IR 437 Nationalism and
Ethnicity
Lecture 2
Website that you can refer to on theories of
nationalism
• http://www.nationalismproject.org/what.htm
Weekly assignments
• 3 presentations on the topic of your paper
• Significance of the topic
• A few research questions (what is it that you would like to find
out?)
• Reference/bibliography and sources
Primordialism
• Ethnicity as primordial
• Ethnicity is deeply ingrained in human history and experience
• Ethnic bonds are primordial and unlike any other bonds: have an
overpowering non rational, emotional quality, are largely
inexplicable, are ancient, enduring and recurrent, given natural
and immutable.
Primordial versus modernism
• Modernists view nations as specifically modern, the result of
political and economic developments in European history, traced
to last quarter of 18 century (Enlightenment)
• First conception of nationalism were primarily civic and
territorial, ethnic nationalism rose in importance in 19th century
6 Nationalist theorists
● Ernest Gellner
● Miroslav Hroch
● Eric Hobsbawm
● Ernest Renan
● Benedict Anderson
• Anthony Smith
• These 6 theorists have contributed a tremendous amount to the
study of the rise of nationalism. Gellner, Hroch and Hobsbawm
propose general models for the rise of nations, while Renan and
Anderson define nationality and examine the spirit behind it.
Ernest Gellner
• Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics
Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University
• Nation and Nationalism (1983)
• Nations and Nationalism are products of industrialization.
• Emerge of nations and nationalism marks a sharp disjunction
between elder agrarian societies and modern industrial society.
Mobility and Cultural Homogenization
• Mobility
Universal Literacy
Standardization of language
General sophistication
• Cultural homogenization
‘It must be the one in which they can all breathe and speak and
produce; so it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a
great or high (literate, training-sustained culture) and it can no
longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or
tradition
Cultural homogenization
• Create and maintain:
One kind of culture
One style of communication
One centralized and standardized education system
The birth of a state
• State
“Nations and states are not the same contingency. Nationalism
holds that they were destined for each other”
• Ethnicity
“nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy which requires that
ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in
particular that ethnic boundaries within a given state….should not
separate the power-holders from the rest”
Ernest Gellner
• Baseline: "A world exists where ethnicity is still not yet selfevidently present, and where the idea of any link between it and
political legitimacy is almost entirely absent."
Ernest Gellner
• Nationalist Irredentism: "A world which has inherited and retained
most of its political boundaries and structures from the previous
stage, but within which ethnicity as a political principle—in other
words, nationalism—is beginning to operate…The old borders and
polities are under pressure from nationalist agitation.”
• Irredentism tries to justify its territorial claims on the basis of
(real or imagined) historic or ethnic affiliations.
Ernest Gellner
• Emergence of Nationalist States: "National Irredentism triumphant
and self-defeating.
• Plural empires collapse, and with them the entire dynasticreligious style of political legitimation, and it is replaced by
nationalism as the main effective principle.
• A set of smaller states emerge, purporting to fulfill the national
destiny of the ethnic group with which they are identified. This
condition is self-defeating, in so far as these new units are just as
minority-haunted as the larger ones which had preceded them.
The new units are haunted by all the weaknesses of their
precursors, plus some additional ones of their own. "
Ernest Gellner
• Nacht and Nebel. "This is a term employed by the Nazis for some
of their operations in the course of the Second World War.
• Under cover of war time secrecy, or in the heat of conflict and
passion, or during the period of retaliatory indignation, moral
standards are suspended, and the principle of nationalism,
demanding compact homogenous ethnic groups within given
political-territorial units, is implemented with a new ruthlessness.
It is no longer done by the older and benign method of
assimilation, but by mass murder or forcible transplantation of
populations."
Ernest Gellner
• Cultural Convergence: "High level of satiation of the nationalist
requirement, plus generalized affluence, plus cultural
convergence, leads to a diminution, though not the
disappearance, of the virulence of nationalist revindication.
• "*Gellner grounds each stage historically. It is interesting to note
that he considers the world on eve of the French Revolution in
1789 the "baseline" society, although it bears very little
resemblance to either one of the two societies Gellner describes
as "baseline." Prior to the French Revolution, dynastic monarchies
invoked the Divine Right of Kings to apportion land and to govern
the people.
Anthony Smith
• Professor of Sociology at the London School of economics
• He has specialized in the study of ethnicity and nationalism,
especially the theory of the nation
• His major influential works are: Theories of nationalism (1971),
The ethnic revival (1981), The Ethnic origins of Nations (1986) and
National Identity (1991).
• His main question is when did the nations emerge?
The nation is not old
• Before nations were assumed to be old; they could be traced back
to the Middle Age.
• Today both nation and nationalism are understood as modern
phenomena.
The nation is a product of nationalist ideologies
The nationalism is an expression of modern, industrial society
The nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history and
embedded in purely modern conditions.
Ethnie
• Smith questions the modernists’ arguments, “is the nation a new thing?”
• Smith argues that modern nations have an “ethnic origin, ethnic core”:
• Ethnie
1. A collective name
2. A common myth of descent
3. A shared history
4. A distinctive shared culture
5. An association with specific territory
6. A sense of solidarity
Ethnic Origin of the Nation
• In pre-modern communities, people are connected among the
members and through generation by their ethnic core
• The cultural homogeneity was actually due to nation’s ethnic past
prior to the nation
• It is because of its ethnic origin the modern nation is able to
attract the allegiance of so many people
Three revolutions
• When would people’s ethnic sentiment transform to nationalism
and to form a nation?
• The origins of the transition to nationhood are shrouded in
obscurity.”
• Three types of revolution
Economic – the division of labor
Political – the control of administration
Cultural – the cultural coordination
Economic Revolution
The division of labor (capitalism)
State controlled over key resources like mining
State regulated trade and commodity exchange
Every region of a country was integrated as a state-supervised
economy
• The division of labor was reorganized around the center
(production, supplier)
•
•
•
•
The Political Revolution
• The control of administration
In the latter half of the 17th century a new class of military professional
with high degree of training and expertise in science and technology
emerged
They required the highly trained bureaucrats supports
Centralized institutions for higher education
• The new type of bureaucratic state encouraged the growth of a wealthy
bourgeois class and an allied intelligentsia (in opposition to the nobility)
• Strengthen nationalistic policies
The Cultural Revolution
• The cultural coordination (educational revolution)
The expansion of secularism to weaken the power of church
Monarchs claimed that their right to rule was given by the God.
Centralized education, standardized patriotic culture for citizens
Spreading the nation
• The revolutions achieved:
Territorial centralization and consolidation
Cultural standardization
• Nation was gradually formed
Because these revolutions were highly discontinuous, their effects
were felt at different times in different areas, the nation that was
gradually formed revealed differences in both content and form.
• What about non western communities?
• The non-Western societies were stimulated to follow because of
the West’s military and economic success.
Miroslav Hroch
• ● classifies a nation as "a large social group integrated not by one
but by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships
(economic, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical,
historical) and their subjective reflection in collective
consciousness."
Miroslav Hroch
• Miroslav Hroch three keys to creating a "nation:"
• 1. "a memory of a common past, treated as a destiny of the group
• 2. a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree
of social communication within the group or beyond it
• 3. a conception of the equality of all members of the group
organized as a civil society."*three keys to creating a national
identity generally occur in Phase A:
Miroslav Hroch
• Phase A: Activists strive to lay the foundation for a national
identity. They research the cultural, linguistic, social and
sometimes historical attributes of a non- dominant group in order
to raise awareness of the common traits—but they do this "without
pressing specifically national demands to remedy deficits."
Miroslav Hroch
• Phase B: "A new range of activists emerged, who sought to win
over as many of their ethnic group as possible to the project of
creating a future nation.”
• ● Phase C: The majority of the population forms a mass
movement. "In this phase, a full social movement comes into being
and movement branches into conservative- clerical, liberal and
democratic wings, each with its own program."
Eric Hobsbawm
• incorporates Hrochs three phases into his model for the
development of nations and adds to them: National Consciousness:
Hobsbawms first stage describes how "national consciousness"
develops "unevenly among the social groupings and regions of a
country…the popular masses—workers, servants, peasants—are the
last to be affected by it" (Nations and Nationalism 12).
Eric Hobsbawm
• Phase A: Hobsbawm adopts Hrochs terminology, describing Phase A
as the emergence of cultural, literary and folkloric identity for a
particular social group or region (12). Within this phase,
Hobsbawm cites three criteria for making claims of nationality:
• cites three criteria:1."Its historic association with a current state
or one with a fairly lengthy and recent past”
• 2."The existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a
written national literary and administrative vernacular”
• 3."A proven capacity for conquest"
Eric Hobsbawm
• Phase B/ Popular Proto-Nationalism: A body emerges, which
consists of pioneers and militants of "the national idea." They
begin to campaign for this idea of "nationality" (12). He gives four
main criteria for the development of "popular proto-nationalism":●
1. Language● 2. Ethnicity● 3. Religion● 4. "The consciousness of
belonging or having belonged to a lasting political entity—the most
decisive criterion of proto-nationalism"
Eric Hobsbawm
• Phase C: "Nationalist programmes acquire mass support, or at
least some of the the mass support that nationalists always claim
they represent”
• 1. "The transformation of nationalism"(1870-1918): In this period,
the world witnessed the completion of German and Italian
unifications during the "Mazzinian phase" (1870-1880), as well as
the collapse of multinational empires(the Hapsburg empire, the
Ottoman empire, Russia) from 1880-1918 (101-130)
Eric Hobsbawm
• 2. "The apogee of nationalism" (1918-1950): he describes this
period as the triumph of the nineteenth century "principle of
nationality”
• 3. Nationalism in the late twentieth century: the rise of
"internationalism" .
Ernest Renan (1832-1892)
• He was a French scholar of language and history. A professor at
Sorbonne University. He is best known for his historical works on
early Christianity and political theories
• His famous work: What is a nation, 1882
• The desire of nations to be together is the only real criterion
Nation and Nationalism
• Renan rejects the idea of defining the nation by objective criteria
such as shared language, physical characteristics, culture, customs
etc..
• Two things to constitute principle of a nation: past and present
• Past – the possession of a common legacy of remembrance
(common sufferings)
• Present – the consent, the desire to live together to continue to
value the heritage which all held in common.
Nationalism
• Nationalism connects individuals to the state
They become sentimentally attached to the homeland
They gained a sense of identity and self esteem through their
national identification
They are motivated to help their fellow nationals and countries
• Nationalism is a process
Ernest Renan
• "a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things constitute this
soul or spiritual principle:
● One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories;
● the other is a present-day consent, the desire to live together, the
will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in
an undivided form".
• Sacrifices form the foundation of "nations"—"a nation is therefore a
large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices
that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to
make in the future".
Ernest Renan
• disregards conventional proposals that race, religion and language
generate nationalism. However, he does cite geography as a
significant factor.
• also emphasized, most nations began as dynasties. According to
Renan, dynastic territories progress to nations in one of three
ways: dynastic unions, general popular consciousness and direct
will of provinces
Benedict Anderson
Professor of International Relations at Cornell University.
He specializes in the politics of Southeast Asia.
His major work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, had become
one of the most cited texts in the field.
He argues that the nation is “imagined.”
The Imagined Communities
• The nation is imagined
• …the nation in anthropological spirit; is an imagined political
community and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign..
Nation and Nationalism as cultural artifacts
• Nation states as well as nationalism are cultural artifacts of
particular kind
• Nationalism has to be understood by aligning it not with selfconsciously held political ideologies but with the large cultural
systems that precede it out of which – as well as against which – it
came into being
The nation is imagined in a particular way
• The community whole size is beyond face to face contact are all
imagined
• The nation is imagined as limited because a nation holds limited number
of people
• The nation is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in the
age in which realm of absolutism was destroyed by revolution
• The nation is imagined as community because the nation is always
conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. It is this fraternity that
makes it possible for so many millions of people willingly die for their
nation.
Print capitalism
• What makes such imagining possible?
• Print capitalism – (books, novels and newspapers)
• Origins of national consciousness was print capitalism: the nation
was imagined through language
Vernacular language press and national
consciousness
• The vernacular print language laid the bases for national
consciousness in 3 ways:
• They created unified fields of exchange and communication
Print language made possible for people who speak different
dialects to communicate
The fellow – readers were connected through print and they
formed the embryo of the nationally imagined community
Vernacular language press and national
consciousness
• Print capitalism gave a new fixity to language which helped to
buıld the image of antiquity of the nation.
• Print capitalism created language of power
Spread of nations
• The nation came to be imagined and once imagined it was
modeled, adapted and transformed
• In the colonized countries the colonial state conditioned the
natives to imagined a nation: education for native people
• Native bureaucrats in colonial administration, bilingual
intelligentsias have learned nationalism and copied, adapted and
improved..
Imagined colony
• Imagined nation of colonized countries
 The nation model of colonized countries was colonial state
 Three institutions made such imagination:
- census
In the past it was for tax and military but now individual persons are counted
-map and map as logo
the model for drawing the national borders
necessity for administrative mechanism for troops to back their claims
- Museum
Victorious past (conquest)
Benedict Anderson
• ● proposed that nationalism filled the void left by the decline of
religious and dynastic territorial control. He writes, "Through the
general principle of verticality, dynastic marriages brought
together diverse populations under new apices" .
• ● The power of dynastic unions emerged most clearly through the
Hapsburg family. Monarchs invoked the Divine Right of Kings to
manipulate their subjects (as opposed to their citizens), and the
Hapsburg family embodies that potent combination of religion and
a monarchy.
Benedict Anderson
● Monarchs invoked the Divine Right of Kings to manipulate their
subjects (as opposed to their citizens), and the Hapsburg family
embodies that potent combination of religion and a monarchy. In
1452, the Archduke of Austria (a Hapsburg) was elected Holy Roman
Emperor, marking the beginning of a dynastic superpower that
would endure until the First World War.
• However, as the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment approached,
such blind faith in the monarchy diminished, and people began to
consider the concept of becoming a "nation."
Benedict Anderson
• The First World War saw the demise of many dynastic realms—"by
1922, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans were
gone…
• From this time on, the legitimate international norm was the
nation-state, so that in the League of Nations even the surviving
imperial powers came dressed in national costume rather than
imperial uniform”.