II.

Modernist Approaches

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, nations were generally regarded as perennial and immemorial, if not natural. In this essentially nationalist view, nations were to be found everywhere in the historical record; even if some nations had been absorbed or destroyed, many were centuries-old, their roots stretching back into the Dark Ages or even antiquity. Of course, the members of the nation were not always conscious of their long-standing nationhood; and, like the Sleeping Beauty, they had to be aroused from their deep slumber by the nationalists.

Since 1945, most scholars have rejected this perennialism, along with the essentializing nationalism that bred it. Instead, they have come to regard nations as modern political phenomena, that is, as both recent and novel, and as creations of nationalism rather than vice-versa. In this explanatory paradigm, both nations and nationalism are seen as products of modernization, of the novel processes and conditions that gave rise to nations and nationalism from the 18th century onwards; and for this reason, its proponents may conveniently be labelled as “modernists”.

This is very much the view of historians Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. Kedourie had argued for the novelty of nationalism, the ideological movement, which he regarded as a political product of Kantian philosophy (see Immanuel Kant) and German Romanticism. Later, he extended his analysis to Africa and Asia, contending that the imperialism of the great powers had pulverized the traditional societies of their colonies, brought secular education to their urban middle classes, and created a class of “marginal men” who had witnessed liberty and equality in the West or through their secular reading, only to return home to discrimination and rejection. In these circumstances, they sought a millennial political solution to their personal situations in a Western-derived anti-colonial nationalism, but they went on to adapt it to their pre-existing ethnic traditions, creating a cult of the “dark gods” that expressed revulsion against the West, even as they sought to create Western-style nations led by secular nationalist intellectuals.

Gellner in turn rejected the idealism and diffusionism of this account, but accepted the modernity of both nations and nationalism as a sociological necessity. In his view, it was not the spread of Western ideas, but industrial “modernization” that was uprooting villagers and eroding their traditional social structures, and forcing them to adopt a new literate culture in the anonymous, impersonal city. This modern, urban, literate, and specialist-supported “high culture” was nationalism, the new and all-important human identity of citizenship and the basis of a novel industrial world of nation-states. For, to create such modern identities required a large-scale, mass, public, and standardized education system, which only centralized states could support and resource. The homogeneity and fluidity of modern societies serviced by a highly mobile, literate workforce tended to iron out cultural differences, except for those based on visible traits of pigmentation and textual religions. The result was that, in the conditions of urban conflict over scarce resources generated by the uneven nature of modernization, two nationalisms were born, either side of the divide, giving rise to new homogenous nations. It was not nations that created nationalism; rather, nationalism created nations where they did not exist, even though it helped if they could be built round pre-existing cultures.

There is more than an element of determinism in both these accounts. For Kedourie, millennial ideas, like opiates, derange the senses of their adherents. For Gellner, it is the tide of modernization sweeping out from the West that compels everyone in its path to westernize and embrace secular national education. In the same vein, the sociologist Michael Hechter and philosopher of nationalism Tom Nairn regard the rise of nations and nationalism as a product of the unevenness of modern capitalist imperialism penetrating the periphery “at home” or overseas. For Nairn, the agents of resistance are located in the small non-Western bourgeoisies and intelligentsias who, in their helplessness, appeal to “their” co-cultural peasant masses, “inviting them into history” and writing the invitation card in their language and culture. Hence, the populist, cross-class nature of nations and of romantic nationalism.

For other modernist historians like John Breuilly and Michael Mann, the origins of mass nations must be located in the context of the modern state in the West. Here, the slow emergence of the centralized, bureaucratic, absolutist state with its military ambitions and control over capitalist production provoked a demand for representation by the increasingly taxed and conscripted middle classes. It also provoked a growing sense of alienation on the part of civil society, especially the intelligentsia. In England, France, Spain, and Sweden it was the absolutist state that provided the framework and basis of the nation; and even in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Hungary oppositional nationalisms aimed to seize power and to replace existing absolutist or imperial states with ethnocultural nation-states. Nationalism was nothing if not a political movement; and the nation-state that it created was the pre-eminently modern form of state power.

Such analyses raise the difficult issue of temporal priority: was it the nation that preceded, and encouraged the growth of, the modern state, or vice-versa? After all, in the Western cases, the state in question emerged from the medieval epoch as the state of a particular upper class, of a specific ethnic aristocracy. In the absence of such ethnic unity, the chances of creating a strong, stable, and durable state would have been greatly reduced, as it was in Central and Eastern Europe, where it could be argued that ethnic communities and nations were mobilized and politicized by intelligentsias and independent statehood followed on from this.

A similar objection can be made to the ideas of Eric Hobsbawm and his associates that nations are not only recent, but “invented”, social constructs engineered by ruling state elites through the judicious selection of “invented traditions” of national community, history, mythology, and language, which link a modern nation to a fictive historical past. For Hobsbawm, the period 1870-1914 in Europe was critical. In the earlier part of that century, the nationalism inspired by the French Revolution had been inclusive, mass-democratic, and civic, and had succeeded in creating the “great nations” of the West. After 1870, a new, more reactionary and divisive ethno-linguistic nationalism dissolved the great empires of Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Balkans, creating small, economically unviable and extremist nation-states that became fertile ground for fascism. After 1870, the nation became a form of social control, and nationalism was encouraged in order to manipulate and channel the sentiments and votes of the newly mobilized and enfranchised masses in rapidly industrializing and democratizing societies (see Electoral Reform).

For Hobsbawm, too, it is the state and nationalism that create modern nations. Though he concedes the existence of local pre-modern “proto-national” bonds of religion, region, and language, he denies them any role in subsequent nationalist projects of territorial state-creation, except in a few cases like England, France, Russia, and Serbia where the institutions of State or Church had preserved continuity between proto-nations and modern nationalisms. This echoes the Hegelian distinction between “historic” and “historyless” nations (see G. W. F. Hegel): only historic nations that could look back to the memory of former statehood would be able to build national states in the future, whereas historyless nations were fated to become “ethnographic monuments”, in the celebrated phrase of Friedrich Engels. The main objection to this constructionist view is its elitism.

With elites using invented traditions to control the masses, the latter appear as tabula rasa, or “blank slate”, to be moulded into the requisite shape, unable or unwilling to make any contribution to the process of nation-formation, despite having their own cultural traditions. However, does this square with the many mass national revolts throughout the 19th century, from Spain and Italy to Poland and Greece? Most nationalisms were, as Breuilly notes, oppositional, and the intelligentsias who usually provided their leadership, far from simply “inventing” traditions, were anxious to rediscover and authenticate the traditions of “the people” they sought to “reawaken” and regenerate. Admittedly, their reconstructions were selective, and their interpretations were liable to change. Nevertheless, given nationalism’s need for authenticity, they generally operated within the limits of the language and culture of the people they sought to designate a nation.

Against this elitist and rationalist view of nation-formation, Benedict Anderson provides an alternative constructionist account that locates the origins and spread of nations in the realm of culture. Anderson defines nations as imagined political communities—and imagined as finite, sovereign, and horizontal comradeships. The question he seeks to answer is why so many millions of people have allowed themselves to be killed in the name of the nation, a question symbolized in the sanctity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Human life, he argues, is framed by two great fatalities: death and the oblivion that it brings, and Babel, the fact of linguistic diversity across the globe. Nations are imagined communities that seek to transcend the first of these fatalities, while building on the second. However, nations can only come into being when older modes of human community are waning, especially sacred congregations and their languages, and the hierarchies of divine monarchies. The void created by their decline is filled by nations as a result of three developments: first, the appearance of “print-capitalism”, the use by early market capitalism of the new print technology to produce vernacular books and later newspapers (“one-day best-sellers”); the consequent growth of a reading public consuming the ideas, tropes, and social vision typical of these print commodities; and, finally, a revolution in our conceptions of time, from a messianic and cosmological vision to a linear view of “homogenous, empty time” measured by clock and calendar.

While for Anderson particular conditions gave rise to nationalisms in different continents and culture-areas, these are the basic elements found in all cases of nationalism; and because the nation that nationalism creates is felt to be pure and disinterested like the family, it becomes the object of intense love and devotion on the part of its members.

There is no doubt that nationalist rhetoric likens the nation to a family and appeals to a sense of common ancestry, however fictive. This is vital for the imagining of the nation, which is such a central element in Anderson’s approach. However, we have to ask ourselves how far people will let themselves be killed for an “imagined” rather than an “experienced” or “real” community. Does the characterization of the nation as noble and pure suggest a slide from “imagined” to “imaginary”, perhaps even utopian? No doubt, many people have conjured a romantic vision of the nation, but imagination must be complemented by will and emotion, not to mention interest, if it is to hold the loyalty of its members over the long term, and especially in a crisis. Anderson’s innovative concept of imagined community has proved enormously influential, but it is also seen as problematic. While it helps to explain how the abstract category of the nation is rendered more tangible and accessible, it says nothing about the moral and emotional dimensions of nationhood, and hence the energy and commitment to common purposes it imparts to large numbers of human beings throughout the world.

Historically, too, Anderson’s suggestive account, beginning as it does in the 16th century but only coming to fruition over two centuries later, raises several difficulties. In the first place, as has been pointed out, the evidence hardly supports his contention that nations can only emerge where the ties engendered by sacred monarchies and religious communities have become attenuated. There are several cases where monarchy has been central to the rise and meaning of national identity—in Britain, Tsarist Russia, Japan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. As for religion, the recent spate of “religious nationalisms” and the history of borrowing by nationalisms of the motifs, beliefs, liturgies, and rituals of traditional religions, suggests a failure to give due weight to the persistent role of the sacred in modern nations. In the second place, if ancient historians and medievalists would dispute the depiction of linear time as peculiar to the modern world, modern historians may be unhappy with the near three centuries’ time-gap between the early market for vernacular printed books and the emergence of nations and nationalism around 1800, as well as with Anderson’s overemphasis on print and a reading public, in view of the fact that so many populations were semi-literate or illiterate well into the 19th century. Other modes of communication, notably through the visual arts, music, and latterly film, have been often more decisive for the definition and dissemination of the concept of the nation.

In recent years, a number of scholars have dissented from the modernist orthodoxy that sees nations, as well as nationalism, as both recent and novel. This dissent takes three main forms.