Nation and Identity

Ross Poole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134800209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Nation and Identity provides a concise and comprehensive account of the place of national identity in modern life. Ross Poole argues that the nation became a fundamental organising principle of social, political and moral life during the period of early modernity and that is has provided the organising principle of much liberal, republican and democratic thought.
Ross Poole offers us a new and urgently needed analysis of the concept of identity, arguing that we are now in a position to envisage the end of nationalism. We see that the impact of issues like multiculturalism, republicanism, and indigenous rights have made it very difficult to see how the possibility of a postnational cosmopolitanism could not degenerate into a nihilistic moral universe.
Nation and Identity will be a fascinating read for all those interested in issues of national identity, both politically and philosophically.

1 The coming of nationalism

Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.

(Ernest Gellner)¹

In its most familiar and historically potent form, nationalism is the principle that the nation is the ground of political sovereignty and that political sovereignty is the right and destiny of the nation. This principle is satisfied when and only when nation and State come together as the nation-state.

Nationalism has played an enormous role in modern history. World maps have had to be redrawn – and are still being redrawn – in the effort to make state borders coincide with what are conceived to be the boundaries of the nation. Large numbers of people have been prepared to make great personal sacrifices – up to and including life itself – in the struggles needed to achieve or defend the political sovereignty of their nation. At the end of the twentieth century, it does not need emphasising that many have been prepared to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of the nation. However, it should also be remembered that those of us who go about our business in politically stable countries rely on this principle when we draw a comfortable moral line between the claims of our compatriots and those outside our national boundaries.

But what is the nation? And what is it about the nation which supports – or has seemed to support – the claims made on its behalf? If the nation is the source of political authority, what is the source of its political authority? Why is it our nation, rather than our class, religion or political commitment, that demands political recognition?

The nation: imagination and culture

In an anthropological spirit…I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign.

(Benedict Anderson)²

Benedict Anderson’s characterisation of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ has become unavoidable in recent discussions of nationalism. And for good reason. Prior to Anderson’s work, too many theorists – especially liberals and Marxists – had dismissed the nation as a collective illusion or form of false consciousness, as a pathology unworthy of serious engagement, let alone sympathetic attention. The term ‘imagined community’ provided a way forward. In suggesting that the nation is an object of the creative imagination, a cultural product analogous to a work of literature or music, it encouraged more sensitive investigations of the kind of imagination involved in the nation. Anderson’s own work was exemplary in this respect. The term also allowed theorists to entertain the idea that the nation might be a creative response to economic and political changes, rather than a rationalisation or mystification of them. It lessened – though it has never quite removed – the temptation to conceive of the nation as a mere epiphenomenon of more fundamental economic and political causes.

These consequences have been entirely beneficial. However, the enthusiasm with which the term has been taken up has obscured the fact that it also has major problems and limitations. Anderson’s own account of the term is quite confused. A ‘nation’, he writes:

is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.³

This passage implies that the notion of an ‘imagined community’ comes into play when a group becomes too large for its members to know each other personally. This suggestion is reinforced when Anderson goes on to say that ‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’.⁴ But the suggestion – albeit half-hearted – that ‘face-to-face’ contact might do without imagination is highly misleading. It is after all a hermeneutic truism that all social relations – even those between ‘primordial’ villagers – work through the shared understanding (and misunderstanding) of those involved. ‘Face-to-face contact’ is hardly a substitute for imagination. If the concept of an ‘imagined community’ is to mark an important distinction among social relations, it is not because of the presence of imagination in some and its absence in others.

In the final clause of the passage cited, Anderson hints at a different reading. Here he says that the notion of an ‘imagined community’ comes into play when the members of a community ‘live the image of their communion’. I take this to mean both that people conceive of themselves as belonging to the community, and also that the conception of the community informs the way in which they live, relate to others, and so on. This suggests a different way in which the distinction between imagined communities and other forms of social relation might be drawn. We can – and should – recognise that all social relations work through the reciprocal understandings of those involved. However, some social relations require a shared understanding of the social whole – the community – which makes the relationship possible. A representation of the community is a constitutive presence in the relations. These are the relationships which involve the idea of an imagined community.

This distinction is not based on size. As Anderson himself allows, there are extensive networks of social relations which do not depend upon an understanding of the network as a whole. He suggests, for example, that Javanese villagers think of themselves as connected with people they have never met by ‘indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship’, and that they do not have the idea of a ‘society’ to which they all belong.⁵ Or, to take a more familiar example, people may conceive of themselves as related to others through an extensive web of exchange relations without forming the concept of the ‘market’ as the social whole which makes these relationships possible. The relevant concepts – of society and of the market – are the inventions of theorists, and need not be part of the conceptual equipment of the participants in social or market relations. On the other hand, relations between members of the nation are mediated by their mutual recognition that they belong to the same nation. Nations are not, of course, the only imagined communities. For example, the relationships between Islamic or Roman Catholic co-religionists may well depend upon a shared conception of the church to which they belong. In cases of this kind, where it is the representation of the community which makes the relationship possible, the representation is not a merely theoretical category, but is a component of the consciousness of its members. If we are to understand such ‘imagined communities’ we must explore the ways in which they are conceived by those who belong to them.⁶

It may be that Anderson’s confusion of size with the need for imagination is one of presentation rather than of substance.⁷ It is, however, very important to clear it up. The distinction, between those social relations which depend upon a shared conception of the social whole and those which do not, is of considerable importance to the understanding, not merely of the nation, but of a range of other kinds of social relationship and community. It is also, as we shall see in the next chapter, crucial for the understanding of the different forms of identity involved in social life.

A second problem for Anderson’s account concerns the limitations of the concept of imagination. Though the concept of the nation as an imagined object provides a place for the creativity involved in conceiving the nation, it does not help us understand the extent to which we find ourselves subject to an object we have ourselves created. It is one of the great strengths of Anderson’s own account that he recognises the strength of the hold of the nationalist imagination on us. Indeed, this forms his starting point:

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers…[V]oid as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.⁸

The various commemorations of war – cenotaphs, tombs of the unknown soldier, and the like – play a central role in the iconography of the nation just because they symbolise the sacrifices that men and women have been willing to make on its behalf. As Anderson emphasises, if we are to understand the moral presence of the nation in our lives, we must come to terms with its capacity to demand and be freely given these sacrifices. However, it is at this very point that the notion of imagination fails. It does not explain why the object we have imagined can make these claims on us. The first steps towards this explanation are made when we realise that when we imagine the nation we do not merely construct an object of consciousness, but we also form a conception of ourselves as existing in relation to that object. The nation is not just a form of consciousness, it is also a form of self-consciousness. As members of the nation recognise each other through the nation, they also recognise themselves. If the nation is an imagined community, it is also a form of identity. As an imagined community, it exists as an object of consciousness. It is the public embodiment of the nation’s conception of itself. As a form of identity, it exists as a mode of individual self- and other-awareness. In order to understand this dual form of existence, we need to go beyond the concept of imagination to that of culture.

This may not seem much of an advance. The concept of culture is a notoriously difficult one. As Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’⁹ However, it is inescapable in a discussion of nationalism. Of its many senses, three are especially important here.

In one significant sense, a culture consists of a gallery of meaningful or representative objects which those with the appropriate cultural knowledge and identity can interpret and evaluate. In this sense, culture exists as a public realm. However – and this is the second sense – the concept of culture also refers to the way in which these objects are created, recreated and modified. In this sense, culture is process rather than product. A culture is not made once and for all. It is continually being remade, reaffirmed and sometimes changed. Cultural objects may change their meaning or become less central; new objects may be introduced. Even the most static culture is the scene of contestation, reinterpretation and criticism, and these are all aspects of the process by which a culture is produced and reproduced. In a third sense, the concept of culture refers to the process by which people acquire the knowledge which allows them to understand the various cultural artefacts and to recognise them as their own. It is the process by which members of the culture come to understand the meaning of the objects which form the culture and, crucially, find their identity in these objects. In this final sense, culture is ‘Bildung’ – education or formation.¹⁰ It is the process by which an individual is inscribed within a particular form of life. This is not a passive acquisition of preexisting patterns of behaviour (‘socialisation’) but a process in which the individual fashions and finds him- or herself within the forms (or images – die Bilder) which are socially available. It is a process of self-formation, not merely formation of the self; it is the process by which human individuals acquire various social identities.

In order to understand the nation, we need to make use of the concept of culture in each of these related senses. The nation is a specific cultural object. It exists in and through the language we speak, the public symbols we acknowledge, the history and literature we were taught at school, the music we listen to, the currency we use, the sporting activities we enjoy, and the news bulletins on the television. These cultural artefacts enable us to recognise that our way of life has an objective external existence, and they constitute the social environment which we recognise as ours and in which we are ‘at home’. The national culture is subject to change, and at any given time aspects will be subject to debate and criticism. Elements which were central may become marginal, and national rituals may change their meaning. The process of transformation and contestation is the process by which the nation is produced and reproduced. However, the nation also exists in the process by which individuals become aware of themselves as having a national identity. This is an aspect of our self-formation, and it is in virtue of the success of this process that we find ourselves at home in one social environment rather than another. We come to feel that our national identity is as natural and inescapable as our gender (another successful piece of Bildung). Our national culture provides a moment of self-recognition through which we both confirm our individual existence and become conscious of ourselves as having a collective existence.

The acquisition of language and other forms of communication is a crucial aspect of this. It is our native language which provides us with our primary mode of access to the objective world; and it also provides the means by which we are able to recognise others who share that mode of access. Though it is socially acquired, our language soon acquires a quasi-natural status. It constitutes the taken for granted framework through which we experience the world. It provides for a basic form of intersubjectivity: those who speak the same language are those with whom we can share our experiences, our emotions, our thoughts and our jokes. It also demarcates the realm of objectivity: users of the same language inhabit the same external world. And it is language which provides the crucial link between the individual and the wider public spheres of work and pleasure, the media, culture and tradition, and ultimately politics. Much of the strength of nationalism in the modern world flows from the appropriation of linguistic identity by the nation.¹¹ When this appropriation is successful, it becomes difficult to say or think who we are without identifying ourselves as members of a particular nation.

Of course, a shared culture also provides other forms of communication and means of recognition. The way we dress, the music we listen to, perhaps the religious symbols we acknowledge, and even the way we eat and drink, all provide forms in which we are able to communicate aspects of our lives to others – but not to all others – and to recognise those who share this privileged realm. In many circumstances, cultural differences of this kind (usually together with political differences) may be sufficient to form distinct identities despite the existence of a common language. Anglophone Canada and the United States are cases in point. In other cases, cultural identities may be formed which override linguistic difference. For example, Switzerland maintains a unitary sense of itself despite the fact that it is trilingual; bilingual Canada may or may not be able to sustain its national identity. These cases are sufficiently interesting to merit the fuller discussion they will receive later. For the time being, it is sufficient to note that differences in language are more usually conceived as – and thus tend to become – a source of disunity within a nation. While this potential disunity may be overcome by other features, e.g. a strong tradition of civic life, federal political institutions, the existence of a common enemy, etc., in the more usual case, the cultural unity of the nation is constructed on the basis of a common language.

The concept of culture is a relatively new one, dating back no further than the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹² Indeed, it is significant that it first came into use in the period which also saw the birth of nationalism as self-conscious political project. The concept was part of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment values, when it was especially contrasted with the concept of civilisation and, in Germany at least, conceived to be a superior value.¹³ The concept of civilisation – also an eighteenth-century invention¹⁴ – stood for a way of life which was the universal goal of historical development. Though its proponents believed that this way of life had in the first instance been achieved in England and/or France, it was in principle available to all countries which followed the same historical path. Culture, on the other hand, was rooted in specific ways of life, particular traditions and histories. It allowed for dimensions of feeling, poetry, mythology and oral tradition which w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The coming of nationalism
• 2 National and other identities
• 3 Three concepts of freedom: liberalism, republicanism and nationalism
• 4 Multiculturalism, Aboriginal rights and the nation
• 5 The end of the affair?
• Notes
• Bibliographical essay: the state of the nation
• Index