The Times Higher Education Supplement

Is this what makes us go 'here we go'? Karen Gold Published: 25 June 2004

Natural feeling versus political programme, modern versus ancient, the historians can't reach agreement on what causes nationalism. Karen Gold reports. "More than 1,000 years before the arrival of Slavs, in the 6th century AD, the lands east of the Adriatic were the home of peoples known to the ancient world as Illyrians, the precursors of the present Albanians." So runs the history of Kosovo on the web pages of the Albanian Liberation Peace Movement. The Serbian Ministry of Information's website tells a different story: "The Serbs have been living in the territory of Kosova and Metohija since the 6th century. That territory was the centre of Serbian statehood, an inalienable national treasury, indispensable for the identity of the Serbian people." Nationalist feeling comes as naturally to us as breathing, according to Gottfried von Herder, the German philosopher. At the end of the 18th century, full of Romantic sentiment and liberal politics, he coined the terms Nationalismus and Volk and put forward the argument that nationalism was an organic entity in nations, embodied in language and culture, and existing, consciously or unconsciously, whether anyone wanted it to or not. We have Herder to thank for the Brothers Grimm, whom he inspired to collect fairy tales and folklore, the cultural expression of the Volk. It was really only in the 20th century that historians began to suggest that a belief in nationalism as a natural state was useful to political leaders and/or elites who wanted to persuade people to act in a unified way. Historians have focused on key periods and episodes to argue this case, pointing, in particular, to the French Revolution, whose leaders purveyed notions of La Patrie and a standardised French in the hope of uniting a scattering of peasants speaking different dialects across the newly liberated land. They have traced the way the 19th-century Napoleonic and British empires aroused resentment while, in Europe at least, failing to fill the faith gap vacated by religion and divinely appointed rulers. Resistance leaders in an unbroken line from Italy's Guiseppe Mazzini, through Ireland's Daniel O'Connell, to India's Mahatma Gandhi, this argument goes, all saw nationalism as a way of uniting and inspiring the disaffected masses to reject their oppressors in the name of creating, or recreating, a nation. Some historians, such as Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics (the LSE has been rich soil for nationalism theories), have argued that the main reason why nationalism spread in these circumstances was because it was an ideology that appeared in the right place at the right time. Alienated peoples were shown it, and they bought it. Marxist and proto-Marxist thinkers, in particular Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, pre-eminent nationalism theorists for the past 20 years, were more sceptical. (Marx himself virtually ignored nationalism as a horizontal distraction from vertical class conflict.) The anthropologist Gellner argued that nationalism arose out of pressures created by the Industrial Revolution, when people from different backgrounds, speaking different dialects, converged on the city and had to be welded into a literate and retainable workforce. So the state created a common language, a common past and a common culture for them. This view of nationalism as originating from above was criticised by Hobsbawm as inadequate, even though true. The artefact of nationalism cannot be understood without understanding the assumptions, hopes, longings and interests of ordinary people under capitalism, he argued. The myths and histories that nations created, about themselves and each other, spread only because the working class needed to believe in them. Why did they need to? Answers to that question take us into an entirely different realm of explanations. Sociobiologists have argued for a genetic predisposition to nationalism: members of a group who believe they have a claim to their own territory are likely to defend it more successfully than those who doubt it, or even hold high-minded principles about sharing it with others. Cultural primordialists, such as the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz, hold a similar position, arguing that territory and kinship are inescapable cultural givens. Psychologists have also put forward related theories, positing a universal tendency for people to consider other groups less important than their own and to form stereotypes about them. Horror stories that circulate about other nations - from competing cruelties in Kosovo, to unsubstantiated rumours of mass rapes and killings attributed by both sides in the First World War, to the ancient blood libel believed of the Jews - seem to substantiate this argument. But historians have criticised it as problematic. Anthony D. Smith, professor of nationalism and ethnicity at the LSE, says: "The trouble is that psychologists tend to equate nations with groups. But there are many groups in the world, and they are not all necessarily nations... And there are some nations where everyone doesn't even speak the same language, like Switzerland. Ideas about groups really don't get to the specificity of nationalism." Much of the debate about nationalism's longevity, and therefore what causes it, depends on definitions. Should it be defined as a specific political programme or a more cultural movement? Smith believes that nationalism's roots are in culture. That makes him a "perennialist" - someone who believes that nationalism precedes the 18th century, though in less sophisticated forms. He suggests that foreshadowing the modern nation are "ethno-symbols", constructed on language and a vernacular literature, but also on less obvious elements: memory, value, myth, symbolism and landscape. The idea of nationalism may be modern, but its roots are in a distant shared past, he argues. Another perennialist, Adrian Hastings, the late Leeds University theologian, pointed to 14th and 17th-century England as periods when national identity was particularly strong; others argue that the Jews and Armenians sustained powerful national identities over millennia. Mazzini, formulating 19th-century Italian nationalism against Napoleonic France, passionately defended the cultural roots of his movement: "They (Italians) speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition, they demand... to contribute their stone to the great pyramid of history." Ironically, there was virtually no public or academic interest in the roots of nationalism before and after its florid expression in two world wars. Instead, peak times for academic exploration of nationalism's causes have been the 1960s, prompted by African and Asian independence, and the late 1980s and early 1990s, after the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The argument here has been whether nationalism is the cause or the product of the break-up of old states and the creation of new ones. Rogers Brubaker, the US sociologist, for example, has argued that the organisation of the Soviet Union into component parts was what taught people to think of themselves as Lithuanian or Ukrainian. In contrast, Michael Hechter, in Containing Nationalism, and Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, point to social and linguistic ties and to a memory of a common past as the trigger for claiming nationhood - though still prompted by historical circumstance rather than any organic drive. Recently, sociologists, particularly on the left, have debated to what extent a new nationalism is appearing in Europe, expressed as anti-immigrant feeling, and how far it is driven by identity or by class interests. The fundamental issue is the same as that between Kedourie, Gellner and Hobsbawm: to what extent is this nationalism attributable to a shared ideology, to frustration among individuals who seek an identity having been disappointed by what the 20th-century state offers them, or to pressures from above to stand together and conform. Whatever the case, this is nationalism within identified nations. Nationalism among people who are not yet nations has another modern cause, historians argue, which is that today's world structures will hear people only through the representation of a nation-state. "Once almost the whole world is organised into nation-states then if you want to be recognised as a legitimate entity you have to be a nation-state," says David Bell (see below). "So it is almost inevitable that nationalism will follow." It is almost inevitable but not entirely. The urge to create, or recreate, nations in the dismantled Soviet Union was not uniformly strong, he says. The Russian Federation remains a federation. In central Asia, religious forces seem to be exerting a more powerful pull than nationalist ones. So are we about to see a decline in nationalism across the world, to be replaced by globalisation or religion? The way people see the future of nationalism depends very much on the explanations they credit for its past. Smith says: "If you think nationalism is a given in history, then you will think it is going to be around for a long time. If you think it is a completely modern phenomenon, then you might or might not think it is going to pass more or less quickly away."

Une Nouvelle Notion Est Enfin Arrivée David Bell The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 25, 2004, BIG QUESTIONS IN HISTORY; No.1646; Pg.18

Nationalism, barely 200 years old, is impossible to avoid, says David Bell Nationalism is one of those phenomena that get more confused the closer one looks at them. Most readers would probably accept the principal definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Advocacy of or support for the interests of one's own nation." Yet scholars cannot agree if nationalism is a simple sentiment or a political programme, a modern occurrence or an ancient one, the product of particular social conditions or a free-floating doctrine. Following two notable scholars of the subject, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, I have found a fairly narrow definition most useful. Simple feelings of support for, loyalty to or belief in a nation are covered by the terms "national sentiment" and "patriotism". What distinguishes nationalism is that it refers not simply to feelings, but to organised political doctrines and movements. Furthermore, these doctrines and movements have a clear goal: the construction and/or completion of a nation. Nationalist movements, after all, nearly always claim that their nation remains an unfinished project and suffers from problems that need to be rectified through political action. In some cases, they allege that their nation has been deprived of territories that rightly belong to it; in others, that the national community is diluted or polluted by the presence of national minorities; in others still, that the citizenry has an imperfect knowledge of, and commitment to, national values and traditions, and the national culture. Most often, the ultimate aim of a nationalist programme is to unite members of a nation within its historical territory, where they can collectively exercise political sovereignty while identifying with national culture. Because nationalists justify their actions by invoking the rights of their nation but simultaneously confess that this nation does not yet exist, there is something more than a little paradoxical about nationalism. The paradox is most often resolved through an appeal to history: while the nation may not fully exist today, nationalists explain, it did so once, and still retains all of its rights from that time - indeed, these rights constitute a sacred inheritance. Nationalists, in short, forever situate themselves in a beleaguered and imperfect present, en route between a more glorious past and a more glorious future. As defined in these terms, nationalism is very much a modern phenomenon, dating from no earlier than the 18th century, and originating in Europe. Before then, European observers most often defined nation as a group of people united by language, law and/or historical tradition, but they saw nations as organic entities. Nations could be born, grow, wither and die, but they could not be created (or recreated) through systematic political action. The idea that millions of people could be shaped into a nation through politics was as yet unthinkable. Only with democratic revolutions did the idea begin to gain adherents. To understand how nationalism first came into being, it is worth looking at revolutionary France. At the end of the 18th century, France was a multi-ethnic, multilingual country in which only a minority spoke standard French. France's kings had never seen this diversity as a pressing political problem, but the revolutionaries of 1789 believed that they could not create a cohesive democratic community without taking the component peoples of France and, in the words of revolutionary Henri Gregoire, "melting them into the national mass". They devised educational programmes to eradicate regional differences and to create a cohesive, unified national community. They imagined legions of instructors bringing the gospel of the nation to the patois-speaking peasantry, in conscious imitation of the counter-Reformation missionaries who had earlier gone into the countryside for the very different purpose of ensuring conformity with Catholic teachings. French nationalism, however, was not born solely from political thought. When devising their projects, early French nationalists could already take for granted the existence of a cohesive national territory, administered by a centralised state apparatus, and the existence of a social and cultural elite who, wherever they lived in France, already spoke standard French and looked to Paris for cultural guidance. The availability of a reliable postal service, transport and a burgeoning number of national periodicals facilitated communication among this elite and allowed them to see themselves as all belonging to the same community. Without these preconditions, the nationalist project of the revolution would have been difficult to imagine in the first place, let alone to begin implementing. Perhaps the most important point to retain about French revolutionary nationalism is that it worked. The prospect of coming together to construct a new, greater national community offered material advantages to potential members, and also a sense of spiritual purpose to people increasingly alienated from traditional Christian teachings. The French revolutionaries did not manage to teach all French citizens to speak French, but in other realms they had remarkable success. Most important, within a few years after 1789, they forged a truly national conscript army that quickly overran the frontiers of the ancien régime and embarked on a programme of conquest. By the time of Napoleon, French leaders had acquired the ambition not simply to construct a new French nation, but a new "great nation" that would dominate Europe. In the two centuries since the revolutionary era, nationalism has changed the world - and in doing so, it has changed its own causes. Not every nationalist movement has followed the path of the French. The success and spread of nationalism have created ever more incentives for people to become nationalist, and ever more examples for them to imitate. Even in the early 19th century, thinkers outside France - with the example of the French Revolution before their eyes - found it easier than the French had done to imagine coming together into national communities. In Napoleonic Germany, despite a high degree of political and administrative fragmentation, leading intellectuals came to believe that only the political construction of a united German nation would save them from absorption into France. They thus spurred resistance to Napoleon and inspired projects that would blossom in the time of Otto von Bismarck. These intellectuals also began to popularise the idea of a world naturally divided into distinct nations, each with a particular "genius", language and culture. The ultimate success of the Germans - and of other nations - in resisting Napoleon inspired more movements across the Continent. The period around the European revolutions of 1848 is justly called the "springtime of nations". By the end of the First World War, these movements had destroyed most of Europe's old empires, while the Versailles Conference confirmed the principle of "national self-determination" as the basis for a new world order of states. As a result, throughout the 20th century, nationalism was less a choice than a necessity for people worldwide seeking political power and influence. It had been one thing to embrace nationalism in the early modern world of large, multi-ethnic, religiously inspired empires. It was another to embrace it in a world where humankind was assumed to be naturally divided into nation-states, and where any political unit that did not conform to this norm would have a hard time fitting into an ever-more tightly linked international system. In the post-First World War world, therefore, nationalism not only remained ubiquitous in Europe, but also quickly spread beyond the Continent. And to their shock, the European imperialist powers discovered that the more cultural influence they wielded - the more they managed to impart their beliefs and values to their colonial subjects - the more they spurred nationalist resistance to their own rule. Thus, in the end, their own colonial empires proved no more successful than Austria-Hungary in staving off nationalism's centripetal demons. In the years after the Second World War, they shared its fate, dissolving into often violent and unstable constellations of independent nation-states. Forty years later, the Soviet empire followed, too. As in the Balkans, the examples have often been troubling. But with every population that has shaped itself into a nation-state, the pressure has only risen on adjacent populations to do the same. Most of the new nation-states have not possessed anything like the material preconditions of nationhood the French had been able to count on in the 18th century. In some cases, they have had no basis other than lines on a colonial map. But the causes of nationalism are no longer what they were in the 18th century, for nationalism has become a fundamental principle of world order. Until this state of affairs changes, nationalism is something that will remain impossible to avoid. David A. Bell is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, US.

A losing politics

Phil Cerny
Published: 09 July 2004
The Times Higher Education Supplement, July 9, 2004, LETTER; No.1648; Pg.17

However, nationalism is losing its effectiveness as a political tool, eroded from above and below. In terms of security, territorial stalemate and multilateralism constrain it from above, while ethnic and religious conflict, civil wars and terrorism undermine it from below. Crises and collapses in postcolonial states are undermining claims that nationalism creates political stability, democratisation and welfare; indeed, it often leads to the opposite.

International economic interdependence means that national development strategies and welfare priorities are being discarded by today's modernising elites for trade, financial and productive integration into a more open, post-Fordist world. While "global governance" is still fragmented and embryonic and most developed nation-states have been able to manage change by "reinventing government", for example, national autonomy is challenged everywhere.

Nationalism as a political project is neither "a given" nor "modern". The paradox of nationalism is that although it has become, in Bell's phrase, "a fundamental principle of world order", the nation-states on which that order is based are being eroded and snared in transnational webs of politics, society and economics.

Phil Cerny
Professor of international political economy
Manchester University