IV.

A Symbolic Network

Together, these ideals have formed a rich conceptual field and have helped to produce a striking array of emotive images and symbols. Not only do we have a set of characteristic concepts and languages of nationalisms; there are also recurrent myths, symbols, and memories associated with nations and nationalism.

Take the well-known symbols of the nation, developed for the most part by nationalists. These include emblems and flags for each nation and each national state; the national songs and anthems which emerged in the 18th century and became a sine qua non of any “genuine” nation; the various national holidays (of independence, of the constitution, of decisive battles and revolutions, etc.); the emergence of capital cities of government; the delineation of fixed and policed borders; the growing use of passports and currencies; the establishment of national museums and galleries, academies and libraries, and of national heritage trusts; the proliferation of statues of heroes and heroines, personifications of the nation (Marianne for France , Deutsche Michel for Germany, etc.); national military parades; tombs of the Unknown Warrior; and especially national festivals of remembrance for the war dead. All these, openly displayed or just taken-for-granted, have been reinforced or inculcated by nationalists to underpin and map the nation in the hearts and minds of its members.

The same can be said for the myths and memories of the nation. Nationalism has given coherence and force to the various elements of myth and memory that were the legacy of usually pre-modern cultures and ethnic communities. In the historicist mythology of the nation, its origins are clearly located in time and place. In some cases, there is also a putative ancestor and/or founder, such Piast for the Poles, Oghuz Khan for the Turks, and Abraham for the Jews. There may also be a decisive founding moment or turning point: the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, Gregory's conversion of the Armenians in c.3l2, the creation of the Hungarian kingdom in 896, the Swiss Oath of the Rütli in l29l.

These moments become the stuff of nationalist legend but no less important are the high points, the “golden ages” of the nation. These may be political and military, as with the Han Chinese or the Serbian empires; or they be economic, like the civilization of Teotihuacán in first millennium Mexico; they may be religious, as with the rise of Islam among the Arabs, the Vedic age in India, or the Mosaic or rabbinic ages among the Jews; or they may be artistic and intellectual, like the “golden age” of classical Athens, or the Italian Renaissance. For nationalists, these heroic ages serve a purpose: to excite the imaginations, and stir the emulation, of their co-nationals, and to rouse them so that they may once more scale the heights which their “ancestors” had conquered, and renew the ancient days of national glory.

This rhetoric is reinforced by a myth of national decline. Creativity dried up, wealth was dissipated, the spirit of communion faded, the nation decayed and split into fragments, and sooner or later, it was conquered, its lands expropriated, its members dispersed, and its people sank into ignorance and apathy. This is, of course, the cue for the nationalists to break the spell, awaken the slumbering beauty of the nation, and, through re-education, toil, and struggle, set it once again back on its historic course.

For this purpose, the nationalists appeal to the power of collective memory. Of course, these are not first-hand memories, not even recent, well-attested memories. They are traditions, some of them documented, based on earlier interpretations of often distant events and personages. There is no clear line between such memories and myths, for both deal with popular imagination and widely believed tales of an heroic ethnic past or pasts, and both rely on chains of interpretation after the event. Their selection is guided by present concerns, usually those of this or that political faction, but only within certain cultural limits and the parameters of popular resonance. For all that, the myths, memories, symbols, and traditions of earlier ethnic communities, widely recognized as “ancestral” to the nation in question, have become the staple of nationalist mobilization, and, along with language codes, have provided the cultural framework and underpinning of the nation.