emerged in these colonies
...
In fact, his overestimation of the
power of ideas is closely linked to his belief in the universal need of human
beings to belong to a stable community
...
At this point, the nation appears, like some deus ex machina, to
fill the gap and assuage the pain of their disorientation
...

But all this assumes, first, that human beings must belong to stable
communities, and second that the nation is indeed a wholly new kind of
community and has no links with traditional communities
...
But it should not be inferred from
this that all human beings always prefer stability to change, and tradition to the
ability to join or even form their own communities of choice
...

Once again, the context is all-important
...
In following the conservative tradition of Lord Acton and Michael
Oakeshott, Kedourie adopted a rather one-dimensional psychologism that
bypasses the social and cultural settings which contribute to the variety of human
responses to rapid change in the modern world, and prevents him from seeing
how in the contemporary world, many more human beings are experimenting
with different forms of social network and cultural community (see Melucci
1989)
...
In fact, as
we shall see, this view needs to be seriously qualified
...
Let
us concede such a universal need
...
In other
words, Kedourie’s idealist and psychologist methodology precludes him from
explaining why it was, and is, the nation that has won out over all these rivals,
and why nationalism has become the dominant ideology and culture of our time
...
The nation, along with
nationalism, is seen as a new-fangled type of community, a construct of disaffected
intellectuals, without any precursor or foundation in pre-modern epochs
...
Forced to eat of
this tree of knowledge and driven out of their pre-colonial Eden, Africans and
Asians have become prey to the lure of the latterday opiate of unattainable
perfectibility, which removes them yet further from the ways of life that had
served them so well, and bars their return to the warmth and intimacy of family
and tradition
...
The argument
proceeds in two ways: by analogy and by filiation
...
This route is necessarily obscure, since
the heretics were suppressed and often left no records
...
A view of the last stage is afforded by
some paragraphs of Lessing’s Education of the Human Race (1780) which, in prophetic
bursts, proclaims the coming of ‘this epoch of perfection’ and traces the origin

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of this ‘everlasting gospel’ of perfection to ‘certain visionaries of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries’
...

Now, we may readily concede some influence on eighteenth-century meliorism
from earlier expressions of religious messianism
...
In the long intervening period, Kedourie
cites only the drama of the Anabaptist rising in Münster under Jan Mathys and
Jan of Leyden
...
It may be possible to
show that a few nationalisms were preceded, within a few decades, by a millennial
movement—the Taiping Movement in China springs to mind—but there are many
more cases where no such chronological succession of millennial and nationalist
movements can be discovered
...
Yet so many strands went into the making of
eighteenth-century meliorism; why give this particular one such importance?7
The answer lies in the second, analogical, mode of argument
...
Nationalism, therefore,
like millennialism, seeks to abolish the distinction between the private and public
domains; nationalism, like millennialism, seeks to institute a new morality of
absolute purity and brotherhood; nationalism separates its devotees in the
movement from the crowd much as millennialism elevates its virtuous elect; and,
like millennialism, nationalism renounces earthly pleasures to achieve through
struggle its goal of justice on earth
...

Now it is certainly true that nationalism often displays messianic tendencies
and seeks the overthrow of particular regimes
...
Nationalists are not seeking to abolish this
world and establish the kingdom of God on earth
...
Their concerns are relatively local; they aim to rectify a particular anomaly
...
The typical
follower of millennial heresies seeks to rid the earth of all corruption; the typical
adherent of nationalism seeks only to rid his country of corrupt, because alien,
rulers (see Cohn 1957; Burridge 1969)
...
There
have been puritannical nationalisms like the French Jacobin or perhaps the Black
‘Nation of Islam’ movements, which have enjoined on their followers zeal, selfsacrifice, abstention and self-discipline
...
Most nationalisms encourage the puritanical virtues
of heroic self-reliance, simplicity, fraternity and discipline in an effort to create the
‘new man’ and ‘new woman’, but they also extol family values, prize community
and harness religious fervour for their ends
...
9
Above everything else, nationalisms seek ‘auto-emancipation’: the self-reliant
individual choosing his or her destiny, and the autonomous community
determining its own fate without external interference
...

This is in stark contrast to the ethos of millennialism, which seeks to escape
from and abolish a corrupt world and establish an entirely new order of purity,
love and justice
...
The love and purity that
nationalists seek is this-worldly, a social solidarity, or fraternity, which underpins
a world of national states, rendering them peaceful and united
...
But most nationalists are
none of these things; they are perfectly ordinary bourgeois, lower-middle or
working-class men and women seeking an escape from immediate oppression
and injustice
...
This suggests once again the seductive
picture of an elite of alienated intellectuals pursuing chimerical dreams, cut off
from the everyday needs and aspirations of the vast mass of their compatriots,
whom they manipulate through the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of collective empathy
...
But this simply compounds the
errors of the state-centred versions of political modernism explored in the last
chapter, which are then magnified by treating the modern followers of nationalism
as analogues of the adherents of millennialism
...

Millennialism appealed to the least educated, the poorest, most peripheral and
most downtrodden strata, whereas more ambitious, educated, urban classes
formed the backbone of most nationalist movements, even when they sought to
draw other strata, lower down the social scale, into the movement (A
...
Smith
1979: ch
...

It is noteworthy that the French Revolution figures only as a legend and an
example in Kedourie’s analysis, despite the fact that, already in 1789, let alone
1792, French nationalism was the first fully fledged example of secular nationalism
in Europe, and that it directly evoked nationalist responses wherever the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies penetrated
...

But it is not only in France that the educated urban classes, including the
bourgeoisie, took up the nationalist cause
...
Nor is the movement they espouse
in the least bit apocalyptic or antinomian, even if it often centres on a messianic
leader
...
In this respect, most
nationalisms conform much more closely to what Kedourie calls the British
‘Whig doctrine of nationality’ of which he approves, than to the ‘Continental’
unitary doctrine of nationalism, which he so heartily detests (Shafer 1938;
Kedourie 1960: ch
...
7; Gildea 1994: ch
...

So neither at the sociological nor at the ideological level, can nationalism be
compared with, or derived from, millennialism, whether of the medieval or of
more recent varieties
...

The religion of history
Millennialism seeks to abolish the past, and replace it wholly by the future
...
Not
any past, of course; only an authentic past, the genuine past of a people in its
homeland
...

Now, for Elie Kedourie, the past is mainly a cultural resource to be politicised
so as to mobilise and manipulate the sentiments of the masses
...

In this respect, Kedourie differs from other modernists
...


Political messianism

113

There is, in this view, something optional about the nationalist attitude to the
past
...
The elites have
no option
...
To some extent this qualifies Kedourie’s modernism
...

Kedourie may underline the historical novelty of such modern ‘nations’ as Egypt
and Greece, yet he has to concede their basis in the older religious traditions of
Islam and Orthodoxy
...
11
This, then, is Kedourie’s answer to the problem of ‘popular resonance’ which
all theories of ‘elite manipulation’ face
...
But the long-term success of
their endeavours is always in doubt, and so nationalists have often thought it
better to build on the traditions and sentiments of the majority, and, as Nairn
argued, use those motifs and symbols that have popular resonance
...
To mobilise the people, elites must therefore harness the collective
emotions roused by traditional religions
...
2; cf
...
2)
...
In so many non-Western nationalisms, religion plays and has played a
critical role in the life of the vast mass of the population, and as a result the
nationalist ‘transvaluation’ and politicisation of its values has been profoundly
significant for the mobilisation of the people and the character of the subsequent
nationalism
...

Nevertheless, insofar as nationalism is a modern and a secular doctrine—and
this is Kedourie’s point of departure—its attitude to religious figures like Moses
and Muhammad and to religious festivals like Passover is quite different from,
and shows scant respect for, the traditional religious understanding (see A
...

Smith 1973c)
...
For a number of other theorists, too, religion continues to be
directly relevant to nationalism
...
The latter has attempted to reconstitute the nation as a secular and
liberal creation of the modern state
...
They denounce the rampant materialism, alienation and
corruption of Western society and its secular nationalism, and wish to wrest the
nation back from the secular modern state to its ‘genuine’ spiritual and religious
roots
...
Hence it is not nationalism as such, but
rather the Western, materialist and secular conceptions of the nation that have
proved so disastrous in their consequences
...
Chatterjee 1986)
...

He examines two very different societies and religious settings, Sri Lanka and
Australia, showing how in both, nationalism itself takes on the role of a religion
whose beliefs and rites address the central ontological problems and supply
meaning and purpose to individuals and nations
...
This
is what has happened in Sinhalese Sri Lanka: traditional Sinhalese Buddhism
has been politicised and its rituals have taken on new and violent meanings in
the context of inter-ethnic warfare
...

In Australia, in contrast, the religion of the nation replaces traditional
religions, Christian or other, while taking over much of their rites and symbols
...
By emphasising themes of suffering, death, sacrifice and rebirth, a
pragmatic, secular Australian nationalism is framed by religious forms, and
provides an interesting variant on the ‘secular religion’ of Western nationalisms
(Kapferer 1988: chs 5–6)
...
It may, of

Political messianism

115

course, be a recent past, as in the Australian case
...
The past is as necessary to the nationalist mythology as is the
future, and the ‘golden age’ is as relevant as the nation’s glorious destiny
...
The past is not some neutral terrain to be
explored and dissected; it is the locus of exempla virtutis, of the sacred, of the
ancestral homeland, of the golden age, and of communal authenticity and identity
...
For nationalism, these
are the sacred elements of the national spirit, which must be preserved and
revitalised
...
Elie Kedourie
was right to point out the way in which nationalists have used history selectively,
viewing it through a special political lens
...
They do, of course, suggest some of
the questions we ask of the past
...
Here the past, reinforced by the panoply of institutions, mores and
symbols we have inherited from previous generations, shapes our understanding
of the present
...

That the intellectuals are freed from social constraints is, of course, a
prerequisite for a psychological and diffusionist theory of ‘political religion’, one
whose mainspring is anomie and alienation
...
But
Greenfeld does not remove the alienated from social and political constraints,
even if, like Kedourie, she does not fully explain the origin and nature of the
ideal of the nation to which the thwarted and alienated turn
...
In contrast, Kedourie
wants to convince us of the evil that nationalism represents
...
Concentrating on what Michael Billig calls ‘hot’
nationalism, Kedourie fails to see how nations and nationalism have become
part of the very structure of modern society, and how they have been absorbed
and assimilated by the vast majority of the world’s populations for whom the

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Varieties of modernism

colourful rhetoric and slogans of some intellectuals are at best decorative extras,
‘icing on the cake’
...
16
Ideology is undoubtedly a key element in the widespread appeal and success
of nationalism
...

But these ideologies are not simply the product of intellectuals, nor are most
intellectuals, even those who are caught between competing cultures, free-floating
and disoriented, nor are most of them able to exercise the kind of influence that
Kedourie attributes to them
...
Only then can they mobilise large numbers of people to
demonstrate and march, join movements and work for the liberation and unity
of their nation
...
Only the
most extreme conditions breed apocalyptic visions and only minorities are likely
to be attracted to their exponents
...
It is unlikely that this state of affairs would have obtained if it were
simply the product of deranged intellectuals operating in a social vacuum created
by modernisation, or that the mass of the people who adhered to their traditional
religions and cultures could have been seduced by such visionary fantasies to
create a world of nations
...
The first, entitled The Invention of Tradition, contained a series of
essays on a variety of political rituals, and was edited by Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger, with an introductory chapter by Hobsbawm
...
Both books stemmed from a Marxist tradition, but sought to move
beyond its usual concerns with political economy into the realm of culture by
reworking and supplementing them with themes drawn from the analysis of
narratives and discourse developed by ‘postmodernist’ deconstructionism
...
For both,
nations and nationalism are constructs and cultural artefacts; the task of the
analyst is to uncover their forms and contents, in order to reveal the needs and
interests of those elites and strata which benefit or use their narratives
...
The implications of this for the modernist paradigm of nationalism
will be explored later
...
His message was that we can best understand the nature and appeal of
nations by analysing national traditions, and that national traditions are one
kind of invented traditions
...
What is an ‘invented tradition’? Hobsbawm defines it as
follows:

117

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Varieties of modernism

‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed
by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which
seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which
automatically implies continuity with the past
...
A
striking example is the deliberate choice of a Gothic style for the nineteenthcentury rebuilding of the British parliament, and the equally deliberate
decision after World War II to rebuild the parliamentary chamber on exactly
the same basic plan as before
...

(ibid
...
Traditions, whether old or new, are invariant; the past to
which they refer imposes fixed patterns
...

Custom is what judges do; ‘tradition’ (in this instance invented tradition) is
the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualised practices
surrounding their substantial action
...
: 2–3)
As for conventions, though they too become invariant, their functions are purely
technical, designed to facilitate readily definable practical operations, and they
can be changed when practical needs change, as can the rules of a game
...

Hobsbawm does not deny the importance of old traditions adapting to meet
new needs, such as those of the Catholic Church or nineteenth-century
universities
...

What he claims is that it is the modern age, because it has seen such rapid
change, where one would expect to find the ‘invention of tradition’ occurring
most frequently, whether such traditions are invented by a person, such as the
Boy Scouts rituals by Baden-Powell, or by a group, such as the Nuremberg rally
rituals by the Nazi party
...

(ibid
...
Sometimes new
traditions can be grafted onto old ones, and sometimes they can be devised by
‘borrowing from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual, symbolism and
moral exhortation’; Hobsbawm gives the example of Swiss nationalism which
extended, formalised and ritualised ‘existing customary traditional practices’ like
folksong, physical contests and marksmanship, combining religious with patriotic
elements (ibid
...
2
Not only did entirely new symbols and devices come into existence with the
rise of national states, such as flags and anthems and emblems of the nation, but
also
historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient
past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction (Boadicea,
Vercingetorix, Arminius the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech
medieval manuscripts)
...
: 7)
Even genuinely ancient traditions, like English Christmas carol folksongs are
‘new’ in the sense of being revived in new settings for new purposes in the
nineteenth century
...
: 7–8)
...
The first type
establishes or symbolises social cohesion or membership of groups, real or artificial
communities; the second kind establishes or legitimises institutions, status or
relations of authority; while a third type aims to socialise, by inculcating beliefs,
value systems and conventions of behaviour
...
: 9)
...
The
former are specific and strongly binding, whereas the latter are unspecific and
vague in the content of the values and obligations of group membership they
inculcate—such as ‘patriotism’, ‘loyalty’, ‘duty’ and ‘playing the game’
...
: 10–11)
...
Even though invented traditions occupy
a much smaller part of the social space left by the decline of old traditions and
customs, especially in the private domain, these neo-traditional practices remain
prominent in the public life of citizens, including mass schooling and the

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institutions and practices of state; and most of them ‘are historically novel and
largely invented—flags, images, ceremonies and music’ (ibid
...

In conclusion, Hobsbawm claims that the study of ‘invented traditions’ is
highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation, the ‘nation’,
with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national
symbols, histories and the rest
...
Israeli and Palestinian nationalism or nations
must be novel, whatever the historic continuities of Jews or Middle Eastern
Muslims, since the very concept of territorial states of the currently standard
type in their region was barely thought of a century ago, and hardly became
a serious prospect before the end of World War I
...
: 13–14)3
We should not be misled by the paradox that nationalists claim their nations are
rooted in antiquity and self-evidently natural, when they are in fact quite recent
and novel constructs
...
And
just because so much of what subjectively makes up the modern ‘nation’
consists of such constructs and is associated with appropriate and, in general,
fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse (such as ‘national history’),
the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful
attention to the ‘invention of tradition’
...
: 14)
To give flesh and blood to this programmatic statement, Hobsbawm and the
other contributors give us a series of case-studies of the relatively recent invention
of the Highland tradition in Scotland, the cultural revival in Wales, the British
coronation ceremony, the symbolism of authority in Victorian India, the invention
of traditions in colonial Africa, and, in the last chapter by Hobsbawm himself,
the efflorescence of mass-produced traditions in late nineteenth-century Europe
...
All these were, to a large extent,
state-inspired: they were felt to be socially necessary by state elites intent on
controlling rapid social change and managing the influx of enfranchised citizens
into the political arena (ibid
...
In France of the Third Republic and Second
Empire Germany, the ‘invention of tradition’ reached its climax during the period
before the First World War, with a spate of official and local ceremonies, a
mania for statuary, monuments and public architecture, and the inculcation of

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121

national values and ideals in the textbooks of the mass education system (ibid
...
Some of these new traditions proved ephemeral, others like the mass
ceremonies proved more durable
...
: 263)
...

This offered a historical analysis of the rise of nations from about 1830 until the
postwar period
...
Nationalism is a political programme;
without the goal of creating a nation-state, nationalism is of little interest or
consequence
...

(Hobsbawm 1990:9–10)
For Hobsbawm, nations are made by nationalists
...
Moreover,
national loyalty is only one of many allegiances, which are always shifting with
circumstances
...
The first type is that of mass, civic and
democratic political nationalism, modelled on the kind of citizen nation
created by the French Revolution; this type flourished in Europe from about
1830–70, notably in Germany, Italy and Hungary, and it operated a ‘threshold
principle’, namely that only nations large enough in territory and population
to support a large capitalist market economy were entitled to claim selfdetermination as sovereign, independent states
...
This type of nationalism prevailed in
Eastern Europe from 1870–1914, and resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s,
after the anti-colonial civic political nationalisms in Asia and Africa had spent
their force
...
The
first focuses on official or governmental ideas and institutions, and is ‘top-down’
and elite-based
...
While Hobsbawm

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Varieties of modernism

considers nations to be ‘constructed essentially from above’, he concedes that
they must also be analysed from below, in terms of the hopes, fears, longings
and interests of ordinary people
...

But he regards neither as the ancestor or progenitor of modern nationalism,
because they had or have no necessary relation with the unit of territorial
political organisation which is a crucial criterion of what we understand as
a ‘nation’ today
...
: 47)
Hobsbawm regards language as in part a product of state formation and national
languages as semi-artificial constructs, only of indirect consequence for modern
nationalism
...
: 66)
...
: 75–6)
...
This new type differed in three ways from
the earlier ‘Mazzinian phase of nationalism’
...
Henceforth any body of people
considering themselves a ‘nation’ claimed the right to self-determination
which, in the last analysis, meant the right to a separate sovereign independent
state for their territory
...

Yet there was a third change which affected not so much the nation-state
national movements, but national sentiments within the established nationstates: a sharp shift to the political right of nation and flag, for which the
term ‘nationalism’ was actually invented in the last decade(s) of the nineteenth
century
...
: 102, original emphasis)
The efflorescence of ethno-linguistic nationalisms was the product of a number
of factors: the conflation of ‘race’, language and nationality during this period;
the rise of new classes and the resistance of old classes to modernity; and the
unprecedented migrations of peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Invention and imagination

123

centuries—all this in the context of the democratisation of politics and the massive
new powers of centralised states (ibid
...

For Hobsbawm, the new linguistic nationalism centred on the vernacular
was, ‘among other things, a vested interest of the lesser examination-passing
classes’, especially when it became a medium of secondary-school instruction;
and these classes veered to the political right, seeing themselves as embattled
and endangered, especially by the ‘menace’ represented by foreigners like the
Jews
...
: 111, 121, 133)
...
While not denying the dramatic
efflorescence and impact of nationalist or ethnic politics, Hobsbawm argues that
‘It is no longer a major vector of historical development’
...
Hence the insistence on ‘ethnicity’
and linguistic differences, each or both sometimes combined with religion
...
: 164)
Though operating in the name of a model of political modernity, the nationstate, they simultaneously reject modern modes of political organisation, national
and supranational
...

(ibid
...

Wherever we live in an urbanised society, we encounter strangers: uprooted
men and women who remind us of the fragility, or the drying up of our
own families’ roots
...
: 167)
But, claims Hobsbawm,

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Varieties of modernism

The call of ethnicity or language provides no guidance to the future at all
...

(ibid
...
It is a reaction to the ‘overwhelmingly non-national and non-nationalist
principles of state formation in the greater part of the twentieth-century world’
(ibid
...

The central point is that today, nationalism has lost its state-making and
economy-forming functions
...
But globalisation and the international
division of labour has removed these functions, and the revolutions in mass
communications and international migration have undermined the possibility
of territorially homogeneous nation-states
...
: 175–6)
...
Nationalism ‘is a substitute for lost
dreams’, a reaction to the disappointment of larger hopes and aspirations
...
It is no longer, as it were, a global political
programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier
twentieth centuries
...

(ibid
...
Nations and nationalism will be present in history, but in
subordinate, and often rather minor roles
...
: 182)
The progress of late twentieth-century historians in analysing nations and
nationalism ‘suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak’
...
It
is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism
...
: 183)

Invention and imagination

125

Ethnic and civic nationalisms?
Of course, Kedourie’s conclusion was anything but hopeful
...
Hobsbawm, however, sets out to explain
nationalism from Marxist premisses, from the ‘movement of history’
...
This
framework enables Hobsbawm to provide a variety of rich historical
characterisations and incisive analyses of various kinds of mainly European
nationalism, particularly linguistic movements, and their social composition
...
Far from
being primordial or even relatively long-lived, nations are quite recent constructs
and artefacts of elites bent on preserving order in the turbulence of late capitalism
...
Both agree on the nineteenth-century origins of nationalism, though
Kedourie is more insistent on its German Romantic provenance
...
Hobsbawm shares Kedourie’s
instrumentalist attitude to nationalism and his belief in its uses for elites to tap
the emotions of the masses and provide them with social and psychological
security; but for Kedourie it is restless intellectuals rather than capitalist power
elites who seek to manipulate the masses
...

On another point, too, there is a curious agreement between two historians
whose political views represent the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum
...
For
Kedourie, this is because only the organic version of nationalism represents the
true doctrine; and the organic version was developed by German, not French
intellectuals
...
In other words, France, like England, was an example
of a civic nation (and the Revolution was a legend), but it had emerged long
before the age of nationalism
...
Already in its first phases, the French revolutionaries disseminated and
politicised even earlier ideas of la nation, la patrie and le citoyen, and chose a new
French flag, the tricolor, to replace the old royal standard
...
Likewise,
the Estates General became the National Assembly and Convention, new oaths
for la patrie were sworn on the Champ de Mars, new hymns were sung, new
Roman-style heroes and latterday martyrs were adopted and commemorated, the
great journées acquired a new nationalist liturgy, internal customs and dues were
done away with throughout France, regional assemblies and their dialects were
abolished and la belle langue disseminated, a new calendar was adopted, and all
citizens were urged to fight and the for the fatherland
...
6
The spectacle of this nationalism in Europe’s most populous and civilised
nation, and not just Napoleon’s dissemination of its ideas and conquests, helped
to galvanise the intellectuals in various parts of Europe into formulating their
own nationalisms
...
But this, as we saw with Breuilly, is an unduly
restrictive criterion; it omits all the other functions and dimensions of
nationalism—social, cultural and psychological—that make it so central to the
modern world
...
The
distinction between an ethnic-linguistic and a civic-political kind of nationalism
is well entrenched in the literature; but it is an analytical and a normative one
...
For even the most ‘civic’ and ‘political’
nationalisms often turn out on closer inspection to be also ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistic’;
this is certainly the case with French nationalism during the Revolution, let
alone afterwards, with its appeal to ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ and a single French
people, and its suppression of regional languages in favour of Parisian French
...
Sometimes these civic and ethnic elements
are aligned, as has occurred in Czechoslovakia, Scotland and Switzerland, at

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127

other times they come into conflict, as they did in the Dreyfus Affair in France,
or as they are doing in India and Israel today
...
1; Breuilly 1993: ch
...
8
Besides, Hobsbawm’s use of the term ‘ethnic’ is unclear
...
This
is because he tends to conflate it with language, or confuse it with actual descent,
and fails to consider the importance of myths, memories, traditions and symbols
of sociocultural groupings—including shared memories of historical events,
however selective or idealised, and shared myths and symbols of (presumed)
ancestry
...
9
‘Proto-national’ bonds
In fact, what Hobsbawm has given us in modern terminology is the old Hegelian
idea of ‘historyless peoples’, in which only memories of earlier statehood can be
extended to the masses and provide the basis for later nationalisms and states
...

They are passive, acted upon, and usually manipulated by elites for political
ends, but their cultures and social networks, even where they have a measure of
autonomy, have no political relevance
...
Only where, as in Russia,
there was a popular myth of the holy land and a holy people identified with the
kingdom, could such proto-national ties provide the basis for a subsequent nation
(Rosdolsky 1964; Hobsbawm 1990: ch
...
Cherniavsky 1975)
...
To begin with,
many peoples, apart from the Russians (and the Irish and Tyroleans) have
entertained vivid ideas of a holy land, and of a chosen kingdom and people
...
The Jews retained the most vivid sense of
their lost holy land and kingdom of David through all their wanderings, as did
the Armenians, Greeks (under Ottoman rule), Amhara, Poles, Czechs and Scots
...
Second, why must the ‘holy land’
be connected to a kingdom or state? The Swiss soon became convinced of their
chosen status and the holiness of their mountain and valley confederation; but
land and people could form the basis for a subsequent nation without memories
of early statehood
...
Third, nations have been formed on the basis
of ethnic cultures which had little benefit of popular ideas and sentiments about
holy lands, let alone kingdoms
...

Perhaps more serious is the implication that this passivity of the masses must
have its counterpart in the manipulations of the elites, that the emotions of an
inert mass are waiting to be aroused and channelled by elites as part of an
exercise in social engineering
...

Apart from assuming that the popular strata carry few indigeneous traditions
and beliefs, or such as are only local, this view fails to account for the passion
and fervour of mass followings for nationalist movements, and the frequent
willingness on the part of the unlettered and poor to make great sacrifices and
even court death to defend their countries and drive out tyrants
...
10
This view also credits elites with more instrumental rationalism than the record
suggests
...
But even here the cultural distance between
elites and masses was less than this schema suggests; elites were often as much
in the grip of nationalist passions, and prepared for idealistic self-sacrifice, as
‘the masses’ from whom many of them had, after all, emerged
...
2; A
...
Smith 1981b)
...
But once that equation is accepted, we can begin to see
why ethnicity is such a powerful force in the modern world, and why so many
nations are, or seek to be, formed on the basis of dominant ethnies, or at least
attempt to achieve that sense of cultural unity and intimacy that ethnicity provides
...
By ruling this connection out a priori, Hobsbawm is unable to
give a convincing account of the involvement of ‘the masses’ in the nation and
nationalism
...
By regarding the nation as a modern construct of elites organising
the newly enfranchised masses into new status systems and communities,
Hobsbawm aligns himself to a certain extent with ‘postmodernist’ analyses of
political discourses and narratives
...
What
does it mean to say that the nation is a social construct and consists largely of
invented traditions? Why do the elites select this particular construct? Why
does this type of discourse (of nationalism) resonate with ‘the masses’?
For resonate it must, as Hobsbawm recognises, if the idea of the nation—and
of this particular nation—is to succeed and retain its efficacy
...
He has precluded an
account based on pre-existing ethnic ties (‘proto-national’ bonds)
...
Simply to condemn the latter as
historically irrelevant (or worse) hardly furthers the cause of explanation
...
Prys Morgan, in an essay on the revival of
Welsh culture and Welsh nationalism, suggests, inter alia, that the revival of the
Eisteddfod from 1789, though a new departure, was connected to the ancient
eisteddfoddau which had been held from as far back as 1176 right up to the sixteenth
century
...
It was from these local competitions that the
Welsh cultural nationalists in London learnt about the traditions of rhyme and
metre, and they deliberately incorporated them into their new festivals of Welsh
poetry and music (Morgan 1983)
...
It is certainly
true, as Hobsbawm and his associates underline, that modern elites and
intellectuals deliberately select and rework old traditions, so that what appears
today under the same banner is very different from its ostensible model
...

These limits are set by the culture, or cultures, of the public in question—its
language, law, music, symbols, memories, myths, traditions and so on
...
To call them ‘invented’ traditions
does scant justice to the complex ways in which these, and other ceremonies,
were reconstructed and reinterpreted
...
11
To see nations as composed largely of ‘invented traditions’ designed to organise
and channel the energies of the newly politicised masses, places too much weight
on artifice and assigns too large a role to the fabricators
...
It is hard to believe that most
people would willingly lay down their lives for an artefact or be duped by
propaganda and ritual over a long period, unless that ritual and propaganda
expressed and amplified pre-existing popular sentiments which saw the ethnic
nation as the family and locality writ large
...
Where such attempts are being made, they generally proceed on
the basis of memories, myths, symbols and traditions of the dominant ethnie in
the new state (such as the Kikuyu in Kenya or the Burmese in Burma), that is,
on the basis of the pre-existing culture of the dominant ethnic community which
resonates with the majority of the population
...
My point is only that, to be successful, these attempts need to
base themselves on relevant pre-existing social and cultural networks
...
But the idea of a
Pakistani state would have had no collective force or meaning, unless the mass
of Muslims in northern India had already acquired a vivid sense of common
ethnicity based on their shared religion, one which differentiated them from
other Indians
...
12
Similarly, the Polish national state that came into being in 1918 was neither
simply a ‘rebirth’, nor an ‘invention’
...

But neither was it an entirely new creation
...
To some extent, the Poles met Hobsbawm’s (and
Hegel’s) political criterion
...
They had, after all, taken Rousseau’s
advice to heart and preserved their language, customs and ethnic heritage
...
The
element of ‘invention’, where it exists, is therefore confined to the political form
of that reconstitution, and is misleading when it is applied to the sense of cultural
identity which is the subject of reinterpretation (see Halecki 1955; Davies 1982;
cf
...

Imagining the nation
Two fatalities
A very different solution to the problem of elite construction and mass response
in the formation of nations is provided by Benedict Anderson in his seminal and
highly influential Imagined Communities
...

Anderson’s initial problem is the inadequacy of Marxist theory in dealing
with what Marxists termed ‘the national question’
...
Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the
political life of our time
...
But, rather than regard ‘Nationalism-with-a-bigN’ as an ideology, he thinks it would

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Varieties of modernism

make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ or ‘religion’
rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’
...
: 5)
In that spirit, Anderson offers his well known definition of the nation: ‘it is an
imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign’ (ibid
...

Anderson goes on to explain that the nation is imagined because its members
will never know, meet or even hear of most of their fellow-members, ‘yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (ibid
...
He concedes that
all communities larger than villages with face-to-face contact are imagined; so
what distinguishes the nation is the style in which it is imagined
...
It is imagined as sovereign because, in an age of enlightenment
and revolution, nations want freedom and this means possessing a sovereign
state
...
: 7)
...
What he wants to
explain is the problem of mass self-sacrifice for the nation, the fact that
Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two
centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly
to the for such limited imaginings
...
: 7)
That is why, says Anderson, we must begin our explanation with the two great
fatalities of the human condition: death and Babel
...
In a secular age we increasingly look to posterity to keep our memory
alive; and the collective memory and solidarity of the nation helps us to overcome
the threat of oblivion
...
Without name or known remains,
these tombs are filled with ‘ghostly national imaginings’
...
It does so by ‘transforming fatality into continuity’, by linking the dead and
the yet unborn
...
: 11), since nations
always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide
into a limitless future
...

(ibid
...
: 12)
...
This general condition of
‘irremediable linguistic diversity’ is not to be confused with some nationalist
ideologies’ insistence on the primordial fatality of particular languages
...
Yet, like mortality, this linguistic diversity had little
political importance ‘until capitalism and print created monoglot reading publics’
...
: 43)
...
In
fact, all three ‘lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds’ in the early modern
epoch, thereby providing the necessary conditions for the rise of nations and
nationalism
...
: 36)
...
: 13)
...
For all that, the power and ‘unselfconscious
coherence’ of these ‘great religiously imagined communities’ waned in the late
Middle Ages, largely through European explorations of the non-European world
and the gradual demotion of the sacred language itself in the sixteenth century
(ibid
...

The second kind of universal cultural conception was monarchy and the
dynastic realm, which organised everything around a high centre
...
But from the seventeenth century, at least in Europe,
the ‘automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy’ gradually declined, notably after
the French Revolution
...
: 19–22)
...
In pre-modern ages, men and women

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Varieties of modernism

had ‘no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of
radical separations between past and present’ (ibid
...
Earlier conceptions
viewed time as ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’,
something like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Messianic time’:
What has come to take the place of the medieval conception of simultaneityalong-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous,
empty time’, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time,
marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence,
and measured by clock and calendar
...
: 24)
Anderson goes on to illuminate this novel concept of transverse time, with the
importance it accords to the word ‘meanwhile’, through a textual analysis of
modern novels from the Philippines, Mexico and Indonesia, all of which portray
the solidity of a finite sociological community moving through calendrical time
...
The community which the novel
represents is an imagined one; yet it is fixed and durable, not only because it
comprises a linguistic community which is that of its readers, but also because
we are all too familiar with its historical and social landscape of prisons, schools,
shops, villages and monasteries
...
: 26–7)
...
Anderson comments that the phrase ‘our young man’
used of the unnamed hero, locates the action and people in a specific imagined
community, of Indonesians; but also that ‘the imagined community is confirmed
by the doubleness of our reading about our young man reading’ (ibid
...

This selective fictiveness is just what we experience every day when we read
the newspapers, which are nothing more than books on a colossal scale, what
Anderson terms ‘one-day best-sellers’
...
More than anything else, the newspaper and its market
reassures us that ‘the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life’; and in
the longer term it thereby helps to create ‘that remarkable confidence of
community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (ibid
...


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135

Print-communities
It was Gutenberg’s invention that made possible the idea of a secular, imagined
linguistic community, but it was commodity capitalism that made a particular
kind of such community, the nation, likely
...
So the need to expand markets in the mass commodity of the printed
book, once the elite Latin market was saturated, gave capitalism a wholly
unforeseen and revolutionary vernacularising thrust
...
First, the sacred tongue, Latin, itself became, in the hands of the
antiquarian classical humanists, increasingly Ciceronian, arcane and remote from
everyday life and the masses
...
And third, certain dialects, usually those in the political
centre, were haphazardly selected by courts and bureaucrats as official vehicles
of administration and political centralisation even before the sixteenth century,
and were thereby gradually elevated to the status of fixed vernacular languages
by means of mass print circulation, challenging the dominance of Latin and its
sacred script community (ibid
...

Yet, claims Anderson, none of these factors alone is a necessary condition for
the rise of nations; rather,
What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a
half-forfuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production
and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print),
and the fatality of human linguistic diversity
...
: 42–3)
Anderson is at pains to underline the element of fatality—of both death and
linguistic diversity—but also the interaction between these fatalities and the new
mode of production and technology (ibid
...
Capitalism played a crucial role
in ‘assembling’ print-languages, within definite grammatical and syntactical limits,
from the immense variety of related local vernaculars or idiolects
...
So the
stage was set for the global diffusion of the idea of the nation
...
He stresses the way in which the idea of the nation could
be ‘pirated’ by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands (ibid
...


136

Varieties of modernism

Thus in Latin America and North America, which he claims were the earliest
cases of nationalism, creole printmen were important in delineating the ideas of
the nation and of republicanism
...
: ch
...

In Europe, on the other hand, history and language became crucial
...
: ch
...
And again, the threat of such
popular vernacular mobilisations created an imperial response in the form of
‘official nationalisms’ on the part of dynastic rulers and their bureaucracies,
especially in Eastern Europe and Asia (ibid
...
6)
...
: ch
...
In each case, the particular agencies and characters of
a group of nationalisms differed considerably from those of other groups, but at
the same time they bore the marks of their common origin in the conditions
that favoured the rise of mass reading-publics joined together by printing and
commodity capitalism
...

An imagined community?
This is a novel and path-breaking account of nationalism
...
What has attracted most attention
is his striking use of the concepts of an imagined political community and printcapitalism, whereas his ideas about the decline of large-scale sacred communities
and the emergence of linear time, which lie at the heart of his modernism, have
received less recognition
...
At the same time, the implications
of his emphasis on the bond of imagination take us beyond the confines of
modernism and look forward to its dissolution
...
That nations, like other large
communities, are imagined is, as Anderson notes, a fairly common notion
...
That which is imagined can, and
has to be, re-presented, if it is not to remain in the purely private realm of the
individual’s mental processes
...

There are several problems here
...
Terms like ‘invention’
and ‘imagination’ can mean different things and are commonly used in just
those senses from which Anderson wishes to distance himself: it is so easy to
slide from ‘imagined’ in the sense of ‘created’ to ‘imaginary’ in the sense of
‘illusory’ or ‘fabricated’, a tendency encouraged by his insistence on regarding
the nation as a cultural artefact portrayed/narrated by other cultural artefacts
(novels, etc
...
As such, the nation possesses
no reality independent of its images and representations
...
14
Second, there is the problem of intellectualism in Andersen’s account
...
He recognises the specific ‘love’ that inheres
in the nation (ibid
...
At the same time his emphasis upon a form of
individual cognition—imagination—as the key to the rise and spread of nationalism,
deflects attention away from collective attachment and sentiment
...
15
A third problem is that of voluntaristic individualism
...

(ibid
...

(ibid
...

(ibid
...
But, as these quotations confirm, the thrust of
Anderson’s definition of the nation is individualistic and voluntarist, not only
because he thinks nations are largely imagined civic communities, but because
he singles out language—something that individuals can, acquire—as the main
criterion of the nation
...
This means that,
provided it is political, finite and sovereign, any imagined community—be it a
city-state, a kingdom or even a colonial empire with a single lingua franca—can be
designated by its members as a nation
...
17
What, I think, underlies these difficulties is an excessive emphasis on the
idea of the nation as a narrative of the imagination, a text to be read and grasped
and deconstructed through literary categories and devices
...
There is much to be
gained from cultural analysis, in conveying the nature and feel of particular
sociological communities through their literary portrayals
...
National communities do purvey great historical and linguistic
narratives, which are vital to their survival and renewal
...

Print-capitalism and re-presentation
This view of the nation as primarily a text and discourse inevitably suggests a
leading causal role for print technology and print-capitalism, one which leaves
little room for other modes of cultural representation and omits other vital factors
in the rise of nations and the spread of nationalism
...
But it would be a mistake
to overgeneralise the role of the printed word
...
Even in Europe, literacy

Invention and imagination

139

was often confined to small coteries of intellectuals and upper classes; many
more Italians joined and fought in the Risorgimento wars than could read and
write (let alone in [Tuscan] Italian)
...
It was the nationalists who, on coming
to power, set about educating their populations and turning them into citizens
of the nation
...
18
Outside Europe, in fact, the community of the nation was imagined and
portrayed by a variety of media which, with the rise of cheap technologies,
percolated to the majority of the designated populations
...
Unlike print, which for long was
confined to elites and some middle strata, these were genuinely popular media,
and the works they purveyed were shared by large numbers of people as part of
their daily lives
...
More recently, as Anderson recognises, print has
been supplemented, and then overtaken, by radio, cassette, film and television,
which can reach vast audiences unknown to the purveyors of pamphlets and
novels (ibid
...
19
In other words, while discursive networks provide a key to the role of elites
in portraying the nation and disseminating nationalism, other cultural media
from music and art to radio and television have penetrated and mobilised the
majority of the people, provided always that they ‘spoke’ to them in a ‘language’
and culture that they understood, and conveyed messages of myth and symbol,
memory and tradition, that resonated with them
...
For, quite obviously, as Anderson himself recognises,
a global map of ‘print-communities’ does not correspond with one of emergent
nations
...
That is
why Anderson supplements an explanation of the rise of nations in Latin America
through the work of creole printmen with an analysis of the provincial
administrative ‘pilgrimages’ of creole functionaries
...
: 116, 121–30)
...
: ch
...


140

Varieties of modernism

Yet at the end, Anderson reverts to his original thesis: though language is
inclusive, ‘Print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language
per se’ (ibid
...
If that is so, then we would expect nations to correspond to
the limits of print-languages
...
It becomes just one
among many contributory causes, especially in Europe
...
They can only
emerge at specific historical junctures, and only within a determinate sequence
which starts with mortality and linguistic diversity, moves on to the long-term
decline of sacred monarchies and sacred script-communities and ends in the
revolution of linear, ‘empty, homogeneous time’
...
But it is here that we find ourselves in
greatest difficulty
...
How do we get from knowing and imagining the nation to feeling it
and loving it? Is it because we think the nation is interestless? Anderson rightly
points to the way in which the nation is likened to a family, and the family is
treated in most of human history as a domain of disinterested love, purity and
solidarity
...
On the contrary: as history too often proves, families
have powerful interests, and their members equally fervent attachments bound
up with those interests
...
Hence the peculiar passion and violence which it
elicits from its members, the feeling too that the nation insures us against mortality,
or rather against the oblivion that our death so clearly threatens
...
20
The concept of me nation, then, is not only an abstraction and invention, as
is so often claimed
...
But transcending death
is what the world religions sought in their different ways; so, we may ask, does
this not make of nationalism some latterday religion in secular guise? And does
not the current revival of religion, and the spate of religious nationalisms today,

Invention and imagination

141

cast doubt on the validity and utility of the modernist sequence which frames
Andersen’s post-modernist insights? (see James 1996)
...
It is simply not the case that all the great sacredscript communities declined and thereby made space for the nation
...
Something of
the same kind has been happening to Jews in Israel, where a vigorous orthodox
Judaism is being strengthened while itself reinforcing Israeli nationalism
...
As
we saw, Juergensmeyer’s review of religious nationalisms reveals the explosive
resilience of this alliance between religion and nationalism, with their combined
demands for mass self-sacrifice and their ability to guarantee to their adherents
a kind of double insurance for survival through both posterity and the afterlife
(Marty and Appleby 1991; Juergensmeyer 1993)
...
After all, linear time,
measured by clock and calendar, was well known in antiquity (and not only
among the ancient Jews), not to mention the medieval period
...
But the real question is: is there any causal
connection between the admittedly linear-progressive narratives of nationalism
and the growing adoption of linear, chronological time in the West? How could
such a link be established? And how important was such a link? (Sarkisyanz
1964; Johnson 1995)
...
For Michael Walzer, too, the return to biblical Exodus history
has shaped the civic-political aspirations of national liberation movements
...
More specifically, modern capitalism encounters in religion
another tenacious foe
...
1; cf
...
21
None of this is to gainsay the achievement of Andersen’s twofold synthesis
of cultural analysis with a basically Marxist socioeconomic framework, and his
postmodernist reading of the concept of the nation with a modernist account of
its genesis and diffusion
...
The postmodernist reading, and its accompanying cultural
analysis, can always be detached from its modernist moorings
...
Though print-capitalism has
been accorded a respectful hearing, it is the role of imagination, and the idea of
the nation as a discourse to be interrogated and deconstructed, that have proved
most influential
...

In a longer perspective, Anderson’s role in the modernist theory of nationalism
has proved to be double-edged
...
On the other hand, it has provided, doubtless
unintentionally, the means to negate its basic premisses by undermining the
ontological status of me nation as a real community grounded in the historical
and social life of cultural collectivities
...
For the many
postmodernist writers influenced by his vision, Anderson’s methodological legacy
has been, not only to replace attempts at causal explanation by literary and
textual analyses (something he himself refuses to countenance), but to sacrifice
sociological investigation of the origins, spread and effects of nationalism for a
more descriptive, and deconstructive, analysis of the characteristics of national
projects
...
To
this phase of dissolution I shall return in the last chapter
...
The nature of that crisis, and the attempts
to replace modernism by more viable paradigms and analyses, form the subject
of the second part of my study
...
It is also one of the last
...

But, as in other fields of study in the social sciences, these kinds of allencompassing explanatory paradigm have been increasingly abandoned in favour
of limited models and accounts of particular, usually contemporary, aspects of
the study of nations and nationalism
...

This is not to say that there were no alternative grand narratives, no rival
paradigms, in terms of which more or less radical critiques of modernism could
be mounted
...
Yet despite the validity of many
of these criticisms, the proposed alternatives have to date generally failed to
attract the support of the majority of scholars in the field
...
The result is that students are faced with an
unenviable choice between inadequate or untenable paradigms and a series of
limited analytical accounts of specific problems in the field
...
In
this chapter I shall attempt to show why the alternative ‘primordialist’ and
‘perennialist’ paradigms are unacceptable; in the next, why the one alternative
that might be acceptable should be viewed largely as an internal critique and
expansion of modernism; and in the last chapter, why the more limited, analytical
accounts of specific problems do little to advance the overall theory of nations
and nationalism
...

145

146

Critics and alternatives

Primordialism I: inclusive fitness
The oldest paradigm of nations and nationalism, the one against which
modernism has always battled, is the nationalist
...
Back in 1944, Hans Kohn had made
an important distinction between a ‘voluntarist’ type of nationalism which
regarded the nation as a free association of rational human beings entered into
voluntarily on an individual basis, and an ‘organic’ type which viewed the nation
as an organism of fixed and indelible character which was stamped on its
members at birth and from which they could never free themselves
...
1
If we forget Kohn’s highly questionable geographical applications and retain
only his ideological distinction, we can see that the ‘organic’ theory first developed
by the German Romantics provided an overall account of nations and nationalism
which, were it tenable, would make the modernist paradigm irrelevant and
superfluous
...
2
Now, to a modernist, each and every one of these tenets is questionable, if
not unacceptable
...
Before the modern epoch, nations were largely unknown, and
human beings had a multiplicity of collective loyalties; religious communities,
cities, empires and kingdoms were the chief collective actors, above the village
and district level, and the outlook of most human beings was strictly local
...
In fact, we often witness
nationalists disputing among themselves about the ‘true’ characteristics of their
nation
...
Might it be that nations have no existence apart from the
ideas and goals of nationalism, that we can only verify the existence of the
nation ex post facto from the activities of the nationalists? Perhaps it is the
nationalists themselves who have legitimised their political aspirations and
mobilising activities, using the metaphor of ‘reawakening’ a population who

Primordialism and perennialism

147

had never for a moment even entertained the idea that they were members of
a particular, designated nation (see esp
...
5)
...
This is, in fact, part of the data of the problem of
nationalism
...
Both of these ideas have entered into two well known
theoretical critiques of modernism
...
However, apart
from these references to biology and culture, neither of these ‘primordialist’
critiques has, or seeks to have, anything in common with organic nationalism
...

Broadly speaking, it claims that ethnic groups and nations should be seen as
forms of extended kin groups, and that both nations and ethnic groups, along
with ‘races’, must be ultimately derived from individual genetic reproductive
drives
...
As he puts it, ‘the very concept of the nation is an extension of kin
selection’, and so nations are to be treated as descent groups in the same manner
as ethnic groups
...

Van den Berghe argues that human sociality is based on three principles: kin
selection, reciprocity and coercion
...
But ethnicity, caste and
‘race’ ‘tend to be ascriptive, defined by common descent, generally hereditary,
and often endogamous’
...
Van den Berghe traces such groups from small ‘tribes’; linked by ties
of kinship, they made ‘the tribe in fact a superfamily’
...

(van den Berghe 1978:403–4)
For Pierre van den Berghe, ethnic groups were in-breeding superfamilies for
most of human history, and signalled that fact by maintaining clear social and
territorial boundaries with other ethnic groups
...
But the putative character of some ethnic groups’
extended kinship ties is irrelevant
...
The ease and speed with which these sentiments can be
mobilised even in modern industrial societies…the blind ferocity of the
conflicts to which these sentiments can lead, the imperviousness of such
sentiments to rational arguments are but a few indications of their continued
vitality and primordiality
...

(ibid
...
That is why ethnocentrism is the norm, and
why
those societies that institutionalised norms of nepotism and ethnocentrism
had a strong selective advantage over those that did not (assuming that any
such ever existed), because kin selection has been the basic blueprint for
animal sociality
...
: 405)
Genetic relatedness, in other words, determines the extent of animal, and human,
cooperation, and thereby the degree to which they enhance each other’s fitness
(‘inclusive fitness’)
...
These suggest that people sharing these cultural traits are descended
from the same ancestor; and that myths of common ancestry are correlated with
actual biological ancestry
...
Ethnicity
is, in part, defined by myths of common ancestry
...
Hence the theory is invalid
...
Ethnicity
or race cannot be invented or imagined out of nothing
...
Ethnicity is both primordial and instrumental
...
What van den Berghe has done
is to bracket physical appearance with culture, and equate living together and
having common myths and historical experiences with preferential endogamy
...
The Roman myth of common ancestry
emphasised their varied origins (Latins, Etruscans, Sabines, etc
...
This did
not prevent a powerful ancestry myth (or two, to be precise) from developing,
alongside equally powerful shared historical experiences (the Samnite wars, the
Gallic invasions, Pyrrhus, and above all, Hannibal…) to give rise to its first
literary expressions (see Gruen 1993; Garman 1992)
...
The same is true of the medieval and
modern French ancestry myths, with its celebrated contest between Franks and
Gauls (not to mention Romans during the Revolution) (Poliakov 1974: ch
...
1)
...
But, as Vernon Reynolds (1980:311) points
out:
Unless his primordial inter-group theory based on sociobiology can explain
why the new non-genetic transmission of kinship and group affiliation has
to follow the logic of the old genetic one, it breaks down
...
D
...

Van den Berghe is surely right to remind us that there are limits to ethnic
plasticity and malleability
...

Ethnicity always involves the cultural and genetic boundaries of a breeding
population, that is, a population bounded by the rule or practice of endogamy
...

This is the case even in such a culturally long-lived example as the Greeks,
where undoubted evidence of massive rupture of demographic continuity by
the influx of Albanians and Slavs on the Greek mainland from the sixth to
eighth centuries AD and of considerable, though not complete, culture change
after the conversion to Orthodoxy, call into question the continuity and influence
of a common ancient Greek biological and genetic inheritance on modern Greeks
(see Just 1989)
...
? This seems to me the central difficulty of any kind of genetic explanation
in terms of individual reproductive success
...
But even if these
mechanisms could be rendered precise, this shifts the basis of ethnic kinship
away from the realm of the purely physical and genetic to the domain of the
social psychological—something that van den Berghe for one opposes—thereby
invoking an alternative structural and/or cultural explanation, without recourse
to genes or phenotypes; and so the powerfully felt ‘primordiality’ of ethnicity
and nationality becomes a purely cultural, rather than a biological, phenomenon
...
Nations are elided with ethnic groups, and any
differences between them are relegated to the superstructural, i
...
sociopolitical
and non-biological realm, making redundant all attempts to provide separate
explanations for the rise of nations and nationalism
...
If modernists insist on a historical and
sociological gulf between the agrarian and capitalist industrial epochs,
sociobiological accounts disregard epochal differences altogether in their desire
to provide reductionist explanations for a wide range of social and cultural
phenomena
...
In the end, as societies become
more evolved and complex, and as migration and intermarriage undermine group
endogamy, individual ‘kin selection’ becomes an increasingly residual factor,
and we must look elsewhere for an understanding of the power and passion of
ethnic ties and nationalism
...

Primordialism II: cultural givens
For many, the passions aroused by ethnicity and nationalism must be traced
back to the ‘primordiality’ of the ‘cultural givens’ of human society
...

It was Edward Shils who first identified various kinds of social bond between
members of modern societies
...
Recalling the Durkheimian argument which saw the retention of
a kernel of older kinship, moral and religious ties—the similarities of beliefs and
consciences in a ‘mechanical solidarity’—even within modern, industrial societies
with their more individualistic, but at the same time cooperative and
complementary division of labour or ‘organic solidarity’, Shils argued that
primordial ties of kinship and religion remained vital even within modern secular
societies, as witnessed by their symbols and public ceremonies (Shils 1957)
...
Here modern states were
emerging on colonial territorial and political foundations, but their populations
were bound together less by the civil ties of a rational society than by the
primordial ties which arose on the basis of language, custom, race, religion and
other cultural givens
...

Geertz began by distinguishing
two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and actually opposed
motives—the desire to be recognised as responsible agents whose wishes,
act, hopes and opinions ‘matter’, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic,
modern state
...
The other
aim is practical: it is a demand for progress, for a rising standard of living,
more effective political order, greater social justice, and beyond that of
‘playing a part in the larger arena of world politics’, of ‘exercising influence
among the nations’
...
People in these multi-ethnic states ‘tend to regard the
immediate, concrete, and to them inherently meaningful sorting implicit in such
“natural” diversity as the substantial content of their individuality’ (ibid
...

Geertz claims that, considered as societies, the new states are abnormally
susceptible to serious disaffection based on primordial attachments
...
These congruities of
blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at
times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves
...
The general
strength of such primordial bonds, and the types of them that are important,
differ from person to person, from society to society, and from time to time
...

(ibid
...
Geertz
himself does not use this term
...
:
260)
...
He lists the main sources of such sentiments:
Assumed blood ties or ‘quasi-kinship’; and he explains this:
‘Quasi’ because kin units formed around known biological relationship
(extended families, lineages and so on) are too small for even the most

Primordialism and perennialism

153

tradition-bound to regard them as having more than limited significance,
and the referent is, consequently, to a notion of untraceable but yet
sociologically real kinship, as in a tribe
...
: 261–2)
race, which refers to phenotypes rather than any definite sense of common
descent;
language, though not necessarily divisive, can give rise to linguism as the basis
of primordial conflicts;
region, which can be especially troublesome in geographically heterogenous
areas;
religion, a force which can undermine the comprehensive civil sense;
custom, which with life-style often opposes sophisticated groups to what they
see as more barbarian populations
...
Using
this distinction, he builds a preliminary classification of ethnic-state relationships,
emphasising that their patterns of primordial cleavage and identification ‘are not
fluid, shapeless and infinitely various, but are definitely demarcated and vary in
systematic ways’ (ibid
...
He then goes on to argue that the rise of a modern
political consciousness centred on the state actually stimulates primordial
sentiments among the mass of the population:
Thus, it is the very process of the formation of a sovereign, civil state that,
among other things, stimulates sentiments of parochialism, communalism,
racialism, and so on, because it introduced into society a valuable new prize
over which to fight and a frightening new force with which to contend
...
: 270)
This, then, is the ‘integrative revolution’, and it is clearly a double-edged process
...
: 260–1, note)
...
In a debate on the formation of political identities
in South Asia, specifically Pakistan, Paul Brass in a measured critique highlighted
some of the limitations of what he called a ‘primordialist’ approach
...
But he

154

Critics and alternatives

argues that some primordial attachments are variable
...

Religions too are subject to change by reformers, and to conversions and
syncretism
...
Massive migration has severed a sense of attachment to their
place of birth for many people; besides, place of birth is not usually of political
significance, at least until recently
...

Fictive kinship relationships may extend the range of some ethnic groupings
rather broadly, but their fictive character presumes their variability by
definition
...

There are two further objections to the primordialist position
...
The second,
derived from Geertz, is that
ethnic attachments belong to the non-rational part of the human personality
and, as such are potentially destructive of civil society
...
: 38)
But ethnic identities may be felt or adopted for quite rational reasons, for survival
or for gain
...
: 38)
...
: 38)
...

(ibid
...
: 40)
...
Like
Thomas Eriksen, he distances himself from the extreme instrumentalists for
whom culture is infinitely malleable and elites free to choose whatever aspect of
a culture that can serve their political purposes or mobilise the masses
...
He emphasises the advantages accruing
to different kinds of elite and counter-elite in symbol selection, but agrees with
Francis Robinson in acknowledging the constraints placed upon them by their
communities’ cultural traditions
...
Hence we may
infer that it is the competition between elites within a community, and between
the elites of different communities, using multiple symbol selection, that mobilises
the members of communities and forms them into cohesive nationalities (Brass
1991: ch
...
Eriksen 1993)
...
For them, the
concept of primordiality contains three distinct ideas:
1
2
3

the ‘given’, a priori, underived nature of primordial attachments, which
precedes all social interaction;
their ineffable, overpowering, coercive qualities;
the emotional, affective nature of primordial sentiments and attachments
...

Eller and Coughlan then set out to demonstrate, by citing a variety of empirical
studies, the variable and socially constructed nature of ethnic ties, which are
continually being renewed, reinterpreted and renegotiated according to changing
circumstances and interests
...
They do concede that in some
cases of ethnicity ‘some old realities and resources were being activated which
might arguably be part of a “primordial heritage”’
...
Eller and Coughlan then go on to criticise
the followers of Shils and Geertz who, regardless of their possible intentions,
treat primordial attachments as ineffable and therefore unanalysable
...

This leads to a mystification of emotion, a desocialising of the phenomenon,
and in extreme cases can lead to the positing of a biological imperative of
bond-formation
...
Sociobiological
explanations thus become, curiously, the last bastion of any kind of analytic
enterprise, albeit a dead-end one
...
: 192, original emphasis)
But is all this not to seriously misunderstand the import and utility of the concept
of the ‘primordial’ for the study of ethnicity and nationality? Certainly, for Steven
Grosby, the concept of primordiality has to do more with cognition of certain
objects which the emotions that Eller and Coughlan erroneously single out,
accompany
...
Against the current reductionist vogue, this tradition recognises the
importance of different kinds of cognition, or belief, which attach to different
kinds of object, in this case, beliefs about ancestry and territory (Grosby
1994:166–7)
...
This is an act of interpretative cognition
...
‘The patterns are the legacy of history; they
are tradition’
...

(ibid
...
That is why human beings have always attributed and continue to
attribute sacredness to primordial objects and the attachments they form to
them
...

(ibid
...
That is why the instrumentalist
critique is so fundamentally misguided and its sociological analysis so shallow
...
Despite their
protestations to the contrary, there is a reductionist tendency in both polar
positions: an attempt to explain ethnicity and nationality as either instruments
of rational self-interest, or as collective outgrowths of beliefs about the primordial
...
Instrumentalists tend to view ethnicity
and nationality as sites and resources for collective mobilisation by interestmaximising (and often rationally discriminating) elites; hence their analysis is
largely voluntaristic, elite-driven and top-down
...
e
...

Theoretically, the instrumentalist-primordialist debate appears to pit ‘interest’
against ‘affect’, elite strategies of cultural manipulation against the power of
underlying cultural cleavages
...
But in between there are a variety
of positions on a continuum, which in one way or another recognise what Daniel
Bell saw in ethnicity, its unique combination of ‘interest’ with ‘affect’ and its
consequent superiority to other collectivities as sites of mass mobilisation (Bell
1975; cf
...
7
In fact, there has been considerable misunderstanding of what might be termed
the ‘cultural primordialism’ of Shils and Geertz
...
Neither Geertz nor Shils regarded
primordial ties as purely matters of emotion; they were careful to circumscribe
the domain of primordiality and reveal how it was but one of several sources of
beliefs, actions, attachments and sentiments
...
Nor did they regard primordiality as inhering
in the objects themselves, but only in the perceptions and emotions they
engendered
...
This is the language of perception and belief, of the
mental and emotional world of the individuals concerned
...

Here lies the vital insight of this kind of ‘primordialism’
...
It
draws attention to the powerful perceptions, beliefs and emotions that can inspire
and excite human beings, and rouse them to collective action and self-sacrifice
...
A theory of
ethnicity and nationalism that fails to address the power of the resulting ties and
their capacity for rousing and guiding mass self-sacrifice, whatever its other merits,
is seriously deficient in addressing those elements that so signally distinguish
these phenomena from others
...
Like
sweetwater fish, they cannot survive in the turbulent oceans of rampant ethnic
nationalism
...
8
But this too would be a mistake
...
It consists
in re-describing at a higher level of analysis the peculiar features and dimensions
of ethnicity and nationality; and those in very general, if suggestive, terms
...
Though this throws light on their character, it does not
thereby explain the formation, course and decline of instances of these
phenomena
...
It accords no separate role for the rise of nations or for the
cultures and ideologies of nationalism, nor does it provide any tools for explaining
the historical development of different forms of ethnic and national attachments
...

Perennialism I: ethnic continuity
The primordialist-instrumentalist debate, which I have only briefly outlined here,
is largely concerned with ethnicity and ethnic identity rather than with nations
and nationalism
...
9
In the past, one could be sure that modernists were also instrumentalists (and
vice-versa), while perennialists were always primordialists of one kind or another
(and vice-versa)
...
Not all modernists embrace a robust instrumentalism;
and not all perennialists turn out to be primordialists
...
What we find instead are theorists who embrace a perennialist
view of ethnicity (with some primordialist overtones), only to adopt a modernist
approach to nations and nationalism
...

What is meant here by the term ‘perennialism’? Broadly speaking, it refers to the
historical antiquity of the type of social and political organisation known as the
‘nation’, its immemorial or perennial character
...
The perennialist readily accepts the modernity of
nationalism as a political movement and ideology, but regards nations either as
updated versions of immemorial ethnic communities, or as collective cultural
identities that have existed, alongside ethnic communities, in all epochs of human
history
...
As perennialists, they could not endorse the central idea of
the Abbé Sieyes, for whom nations were sui generis, existing in the natural order as
part of the substratum of human and social existence
...

At the same time it is a constant and fundamental feature of human society
throughout recorded history; and for this reason nations and ethnic communities
appear to be immemorial to their members
...
Fishman does not use the language
of ‘cultural primordialism’, though many of his formulations share its spirit
...
Attacking externalist liberal, Marxist and
sociological denigrations and misunderstandings of ethnicity, Fishman briefly

160

Critics and alternatives

traces the history of ethnic belonging from the Greeks and Hebrews, and invokes
the spirit of Herder, not only to stress the intimate bond between language and
ethnicity, but more fundamentally to reveal the immemorial ubiquity and
subjectivity of unmobilised ethnicity as the ‘untutored and largely unconscious
ehtnicity of everyday life’
...
As far as ethnic ‘being’ is concerned:
Ethnicity has always been experienced as a kinship phenomenon, a continuity
within the self and within those who share an intergenerational link to
common ancestors
...
The human body itself
is viewed as an expression of ethnicity and ethnicity is commonly felt to be
in the blood, bones and flesh
...
Ethnicity
has indeed a biological component, but it extents well beyond biological and
bodily, or ‘being’, dimension
...
‘The “doings” of ethnicity
preserve, confirm and augment collective identities and the natural order’, and
include verbal expressions like songs, chants, rituals, sayings and prayers
...
Ethnic expressed
in authentic media
...
Indeed, the same deeply felt need to
belong intimately has provided the basis also for modern ethnic nationalisms
(ibid
...
Isaacs 1975; Nash 1989)
...
Rather, he is concerned to underline the power, longevity and
ubiquity of ethnicity/nationality, to trace its deep roots in both history and the
human psyche, and to vindicate the importance of seeing ethnicity empathetically
and not to judge it by some externalist criterion of ‘objective reality’
...
Who exactly
feels the tangible, living reality of ethnicity? Is it ethnic leaders and elites alone
or ethnic populations as a whole? If the former, cannot such ethnicity be the site
of different, and contested, interpretations? If the latter, how can we verify their
beliefs and sentiments, especially in pre-modern epochs? Besides, who
authenticates the cultural ‘doings’ and ‘knowings’ of the community, and is there
anly one standard of authenticity? Granted that many people feel a deep need
to belong intimately, and therefore the analyst needs to enter into the beliefs

Primordialism and perennialism

161

and sentiments of ethnic members, how do we explain from within the formation
and decline of different ethnic communities and nations, the consequences of
mass migration and adoption of new ethnic identities, the effects of large-scale
inter-marriage on the sense of intimate belonging, and the possibility of mixed
heritages and bilingual and dual-ethnic belonging? It seems that Fishman’s
analysis, in capturing the deeply felt sense of intimate belonging of ethnic
communities with vivid memories and well documented histories, fails to address
the problems of communities with more ambiguous and less documented pasts,
and the situations of so many people who are in transit from one ethnic
community to another or who combine cultural elements of different
communities
...

Nor is there any attempt in Fishman’s kind of analysis to single out a special
problem of nations or nationalism
...
Nor is there any attempt to disentangle the ideas of
‘ethnic continuity’ and ‘ethnic recurrence’ in perennialism
...
Fishman provides us with no clues about the effects of
conquest, colonisation or genocide for particular ethnic communities or ethnicity
in general; his appears to be a form of ‘continuous perennialism’, whereby nations
and ethnic communities can be traced back through the generations to their
first beginnings, with a corresponding sense of their immemorial character
...
In a
series of powerful and seminal articles, now reprinted in a single volume, Connor
argues that the national bond is fundamentally psychological and non-rational
...
Basically, a nation
is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related
...

(Connor 1994:202)
Connor goes on to show how nationalist leaders have grasped and used this
point, while scholars have tended to confuse nationalism with patriotism, the
nation with the state
...
But, lest he be misunderstood, Connor
clearly differentiates his position from that of the sociobiologists:
The sense of unique descent, of course, need not, and in nearly all cases will
not, accord with factual history
...
It is not chronological or factual history that is
the key to the nation, but sentient or felt history
...

(ibid
...
Economic
explanations in terms of modernisation and class conflict or relative deprivation,
or political explanations in terms of state power and institutions, or individualistic
rational-choice theories of the strategic manipulations of the intelligentsia, must
by their very nature fail to ‘reflect the emotional depth of national identity’, and
the love, hatred and self-sacrifice it inspires
...
: 206)
...
Patriotism is love of one’s state or country
and its institutions; nationalism is love of one’s nation, the largest felt descent
group
...
For ethnicity too involves a sense of common ancestry, as Weber had
already noted when he wrote that
We shall call ethnic groups those human groups that entertain a subjective
belief in their common descent…
...

(Weber 1968:I, 389, cited in Connor 1994:102)
Connor points out that Weber went on to say that, though the idea of the nation
shares this sense of common ancestry with the ethnic group, ‘the sentiment of
ethnic solidarity does not by itself make a “nation”’
...

In these cases a segment of the ethnic group feels a low level of solidarity when
confronted with a foreign element; this type of xenophobia consists in knowing
ethnically ‘what they are not before they know what they are’ (Connor 1994:102–
3, original emphasis)
...
While an ethnic group may,
therefore, be other-defined, the nation must be self-defined
...
: 103, original emphasis)
Up to this point, Connor presents a perennialist view of ethnicity, with some
hints of primordialism
...
Connor offers no explanation for the rise of ethnic groups,
except in terms of felt kinship, which is presumably an extension of real (but
small-scale and hence politically insignificant) kinship
...
In fact, it turns out to be a fairly
radical version of modernism
...
This means
that most nations are very recent,
and claims that a particular nation existed prior to the late nineteenth century
should be treated cautiously
...
Though we cannot know
exactly what proportion of the population has internalised the national identity
and thereby suffices to confer on the ethnic group the title of nation, there are
several clues that suggest that, even in the Western democracies, this process
has been recent and, even in Europe, incomplete
...
In fact, enfranchisement of most of the population provides a
good test of national inclusion and therefore national identity; in which case,
even the Western democracies could not claim the title of nation until the early
twentieth century, when voting rights were accorded to women and the working
classes (ibid
...
11
Why is this the case? Basically, over the last two centuries the idea that the
right to rule is vested in the people has been a potent and ever widening political
force, undermining all previous political structures
...

(Connor 1994:169)

164

Critics and alternatives

The result has been a surge of national liberation movements, but it is only
from the mid-twentieth century that this wave of nationalism has been extended
across the globe and to peripheral hinterlands by the accelerating forces of mass
communications and state-sponsored education
...
Indeed, what Connor terms ‘ethno-nationalism’ has swept the globe
as a result of the mass communications spreading the message that popular
sovereignty is wedded to ethnicity coupled with the ‘demonstration effect’ of
successful ethno-nationalisms
...
: 169–74)
...
In one particularly incisive
essay, Connor reveals the erroneous analysis and misplaced optimism of
evolutionary modernisation theory, in the light of renewed worldwide ethnic
separatism
...
But his justified critique of Deutschian assimilation
theory can lead to an overestimation of the power of ethnic separatism in relation
to state sovereignty and a flexible inter-state system
...
While
Connor’s approach illuminates the ways in which ethnic masses are mobilised in
nationalist movements, it is perhaps less useful for analysing the more routine
sentiments of national identity in advanced, stable and democratic states, particularly
where there is a high degree of immigration and intermarriage
...
How are we to measure the extent and diffusion of collective
awareness? Connor is all too conscious of the limitations of our sources,
particularly for pre-modern periods and for lower classes
...
It assumes first
that the nation is necessarily a mass phenomenon, second that awareness is
tantamount to participation, and third that in democracies, at any rate,
participation is measured by voting
...
While it is true that the ‘modern nation’
is a mass phenomenon, this is no more than an interesting tautology, unless of
course we claim a priori that the only kind of ‘nation’ is the ‘modern nation’
...
With regard to the second assumption, people

Primordialism and perennialism

165

can be aware or be made aware of something without participating in it, for
example, the judiciary or the global system of states
...
That is, I suggest, very much what occurred in Europe in the early
modern period, if not earlier, as well as in many ethnic communities around the
world
...
They might even
volunteer for war service without being able to vote for or against the war
...

The psychology of ethnic affiliation
A similar combination of perennial ethnicity with political modernism can be
found in Donald Horowitz’s great study of ethnic group conflict in Africa, Asia
and the Caribbean, Ethnic Groups in Conflict
...
In the spirit of Weber, he writes:
Ethnicity is based on a myth of collective ancestry, which usually carries
with it traits believed to be innate
...

(Horowitz 1985:52)
Ethnicity is best viewed as a form of greatly extended kinship
...
: 81)
...
Ethnicity
builds on kinship, even if it extends the range of ‘kinsmen’ to include neighbours
and those who share common cultural traits
...

Nevertheless, most people are born into an ethnic group, so that whatever other
differences there might be between groups, birth ascription is ultimately the
defining element of ethnicity (ibid
...

Of course, group difference and discrimination is near-universal
...
But, unlike other random groups, ethnic groups ‘tie their differences
to affiliations that are putatively ascriptive and therefore difficult or impossible
to change’
...

This perennial struggle for relative group worth in comparison with significant
others also forms me basis of ethnic conflict today (ibid
...
It is typically
expressed in ethnic stereotypes, which categorise groups as economically and
culturally ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ in relation to the (ex-) colonial West
...
: ch
...

68–9)
...
They are the product of the massive changes
wrought by the advent of the modern colonial state and capitalist economy
...
Until the arrival of colonialism, the struggle
for relative group esteem was small-scale, localised and sporadic
...
: 66–77; cf
...

Unlike Connor and Fishman, Donald Horowitz’s focus is on the impact of
colonialism and its consequences for the plural ethnic states that it created in
Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and he gives a rich and illuminating account of
the ways in which ethnic parties sought to capitalise on the new opportunities
opened up by colonialism and to compete in the new political arena of the modern
territorial state
...
Like Fishman and Connor, Horowitz insists on the presumed
kinship basis of ethnicity, and its vital subjective components, though, curiously,
in his analysis of the origins of the plural state, he accords little or no role to precolonial ethnic communities and conflicts
...
At the same time, Horowitz
gives us a much more historical, structural, and rationalist account of ethnic
conflict in the modern plural national state, and this raises the question of why
ethnicity itself might not be amenable to a similar kind of historical and structural,
if not instrumental, analysis
...
It is also not clear how ethnic conflict in the new states is related
to the spread of nationalist ideologies and to the formation of nations and national
states
...

For Armstrong, the group identity called the ‘nation’ is simply a modern
equivalent of pre-modern ethnic identity, which has existed all through recorded
history
...
Following Earth’s
analysis of social organisation and group boundaries, Armstrong sees the clusters
of perceptions and attitudes that we call ‘ethnicity’ forming and dissolving in
every period of history
...
Armstrong distinguishes between ethnicity in
pre-modern epochs as a persistent group identity that ‘did not ordinarily constitute
the overriding legitimisation of polity formation’, and nations in the nationalist
era, ‘when consciousness of ethnic identity became a predominant force for
constituting independent political structures’ (Armstrong 1982:4)
...
: 7)
...

But, given his Barthian approach, which sees ethnicity as maintained by social
boundaries rather than primordial attachments or presumed kinship ties, how
shall we understand Armstrong’s perennialism? Does he regard modern nations
as continuous with, and in some cases growing out of, older ethnic identities?
Or does he see ethnic identities and pre-modern nations as recurrent phenomena
in every period of recorded history, emerging and dissolving, with particular
modern nations having little or no relationship to pre-modern ethnic identities
or nations? In other words, is his a version of perennialism that emphasises
continuity between modern nations and pre-modern ethnic groups, or one that
emphasises recurrence of ethnic and national identities, but little or no continuity?
There is evidence in Armstrong’s writings for both positions
...
Of course, there are some cases of continuity between modern

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Critics and alternatives

nations and pre-modern ethnic identities, such as diaspora communities like the
Armenians and Jews, or cases like the French and Russians, but for the most
part Armstrong seems to stress the ways in which, despite their durable myths
and symbols, ethnic identity is subject to long-term emergence, transformation
and dissolution, and is therefore a recurrent phenomenon
...
15
In contrast to Armstrong, many historians have been concerned to trace a
continuity between particular modern nations and pre-modern ethnic
communities
...
This was certainly
the position of an older generation of historian who, under the influence of
nationalism, tended to see nations and nationalism everywhere in antiquity and
the Middle Ages
...
Thus Brandon treated the
ancient Zealots in Roman Judea as nationalist guerillas (a term that might be
extended to the Hasmonean revolt of the Hasidim under Judas Maccabeus against
the Seleucid Antiochus Epiphanes some two centuries earlier); their response to
Roman occupation and oppression was of a piece with modern religious
nationalisms, as they regarded the land of Israel as God’s holy land and the
property of His people
...
In this respect he
approaches the distinction made much more forcefully by Moses Finley with
regard to the ancient Greeks
...
On the other hand, there was a a
wide cultural network and a broad ethnic identity among the Hellenes (Brandon
1967; Mendels 1992; Finley 1986: ch
...
16
For Steven Grosby, on the other hand, we may use the term ‘nation’ with
caution for the people of ancient Israel, from at least the seventh century BC
...
Grosby argues that Israel was not alone in this
development; we find it in neighbouring Moab, Edom and probably ancient
Egypt, whereas ancient Greece and Mesopotamia remained either city-states or
empires because they failed to develop a belief in a single land inhabited by a
single people under a single ‘god of the land’
...
Wiseman 1973)
...
But is
his use of the term ‘nation’ similar to that of the majority of scholars of modern
nations? Does not the substitution of religion for citizenship as a necessary
component of the idea of the ‘nation’ separate his concept entirely from that of
the ‘modern nation’? Can, and should, we then speak of a ‘pre-modern’ and a
‘modern’ kind of nation, and how would they be related? Certainly for modernists
like Breuilly or Gellner, Grosby’s conception of pre-modern nations has little
connection with that of the modern nation defined by citizenship and mass culture
and education
...
Could
we, in fact, be dealing with two kinds of ‘nation’, or, better, perhaps a continuum
from the one polar type to the other, with particular cases being ranged along
it? Such a view would have the merit of being able to avoid the rather arbitrary
exclusions which plague the field
...
It misses out the vital
element of historical context
...
After all, do not the very meanings of the terms we employ, which
are always inadequate to the nuances and complexities of historical development
and social life, derive from the changed contexts in which these concepts are
used and hence reflect those changes? And were not the changes that
inaugurated the modern world massive beyond previous human belief and
knowledge?
But this is to beg the question of whether radical changes in some spheres of
society and history—technology, communications, economics and demography,
for example—necessarily have their counterparts in other spheres like culture,
community and collective identity; and whether, if they have, the changes wrought
are such as to make it necessary to treat more recent forms of culture, community
and identity as utterly different and quite incommensurable with older forms,
or whether, per contra, certain elements like kinship, memory and symbol, while
differing in their particular contents between cases, remain constants of the human
condition and are found in every historical context
...


8

Ethno-symbolism

In the writings of scholars on nations and nationalism, three antinomies are
frequently proposed: the ‘essence’ of the nation as opposed to its constructed
quality; the antiquity of the nation versus its purely modern appearance; and
the cultural basis of nationalism contrasted with its political aspirations and goals
...

As far as the historians are concerned, a great debate has raged over the
second and third antinomies, the antiquity of nations and the nature of
nationalism in the Middle Ages (and indeed in general), a debate that harks
back to the conflicting views of Heinrich Treitschke and Ernest Renan over
the origins and nature of nations, and of the German and French nations
respectively
...
One consequence of this debate was that for the
‘objectivists’, nations and national sentiment could be found as far back as the
tenth century, whereas for ‘subjectivists’ both were products of the eighteenth
century (Renan 1882; Tipton 1972; Guenée 1985:216–20; Guibernau 1996:
ch
...

‘Old, continuous’ nations
The debate has its more recent echoes
...
For
many historians, national sentiment and nations can already be found as far
back as the sixteenth century
...
It is clear from her detailed and wide-ranging account that
‘nationalism’ signifies ‘national sentiment’ rather than ‘nationalist ideology’,
although by the early seventeenth century, with its return to Old Testament
ideals of chosenness and its development of a Protestant martyrology, English
national sentiment had become political in content and turned to outright
nationalist ideology couched in religious language
...
1)
...
While we are unable to find explicit
expressions of nationalism in this period, there are clear examples of an English
national sentiment, such as the leading ecclesiastical writer, Aelfric, who explained
in a letter to a nobleman why he had translated the Book of Judith into English:
It is set down in English in our manner, as an example to you people that
you should defend your land against the invading army with weapons
...
By the
eleventh century, at least,
England is seen in biblical terms, a nation to be defended as the Israel of
the Old Testament was defended
...

(Hastings 1997:42; cf
...

The Bible, moreover, presented in Israel itself a developed model of what it
means to be a nation—a unity of people, language, religion, territory, and
government
...

(Hastings 1997:18)
Hastings admits that Protestantism multiplied the effect of the Israelite model
through its dissemination of vernacular translations of the Bible, as well as through
the Book of Common Prayer
...

(ibid
...

(John Milton: Areopagitica, vol
...
Nevertheless, fully fledged secular political nationalisms, the first
examples of Gellner’s ‘nationalism-in-general’, a vast wave of nationalisms which
for Adrian Hastings are ‘said to constitute the “Age of Nationalism”’ and represent
‘a sort of Mark II nationalism’, had to wait until the American and French
Revolutions, which proclaimed the supremacy of the ‘nation’, conceived as a
willed political union of fellow-feeling and culturally similar ‘citizens’ (Kohn
1967b; Newman 1987; Colley 1992: ch
...
2
The examples of England and France have provided the litmus test of the
antiquity of the concept of the nation and the nature of national sentiment, as
well as of the historical continuity of particular nations
...
For both historians, the distinction related mainly
to the advent of political nationalise, the ideology and movement
...
Tilly 1975:
Introduction and Conclusion)
...
He lists the
nations that evolved gradually, and describes the process by which they were
formed over several centuries:
The old nations of Europe in 1789 were the English, Scots, French, Dutch,
Castilians and Portuguese in the west; the Danes and Swedes in the north;
and the Hungarians, Poles and Russians in the east
...
It was a spontaneous process,
not willed by anyone, though there were great events which in certain cases
clearly accelerated it
...
: 8)
The new nations, on the other hand, were formed over much shorter periods,
by well known leaders using the written word and modern communications
...
Economic and geographical
causes were more important in the formation of overseas nations of European
origin, while state boundaries imposed by imperial governments formed the
matrix of ex-colonial nations in much of Asia and Africa (ibid
...

Pre-modern nations?
Seton-Watson’s narrative is impressive in its scope and the wealth of historical
evidence he adduces, but it is not without its problems
...
And he admits to the impossibility of finding a ‘scientific definition’
of the nation, claiming that
a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider
themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one
...
: 5, 11)

174

Critics and alternatives

This formulation, of course, begs the question not only of the number of people
considered to be ‘significant’, but also of the nature of the ‘community’ in which
they are located
...

There is a basic problem with this kind of continuous perennialism
...
This tends to
promote a ideological emphasis on the ‘predestined nation-states’
...
The history of nationalism becomes less a part of the history of
political thought than of historical geography, while the starting-point of
political development becomes the nation, with its national character or
national characteristics
...

(S
...

(Seton-Watson 1977:15)
According to Reynolds, this kind of perspective prevents us from appreciating
the ideas and sentiments of the early (or later) Middle Ages for what they were
in themselves, without imposing a retrospective relationship
between the medieval ‘people’ and its kingdom on the one hand and the
modern ‘nation’ and its state on the other
...
Reynolds 1984:253)
To avoid confusion, Susan Reynolds proposes to use the adjective ‘regnal’ in
place of ‘national’, since the medieval kingdom

Ethno-symbolism

175

corresponded to a ‘people’ (gens, natio, populus), which was assumed to be a
natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law and descent
...
: 250)
By about 900, the idea of peoples as communities of custom, descent and
government was well entrenched
...
Reynolds 1983)
...
For, like Connor and Grosby, Reynolds’ analysis focuses on popular
ideas, beliefs and perceptions of the participants, rather than on the analyst’s
view of the referents of those ideas, perceptions and beliefs (ibid
...
note
8; 256–9)
...
For organic nationalists, of course, the quest for
‘our true ancestors’ was essential to the cause of the nation
...
2;
Herbert 1972; Poliakov 1974, ch
...
Viroli 1995)
...
Lesley
Johnson, who applies the Andersonian view of the nation as an imagined political
community to the medieval world, cites a popular example from the introduction
to an exhibition catalogue on the Anglo-Saxons, The Making of England, where
the author argues that ‘The Anglo-Saxons…were the true ancestors of the English
of today
...
As such, it tends to assume
what has to be proved, and posits a historical continuity which, given the silences
and complexities of the historical evidence, is at best problematic (Johnson 1995)
...
This is particularly true of peoples whose
identities have been shaped and ‘carried’ by a scriptural religion, the Armenians

176

Critics and alternatives

and Jews being the outstanding, but by no means the only, examples
...
To do so without empirical examination is to make
uncritical assumptions about continuities between premodern ethnic and
modern national identities and to fall into the post hoc propter hoc fallacy
...
In
the nature of things, such evidence is often difficult to obtain, especially if it is
stipulated that both ethnicity and nationhood must be mass phenomena, and
that in the medieval world, the peasants must therefore be aware of their ethnic
and regnal ties, if we are to grant the existence of ethnic communities or nations
...
Hastings, for
example, argues that
one cannot say that for a nation to exist it is necessary that everyone within
it should want it to exist or have full consciousness that it does exist; only
that many people beyond government circles or a small ruling class should
consistently believe in it
...
But,
of course, if a specific society was overwhelmingly one of peasants and
nobles only, then that might indeed be a decisive difficulty
...
: 26–7)
...
of nations and nationalism) (ibid
...
It is equally, of course,
a sociological and political schism, and the vital issue of ‘commencement’ takes
us back to rival definitions of the nation and of nationalism
...

For the moment, I want to focus on the third antinomy, the contrast between
the cultural basis and political goals of nationalism, because it throws a different
light on both the nature and the antiquity of nations
...
This refutes the
common idea that modern nationalism is simply the later politicisation of purely
cultural or ethnic sentiments in pre-modern periods, and that the distinctive
feature of modern nations is their sovereignty as mass political communities
...
It also appears to refute the separation of a
purely cultural from an exclusively political type of national (or regnal) sentiment
...
1; Grosby 1991; but
cf
...
Hall 1992)
...
John
Breuilly, as we saw, wished to confine the use of the term ‘nationalism’ to a purely
political movement; and Eric Hobsbawm also argued that nationalism’s only interest
for the historian lay in its political aspirations, and especially its capacity for statemaking (Breuilly 1993: Introduction; Hobsbawm 1990: Introduction)
...
It omits other important
dimensions of ‘nationalism’ such as culture, identity and ‘the homeland’, and
pays little attention to the character of the object of nationalist strivings, the
‘nation’
...

This is the point made by John Hutchinson in his pioneering and thoughtprovoking analysis of cultural nationalism
...
But he thinks that we cannot overlook the recurrent significance of
cultural forms of nationalism; despite their much smaller scale and often transient
character, we must accord due weight to ‘a cultural nationalism that seeks a
moral regeneration of the community’ (Hutchinson 1994:41)
...

What exactly is the vision of cultural nationalism and how does it differ
from that of political nationalism? The latter’s ideal is of
a civic polity of educated citizens united by common laws and mores like the
polis of classical antiquity
...

By contrast, the cultural nationalist perceives the state as an accidental,
for the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilisation, which is the product
of its unique history, culture and geographical profile
...
Like families, nations are natural solidarities;
they evolve in the manner, so to speak, of organic beings and living personalities
...

(ibid
...
So the small circles of cultural
nationalists form clubs and societies, read poetry, edit journals and engage in
rituals, and seek to promote national progress through communal self-help
...

(ibid
...
It could be found both among populations
that existed only as ethnic categories, without much self-consciousness, such as
the Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians, who had few ethnic memories, distinctive
institutions or native elites; and among well defined nations with definite borders,
a self-aware population and rich memories, like the Croatians, Czechs,
Hungarians and Poles; or among peoples with religious memories and institutions
like the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians (ibid
...
7
Hutchinson draws three conclusions from his analysis of the dynamics of
cultural nationalism
...
The second is ‘that there are usually competing definitions
of the nation’, and their competition is resolved by trial and error during
interaction with other communities
...
: 29–30)
...
It may
look back to a presumed glorious past, but it repudiates both traditionalism and
modernism
...

(ibid
...
They continually re-emerge in times of crisis
even in advanced industrial societies, because they answer to ‘a deep-seated
conflict between the worlds of religion and science’
...
Kohn had argued that once a middle
class entered the political arena in Eastern Europe after 1848, cultural nationalism
was superseded by a ‘rational’ political nationalism
...
between religion and science)
...
: 40)
It is better, therefore, to see
cultural and political nationalism as competing responses—communitarian
and state-oriented—to this problem
...
Their effect…is frequently to reinforce rather than
to attenuate religious sentiments
...
: 40–1; Hutchinson 1994: ch
...
Kohn 1967a: ch
...
Hutchinson is at pains to highlight the alternations between failed political
nationalism and resurgent cultural movements, and the reasons why the cultural
movements appealed to an intelligentsia whose mobility was blocked by professional
and occupational restrictions under British rule
...
But Hutchinson’s analysis is concerned
to reveal how the interests and needs of particular classes and strata, caught between
religious tradition and modern science, are met by historicist visions which derive
from memories and symbols of Ireland’s often distant past, and how these
rediscoveries could fire the disaffected youth to political action (ibid
...

In his later judicious discussion of the main approaches and debates in the

180

Critics and alternatives

field, Hutchinson distances himself from the modernist positions, while approving
of their role in exposing ‘the anachronistic Eurocentric and national assumptions
of much scholarship about the human past’ and ‘exploding the primordialist
account’ of nations and nationalism (Hutchinson 1994:37)
...
In all ages, most people have had multiple identities and the question
we need to ask is: ‘do national identities become primary under certain
circumstances in pre-modern periods?’ (ibid
...
This means that, pace the
modernists,
a politicised ethnicity is neither entirely absent before the eighteenth century
nor all-pervasive after it, but may be one of many identities that individuals
might simultaneously adopt
...
g
...

(ibid
...
In other words, leaders
and elites do not have the autonomy from previous ethnic traditions and cultures
in their projects of nation-building that modernist instrumentalists claim for them
...
9
For Hutchinson, then, memories and symbols play an important role in
defining the nature and history of the nation, and in securing the attachment of
many people to particular nations
...
Hutchinson is more cautious about
accepting perennialist notions, perhaps because he is concerned to repudiate
any form of primordialism and essentialism; his acceptance of a recurrent ethnicity
throughout history is qualified
...
This implies a rejection
of any idea that nations are ‘invented’
...
But if we make no attempt to move forward from
the past, in an open empirical manner, we risk reading the past only through the
eyes of the present, as the product of the needs and preoccupations of present
generations and elites
...
10

Ethno-symbolism

181

Myth-symbol complexes
Reaching back into the past and moving forward from it to the present, implies
a concern and a method based on a conception of long-term history
...
Its overall aim is to explore ‘the emergence of the intense group
identification that today we term a “nation”’, and its basic assumption is that
‘the key to the significance of the phenomena of ethnic identification is persistence
rather than genesis of particular patterns’
...

An extended temporal perspective is especially important as a means of
perceiving modern nationalism as part of a cycle of ethnic consciousness
...
A
longer look suggests that widespread intense ethnic identification, although
expressed in other forms, is recurrent
...
Although
pre-modern persistent group identities, whether labelled ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’,
are distinguished from ‘nations’ after the late eighteenth century, ‘where
consciousness of ethnic identity became a predominant force for constituting
independent political structures’, the body of Armstrong’s book suggests that he
regards ethnicity and nationhood as continuous, even though it is ethnic identities
that form the subject of his analysis
...

Terms like ‘goyim’, ‘barbaroi’ and ‘nemtsi’ all imply such perception of the
human incompleteness of persons who could not communicate with the ingroup, which constituted the only ‘real men’
...
: 5)
The universality of ethnic opposition is why John Armstrong finds Fredrik Earth’s
boundary approach so illuminating
...
For Barth, ethnicity is a socially bounded type of category,
and one that is both ascribed by others and self-ascribed
...
To the extent that actors use ethnic identities to
categorise themselves and others for the purposes of interaction, they form
ethnic groups in this organisational sense
...

The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic
boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff it encloses
...

The boundary approach clearly implies that ethnicity is a bundle of shifting
interactions rather than a nuclear component of social organisation
...
Though certain tendencies
mark out each of these types of community, over long time periods, each of
these may transmute into one of the others
...
However, lower classes in themselves rarely constitute ethnic
collectivities; they lack an elite with the necessary skills in communications and
bargaining, and so are unable to maintain a distinct identity within a larger
polity (ibid
...

For John Armstrong, as for Barth, symbols are crucial to the survival of
ethnic identification, because they act as ‘border guards’ distinguishing ‘us’ from
‘them’
...
The content of symbols, such as linguistic ‘border
guards’, is often established generations before they act as cues to group members;
that is why ‘ethnic symbolic communication is communication over the longue
durée, between the dead and the living’ (ibid
...


Ethno-symbolism

183

As important as symbols are legitimising myths
...

(ibid
...

(ibid
...

It is impossible, argues Armstrong, to present a single coherent theory of
ethnogenesis, and more broadly, ethnic and national identity, except at a purely
abstract and very general level
...
Here I can only summarise the main points of
Armstrong’s argument
...
The most striking thing here is not material attributes,
but mental attitudes
...
:
16)
...

Compare this with the European, and Christian, peasant ideal of secure, tranquil
plots of earth, derived from semi-nomadic Jewish roots and the pastoral background
of Indo-European peoples such as the Greeks and Romans who sought compact
territorial settlements
...
: ch
...

These contrasts tended to be reinforced, with some variations, by the creeds

184

Critics and alternatives

of medieval Christendom and Islam, which provided legitimising myths and
symbols for two great civilisations
...
In this respect, the two civilisations resembled on a grand
scale ethnic groups that commonly define themselves by reference to outgroups
...
: 90)
Armstrong them explores the legacies of different types of city and empire and
the effect of their legal systems and especially their universal myths, derived
ultimately from Mesopotamian models, for the persistence of ethnic identities
...
The growth of capital
cities and centralised administrations has been critical to the diffusion of such
mythomoteurs and the penetration of ‘myth-symbol complexes’ in wider populations
...
: 129)
...
This is especially
clear in the archetypal diasporas of the Jews and Armenians, with their relatively
decentralised ecclesiastical organisation, which has been as effective in penetrating
the population in symbolic communication as the more hierarchical organisations
of the established churches or the Islamic courts and ulema
...
: ch
...

Indeed, the two main diaspora cases demonstrate how sacral language is
separable from everyday vernaculars, and how language itself functions as a
marker and symbol of ethnicity, at least within the major ‘fault lines’ of language
groups (Slav, Latin and Germanic)
...

In other words, in the long run politics and religion have been the
independent variables in the linguistic interaction within each European
language family
...

(ibid
...


Ethno-symbolism

185

Whatever the ultimate source of the myths, symbols and patterns of
communication that constituted ethnic identity, their persistence is
impressive
...
: 283)
Armstrong sees ethnic identity as a particular affect phenomenon and a specific
value conditioned by the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, whereas the great
religions have been the major sources of a range of values and value differentiation
(ibid
...
They have also provided much of the myth-symbol content of ethnic
identities in Islam and Christendom
...

Culture and the border
In so bald a summary, it is impossible to do justice to the scope and richness of
the historical and sociological materials which John Armstrong presents in his
analysis of particular themes and cases, as he compares historical patterns from
the medieval Islamic and Christian civilisations
...
Few other works pay such
attention to the importance of tracing causal chains over the longue durée to
disentangle the multiple effects and reciprocal influence of so many factors in
the persistence of ethnic identities
...
This represents, by implication, a powerful rebuttal of the more
extreme modernist views that reject any connections between modern nations
and nationalism and earlier ethnic identities
...
It is indeed doubtful that he would
aspire to do so
...
For those in search of a single theory, that may
be a criticism
...

Nevertheless, in a sense, Armstrong has provided, if not a theory, then a
definite perspective from which to judge and research the rise and persistence of
both ethnic and national identities
...
This is liable to

186

Critics and alternatives

cause confusion, and to raise questions about the influence of ‘retrospective
nationalism’ and the danger against which Armstrong himself had cautioned, of
conflating the effects of earlier collectivities which bear only superficial or very
general resemblances to later ones
...
They spring from John Armstrong’s
peculiar combination of Earth’s transactionalism and the phenomenological
approach to social attitudes over the longue durée
...

In his concern to recognise the fluctuations of attitudes and sentiments that
members of ethnic groups display, Armstrong opts for a phenomenological
approach which may be useful in delineating the mixed and changing ethnic
identities of the modern West, but is less suited to the much slower rhythms of
ethnic identification and communication in pre-modern epochs
...
That definition comes near the
end of Armstrong’s analysis: it is myths, symbols and patterns of communication
that ‘constitute’ ethnic identity, and it is myths, including mythomoteurs, that
entrench sets of values and symbols over long time-spans (ibid
...
But this
raises a further problem, this time for the Barthian framework which Armstrong
has adopted
...
This element is rather underplayed in Armstrong’s
own analysis, except in relation to the Crusades and religious heresies
...
14
In fact, Armstrong supplies what Barth was at pains to reject: the ‘cultural
stuff’ which the border encloses—in the form of myths, symbols and patterns of
communication
...
On the contrary: the myths, memories,
symbols, values and patterns of communication that constitute ethnic identity
constitute the distinctive elements of culture which the border encloses
...
If myths and symbols fail to resonate
with the members of the group, it is because they do not, or no longer, perform
these functions; they no longer represent, explain and exemplify
...
Culture, therefore, the meanings and representations
of symbols, myths, memories and values, is not some inventory of traits, or a
‘stuff’ enclosed by the border; culture is both an inter-generational repository
and heritage, or set of traditions, and an active shaping repertoire of meanings
and images, embodied in values, myths and symbols that serve to unite a group
of people with shared experiences and memories, and differentiate them from
outsiders
...
D
...

‘Dual legitimation’
If Armstrong reached forward from the distant past to the age of nationalism,
my own work has taken the opposite route: working back from the modern
epoch of nation-states and nationalism to the earliest manifestations of collective
cultural sentiments
...
Given
the problems of definition in this field, it was necessary to observe certain
methodological procedures
...


The ideology of nationalism itself could be reduced to its essential propositions,
and its main tenets summarised:
1
2
3
4
5

the world is naturally divided into nations, each of which has its peculiar
character and destiny;
the nation is the source of all political power, and loyalty to it overrides
all other loyalties;
if they wish to be free, and to realise themselves, men must identify
with and belong to a nation;
global freedom and peace are functions of the liberation and security of
all nations;
nations can only be liberated and fulfilled in their own sovereign states
...
D
...
In
practice, specific nationalisms have added all kinds of secondary ideas and
motifs, peculiar to the history and circumstances of each ethnic community or
nation
...
Third, we should examine the basic
ideals of the self-styled nationalists to establish a baseline for working definitions
...

(A
...
Smith 1983a:171)
Fourth, the ‘independence ideal’ of nationalism has a number of ideological
correlates, including national integration and fraternity, territorial unification,
economic autarchy, national expansion, cultural renewal and the accentuation
of cultural individuality, and each of these can be selected as the goal of particular
nationalisms at various times and in differing degrees
...

Finally, as a first step towards explanation, we need to distinguish different
kinds of nationalist movement, and especially between voluntarist and organic
varieties, and between territorially grounded and ethnically based nationalisms
...
In my view, they could even be traced in the ‘ethnocentric’
nationalisms of the ancient world, even though the idea of the nation tended to
be submerged in other ideals, as well as in the more outward-looking ‘polycentric’
nationalisms of the modern world
...
In accordance with its etymology, the ‘nation’ should
therefore be defined as
a group of human beings, possessing common and distinctive elements of culture, a unified
economic system, citizenship rights for all members, a sentiment of solidarity arising out of
common experiences, and occupying a common territory
...
D
...
However, the initial
sketch of the origins of ethnic nationalism which I offered stressed the role of

Ethno-symbolism

189

political and religious, rather than social and cultural, factors
...
The advent of this type of state challenges the legitimacy of religious
explanations, and especially the theodicies which they offer in response to human
suffering and evil
...
Particularly
affected by this duality are the modern equivalents of pre-modern clerisies, the
intellectuals
...
The first is ‘neo-traditionalist’:
adopting modern ways and means to reject the authority of the secular state
and reassert traditional divine authority
...
The final response is ‘revivalist’, an attempt to combine
in different ways the two kinds of authority, on the basis that ‘God works through
the scientific state’ and that, when tradition is no longer relevant, human reason
and divine providence can bring material progress and spiritual salvation
...
First, the messianic assimilationists are disappointed, their mobility is
blocked and they are rejected by the (Western) scientific state, so they turn back
to their ethnic communities and indigenous values
...
From this twofold return to an
ethnic past springs the desire to determine the course of the community oneself,
without outside interference, and so become a ‘nation’ (A
...
Smith 1983a: ch
...

To this general schema, The Ethnic Revival (1981) attempted to add a more
rounded picture of the rise of romantic historicism of which nationalism was the
political outgrowth, and a fuller account of the reasons why the intellectuals,
and more especially the intelligentsia, turned to nationalism as a cure for their
status discontents
...
D
...
If
we add die tendency for neo-romantic nationalism, of the kind that flourished
in Western Europe’s ‘ethnic revival’ of the 1960s and 1970s, to surface as the
result of a bureaucratic cycle of centralisation, alienation and fragmentation,
followed by a renewed cycle of centralisation and state penetration, the
inevitability of the nation and nationalism in an era of bureaucratic modernity
becomes assured (A
...
Smith 1979: ch
...


190

Critics and alternatives

However, by the early 1980s, I came to feel that, while this analysis of alienated
and deracinated indigenous intelligentsias radicalised by alien bureaucratic states
helped to explain part of the phenomenon of nationalism, it signally failed to
account for the broader social picture or explain the configurations of nations
and the incidence and intensity of nationalisms
...
Moreover, emphasis on intellectuals
and elites obscured the broad, often cross-class nature of the movement and the
national attachments of middle and lower strata
...
Finally, by using the same term
‘nationalism’ for both, I had overlooked the real ideological differences between
ancient religious motifs and modern political ideologies, while obscuring the
possible links between ancient and modern social formations
...
The problem, and its resolution, lay elsewhere
...
In terms of ideologies, the specific concepts and movements of
nationalism could be fairly securely dated to the later eighteenth century, even
if there were earlier religious nationalisms in England and Holland
...
It was possible to trace examples of all three, in sufficient
and well documented quantities, back to at least the late medieval period in a
number of European nations from England and France to Poland and Russia
...
But more important, it
was possible to find examples of social formations in pre-modern periods, even
in antiquity, that for some decades or even centuries approximated to an
inclusive definition of the concept of the ‘nation’, notably among the ancient
Jews and Armenians, but also to some extent among the ancient Egyptians,
and perhaps the medieval Japanese and Koreans
...
Here, then,
one could speak of national recurrence (see Greenfeld 1992: chs 1–3; A
...
Smith
1994; cf
...

Though hardly sufficient to undermine the modernist paradigm, these
examples seemed to cast doubt on Gellner’s insistence on the impossibility of
nations in pre-modern periods
...
Throughout
history and in several continents, there was considerable evidence, not just of
‘objective’ cultural (linguistic, religious, etc
...
Again, one could point to both ethnic continuity and ethnic
recurrence
...
In other cases, such as the peoples of Ethiopia, the
Fertile Crescent, northern India and the Balkans, ethnicity has been more of a
recurrent phenomenon
...
D
...

In the light of these considerations, the focus of my analysis began to shift
from nationalisms to nations, and from nations to ethnic communities
...

The focus of this analysis was the role of myths, memories, values, traditions
and symbols
...

(A
...
Smith 1981a:66)
Symbols, too—emblems, hymns, festivals, habitats, customs, linguistic codes,
sacred places and the like—were powerful differentiators and reminders of the
unique culture and fate of the ethnic community
...
So, in The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), ethnic communities (ethnies)
were defined as
named human populations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an
association with a specific territory, and a sense of solidarity
...
D
...
: 22–32)
...
There
were ethnic minorities, diaspora communities, frontier ethnies, ethnic
amphictyonies and even ethnic states, states dominated by particular ethnic

192

Critics and alternatives

communities such as ancient Egypt or early medieval Japan
...
The
problem of ethnic survival seemed particularly important for later nationalisms:
the ability to call on a rich and well documented ‘ethno-history’ was to prove a
major cultural resource for nationalists, and myths of origins, ethnic election
and sacred territories, as well as memories of heroes and golden ages, were
crucial to the formulation of a many-stranded ethno-history
...
e
...

(A
...
Smith 1991:29; cf
...
D
...
It is the sense of cultural affinities,
rather than physical kinship ties, embodied in a myth of descent, shared historical
memories and ethnic symbolism, that defines the structure of ethnic
communities; and the same is true for any nations created on the basis of
cultural affinity
...
On the other hand, their crystallisation as selfaware communities, as opposed to other-defined ethnic categories, was the product
of external factors such as folk cultures resulting from shared work and
residence patterns; group mobilisation in periodic inter-state warfare producing
memories and myths of defeat and victory; and especially the impact of
organised religions with scriptures, sacred languages and communal
priesthoods
...
D
...
21
As John Armstrong points out, this was to alter significantly in the modern
world
...
It was the revolutionary
nature of the economic, administrative and cultural transformations of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that brought culture and ethnic
identity to the fore as a basis for polity formation
...

A recent study of elite Scottish identity found that the crucial moment came in
the reflective aftermath of Bannockburn and the Wars with England, with the
rise of a distinctive ethno-history in historical and literary writings of the late
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
...
Its foundations in the Rütli Oath and Tell exploits were
first recorded in The White Book of Sarnen (c
...
In
these and other cases, we can trace the beginnings of an elite nationalism, and
of the coalescence and gradual transformation of ethnic communities into early
nations (Webster 1997; Im Hof 1991)
...

Of the two kinds of pre-modern ethnie,
The first is lateral and extensive, the second is vertical and intensive
...
Typically, ‘lateral’ ethnie
are aristocratic, though usually clerical and scribal strata are included, along
with some of the wealthier urban merchants
...
In either case,
the bond that unites them is of a more intensive and exclusive kind than
among the lateral, aristocratic ethnie; hence its often marked religious, even
missionary, quality
...
D
...
The upperclass members of most lateral ethnies had no interest in imbuing their middle
classes, let alone their subject lower classes, with their own ethnic culture
...
Inadvertently at first, they drew their middle classes into an increasingly
accented, territorialised and politicised ‘national’ culture, i
...
one that, from being

194

Critics and alternatives

a preserve of the court, the aristocracy and the clergy, became a culture of ‘the
people’, at first identified with the urban middle classes, but some centuries later
with the mass of working men and, later, women
...
D
...
4; cf
...

In these cases, it was the bureaucratic state itself which forged the nation,
gradually penetrating to outlying regions from the ethnic core and down the
social scale
...
Here a demotic ethnie is transformed largely under the aegis of an
indigenous intelligentsia into an ethnic nation
...

This latterday return to an ‘ethnic past’ (or pasts) is a corollary of the nationalist
quest for ‘authenticity’
...
The result is a type of nation founded on ‘ethnic’ conceptions, and
fuelled by a genealogical nationalism; although even here, the nation, as in
Germany or Greece, is simultaneously defined in territorial and political terms
and minorities are, albeit more precariously, admitted (A
...
Smith 1989; cf
...

There is, in fact, a third route in the formation of nations which consist
largely of immigrant fragments of other ethnies, particularly those from overseas
...
D
...
4; cf
...
6)
...
To begin with, it depends on the degree to which the great modern
revolutions of market capitalism, the bureaucratic state and secular, mass
education have penetrated given areas and communities, either directly, as in
the West, or through the mediation of imperialism and colonialism (A
...
Smith
1986a: 130–4)
...
More generally, human agency, individual and
collective, has been vital in the process of uniting ethnies and transforming them
into nations
...
Among these groups, modern nationalist leaders and their
followers have often played a disproportionate role; as ‘political archaeologists’
they have furnished blueprints of the ‘nation-to-be’ by rediscovering an ‘authentic’
popular ethno-history and providing convincing narratives of historical continuity
with a heroic, and preferably glorious, ethnic past
...
D
...
8; A
...
Smith 1995b; cf
...

If nationalism is modern and shapes nations in the image of its weltanschauung,
then nations too are the creations of modernity
...

Specific nations are also the product of older, often pre-modern ethnic ties and
ethno-histories
...
There are ‘nations-in-the-making’
(Tanzania, Eritrea, Libya) that are relatively recent and do not appear to be
rooted in a longer ethnic past
...
But the real point is that the first
and most influential examples of the concept of the ‘nation’ did have such premodern grounding, as have a great many others, and they provided the basic
models, civic and ethnic, for later examples, even if the stages of attaining
nationhood have been telescoped and even inverted
...
In our day, the nation has become the norm of social and political
organisation, and nationalism the most ubiquitous of ideologies
...

If ‘nationalism is love’, to quote Michel Aflaq, a passion that demands
overwhelming commitment, the abstraction of ‘Europe’ competes on unequal
terms with the tangibility and ‘rootedness’ of each nation
...
D
...
A truly non-imperial ‘global culture’, timeless, placeless, technical
and affectively neutral, must be memory-less and hence identity-less; or fall into
a postmodern pastiche of existing national cultures and so disintegrate into its
component parts
...
D
...
1)
...
It is, then, not difficult to show
nations being based on, and being created out of, pre-existing ethnies
...
There is, of course, no necessity about this transformation;
otherwise, nationalism and nationalists would be superfluous
...

Hence, we are dealing with something more than an interesting empirical
tautology
...
These differences need to be
kept in mind when considering the ways in which, as Hastings so clearly shows,
nations transcend ethnic communities, and can in principle include more than
one culture-community (Hastings 1997:25–31)
...
But this is to confuse a concern
with la longue durée with perennialism
...
Hutchinson reserves the term ‘nation’ for the
modern period and, like myself, he clearly separates off a modern nationalism
from pre-modern ethnic sentiments
...
The ‘family analogy’ in
nationalism which Connor, for example, rightly emphasises is not central to the
concerns of ethno-symbolists; kinship affords too narrow a social base for larger
ethnies, let alone nations
...

A more recent criticism of my position, brought by John Breuilly, is that it
assumes too close a connection between pre-modern ethnic identities and modern
nations and neglects the necessary role of institutions as historical carriers of
national or ethnic identities
...

The problem with identity established outside institutions, especially those
institutions which can bind together people across wide social and
geographical spaces, is that it is necessarily fragmentary, discontinuous and
elusive
...
However, dynasties were actually threatened by modern
national identities and churches were universalist
...
On the whole, claims Breuilly,
the discontinuities of ethnic sentiments with ‘modern national identity’ are more
striking
...
As long as language is simply a repository of national
culture, myth and memory, it has significance only for a few self-selected cultural
elites; only when it is used for legal, economic, political and educational purposes,
does it have real political significance
...
Almost all the major institutions which construct,
preserve and transmit national identities, and which connect those identities
to interests, are modern: parliaments, popular literature, courts, schools,
labour markets, et cetera…
...

(ibid
...
But I would argue that
Breuilly’s understanding of such ‘institutions’ is narrowly modernist
...
But significant
numbers of people in several pre-modern societies were included, going back to
ancient Egypt and Sumer: in schools, for instance, in legal institutions, in temples
and monasteries, sometimes even in representative political institutions, not to
mention extended aristocratic families like the Alcmaeonids or the Metelli
...
Certainly,
not all these ‘institutions’ reinforced a straightforward sense of ethnic identity,
but many did
...

(ibid
...

The question that John Breuilly, like Eric Hobsbawm, raises is whether even
widespread ethnic identities can have any connection with modern nationalism
...
But the historical evidence is often
contradictory; it can point to clear links with modern nationalisms, and not just
because latterday nationalists sincerely believed in and needed a usable ethnic
past
...
If they are not perceived
as ‘authentic’, in the sense of having meaning and resonance with ‘the people’ to
whom they are addressed, they will fail to mobilise them for political action
...

Clearly, Breuilly has raised an important issue when he challenges ethnosymbolists to provide the historical links with the past ethnic identities and
communities which they postulate as the basis for the formation of subsequent
nations
...
But it requires a broader
conception of the channels through which such identities are transmitted and
transformed, and of the links which bind them to modern nations
...
In this task, we should not dismiss
the evidence provided by the intense nationalist concern with the ‘heroic legends’
of antiquity, and with the ‘poetic spaces’ of the homeland
...
D
...


9

Beyond Modernism?

In his 1986 lectures entitled Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, the
great world historian William H
...
It was only in a short, but vividly documented
period of modern European history, from about 1789 to 1945, that the ideal
of national unity held sway, and the nation-state became accepted as the political
norm
...

Polyethnicity, past and future
For McNeill, only barbarism is monoethnic
...
The reasons are relatively straightforward
...
Military,
demographic and economic reasons support the polyethnic character of urban
civilisation
...

Frequent epidemics among concentrated urban populations also encouraged
urban polyethnicity, since depleted centres continually need to be replenished
by rural populations to meet labour needs
...

The overall result was that pre-modern civilisations with labour specialisation
were necessarily culturally pluralist and soon bred ethnic hierarchies of skill;
only those populations and polities far removed from the centres of civilisation
like Japan, and perhaps England, Denmark and Sweden, could retain their ethnic
homogeneity (McNeill 1986: ch
...

It was only after about 1700 that the ideal of independence for ethnically
homogeneous populations, or nations, emerged
...
The first, and least important, was the influence of
classical humanism, and hence the models of civic solidarity found in classical
199

200

Critics and alternatives

city-states like Athens, Sparta and republican Rome, which captured the
imaginations of humanist intellectuals
...
To this we must add the rapid growth of
population in Western Europe, which allowed depleted cities to be replenished
by ethnically homogeneous migrants from the countryside, and in the process
fuelled revolutionary discontent among superfluous labour
...
McNeill argues that all these factors ‘came together in western Europe
at the close of the eighteenth century to give birth to modern nationalism’, first
in France and then throughout Europe
...
: 51, 56)
...
Two world wars revealed the immense costs of
nation-states and nationalism
...
They had to coordinate their efforts, and in the process
draft in thousands of ethnically heterogenous soldiers and labourers, free or
enslaved
...
In addition, the
emergence of vast transnational companies and the internationalisation of military
command structures have severely curtailed the autarchy of even the richest and
most powerful nation-states
...
For McNeill, once again,
‘Polyethnic hierarchy is on the rise, everywhere’
...
Only a moment in the much-read histories of the classical
city-states made it appear otherwise (ibid
...

In fact, for NcNeill as for many others, this short aberrant period of national
unity is really only a matter of ideology; the social reality was always that of
polyethnic hierarchy, even in the nation-states of Western Europe
...

But the point I want to concentrate on here is McNeill’s prognosis of a return
to polyethnic hierarchy at the cost of national unity, that is, through the
breakdown of the nation-state and nationalism
...
But this is to forget the ‘onion character’ of ethnicity, its capacity for
forging ‘concentric circles’ of identity and loyalty, the wider circle encompassing
the narrower
...

The latter often create competition and rivalry for people’s loyalties; class, region,
religion, gender, ethnicity all create identities and loyalties that may cut across
each other
...
1
If this was the case in the ‘age of nationalism’, according to McNeill, might
it not continue to operate, even within the more continental and global contexts
of the next century? This is just as plausible a scenario as the imminent breakdown
of the nation-state into its constituent ethnic parts
...
Such a relationship needs to be tested empirically in each case,
and the conditions for the relationship specified
...
These themes include:
1

2

3

4

the impact of current population movements on the prospects of the national
state, and especially the fragmentation of national identity and the rise of
multiculturalism;
the impact of feminist analysis and issues of gender on the nature of national
projects, identities and communities, and the role of gendered symbolism
and women’s collective self-assertion;
the predominantly normative and political debate on the consequences for
citizenship and liberty of civic and ethnic types of nationalism, and their
relations with liberal democracy;
and the impact of globalisation trends, and of ‘postmodern’ supranational
projects, on national sovereignty and national identity
...
Even the changed role
of women and the impact of gender divisions can be viewed, on this reading, as
the final extension of a ‘post-national’ citizenship to the largest and most
underprivileged, because hitherto invisible, ‘minority’, as a result of the pressing
needs for skilled labour in civilised polyethnic societies
...

Here I can only touch on the most salient of these issues, and try to show
that, while they ostensibly turn their backs, not only on modernism, but on all
large-scale narratives and higher-level theorising, these discussions and debates,
and the research they have spawned, constitute in reality one part (the last epoch)
of that larger framework which McNeill’s analysis exemplifies
...
Yet in going beyond
modernism they do not mean to challenge its assumption of the modernity of
nations and nationalism
...
Rather, it seeks
to extend the range of modernism to what it sees as a ‘postmodern’ phase of
social development
...

The underlying leitmotif of the most recent phase of theorising in the field of
ethnicity and nationalism, which we may very loosely call ‘postmodern’, is that
of cultural and political fragmentation coupled, in varying degrees, with economic
globalisation
...

Fragmentation and hybrid identities
Of course, Anderson’s analysis of the literary tropes and devices which sustain
the narratives of ‘nation-ness’ foreshadowed the uses of deconstructionist
techniques in the analysis of ethnic and national phenomena
...
For Homi Bhabha, for example,
the very idea of a ‘national identity’ has become problematic
...
Hence the nationalist narratives of
the national self (which was, in fact, always constructed and defined by the
Other, the significant outsider) always claimed to incorporate the Other and
purported to create total cultural homogeneity
...

Cultural difference is irreducible, and it reveals the hybrid quality and
ambivalence of national identity in every state (Bhabha 1990)
...
This superimposed dualism fragments the nation
...
In the manner of Simmel, Homi Bhabha directs our attention to
the impact of the stranger and the outsider in defining the national identity of
the host group
...
The great influx of ex-colonials, immigrants,
Gastarbeiter and asylum-seekers has eroded the bases of traditional narratives
and images of a homogeneous national identity, revealing their fragmented and
hybrid character
...

Housed in ‘anxious states’, national identities have become precarious and
hybridised, as they face in different directions
...
: ch
...

A similar emphasis on the importance of the cultural fragment, and the
irreducibility of its experience and testimony, can be found in the work of Partha
Chatterjee
...
In his earlier
work Chatterjee had demonstrated how, typically, the nationalist discourses of
Asia and Africa both derived from Western models and at the same time opposed
a ‘material’ outer world dominated by the West and the colonial state, to an
inner, ‘spiritual’ domain which was the preserve of the national culture being
created by indigenous elites since the mid-nineteenth century (Chatterjee 1986)
...
At the same time, this dominant Indian nationalist discourse
is influenced by those of the many marginalised groups outside the mainstream
of politics, the ‘fragments of the nation’ which in this case include Bengalis,
women, peasants and outcastes, even when their alternative images of the nation
were bypassed or suppressed, and their aspirations ‘normalised’ by an
incorporating Indian nationalism
...
The encounter with
the Other is certainly crucial, but the forms and contents of the Indian, Middle
Eastern or African nationalism which that encounter triggers are also derived
from other, non-Western sources within the traditional cultures of the community
(albeit greatly modified) (Chatterjee 1993: chs 1, 5; Peel 1989)
...
But here too some radical postmodernist theorising has decentred and

204

Critics and alternatives

decomposed ethnicity
...
Not only is it one among many
competing identities, it derives its meanings from its articulation with other kinds
of identity, notably class and gender
...
For
Etienne Balibar, there is only a discourse of ‘fictive ethnicity’
...

(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991:96, original emphasis)
Ethnicity itself is produced through two routes, those of the language community
and the race, both of which create the idea of predestined, autonomous
communities
...
But Hall also
sees the new ‘identity politics’ of representation in the West as constructing a
new ‘positive conception of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery’
...

(S
...
This is the premise, and justification, of the politics of multiculturalism,
to which I shall return
...
There is little doubt that modern Western nations have
become ‘frayed at the edges’, and that their members have had to rethink former
assumptions about national community and identity in the light of much larger
movements of population
...
At the same time, we should not underestimate
the continuing hold of a sense of national identity among the majority of the
population in Western states, nor the desire of many members of immigrant
communities to become part of a reshaped nation, while retaining their ethnic
and religious cultures, perhaps increasingly in the form of a ‘symbolic ethnicity’
...
To do so is to set
up a false ‘before-and-after’ dichotomy
...
For most people, even in the West, there
remain clear boundaries in determining their ethnic identities and national
allegiances, even when they may dissent from them or their power-holders
...
But this enhanced individual latitude in the West does not
allow people to ‘pick and mix’ or consume at will among ethnic identities; their
choices remain restricted by ethnic history and political geography
...
But being Chinese or Turkish are not
commercially available options
...
6)
...
Early feminist analyses did not seek to address the
issues of ethnicity and nationalism, but from the mid-1980s there has been a
growing literature in this area
...

Of course, modernists might claim that their theories are universal and there
is no need for a separate account of the role of women and gender in nationalism
...

To date, the question of the relations between issues of gender and nationalism
has been pursued at a number of levels, and with very different assumptions
and methodologies
...
4
The role of women in nationalism
The first such level is empirical: the varying role of women in nations and
nationalist projects, and the differential impact of such projects on women and
their prospects
...

(Jayawardena 1986:3)
Jayawardena nevertheless emphasised the separate demands and roles of feminist
movements alongside, or within, the nationalist movements; they might even be
at variance with its goals or interpretations, as Haleh Afshar stresses in her
analysis of women’s struggles in Iran (Afshar 1989)
...
Walby points out how in the older nations of the West,
the formation of nations was long drawn out and women’s emancipation came
very late in their ‘rounds of restructuring’; whereas in the new states of Africa
and Asia, women were accorded full citizenship rights with independence
...

(Walby 1992:91)
But, as Deniz Kandiyoti points out in a scholarly study of the Turkish
emancipation movement, it was only on their own terms that nationalists accorded
women full rights
...
Kandiyoti perceptively concludes:
Thus, there appears to be one persistent concern which finally unites
nationalist and Islamist discourses on women in Turkey: the necessity to
establish that the behaviour and position of women, however defined, are

Beyond Modernism?

207

congruent with the ‘true’ identity of the collectivity and constitute no threat
to it
...
Kandiyoti 1991)

Female symbolism of the nation
Deniz Kandiyoti here touches on a second level of analysis, the ideological and
symbolic uses of women
...
They regard women as central
to the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national projects, and list five
major dimensions of their activity and presence
...

(Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989:7)
In a later thought-provoking and systematic survey of the field, Nira Yuval-Davis
goes on to apply a deconstructionist analysis to the relationships between gender
and nation, and includes the ideological and symbolic modes of locating women
(c and d above) as vital components of cultural reproduction
...

(Yuval-Davis 1997:43)
As a result, hegemonic symbols and cultures are generally strongest in the centre
of the polity and always evoke resistance, particularly at the periphery
...

They call on men to sacrifice themselves for their women and children, so that
they may be eulogised by their women in the manner of Plutarch’s Spartan
women, whom Rousseau so admired
...
In the French Revolution its symbol was ‘La Patrie’, a figure of a
woman giving birth to a baby; and in Cyprus, a crying woman refugee on
roadside posters was the embodiment of the pain and anger of the Greek
Cypriot collectivity after the Turkish invasion
...
In the
home gender relations become constitutive of the ‘essence’ of cultures, which in
turn are to be seen as intergenerational ways of life that include such facets as
family relations, ways of cooking and eating, domestic labour, play and bedtime
stories (ibid
...

Nationalism as a male phenomenon
Yet another level of analysis of gender—nation relationships concerns the nature
of nations and nationalisms as largely masculine organisations and projects
...

(Enloe 1989:44)
And this is also the burden of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s analysis of masculine patriotic
self-sacrifice
...
Perhaps, she reasons,
this is why many women, for example those in the Green and anti-nuclear
movements, often display more international commitments and less militarism;
alternatively, their greater pacifism and internationalism may make women less
involved with the nation and nationalism than men (Elshtain 1993; Walby
1992:92–3)
...
This suggests that there are times, at
least, when the national struggle supersedes or subsumes all other struggles,
including those of class and gender
...
In an age of revolutionary nationalism,
after all, such neo-classic images as David’s painting of the Oath of the Horatii
(1784), West’s The Death of Wolfe (1770) and Fuseli’s Oath of the Rütli (1779) focus
explicitly on the traditional masculine attributes of energy, force and duty
...
This
produced a sharp differentiation, not only in gender roles but also in gendered
attributes and stereotypes, already evident in the anti-revolutionary Germanspeaking regions, which identified the French forces as ‘loose-living’, in opposition
to the respectable, masculine German morality, which nationalists like Ernst
Moritz Arndt embraced
...
Leoussi 1997)
...
In the name of social order, women were returned to the
private sphere as patriot wives and mothers of citizens, as Rousseau had
recommended
...
Like Rousseau, Fichte, Michelet and Mazzini all
emphasised the different roles of the sexes in national education, the supportive,
nurturing function of women and the heroic, military role of men:
Mazzini, like Michelet and Fichte, drew on the image of the patriarchal
family (with the father at its head) as a natural unit to shore up the legitimacy
of the fraternal nation-state and determine its preference for the male citizen
as the active and military patriot
...
For Nira
Yuval-Davis the problem with ‘identity politics’ is that it tends to harden ethnic
and gender boundaries, and homogenise and naturalise categories and group
differences (Yuval-Davis 1997:119)
...
Here too
the dangers of reifying and essentialising cultures ignore power differences
between and within minorities, overemphasise the differences between cultures
and privilege as ‘authentic’ the voices of the most unwesternised ‘community
representatives’
...
Even allowing
for the ‘counter-narratives’ which emerge from the nation’s margins and ‘hybrids’,
there is always the danger that homogeneity and essentialism

210

Critics and alternatives

are attributed to the homogeneous collectivities from which the ‘hybrids’
have emerged, thus replacing the mythical image of society as a ‘melting
pot’ with the mythical image of society as a ‘mixed salad’
...
Kymlicka 1995)
Given the differential positioning of minorities and of women among and within
them, there can be no simple approach to a ‘feminist agenda’
...
: 130)
...
How far it is useful to deconstruct its concepts and
issues in terms of various ‘narratives’ and ‘discourses’, and whether we need to
describe them as hegemonic (or otherwise) ‘constructs’, is open to question
...

It is noteworthy that, for all their analytical insights, only a few of the works
discussed above (specifically, those that opt for a historical modernist approach)
are concerned with the origins and formation of nations and the role of gender
relations therein, or with why nations and nationalism have become so ubiquitous,
or indeed, except in passing, with the issue of why nations and nationalisms
evoke such passions among so many people (including so many women) across
the globe
...

Liberalism and civic or ethnic nationalism
Yuval-Davis’ espousal of ‘transversal politics’ makes sense only in a more liberal
democracy where the form of nationalism is inclusive, participant and relatively
open in character
...

There is a burgeoning literature on the relationship between liberalism and/
or social democracy and this form of nationalism, but most of it is philosophical
and normative, and so lies outside the scope of my enquiry
...
Miller starts
by discussing the idea of national identity or the nation, and lists five
distinguishing marks of a nation as a community:

Beyond Modernism?

211

it is (1) constituted by shared belief and mutual commitment; (2) extended
in history; (3) active in character; (4) connected to a particular territory; (5)
marked off from other communities by its distinct public culture
...
1)
For Miller, nations can be defended on three grounds
...
Second, they are ethical communities, and as members we
owe special obligations to our compatriots
...

Despite our commitment to ethical universalism, Miller argues, in practise we
are ethical particularists, and the nation affords a larger and better basis for
performing duties and achieving social justice
...
Nationality is also superior to citizenship and a purely abstract
‘constitutional patriotism’ of the type favoured by Jurgen Habermas, since it
connects political principles and practice to a sense of shared history and culture,
and a sense of place and time (Miller 1995: chs 2–3; O’Leary 1996a: 419–20)
...
In effect, Miller comes down, as do so many
others, in favour of a civic form of nationalism which is ultimately dependant
on the state and its liberal practices
...
What then of all those ethnic groups that aspire to the
status of nationality and desire to determine their own destinies? How shall we
judge the claims of separatists and irredentists? (O’Leary 1996b:445–7; cf
...
7
Recognition of the political power of ethnicity has inspired a number of cognate
debates, mainly in political science, notably about the ways of managing or
eliminating ethnic differences and conflict
...
Three topics have provoked particular controversy
...
The second is the meanings and political uses of concepts of ‘ethnic
democracy’ and/or ‘herrenvolk democracy’ to characterise exclusive dominantethnie democracy in polyethnic states, and the differences of such regimes from
liberal democracies
...
However, in most of the
literature these issues have a strong normative (and legal) content and have only
been tangentially related to issues of national identity and nationalism
...
8
The debate about the civic or ethnic character of nationalism, on the other
hand, is directly related to our concerns
...

Raymond Breton’s analysis of the evolution of English-speaking Canada, for
example, emphasises a long-term shift from ‘ethnic’ to ‘civic’ nationalism
...
As in English Canada, the collective identity has to be redefined
in such a way as to incorporate the people of non-French origins who are
legally members of the polity
...

Nevertheless, we can usefully distinguish between ‘ethnic’, ‘civic’ and ‘plural’
types of nation and nationalism; and these analytical distinctions may help to
explain, for example, different traditions of state immigration policies
...
Similarly,
Daniele Conversi has contrasted the pattern of cultural values among Basques
and Catalans, revealing how Sabino Arana’s influence has incorporated the
Basque concern with purity of blood and exclusive rights, whereas the Catalan
tradition of linguistic and cultural nationalism has encouraged a more open,
assimilationist and inclusive Catalan nationalism, one that is far more respectful
to immigrants (Brubaker 1992; Conversi 1997)
...
Moreover, each type, as I have argued, has its
peculiar problems
...

As for the ‘plural’ type of nationalism found mainly in immigrant societies like
Canada and Australia, its celebration of cultural diversity risks a loss of political
cohesion and tends towards a national instability which could in turn provoke

Beyond Modernism?

213

reactive nationalisms (and in extreme cases like Quebec, secession movements)
(A
...
Smith 1995a: ch
...
9
For these reasons, those scholars who, in the tradition of Hans Kohn and
John Plamenatz, oppose a ‘good’ civic to a ‘bad’ ethnic nationalism, overlook
the problems associated with each type and in particular rewrite the civic version
to accomodate the new politics of multiculturalism
...

Nationalism will not be easily tamed and categorised to fit the prescriptions of
moral and political philosophers (Kohn 1967a: ch
...

Nor can we easily accept the prescriptions of those who, like Habermas,
would replace nationalism by a form of ‘constitutional patriotism’ that would
make the political institutions and the constitution the focus of collective loyalties
...
After a rich survey of the republican and
nationalist traditions (nationalism here being exclusively of the German ‘ethnocultural’ variety), Viroli argues that a territorially and historically grounded
republicanism would replace nationalist exclusivity with a truly democratic and
civic loyalty appropriate to the modern era
...
10
It is a welcome sign that there has been a renewed interest in the ethics of
nationalism, after so many decades when nationalism was equated with fascism
and was felt to be morally untouchable
...

Nationalism and globalisation
Can we envisage a time, not only when ethnic nationalism has run its course,
but when nation-states, national identities and nationalism-in-general will have
been superseded by a cosmopolitan culture and supranational governance? This,
the last major theme in the literature that attempts to move beyond modernism,
foresees the inevitable supersession of nation-states and nationalism by broader
supranational, or global, organisations and identities in a ‘postmodern’ era
...
Each of
these trends, it is argued, is gathering pace, as nation-states, nationalism and
ethnicity are being more or less gradually replaced by supra-national (for example,
European) and/or global identities and associations
...
It has been
left to so-called ‘postmodernists’ to proclaim the demise of the ‘nation-state’
through an overwhelming combination of political dependence, economic
globalisation, mass communications and cultural hybridisation
...
In a multicultural state like Australia, attempts to
return to primordial themes of nationalism are likely to fail because of a lack of
heroic myths and the impact of migrants and their cultures (Castles et al
...
11
But even if this is the case, are immigrant societies like Australia typical? Are
the forces of globalisation and mass communications producing a similarly ‘nonnational nation’ elsewhere? Or, indeed, a move altogether away from no longer
viable national states and nationalisms, to allow greater space for the ‘tribe’ and
the ‘stranger’, as Zygmunt Baumann argues? Can we consign nationalism to
the ‘great museum’ of tourist history, as Donald Horne’s amusing guide would
have it? (Baumann 1992; Horne 1984)
...
They point, not only to the
fragmentation of national identities discussed above, but to the loss of economic
sovereignty and the growing political dependence of all national states
...
More important, in the post-1945 era, the political
and economic dependence of most states has been accompanied by a huge
expansion of internal state power and penetration in the social and cultural
spheres, notably in such fields as mass education, the cultural media, health and
social welfare
...
D
...
4; Billig 1995:141)
...
As some scholars
have argued, the idea of a ‘global culture’ can be seen as another form of
(consumer) imperialism operating through the prism of the cultural media; though

Beyond Modernism?

215

it presents itself as universal, it bears the imprint of its origins and flows from a
single source, the United States
...

Here global culture appears as an entirely new technical construction, what
Lyotard called ‘a self-sufficient electronic circuit’, at once timeless, placeless and
memory-less, contradicting all our ideas of cultures which embody the distinctive
historical roots, myths and memories, and the specific lifestyles, of ethnic
communities and nations (Billig 1995: ch
...
Tomlinson 1991: ch
...
D
...
1)
...
Paradoxically, too, the electronic media
serve to reinforce old ethnic identities or encourage the (re-)creation of new
ones
...
In these ‘post-industrial’ societies, new modes of electronic mass
communications are encouraging the resurgence of ethnic communities using
these dense networks of linguistic and cultural communications (Schlesinger 1987;
1991: Part III; Richmond 1984)
...
In an age of voluntary networks of social interaction based on
individual needs and activities, ethno-national organisation provides an important
channel for individual identification and solidarity ‘because it responds to a
collective need which assumes particular importance in complex societies’
...
It gives roots, based on a language, a culture and an ancient history,
to demands that transcend the specific condition of the ethnic group
...
As Giddens would argue,
the global and the local feed each other (see Igwara 1995; Jacobsen 1997; Deol
1996)
...
We have witnessed a remarkable spate of ethnic
secession movements since the end of the Cold War
...
The international community will only condone secession in
special circumstances, where it is the result of mutual and peaceful agreement
(as in Singapore) or where there is a strong regional patron favouring secession,
as India did in the bid for secession of Bangla Desh from Pakistan
...
For James Mayall, as we saw earlier, the inter-state system has proved
largely resilient to the challenge mounted by nationalism since the French
Revolution, insisting on the primacy of the principle of state sovereignty over
that of national self-determination, despite the Wilsonian attempt to incorporate
the latter into the fabric of international society
...
15
National identity and supra-nationalism
But, if we cannot yet expect a leap from ethno-national identity to global
cosmopolitanism, are we not at least witnessing a less dramatic, but still
unprecedented, shift of loyalties from nations and national states to ‘supra-national’
continental regionalisms that can accommodate sub-national ethnic identities
and cultural differences?
Evidence for this more limited and realistic position comes mainly from studies
of European political and cultural integration
...
One theme is the growth of a European citizenship
transcending or complementing the existing national citizenships
...
For this reason, scholars like Yacemin Soysal argue
that we can see the emergence of a ‘post-national’ type of citizenship in Europe
alongside the existing national model, though how widespread and potent such
a model has become is open to question in view of the continuing hold of both
national state and ethnic allegiances, the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in

Beyond Modernism?

217

Eastern Europe and the racial nationalist backlashes in the West (Soysal 1994,
1996; cf
...
10; Husbands 1991)
...
A
...
Smith 1992b)
...
Given the continuing strength of existing national identities within
Europe, as well as Europe’s uncertain boundaries and many cleavages, Schlesinger
concludes:
It is difficult to conceive of engineering a collective [sc
...

The production of an overarching collective identity can only seriously be
conceived as the outcome of long-standing social and political practice
...
Michael Billig points to the continuing importance
of boundaries for ‘Europe’, both in respect to trade and defence, and to the
prevention of immigration
...
Either way, the ideological traditions of
nationhood, including its boundary-consciousness, are not transcended
...
But, even more important, they
will have to discover a common goal, a project capable of mobilising the
energy of European citizens
...
‘Europe’ will have to be forged from above after the German
(Zollverein) or the United States (federal) models, with all the problems of popular
resonance which we discussed vis-à-vis Hobsbawm’s thesis
...
If the prospect of an ethnic ‘fortress Europa’ is
unattractive, so is the assimilatory potential of a civic model, which in any case
may fail to command the affections and loyalties of most of Europe’s citizens
who remain locked into a historically embedded mosaic of ethno-cultural nations
(see Pieterse 1995; A
...
Smith 1995a: ch
...
17
Beyond modernism?
Does all this suggest that we have moved beyond the nationalist epoch, in tandem
with the shift away from modernism? Is a ‘postmodern’ epoch ipso facto a ‘postnational’ one, and are both reflected in ‘postmodernist’ styles of analysis?
The suspicion that ‘objective’ referents and empirical trends are, in some
sense, a reflection of a particular style of analysis suggests a measure of caution
in accepting the last part of McNeill’s tripartite periodisation
...
Just as a perennialist paradigm
looks for and finds continuity and rootedness, so the various postmodernist
modes of analysis seek out and discover contestation, flux and fragmentation
...

Looked at strictly from the standpoint of a theory of, or at least a fruitful
perspective on, nations and nationalism, neither approach appears very helpful
...
But here lies the rub
...
It is as if the analysts
had entered the drama in the third act (in terms of William McNeill’s
periodisation), taking for granted some version of modernism’s script for the
two previous acts
...
That suggests a joining of hands with perennialism
over the heads of the modernists
...
Is this not, as Nira Yuval-Davis pointed out, just another
form of ‘essentialism’, perhaps even of primordialism? (Yuval-Davis 1997:59)
...
Again, with the exception of some feminist
analyses, they propose no general explanation of nations and nationalism, and
make no attempt to uncover the mechanisms by which they were formed,
developed and spread
...
But it is also evident in discussions
of globalisation and Europeanisation, and of the civic or ethnic types of
nationalism, which adhere to the usual canons of subject-centred and causal
analysis
...
But they
offer no general explanation for their presence, variations and significance, no
understanding of which nations emerged and where, why there are nations and
nationalisms at all, and why they evoke so much passion
...
This is not without its interest in that unpoliticised
ethnicity, by itself, often evokes some sympathy, as ‘cultural difference’; and, on
the other side, a purely civic form of nationalism is commended by some analysts
...
But, as many of these analysts realise, it is precisely this
combination that, whether it is tacit and ‘unflagged’, as in parts of the West, or
explicit and explosive, as in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, most
requires to be addressed and explained
...
To see it as a de-ethnicised, civic form of nationalism is, I would
suggest, not only a historical and analytical, but also a policy, error, and to that
extent, misleading and unhelpful (see Billig 1995:42–3)
...
Without an explicit theory of the character, formation and diffusion of
nations and nationalism, such arguments will lack depth and validity
...
That can be good neither for systematic social
understanding nor for political and social policy
...

If that framework is tacitly assumed in the research without it being subjected to

220

Critics and alternatives

scrutiny, then the results of that research will be called into question along with
its research programme
...

In my view, most of the analyses I have all too briefly considered in this
chapter assume one or other version of the modernist paradigm, which they
then seek to ‘go beyond’ in time-period as well as in the ‘phase’ of development
of the phenomena themselves
...
But whereas these modernists (including some
‘gender-nation’ theorists) provide us with full and rounded historical, political
and sociological accounts of nations and nationalism, postmodernist and allied
analyses, in their desire to demonstrate the fluid, fragmented and constructed
qualities of these phenomena, repudiate the need for such overall accounts or
simply assume them as given
...
From the standpoint
of a theory of nations and nationalism, this development can only represent a
retreat from the advances made by modernism
...
Some of these findings, notably those of the
‘gender-nation’ perspectives, which have drawn on concepts from other fields,
can be fruitfully integrated with, while modifying, one or other of the existing
paradigms and thereby enrich our understanding of the wider phenomena of
ethnicity, nations and nationalism
...
But, in
general, until the analyses of ‘fragmentation’ and ‘post-modernity’ make their
assumptions explicit within a broader sociological and historical framework, they
will be unable to advance the theory of nations and nationalism and elucidate
the many problems in this field
...
The
problems that our survey has revealed include:
1

2

3

4

The failure to reach a consensus on the delimitation of the field; in particular,
the disagreement between those who wish to treat problems of nations and
nationalism as quite separate and distinct from issues of ethnicity, and those
who regard ethnic and national phenomena as comprising different aspects
of a single theoretical and empirical field, a distinction that corresponds to
that between the modernist and the perennialist (and primordialist)
paradigms
...
It is also
clear that scholars have quite different approaches to the question of
definitions, and in particular whether the concept of the ‘nation’ can only
apply where a majority of the designated population is included (and
participates) in the nation
...
Once again,
there is no agreement about the fundamental theoretical objectives, let alone
substantive elements, of explanations, for example: whether explanations
should be causal, whether they ought to be framed in purely individualistic
terms, how far they should be reductionist, and so on
...
Coupled with the swiftly evolving politics of
ethnicity and nationalism, it is hardly surprising if research should be carried
out on a wide range of topics and problems within the vast terrain of ethnic
and national phenomena; and that it is often quite difficult to relate various
221

222

5

Conclusion

research concerns to each other to form a more composite picture of progress
in the field
...
From these spring often quite opposed ideological
positions vis-à-vis ethnic and national phenomena, which in turn help to
determine different research problems and interests—as, for example, with
the current interests in civic nationalism, hybridised identity and
globalisation
...
Very often, we are dealing with theories, models and approaches which
are equally plausible and valid, even if they appear to be based on opposed
premisses, because they seek answers to quite different questions
...
But equally, as we have seen, various theories and perspectives
may be concerned with quite different objects of explanation, for example, ethnic
identity and community as opposed to nations and/or nationalism, or politically
significant nationalisms as opposed to national identity
...
In the place of genuine theoretical dialogue, we often find
monologues that intersect
...
These would include
questions about the origins and formation of ethnies, the conditions of
ethnocentrism, the basis of ethnic community, as well as the nature and
significance of ethnic identity; the origins and formation of nations, the nature
and significance of national identity, the social, cultural and political bases of
nations and the modernity or otherwise of nations; the (gendered, class and
cultural) character of nationalist ideologies and movements, their role in forging
nations and national identities, and the contribution of nationalist intellectuals
and others; and finally, the consequences for society and culture of a world of
national states, the geopolitical impact of nations and nationalism, and the chances
of creating an orderly community of states
...
Yet such a conclusion would be unwarranted and overly pessimistic
...
Given the interrelations between phenomena in this field, a general
theory would enable us to understand lower-level, more specific phenomena
or aspects, and thereby reveal the possibilities of and constraints upon policymaking
...
The field is so
riven by basic disagreements and so divided by rival approaches, each of which
addresses only one or other aspect of this vast field, that a unified approach
must seem quite unrealistic and any general theory merely Utopian
...
Compared to the relatively crude models of the
1950s and early 1960s, these contributions reveal a much greater level of
sophistication and understanding of the complexities of the field
...
These advances have greatly enlarged our
understanding of ethnic and national phenomena
...

In fact, each of the major paradigms in the field has generated research
contributions that have enhanced our grasp of the dynamics of nations and
nationalism
...

Primordialists attempt to understand the passion and self-sacrifice
characteristic of nations and nationalism by deriving them from ‘primordial’
attributes of basic social and cultural phenomena like language, religion,
territory, and especially kinship
...
This is evident, not only in the work of van den Berghe
and Geertz, but also in Grosby’s research on ancient Israel
...
Perennialists tend to
derive modern nations from fundamental ethnic ties, rather than from the

224

Conclusion

processes of modernisation
...
Here they serve as valuable
correctives to the more extreme modernist interpretations and remind us of
continuities and recurrences of ethnic phenomena
...

Here too the attempts by Armstrong, Hutchinson and myself to trace the
role of myths, symbols, values and memories in generating ethnic and
national attachments and forging cultural and social networks, have added
to our appreciation of the subjective and historical dimensions of nations
and nationalism
...

Modernists seek to derive both nations and nationalism from the novel
processes of modernisation, and to show how states, nations and
nationalisms, and notably their elites, have mobilised and united populations
in novel ways to cope with modern conditions and modern political
imperatives
...
Scholars such as Mann, Breuilly, Tilly and
Giddens have done much to demonstrate the formative role of the state,
warfare and bureaucracy, while the often decisive role of political elites and
their strategies has been explored by scholars like Brass and Hechter
...

Postmodern analyses have revealed the fragmentation of contemporary
national identities, and suggest the advent of a new ‘post-national’ order of
identity politics and global culture
...
Some of them, notably those of
Bhabha, Chatterjee and Yuval-Davis, have embraced a ‘postmodernist’
deconstructionism, whereas others—for example, those of Mosse, Schlesinger,
Kandiyoti, Brubaker and Billig—are intent on exploring novel postmodern
dimensions
...

These five perspectives reveal, I think, a certain order and coherence in what
at first sight appears to be an inchoate and indeterminate field of phenomena
...
They in turn
allow us to gauge the main contributions and advances in the field, revealing
a field with a high level and wide range of research activity, and one in which
several new theoretical advances have been made in recent decades
...

Prospects
We are left with a not unfamiliar paradox
...
The study of nations and nationalism is rent by deep schisms
...
For all that, the analysis of nationalism remains elusive
...
Given the rate at which new ideas and findings
are thrown up, our bafflement is likely to increase
...
For the present, all
we can hope for is the generation of new ideas which will illuminate one or
other corner of the broad canvas, especially as so many scholars have
abandoned the larger narratives and operate with tacit paradigms according
to their particular interests
...

Certainly, progress in the field depends as much on systematic attempts to
answer questions and deal with debates thrown up by the major paradigms as
it does on generating new ideas and research
...
I can see two ways in
which we could envisage some kind of accommodation, if not agreement, between

226

Critics and alternatives

not just medieval (and ancient) and modern historians, but also between
perennialist and modernist social scientists
...
We can envisage scenarios of at least partial
theoretical convergence, in which the concerns and assumptions of some of the
paradigms might be fruitfully combined
...
This in
turn means that we must decouple nations and specific nationalisms from
‘modernisation’
...
The conditions of modernity clearly favour the replication of nations,
national states and nationalisms in all parts of the globe
...
This kind of combined approach
might also help us to explain some of the characteristic postmodern concerns
with globalisation, ethnic fragmentation, and the revitalisation of ethnic ties,
while also suggesting deep historical grounds for the sense of immemoriality
and continuity which underpins the profound attachments of so many people to
their ethnies and nations
...
Here I have in mind a research programme that would
encourage historians and social scientists to compare the various forms of key
institutional and cultural dimensions of nations and nationalism, with a view to
discovering how their recent and ‘modern’ forms differ from earlier, ‘pre-modern’
ones
...
A comparison of forms of polities from early kingship and citystate forms to the most recent polyethnic democratic national states would
help to reveal how far the sentiments of loyalty associated with each resembled,
or differed, from each other; and how far each was able to mobilise different
strata and forge unity within the polity
...

Territory
...
It would also be
necessary to explore the more elusive issues of how landscapes and sacred
sites contributed to the generation of ideas of ‘homeland’ and national
territory, as well as the related questions of ethnoscapes, ‘natural frontiers’
and national borders
...
In the light of the importance attached to language by various
theories of nationalism, this project would need to compare the ways in
which languages and scripts contributed to ethnic and national feelings in
different periods of history; and especially to what extent, and when, various
vernacularising movements and language revivals, as well as their associated
literatures, contributed to the rise of ethnic attachments and national
sentiments
...
Given the resurgence of religious nationalisms, it becomes even
more important to determine how far earlier forms of ethnic sentiment and
later forms of nationalism were similarly imbued with religious beliefs and
sentiments
...
We would also
need to discover to what extent scriptures, liturgies, clergies and shrines
were successful in propagating these beliefs and sentiments in various ethnic
cultures and in successive periods of history
...
In view of the centrality of ‘history’ and history-writing in the
creation of national communities, we need to compare the various forms of
historical consciousness and historiography in different cultures and periods,
in order to determine how far modern modes differ from earlier forms and
how far, in each period, a sense of history was vital to the creation and
maintenance of ethnic communities and nations
...

Rites and ceremonies
...

Given the centrality of foundation and origin myths, the place of ancestral
monuments and remembrance ceremonies, especially those that
commemorate the ‘glorious dead’ and fallen heroes in both pre-modern
and modern societies, needs particular attention
...
Nor is it meant to suggest that we
can somehow ‘transcend’ the very real problems which the paradigm debates
have thrown up
...

But what the above sketches suggest is that the paradigm divisions are not set in
stone, that scholars do in fact cross the divide, and that we can envisage fruitful
permutations and research programmes which may produce further advances
in our understanding of ethnicity and nationalism
...

What we can be sure of is that, just as the old red lines of nationalism erupt
once again across the globe, and just as the field of ethnic and national phenomena

228

Critics and alternatives

is becoming a magnet for scholarship and research everywhere, so the need to
explain and understand the many issues that it throws up becomes all the more
urgent
...
If the
former grand narratives of nations and nationalism no longer command respect,
the imperatives of the times in which we live urge us to fashion new explanations
more attuned to our perceptions and to the problems that we face
...
1)
...
We should avoid reifying
the concept of the ‘nation’ and rather ‘think about nationalism without nations’
...

This kind of individualistic ‘recipe’ analysis was applied, in a rather psychologistic
manner, to national development by Daniel Lerner (1958) and, in a much more
sociologically sophisticated way, by W
...
I
have discussed this approach in A
...
Smith (1983a: ch
...

Brubaker rightly calls our attention to the developments in social theory that
have challenged the conventional ‘realist’ understanding of the nation: these include
the flourishing of ‘network theory’, the theories of rational action, the rise of
‘constructivist’ theoretical stances, and finally an emergent postmodernist sensibility
that emphasises ‘the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed forms
and clear boundaries’ (Brubaker 1996:13)
...

Unfortunately, we lack adequate, up-to-date bibliographies of the field, at least in
the English language
...
D
...
Brief bibliographies may also be found in the Readers on
Nationalism and Ethnicity edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D
...
D
...

For this emphasis on the shaping of the (ethnic) past by the present and by
contemporary preoccupations and interests, see Tonkin et al
...

For a critique which sees this approach as embodying a ‘blocking presentism’, see
the essay on Yoruba ethnogenesis by Peel (1989) in the same volume
...
Michelet: Historical View of the French Revolution, tr
...
Cocks, London: S
...
For Michelet, see Kohn
(1961); and on the Abbe Siéyès, Cobban (1957)
...
4)
...
On the early development

229

230

3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

11
12

13
14

15

2
1
2

Notes

of nationalist thought, see the detailed study of Kemilainen (1964) and the concise
survey by Llobera (1994: ch
...

For the racist schemas of nationalism, see Poliakov (1974) and A
...
Smith (1979:
chs 3–4)
...
also Davis (1967: chs 1–3)
...
For
the Austro-Marxists, see Talmon (1980: Part III, ch
...

I know of no study of these dilemmas in the thought of the founding fathers or
leading exponents of nationalism
...
D
...

5)
...

For example, in Stalin’s well known essay of 1912 (Stalin 1936)
...

For functionalist developments of crowd behaviour models, see Kornhauser (1959)
and Smelser (1962); cf
...
D
...
3)
...

We can trace this influence especially on what I call theorists of state-centred
modernism like Giddens, Breuilly and Mann, whom I discuss in Chapter 4
...
For a critique of Kohn’s
schema, see Hutchinson (1987: ch
...
D
...
8)
...
For the view that nationalism emerged in the sixteenth
century, see Marcu (1976) and the critique in Breuilly (1993:3–5)
...

See, for example, Walek-Czernecki (1929), Handelsman (1929), Levi (1965) and
Brandon (1967)
...

This is especially true of Gellner’s theory, for example, ‘nationalism is not the
awakening of an old, latent, dormant force…
...
On the ‘naturalisation’ of nationalist
constructions of the nation, see Penrose (1995) and Brubaker (1996: ch
...
On
primordialism, see Chapter 7
...
A
...
Smith (1983b: chs 1–3)
...
See
also, inter alia, Pye (1962), Apter (1963a), Binder (1964), Almond and Pye (1965),
Bellah (1965) and Eisenstadt (1965, 1968)
...
D
...
3; 1973b)
...
D
...

The culture of industrialism
See also Gellner’s lecture of 1982 (reprinted in 1987: ch
...
For critiques of this
early formulation, see Kedourie (1971:19–20, 132); A
...
Smith (1983a: ch
...

Gellner adds that, although other modern developments, from the Reformation to
colonialism, have contributed to its spread, nationalism is basically a product of
industrial social organisation, exactly because cultural homogeneity is imposed by
the requirements of an industrial society, with the result that every modern state
must be legitimated in terms of the national principle (Gellner 1983:40–3)
...

Here, of course, Gellner has in mind the archetypal diaspora communities of the
Armenians and the Jews, who despite being polyglot and flexible economic
middlemen, found that their scriptural religion placed an insuperable barrier, a ‘moral
chasm’, between them and the host society; cf
...

Gellner uses the term ‘proletariat’, not in the traditional Marxist sense of wageearning manual labourers, but more inclusively of all peasants and villagers physically
and mentally uprooted by modernisation
...
D
...
6); see also Nettl and Robertson (1968:
part I)
...
D
...

In his last debate on the subject at Warwick, Gellner (1996) cited the Estonians as
an example of a purely modern ‘high’ culture, which appeared ex nihilo in the
nineteenth century
...
D
...
In his posthumously
published Nationalism, Gellner (1997) amplified his view of the purely modern origins
of nations
...
For Gellner’s application of his theory to
Eastern European nationalisms, see Gellner (1994: esp
...
2)
...
2)
...
For the case of Japan, see Lehmann (1982); for Turkey, Berkes (1964)
and Kushner (1976), and for Nigeria, Igwara (1993)
...
3)
...
On Gökalp, see Lewis (1968: ch
...

For Ben-Zion Dinur, see Dinur (1969)
...
2)
...
D
...
All nationalisms
strive for the unity of the nation, but not all of them conceive such unity in terms
of ethnic purity or cultural homogeneity
...

The problems of maintaining or reconstructing a national identity in multicultural
societies have occupied the attention of theorists of ‘postmodernity’ concerned with
cultural difference in western liberal democracies
...
See, for example, Miller (1995: ch
...

On the Czechs and their nationalism, see Zacek (1969), Seton-Watson (1977:149–
57), Agnew (1993) and Pynsent (1994: chs 2, 4)
...
On the Ukrainian, see Portal (1969) and, for their growing sense of

232

15
16
17
18

3
1
2
3
4
5

6

7
8
9

10

11

Notes

difference from Great Russians, see Saunders (1993)
...
2)
...
(1989: Introduction); but cf
...
D
...
For images of national exempla virtutis, see Rosenblum (1967: ch
...

On Tilak’s nationalist use of the Hindu religion and episodes from the past, see
Adenwalla (1961) and Kedourie (1971:70–4)
...

On this ‘blocking presentism’, see Peel (1989); for a more general critique, see A
...

Smith (1988, 1997b)
...
(1989) and Eriksen (1993)
...

Capitalism and nationalism
There is a large literature on the Marxist approaches to nationalism; see for example,
Shaheen (1956), Davis (1967), Fisera and Minnerup (1978) and Connor (1984)
...

For this idea of ‘uneven development’ in Gellner’s early formulation, see Gellner
(1964: ch
...
For Frank’s ideas, see Frank (1969) and for critiques, see Laclau (1971),
Warren (1980) and, more directly related to nationalism, Orridge (1981)
...
6)
...
D
...

See Nairn (1977: ch
...
On early Indian nationalism, see McCulley (1966), Seal
(1968) and Chatterjee (1986)
...
Nairn’s emphasis on populist nationalism
is criticised from a Marxist standpoint by Hobsbawm (1977)
...
The nationalism of the French revolution
eulogised ‘the people’, but in a pre-romantic, neo-classicist, manner; see Minogue
(1967) and Kohn (1967b)
...
D
...

For these criticisms, see the essays in Stone (1979)
...
Weber (1979)
...
6) and Gellner (1983:101–9)
...

On the relationship of cultural nationalism to economic growth in Japan, see Yoshino
(1992)
...

This was a favoured theme in the late 1950s and 1960s: the era of decolonisation
in Africa and Asia was associated both by colonial rulers and their opponents with
the activities of intellectuals and, more generally, intelligentsia who were held
responsible for the prevalent socialist nationalisms of so many ‘Third World’ states
...
H
...
D
...
10; 1979: chs 4–5, 7;
1981a: chs 5–6)
...

For some patterns of relationships between secular nationalists, traditional elites
and the mass of the population, see D
...
For the Eritrean
case, see Cliffe (1989); for the Baluch struggle, see the penetrating essay by S
...
271–7); and, more generally, Brown (1989)
...

See, for example, the analyses of Quebec by McRoberts (1979) and of Hungarians
in Transylvania under the Habsburg empire, by Verdery (1979)
...

Hechter considers the costs of secession to be widely known and understood
...
2)
...

For a discussion of Horowitz’s general theory, see Chapter 7
...
4) and Heraclides (1991)
...
But see, apart from the theorists discussed in this
chapter, Bendix (1996; 1st edn 1964), Poggi (1978) and Tivey (1980)
...

2)
...

On the colonial and post-colonial state in Africa, see Montagne (1952), Zartmann
(1964), A
...
Smith (1983b: ch
...

Besides these typical West European and East European models, there are at least
two others: the colonial state-to-nation model in Africa and parts of Asia, which is
not the same as the indigeneous state-to-nation Western model, being a product of
foreign rule; and the immigrant pioneer model, whereby an ethnic fragment creates
a state and then seeks to incorporate other immigrant ethnic fragments, as in the
United States, Canada and Australia; see Laczko (1994) and Castles et al
...

For the impact of nationalism on the inter-state order and vice-versa, see Hinsley
(1973) and Azar and Burton (1986)
...

Mann cites the case of ‘Sumer’ (Mann 1986:90–3) as a federal ‘people’ whose
‘professional scribes wrote in a common script, learned their trade with the help of
identical word lists, and asserted they were indeed one people, the Sumerians’
...
:
92)
...

Yet, Mann concedes, the Sumerians may have been an ‘ethnic community’ and had
‘a weak but nonetheless real sense of collective identity, buttressed by language,
foundation myths, and invented genealogies’ (ibid
...
In general, except for ancient
Egypt, pre-modern ethnic communities were ‘small and tribal’, like the Jews, while
larger social units (empires or tribal confederacies) ‘were too stratified for
communities to cross class barriers’ (ibid
...
(The exceptions in the ancient world
appear to have been the Assyrians, who developed what Mann regards as an upperclass form of ‘nationalism’, and the Greeks who had three concentric cultural
networks, to the polis, Hellas and humanity
...
Hall 1985)
...
3) and Breuilly (1993:96–115)
...
10), the essays in Hooson
(1994) and A
...
Smith (1996a) and (1997a)
...
Examples of
the close connection between such vernacular mobilisation and nationalism, see
Branch (1985) on Finland and the Kalevala, Kitromilides (1979, 1989) on Greek
language and nationalism, and Conversi (1990, 1997) on Basque and Catalan
nationalism
...
For
late medieval England, Christianity and the vernacular, see Hastings (1997: ch
...

10 Breuilly counterposes his set of nationalist propositions to those I outlined (in A
...

Smith 1983a: ch
...

11 For other studies of the social composition of nationalist movements, see Hroch
(1985) and A
...
Smith (1983a: ch
...

12 John Breuilly is right to oppose the characterisation of nationalism as the politics of
the intellectuals (which clearly belittles its power and resonance)
...
This, I think, resides less in its intellectual abstractions than its
appeal to the aesthetic imagination
...

This is well analysed and illustrated in the work of George Mosse (1964, 1976,
1994)
...

14 For a similar argument, brought against the Marxist developmentalists, see Orridge
(1981) who emphasises the large number of dimensions and issues included in the
concept of ‘nationalism’
...

16 On the question of method in defining the concept of the ‘nation’, see A
...
Smith
(1983a: ch
...
1); Hastings (1997: ch
...
1)
...
Other cases include Wales, Brittany and perhaps Quebec; see Mayo (1974),
Williams (1977) and McRoberts (1979)
...
For a recognition that we cannot separate the analysis of ‘national identity’
from that of ‘nationalism’, see Billig (1995)
...
D
...

20 I exclude here the Nazi example which Breuilly himself highlights, as it includes
other racial, and non-nationalist, ideological dimensions and motifs; see A
...
Smith
(1979: ch
...


Notes

5
1
2
3

4

5

6
7

8

9

10

11

12

235

Political messianism
On the functionalist perspective on politics and religion, see especially Apter (1963b)
and Eisenstadt (1968)
...
D
...
3)
...
See also A
...
Smith (1983b)
and Guibernau (1996:26–31)
...
It is also a doctrine that requires cultural homogeneity, and as such appeals
to the intellectuals whose status depends on linguistic and cultural attainments and
recognition
...

For some examples of nationalism’s tendency to assimilate traditional religion, see
Binder (1964), A
...
Smith (1973c) and D
...
But see the more general
analysis of Juergensmeyer (1993) who argues the reverse: the attempt by a revived
traditional religion to take the nation into its domain against the secular state
...

For an account of the reception of nationalist ideas in sub-Saharan Africa which
takes the local milieux into account, see Markovitz (1977: ch
...

There is, for example, no millennial movement in Egypt (rather than the Sudan)
preceding the rise of Egyptian nationalism in the 1880s or in Turkey preceding the
emergence of a Turkish nationalism in the 1900s
...
D
...
2)
...
It is this ‘naturalising’ quality of nationalism that
makes it so radical
...

These are, of course, seen as predominantly male virtues (with women serving in
the role of mothers of warriors), on which see Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) and Sluga
(1998) and my brief discussion in Chapter 9
...

The title of Pinsker’s classic proto-Zionist pamphlet was AutoEmancipation (1882)
...
2), Honour (1968: ch
...

It is also not clear whether Kedourie believes ethnies to antedate nationalism and the
rise of nations
...

On the contrasts and similarities between religious and nationalist attitudes and
practices, see the early work of von der Mehden (1963); cf
...
Kedourie’s view is not a case of simple instrumentalism
...
This is no aberration, nor is it simply a
conspiracy
...

One may doubt Juergensmeyer’s method, which leans heavily on interviews with
official spokespersons (and in some cases, only a few such representatives), and
question his conclusion of an overall opposition between the secular West and
religious nationalism, given the absence of any sign of unity between the different
forms of religious (including fundamentalist) nationalisms, on which see Marry and
Appleby (1991)
...

Kapferer’s analysis is rich in meaning and suggestion for the relations between
religious traditions and nationalism, but one wonders whether the ANZAC example
which he so perceptively analyses retains its hold for most Australians today and
whether, in consequence of being an increasingly multicultural immigrant society,
it can sustain a sense of nationhood; see Castles et al
...

For fuller discussions of these themes, see A
...
Smith (1996a) and the essays in
Hosking and Schöpflin (1997)
...

Invention and imagination
The literature on postmodernism is vast, but though postmodernists have much to
say about social identities, feminism and post-colonialism, they have not devoted
so much attention to nationalism
...
16) and Chatterjee
(1993), briefly discussed in Chapter 9; also some of the essays in Ringrose and
Lerner (1993) and in Eley and Suny (1996)
...
On the theme of ‘nationalism and
postmodernity’, see the brief overview in Smart (1993:139–45)
...
und 20
...
6 (Erlenbach-Zurich 1965)
...
Kohn (1957)
...
But the real question is how far the Israeli and
Palestinian ‘nations’ are novel, without the state; see Kimmerling and Migdal (1994)
and Shimoni (1995: ch
...

This goes some way to meeting the key point made by his critics, though Hobsbawm
is only interested in the spate of production of ‘invented traditions’, rather than
their reception
...
For German
nineteenth-century commemorations and ceremonies, see Mosse (1976)
...

Here Hobsbawm follows Earth’s (1969) analysis of ethnicity as a social boundary
phenomenon of exclusion
...
For pre-Revolutionary ideas about the nation in
France, see Palmer (1940), Godechot (1965) and Baker (1990: ch
...
For the
importance of linguistic politics during the Revolution, see Kohn (1967b) and

Notes

7
8
9

10
11
12

13

14

15

237

Lartichaux (1977)
...
7) on artistic
propaganda and representations before and during the Revolution
...
3); and for Latin America, see Phelan (1960), Humphreys and Lynch
(1965), Brading (1985) and Anderson (1991: ch
...

For the normative and analytical debate about ‘civic’ and ethnic’ nationalisms, see
Chapter 9
...

Eric Hobsbawm’s discussion of ‘ethnicity’ veers between culture and ‘race’ (ibid
...
:
153–62), together with his note on the term ethnie (ibid
...
The idea that some ethnies may provide bases (as
cultural network, social institution and popular myth, memory and belief-system)
for the formation of nations and national states is, for Hobsbawm, as still-born as
his ‘proto-nations’
...

A similar instrumentalism, this time employing Freud’s theory of the ‘narcissism
of minor differences’, is invoked by Michael Ignatieff (1998: ch
...
Again, this assumes that both ethnicity and nationalism are
largely fictive narratives, constructed to bestow or withold power and privilege on
some to the exclusion of others (ibid
...
At the same time, Ignatieff
assumes the reality of ethnic groups, concedes the history of ethnic differences and
even antagonisms in the Balkans, and the frequency with which nationalism answers
to genuine needs (ibid
...
To which we may add that Tito’s Yugoslavia
institutionalised the major ethnic communities in six republics, giving political and
economic expression to their ethnic myths and memories
...

Yet the context of his use of the term ‘invention’ does call to mind a powerful
instrument for deconstructing and denigrating both nations and nationalisms
...
See Chapter 7 for further
discussion
...
But
Anderson’s analysis goes beyond the rather crude determinism implicit in the earlier
approach, in linking these ‘objective’ technological, economic and political processes
with discursive networks and subjective factors
...
But, in that case, on what basis
can we explain the evident fact (which Anderson underlines) of the continuing hold,
and indeed renewal, of nations and their nationalisms? See the critique in Hastings
(1997: ch
...

‘Intellectualism’ here is not only a question of the human faculty (of imagination),
but also of the particular medium (the printed word) as opposed to other kinds of
media
...


238

Notes

16

On racism and nationalism generally, see Poliakov (1974), A
...
Smith (1979: chs 3–
4) and Balibar and Wallerstein (1991: ch
...
For some case-studies which reveal
their complex interrelations, see Geiss (1974), MacDougall (1982), Thompson (1985)
and Mosse (1994, 1995)
...
5) of such subjectivist and voluntarist
definitions
...
On the growth of a sense of italianita among the
middle classes in Italy, see Riall (1994: ch
...
On the political importance of an
oral culture in sub-Saharan Africa, see Mazrui (1985)
...
In making an over-sharp dichotomy between ‘religion’ and its successor,
‘nationalism’, Anderson seems to accept the traditional Marxist ‘supersession of
religion’ schema
...
The role of the mass media,
particularly television, is discussed in Schlesinger (1991); and see Deol (1996)
...
For the ‘appeal to posterity’ in neo-classical
representations of nations and national heroes, see Honour (1968: ch
...

21 On the myth of ethnic election, which appears among a variety of peoples from
Armenians, Jews and Greeks to Russians, Poles, Swiss, French, English, Scots, Welsh,
Irish, Afrikaners, Americans and Mexicans, as well as among non-Christian peoples
like the Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese and Sinhalese, see Cherniavsky (1975),
Armstrong (1982: ch
...
D
...

7
1
2
3

4
5
6

7

Primordialism and perennialism
Kohn (1967a) differentiated within the ‘Western’ type of nationalism a ‘collectivist’
French version from the ‘individualistic’ Anglo-Saxon version of the nation
...

For the sources of ‘organic’ nationalism among German Romantics, see Reiss (1955)
and Barnard (1965); and for a powerful critique, Kedourie (1960)
...
On the question of Egyptian continuity,
see Gershoni and Jankowski (1987: ch
...
On Jewish continuities, see Seltzer (1980) and Zerubavel (1995)
...

This is the solution preferred by Horowitz (1985), whose approach I outline below
...
R
...
1955,
11)
...

Francis Robinson argued that the growth of Muslim sentiment in northwest India,
and the concentration, collective memories and cultural resources of the Muslims
in the United Provinces, acted as important constraints on the freedom of action of
Muslim elites in India
...

For an overview of some ‘primordialist’ positions, see Stack (1986: Introduction)
...
A range of views is presented in Glazer and Moynihan (1975),
who adopt an intermediate position themselves
...
For attempts to synthesise the rival
positions, see McKay (1982) and Scott (1990)
...
This is very different, but perhaps not incompatible with, the
understanding of a theorist like Grosby (1995), whose analysis of the significance
of national territory as an object of primordial beliefs rests on its widely perceived
life-enhancing qualities for those who reside on it and who are, in part, collectively
constituted by those beliefs
...

For these terms, see Brass (1991), A
...
Smith (1984b, 1995b), as well as McKay
(1982) and Scott (1990)
...
These form ‘a
single recursive metaphor
...
This trinity of
boundary markers and mechanisms is the deep or basic structure of ethnic group
differentiation’ (ibid
...
Nash is wary of the concept of ‘primordial ties’ as applied
to ethnicity: the building blocks of ethnicity (the body, language, shared history,
religion, territory) may be relatively unchanging, but ‘primordial ties’ are ‘like any
other set of bonds, forged in the process of historical time, subject to shifts in meaning,
ambiguities of reference, political manipulation, and vicissitudes of honour and
obloquy’
...
: 4–6)
...
Weber (1979) is a study of the incorporation of the great majority of the population
into the French national state through the mass, compulsory education system, the
conscript army after the defeat by Prussia, and the creation of a centralised
communications network linking all the French provinces
...

On which see Doob (1964) and Billig (1995)
...

See Chapter 3 for Horowitz’s analysis of the causes of secession and irredentism
...

It is not clear whether Horowitz regards nationalism as a mainly state-centred
ideology and movement, or whether we can speak of ‘ethno-nations’ in the new
states of Asia and Africa
...
Brown (1994)
...

On national sentiment in the Middle Ages, see Tipton (1972), Guenée (1985) and
Hastings (1997)
...

Ethno-symbolism
Another historian who dates the rise of nationalism to the sixteenth century is Marcu
(1976)
...

This might be construed as an argument for the precedence of England, but a similar
evolution, in which the state used religious (Catholic) and linguistic homogenisation
to forge an (upper- and middle-class) nation, took place in France from at least the

240

3
4
5

6

Notes

fifteenth century; see Beaune (1985)
...
Palmer (1940) and Godechot (1965)
on the relative modernity of secular French nationalism
...
3) also argues for the early formation of the Scots, Irish and
Welsh nations, the first on a mainly territorial basis, the others on an ethnic basis,
with clear expressions of nationalism consequent on Anglo-Norman invasions from
the twelfth century
...

A good example is afforded by the chroniclers of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Scotland, on which see Webster (1997: ch
...
also the Swiss chroniclers in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on which see Im Hof (1991)
...
also the debates in Tipton (1972), and the very different
analyses in Bartlett (1994: ch
...

For this catalogue, see Webster and Backhouse (1991)
...
At the time the works were produced, there were
several rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, each of which had its own dynasty, its own
aristocracy and its own separate traditions and loyalties
...
None the less the Anglo-Saxons had a
sense that they were one people
...
: 9)

7
8

9

10

Guidebooks and museum catalogues also tend to emphasise the continuities of the
present with a national past
...
4) and for Spain,
Barton (1993)
...
See also Argyle (1976), Kitromilides (1979) and Hroch (1985)
...
See also Petrovich (1980) and the
essays in Ramet (1989), which document the continuing power of religious ties,
and in some cases religious institutions, in many East European and former Soviet
republics
...
8)
...
Hutchinson also, by implication, shares
the conviction of John Armstrong that pre-modern ethnic ties have a shaping
influence on nations, while otherwise adhering to the modernist position that nations
are both recent and qualitatively ‘modern’
...

Hutchinson’s stress on culture emphasises the links between modern nations and
pre-modern ethnic ties, as does his stress on la longue durée
...
(1989: Introduction) who see the past as inevitably
shaped by the interests, needs and preoccupations of the present, but is closer to
Josep Llobera’s (1994) argument that pre-modern (medieval) cultural and territorial
structures form the long-term foundations for modern European nations
...

11 As opposed to his title, and a later essay (Armstrong 1992), which emphasise the
premodernity of nations; cf
...
1, note 10)
...

13 Though a later essay (Armstrong 1995) stresses some areas of convergence with
the predominantly modernist analyses of participants in the Prague conference, on
which see Periwal (1995: esp
...

14 Earth’s emphasis on relatively fixed ascription is the burden of Wallman’s (1988)
critique of his model
...
Cultural nationalists tend to be wary of
the state, and hence of ‘a state of one’s own’
...

16 For critical analyses of Kohn’s distinction, see A
...
Smith (1983a: ch
...
1)
...

Clearly, this confuses a series of analytically separate variables
...

17 This was an earlier and vaguer definition’ of the concept of the ‘nation’, which
omitted the features of the proper name and the ‘mass, public’ nature of the common
culture, and spoke generally about sentiments of solidarity and common experiences,
as the only subjective element
...

19 There was a corresponding change in my definition of the ‘nation’ as a named human
population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public
culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members (A
...
Smith
1991:14)
...
This follows, in my opinion, from the
method of defining the concept of the nation as an ideal-type drawn, as closely as
possible, from the various concepts and ideas of the nation held by self-styled
nationalists (see A
...
Smith 1983a: ch
...

20 In this, I share the position on uneven cultural resources of Brass (1991) and
Hutchinson (1994)
...
D
...
For the different kinds of pre-modern ethnic communities, see A
...
Smith
(1986a: chs 2–5); for the role of ethnic myths, see Hosking and Schöpflin (1997)
...
For
an attempt to apply the ‘ethno-symbolic’ approach to the problem of national identity

242

Notes

in antiquity and the Middle Ages, see A
...
Smith (1994); on particular nationalisms
in the Middle Ages, see Hastings (1997: chs 2–4)
...

2), and of Poland by Knoll (1993)
...

9
1
2
3

4
5
6

7
8
9
10
11
12

Beyond modernism?
For Coleman’s concept of ‘concentric circles of loyalty’ see Coleman (1958:
Appendix); cf
...

McNeill does not use the term ‘postmodern’, but his scheme links up with many of
its assumptions
...

I am well aware of the deeply contested nature of basic approaches to ‘ethnicity’;
see, among many others, the essays in Glazer and Moynihan (1975), de Vos and
Romanucci-Rossi (1975), Rex and Mason (1988), Wilmsen and McAllister (1996),
and the readings in Hutchinson and Smith (1996)
...
I might just add that the problems of the study of ethnicity
are exacerbated by a failure to keep the individual and collective levels of analysis
distinct, and a tendency to read off characteristics of one level from those of the
other; on which, see Scheuch (1966)
...

See Elshtain (1993)
...
chs 7, 9)
...
7) on David’s Oath of the Horatii and Abrams (1986: ch
...
D
...
Of course, this is
only one side of the matter: stereotypical female attributes of nationalism are also
portrayed by romantic artists, for example, the nation as a woman in combat or
mourning, as by Rudé, Delacroix or Ingres (see South Bank Centre 1989), or women
engaged in ‘male’ activities, such as Joan of Arc (Warner 1983)
...

There is an extensive literature on each of these subjects, though most of it only
touches on the issues of concern here
...

On the issue of the definition of nationalism by analysts and (or versus) the ethnic
or civic concepts of the participants, see the debate between Dominique Schnapper
and myself, in Schnapper (1997)
...

This, of course, has become a political issue and is hotly contested by some
Australians, including some scholars (for example, the historian Geoffrey Blainey);
cf
...

Here I have only alluded to an extensive debate on the crisis and/or decline of the
‘nation-state’ (see Tivey 1980)
...
D
...


Notes

13
14

15

16

17

243

For a fuller discussion of the issues of globalisation in relation to nationalism, see
Featherstone (1990) and Tomlinson (1991: ch
...

For George Schöpflin (1995), it is rather the nature and extent of modernisation
and its political expressions that are significant for the re-emergence of ethnicity
and ethnic nationalism in Europe
...

Another large and relatively under-explored subject is the growing contribution of
international relations theorists to the study of ethnicity and nationalism
...
Brown (1993),
notably on the geopolitical conditions of success for ethnic secession movements
...
Equally important is the study of genocide and nationalism, on
which see inter alia Kuper (1981), Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), Fein (1993) and, in
the colonial context, the penetrating analysis in Palmer (1998)
...
Though all these studies have
implications for our understanding of nations and nationalisms, few of them have
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Index

Page references given in bold indicate a significant section on a particular
subject in the text
...
G
...
168
Brass, Paul 6, 153–5, 224
Breton, Raymond 212
Breuilly, John 5, 84–94, 126, 169, 176–7,
196–7, 224, 234n
Britain 12, 18, 53–4, 58–60, 80, 82, 86, 90,
108, 120, 130, 171–2, 179, 200, 215; see
also England; Scots, Scotland; Wales
Brittany 54, 61–2, 164
Brubaker, Rogers 76–7, 212, 224, 229n3
Buddhism 14
Bulgaria 178
bureaucracy 34, 41, 44, 70, 87, 92–3, 95,
102–3, 107, 135–6, 139, 189–90, 193–
4, 224
Burke, Edmund 53
Burma 128, 130, 141
Cambodia 131
Canada 153, 194, 212
capitalism 12, 44, 47–55, 58, 70–1, 80–2,
87–8, 93, 121, 125–6, 129, 133, 135–
6, 141, 150, 166, 194
Carr, Edward H
...
H
...
A
...
H
...
D

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