24
Two
To be reckoned among nations
A nation is a group of people united by a common error about their
ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors. 1
A nalytically, we may distinguish between three concepts of the nation: The nation as a
political community, more or less coterminous with a sovereign state; the nation as a
subjective community; and the nation as a cultural community, with emphasis on language or
other "objective" factors. Varieties of all three are in contemporary use. This ambiguity is
deeply rooted in history, and indicates how the path to nationhood has been far from uniform.
Today's nation concept is far removed from the original Latin natio (from nasci, to be born),
which designated groups of people that were foreign, i.e. different from the Romans by birth,
race, or origin. The elusiveness of our contemporary nation concept is the result of a series of
semantic changes over the centuries in different parts of Europe, from a community of origin
(geographically and/or linguistically) among university students, via a community of opinion,
a political, cultural and social elite, to a sovereign people, and finally a unique people.2
Historically, the criteria that must be filled in order for an entity to be reckoned among nations
have varied, as have indeed the criteria for inclusion in one particular nation. Varying features
of nationhood have been emphasized; among the most prominent of these have been national
character (expressed through shared values, customs and traditions); a connection to a territory; a common government and common laws; shared history, religion, language and
origins.The idea that people belonging to certain nations share a national character, certain
features and ways of behaving that are more or less objectively given, can be dated back to the
Middle Ages, and had become widely accepted in Europe by the mid 18th century.3 For
obvious reasons, the habit of equating nation with race largely went out of fashion after the
Second World War, as did the notion of national character. It gave way to the notion of
"national identity", which is perceived as subjectively defined rather than objectively given,
flexible rather than unchangeable, varying according to context rather than permanent.
1
European saying, quoted in Robert King: Minorities under communism (1973:5).
2
Leah Greenfeld: Nationalism (1992:4–9). See also Louis L. Snyder: Encyclopedia of nationalism (1990), Aira Kemiläinen:
Nationalism (1964); John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism (1994); Walker Connor: Ethnonationalism (1994).
3
Anthony D. Smith: National identity (1991:85–86).
25
Roughly speaking, there were two main paths to nationhood in Europe. One path was the
familiar nationalist, where a national movement helped form, or in their own eyes,
reawakened the nation. The other path was the path of the "first-born"4 West European
nations, where a nation was formed within the borders of an existing state. In the nationalist
version, the nation was a cultural community, while the "first-born" nations were first and
foremost civic nations. This distinction should, however, not be exaggerated.
Before the French Revolution, the features of nation in France had been a connection to a
territory (or a land), including common laws and government, and a national character. In the
course of the Revolution, "nation" got the additional meaning of a whole people and a sovereign people, thereby strengthening the political conception of nationhood. This also implied
that nation was a community of will, not just any people living within the territory of a state.
Among the Germans, nation acquired ethno-cultural rather than political connotations. The
attributes of the nation were common (racial) origins and country, often associated with
common language, laws and customs. This idea of nationhood was much more closed and
differential than the French. Aira Kemaläinen argues that the Holy Roman Empire of the
German nation (as a loose confederation rather than a state), was essential in shaping the
original German conception of nation as a community of descent and language. Another
important factor was the zone of ethno-culturally mixed populations in Eastern Europe, where
German identity was defined ethno-culturally in relation to the Slavs.5 The philosophers of
German Romanticism elaborated on this ethno-cultural conception of nationhood, perceiving
nations as historically rooted, organic entities, regulated by natural laws rather than human
will, and imbued with a specific, unique spirit, a Volksgeist. The role of the state was to
provide shelter for this cultural organism, whose true spirit found expression through the
native language.6
A nation is a state ...
None of the conventional meanings of nation are "wrong." On the other hand, one of them
should be avoided for the sake of clarity: namely, the all-too-common equation of the word
"nation" with state (or also nation-state) – cf. the United Nations. In this meaning
"nationality" equals "citizenship", with no questions asked about the subjective identity or
cultural attributes of the population. For our purposes, a definition along these lines would be
unsatisfactory and confusing, chiefly because the lack of congruence between nation and state
is often a major point of contention for national movements: The classic nationalist goal is to
secure "a state of its own" for the nation. Hence, for the study of nationalism, the nation
cannot be any group of people living within an existing state framework.
4
5
6
The term was coined by Leah Greenfeld (1992).
See Kemiläinen (1964:39) and Rogers Brubaker: Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany (1992:5–7).
A different German tradition evolved in Prussia, where the meaning of nation came to be understood more along (French)
political lines. See Brubaker (1992: pp. 9 ff.) for more on this.
26
The rest of this discussion will focus on two other rivaling nation concepts. These may conveniently be labeled voluntarist and cultural nation concepts, since they focus, respectively,
on voluntary adherence and on certain shared objective features, such as language, religion,
ethnicity and shared history. These are of course not mutually exclusive notions.
... is a "daily plebiscite" ...
In a lecture held at the Sorbonne in 1882, which appeared in print the same year under the title
Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, the French historian Ernest Renan spoke of the nation as "a daily
plebiscite" (un plébiscite de tous les jours) – perhaps one of the most quoted phrases in the
literature on nationalism even today. Renan regarded a nation as a spiritual human
community, endowed with a past, but also with a desire to uphold it through a day-to-day vote
of confidence. According to Renan, not only does the nation share common memories, it also
shares an amnesia, a collective forgetfulness that enables the members to forget past
differences, while concentrating on the things that link them together.
Renan's concept of the nation owes much to Rousseau, and conveys a close relationship
between the nation idea and the idea of rule by the sovereign people. The nation, according to
Rousseau, was the sovereign people. Yet, Rousseau thought of a society whose members
shared common customs as the best foundation for a political society: The people that are fit
for legislation – the people that should be sovereign – should already be "united by some
common bond of origin, interest or convention."7 Here the voluntary aspect becomes blurred.
The nation in Renan's scheme was an entity united by the same political institutions, the same
rules and regulations, the same rights and obligations, which made membership in the nation
more a matter of voluntary choice than a matter of birth or blood. His insistence that it would
be wrong to attribute to nations racial, religious, linguistic, or physiographical connotations
must be seen in light of the French experience, what the French were and what they were not
at that time. They were certainly not a homogeneous cultural community. The transition from
peasants to Frenchmen was not completed until the early 20th century, according to a muchquoted study by Eugen Weber.8 Later on "French-ness" acquired an additional cultural
meaning, including food, beverage, language, customs and traditions. This culturally French
identity permeated the masses only after compulsory education was introduced during the
1880s.9 The notion of an ancestry of blood never entered the French national idea; the French
nation was thus inclusive where the German was exclusive.
7
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The social contract (1762), quoted in Anthony H. Birch: Nationalism and national integration
(1989:15).
8
Eugen Weber: Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), referred in Connor (1994); Geoff Eley & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.):
Becoming national (1996:7).
9
Douglas Johnson: The making of the French nation, in: Mikuláš Teich/Roy Porter (eds): The national question in Europe in
historical context (1993:52).
27
The merit of a voluntarist nation concept is the idea of an identity inherent in it – and, even
more important, an identity that may to a certain extent be chosen. A nation is not a fixed
entity that we are born into, but a community of people with a mutual feeling of belonging
together. The existence of a nation presupposes a subjective identity, which is acquired;
hence, nations are capable of change, incorporating new members, expanding and declining.
A nation concept like this allows for the fact that at times there may be groups of people with
dual or no distinct feeling of national identity at all. It also allows for the fact that people
occasionally change national denomination, if not in the course of one generation, as least in
two or three. This is especially important for understanding the processes that led to the
formation of nations, and in accounting for the fact that nations have a beginning, and
possibly also an end.
Second, a voluntarist nation concept includes only those who are aware of belonging to the
nation. This enables us to distinguish between a situation where nobody feel that they belong
together in a national community, a situation where some feel that they belong together and a
situation where all have this feeling. This allows us to distinguish between stages in the
evolution of national awareness, and to describe nation forming as a gradual process. Nations
exist not by virtue of some common objective feature, like skin color, language, or religion,
but by virtue of our identification with people that are like us: they are in the famous phrase of
Benedict Anderson "imagined communities."10
Hence, where no documentation can be found proving that such sentiments were very
common, no nation can be said to have existed. And nothing of the kind can be proven for the
Middle Ages or the ancient world.11 Most pre-modern communities are then ruled out, as well
quite a few of the present-day entities that claim to be nations.
One the other hand, an exclusively voluntarist nation concept makes it impossible to distinguish between a situation where only some feel that they belong together and a situation where
all have this feeling, because separating "some" from "all" implies using a criterion other than
voluntary adherence. This would mean that even the smallest elite starting to define itself as a
nation must be considered a nation. We need to be able to distinguish between state populations and nations, between ethnic groups and nations, and between national movements and
nations. A strictly voluntarist nation concept does not permit any of this. Finally, to perceive
the nation as something entirely voluntary would be to understate both the stability of national
identities and the amount of coercion involved. For one thing, national identities have been
known to persist for years under foreign oppression. This suggests a stability outside the
domain of will alone. Second, even the French model nation is not quite as voluntary as it may
seem. France was made into a unit by conquest, and the incorporation processes that led to a
common identity were certainly not without coercive elements.
10
11
Benedict Anderson: Imagined communities (1991:6-7).
Even if it did exist, we would not be able to prove the existence of an all-encompassing national sentiment in the Middle
Ages, since the available sources are at the most reliable for the literate strata. (See Chapter One, page 14).
28
... is a community of culture
In his 1913 manifesto on Marxism and the national question, Josef Stalin defined the nation
as a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common
language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up, manifested in a common
culture.12 This is entirely in line with Otto Bauer's nation concept. It is often quoted in the
literature on nationalism as an example of a purely cultural definition, since it leaves out the
notion of an subjective awareness altogether.
Where the voluntarist nation concept is rooted in the experience of the French and the British,
the cultural nation concept has deep roots in German and East European soil. The nation in
the German meaning is not some accidental group of people, but a people bound together by
culture, by language, by birth, by history. This is a culturally distinct entity, an organic whole,
something to be born into, rather than a matter of choice by a sovereign people. German
romantic philosophers like Herder and Fichte added the conception of language as the soul of
the nation and the main differentiating principle. Their influence has been profound and
lasting. Even today some scholars, not to mention nationalists, see language as the main
constituting feature of nations. Other candidates are ethnicity, religion and a shared history.
A cultural nation concept has some obvious merits. By emphasizing culture and language, we
exclude heterogeneous state populations from the concept, and the entities we normally think
of as nations do have certain cultural features in common. Moreover, an identity, separating us
from the others, presupposes that we have something in common that they do not have, a
certain "sameness" in cultural values and attributes that can be recognized. It does not imply
that this sameness has existed from time immemorial. On the contrary, common features may
be more or less recently "construed" or "invented",13 and they may have spread from an
original elite to the masses. That does not make them any less real.
Today most scholars of nationalism reject an exclusively cultural or objective nation concept,
and rightly so in my opinion, mainly because objective criteria claiming general validity are
hard to come by. A closer look at the main candidate – language – may serve to illustrate the
problem. First, although the differences between literary languages may be easily observable,
dialect boundaries tend to be fuzzy rather than sharp. In Europe, the Magyars and the Basques
are probably the only people who beyond doubt are linguistically different from all their
neighbors. Second, nation is not always coterminous with language. There are people who
speak different languages and see themselves as one nation – notably the Swiss. There are
numerous other people who speak the same language, but regard themselves as different
nations, like the Germans and the Austrians, or the British, the Australians and the Americans.
Likewise, the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims of former Yugoslavia speak basically the
same language, albeit with some nuances in dialect that criss-cross the national divide.
12
Quotation in Teich & Porter (1993: xvii).
13
I will return to this debate in the next chapter.
29
The same exercise could be applied to other criteria. Upon reviewing the main alleged criteria
(language, religion, ethnicity, holy icons), Eric Hobsbawm concludes that no single criterion
is applicable to all cases, and consequently, that no feature is indispensable for the formation
of national identities.14 He does, however, concede that when such common features exist,
they make the job of national movements easier, as they serve as a foundation for mobilizing
the masses. This indicates that it is not the differentiating feature per se that is important, but
the fact that it sets "us" apart from "the others."
Another problem is of course that, regardless of what kind of features we see as constituting
nationhood, a cultural concept of nation means that we would not be able to distinguish
between what Anthony D. Smith calls ethnic categories (people who have certain cultural
attributes in common but do not define themselves as a group), ethnie, (where some people
are aware of their common attributes), and nations, (where most people are aware that they
"belong together").15 Again, we are deprived of the possibility of describing the forming of
nations as a process. Cultural sameness is obviously not enough either.
National identity – a combined notion
Our conception of "nation" should include both a certain cultural sameness (it may include
language, and in most cases it will) and a feeling of belonging to a community. A nation may
then be defined as a historically constituted community of people who share a common
culture, including one or more differentiating cultural features, created and recreated by
people with a mutual feeling of belonging together.
National identities thus exist in our minds as ideas of who we are and with whom we belong.
This subjective identification thrives on a certain sameness, some cultural features that are
seen as constituting the national community. It is this sameness that enables the members of a
community to recognize each other as belonging to the same community, and by the same
token recognize non-members as outsiders or foreigners.
The ability of a nation to incorporate new members depends both on the willingness of newcomers to change their identity, and on the willingness of the host nation to accept them as conationals. A corollary is that nations are more or less open to newcomers, depending on what
the constituting features are believed to be. A national identity that is tied to residence and
adherence to certain political institutions is open to newcomers, an identity tied to ancestry is
typically closed, while a national identity that is first and foremost based on language is
neither completely open nor completely closed. Finally, while any cultural feature may be
acquired in the course of a few generations, assimilation may still be barred if one's physical
features remain outside the bounds of "normal appearance" in the national community.
14
See Eric Hobsbawm: Nations and nationalism since 1780 (1992), Chapter 2.
15
Anthony D. Smith: National identity (1991).