For many years now, the dominant—if not exclusive—view among scholars has been that nations and nationalism are essentially modern phenomena. Despite disagreement on the specific times and places in which nationalism first began to arise, or the intellectual and material sources that gave rise to such movements, a relatively broad consensus remains that it did so in the modern era, whereas before that we had…something else.
Somewhat unexpectedly, this view has recently come under somewhat amorphous challenge as part of a larger political and social turn against liberal pieties. The thinking goes that if nations are essentially modern creations, then their authenticity must be in doubt; and further, that those who claim some sort of ancestral connection to their own countries are deluding themselves, and certainly have no greater claim to them than recent (or future) immigrants.
Needless to say, perhaps, a lot of this is bound up with a variety of contemporary political concerns. It is interesting, then, to see what were originally scholarly disputes become proxies for current debates over immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, and so on. For example, the ongoing discussions of whether America is an “idea” or a people, or the rise of the (largely online) term “heritage American” to refer to a notionally more valid category of American citizens, reflect certain anxieties about the historical reality of our polity.
Similarly, the promulgation of “national conservatism,” which has tended to fixate on smaller, ethnically-rooted states like Hungary or Israel as organic models of nationhood, represents an attempt to ground present political commitments in enduring premodern communities (an implicit repudiation of theories concerning the modernity of nations).
In insisting on the historical reality of nations, many of critics of liberalism have oversimplified or caricatured what the major modernist theorists, such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, actually had to say. The result has been a certain straw-manning of modernist theories of nationalism. To be fair, a good deal of straw-manning has already been done by those endorsing such theories. One suspects that few books have been judged as much on their titles, by both supporters and critics, as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. (Here, I always think of The Simpsons’ Lionel Hutz declaring “this “the most blatant case of false advertising since The Neverending Story.”)
But it is simply not the case that modernist scholars were uniformly hostile to nationalism, nor that they considered it “unreal” for having been of recent vintage. That they doubted certain specific claims for the antiquity of this or that modern nation certainly did not mean they doubted the reality (whatever that might mean) of modern nations themselves.
Ernest Gellner has defined nationalism as “primarily a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” The political element is crucial here. While one can find evidence of “nations,” loosely defined, throughout history, it wasn’t until the modern era that the idea that they should have discrete (and usually democratic) political representation became widespread.
This was really quite novel. While we tend to read nationalism back into older periods, the actual history reveals something different—the prevalence of multiethnic empires, dynastic kingdoms, smaller tribal units, and so on. The clearest examples of older political communities, like the Greek polis, didn’t rely upon an ethnic category to determine their political boundaries (e.g., both Athenians and Spartans were understood to be “Greek”). And this is without getting into the ways that modern nations tend to be agglomerations of prior (and smaller) geographic, linguistic, religious, etc. groupings. The point isn’t that collective identities as such didn’t exist, or were only invented recently. Nevertheless, they didn’t have the same political significance—and certainly not on the same scale—as they do today.
Further, modernists’ views on the goodness or desirability of nationalist sentiment varied across different scholars. For that matter. individual scholars were not wholly consistent on this point, depending where and when they were speaking.
Anderson himself had an interesting relationship with nationalism, having come at it originally as a Westerner (specifically, a Brit) who took an interest in political and cultural developments in rural Indonesia. From there, he broadened his focus to a larger consideration of Southeast Asia during the especially fraught period of decolonization, which as he observed was heavily bound up with novel forms of nationalization. Partly owing to his sympathies for these struggles, he was disinclined to view nationalism in an unfavorable light. In this respect, he is something of a throwback to an older variant of leftism, which was largely bullish on the processes of modernization and industrialization (both of which were co-constitutive with nationalization).
Meanwhile, here is Gellner discussing the national basis for political legitimacy: “Life is a difficult and serious business. The protection from starvation and insecurity is not easily achieved. In the achievement of it, effective government is an important factor. Could one think of a sillier, more frivolous consideration than the question concerning the native vernacular of the governors?”
In some respects, this is indeed a criticism of nationalism. Gellner is asking whether you’d rather be governed well by someone who was otherwise foreign than governed poorly by someone just like you? But Gellner also acknowledged that we don’t live in a world where this is an abstract choice. Partly as a result of a larger revolution in the meaning of citizenship, the nation has become the strongest and more coherent source of communal attachments: “It is for this reason that it now seems inherent, in the very nature of things, that to be human means to have some nationality. In our particular social context, it is inherent in the nature of things.” Under those circumstances, we can’t and won’t simply opt for foreign rule, no matter how competent it might be.
Elie Kedourie, on the other hand, expresses a far more jaundiced view of nationalism. At least some of this reaction is likely owed to his personal background as an Iraqi Jew who came of age during the rise of Arab nationalism in that region. (Kedourie also seemed to believe that the historical contingency of many forms of nationalism suggested that they might be reversable, as Gellner did not.) Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, was more inclined than other modernist scholars to view nationalism as an ephemeral phenomenon, and one that relied upon the manipulation of masses by elites. It’s fine to criticize Hobsbawm, Kedourie, or their intellectual followers. But the attack on modernists in general paints with too broad a brush.
Stepping back, one can see diverse treatments of the development of nationalism as a kind of oblique commentary on the multiethnic empires that dominated much of the globe during the era preceding that of the rise of nationalism. If you were a member of a mercantile minority group like, say, the Jews of eastern Europe or the Chinese throughout southeast Asia, you were likely to have viewed imperial rule—with its rule of law, protection of minority interests, and access to distant markets—as comparatively benign. If you belonged to the majority ethnic group in any given area, however, there is a good chance you saw things differently. Academic conclusions can’t be derived directly from the scholars’ circumstances of scholars’ lives. But biographical considerations aren’t irrelevant.
Of course, the modernist thesis has not gone unchallenged. Azar Gat’s Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism has lately garnered renewed popular interest for its bracing defiance of the modernist thesis. For a long time, the strongest counterargument to the modernist camp came from Anthony D. Smith, who studied under Gellner and wrote a series of works on the topic from the 1970s through the 2000s.
Although a critic of modernist theorists, however, Smith accepted a number of their insights. He was generally careful not to insist on the true antiquity of political nations, claiming rather that they rely upon historical antecedents and myths of shared ancestry in what he called “ethnosymbolism.” This was in contrast to what he called “primordialism,” which stressed continuity. For Smith, there was something modern about nationalism, just not all of it.
But whereas Smith tried to thread the needle, Gat pretty much argues that nations are and were quite real, representing enduring ethnic identities accreted around extended familial bloodlines and holding transhistorical political significance. As with other participants in the debate, it’s likely relevant that Gat is Israeli. Insistence on the long, indeed ancient, lineage of Jewish nationalism has be a recurring argument in Zionism.
Merits of the argument and the Jewish case aside, this view holds a certain appeal for those who would like to be able to assert the validity of their own nationhood, tired of being informed that theirs is a “nation of immigrants,” or reminded of the prior (and presumably more legitimate) claim of this or that indigenous group. Our world, in other words, seems to the same as it ever was. To advocates of a primordialist view, it’s importance that we can glimpse the significance of our own lineages beneath the veneer of contemporary liberalism.
One suspects that some of the problem that today’s retro-nationalists have is that the modernist view appears to be engaged in an act of debunking. “See?” it seems to say, “all those supposedly ancestral lineages and traditions you believed so much in are really recent advents.” In fairness, this is how these theories are often taught to undergraduates by instructors who lack some of the nuance of the texts on their syllabi.
This is not unlike the unsophisticated version of social constructivism, which treats social constructs as ephemeral by dint of not being inherent in the natural order of things. Yet the more sophisticated reading recognizes that the underlying origins of most social phenomena make little difference to those who experience them directly.
Put it this way: it’s trivially true that the game of basketball is socially constructed, but knowing this doesn’t change the location of the three-point line. Now apply this to any number of features of modern nation-states: borders, passports, flags, civic traditions, and so on. Acknowledging the contingency of historical development does not imply that we live in a world of radical flux, which is why basketball doesn’t operate like Calvinball.
More generally, specific debates over one’s own country’s policies concerning immigration, refugeeship, reparations, and so on cannot be settled by the scholarly literature on nationalism. That was never its intent. Through their differing arguments, the debate on the origins of nationalism is a model of serious inquiry into one of the dominant themes of modern social life—one that on the whole was capable of surprisingly dispassionate examination of the phenomena under discussion. Whatever one thinks of any particular thesis they advanced concerning the origin of nationalism, the contrast with our own more politicized discourse is instructive.
About The Author
