The Sociology of Nationalism

Tomorrow's Ancestors

David McCrone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134822607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In recent years nationalism has emerged as one of the dominant issues of our time. In this lucid and balanced account, David McCrone lays out the key issues and debates around a subject which is too often obscured by polemic. Among topics covered are:
* classical and contemporary theories of nationalism
* nationalism and ethnicity
* nationalism and the nation state
* colonial and post-colonial nationalisms
* neo nationalism and post communist nationalism.

1
THE FALL AND RISE OF NATIONALISM

Few social and political phenomena have attracted more attention in recent years than has nationalism, and yet few have been so much neglected. By the middle of the twentieth century much of social and political science had confined it to the dustbin of history. Nationalism was ‘over’. It had ushered in the modern state in the nineteenth century, and had reached its deformed apotheosis in fascism in the twentieth. Its final purpose seemed to be to break up empires thereafter, as post-colonial regimes used it as a vehicle for state-building. For the rest, this observation by Dudley Seers on the conventional wisdom seemed to ring true:

Nationalism was not merely of little and declining practical consequence: it was obviously evil. It had lain at the root of war. German chauvinism, in particular, had contributed to two terrible wars. Moreover, nationalist sentiment was still a menace in the second half of the twentieth century, getting in the way of the creation of a just, peaceful and prosperous world society, which modern technology had put within our reach—if only population growth could be controlled. Particularly silly and dangerous were the narrower nationalists who rebelled, often violently, against the state to which they belonged—the Basques, Welsh, Kurds, Matabele, Amerindians, French Canadians, to name a few out of scores of possible examples. They might have economic grievances, but these could be put right by some redistribution of income.

(Seers, 1983:10)

Writing this in the early 1980s, Seers was pointing to the failure of social scientists to see what was developing beneath their noses. His gentle sarcasm was aimed at their failure to take nationalism seriously. As the millennium approaches, this is no longer possible. In the West, regions and nations which seemed settled within their existing states for so long began to seek greater autonomy in the final quarter of the century just as new supra-national organisations such as the European Community/Union and the North American Free Trade Association were eroding the sovereignty of these states. In the Third World, liberation nationalism was judged to have done its work of breaking up empires, but was proving reluctant to leave the scene. By the 1990s ‘ethnic’ conflicts had broken out, and could be traced back with little difficulty to fairly arbitrary devices employed by colonialists for the purposes of divide and rule. The central African conflict between Tutsi and Hutu seemed to owe far more to the racist grid used to map the peoples of that territory than to any meaningful and long-standing cultural hatred between people so labelled. Finally, and to cap it all, the collapse of communism in 1989 ushered in a new wave of nationalism across the old Soviet empire which even the most reluctant of commentators could not ignore. A new vocabulary of ‘ethnic cleansing’—a new word for an old idea—emerged in the tripartite war in the former Yugoslavia, attributed to a despairing UN official seeking a term for bouts of inter-ethnic killing which the textbooks told us was not meant to happen. Nationalism had joined the ranks of the Undead.

What did it all mean? The said textbooks were of little help. To be sure, there was a sizeable literature on ‘nation-building’, mainly on the nineteenth-century variety which shaped most modern European states. Liberation nationalism was also an important sub-literature, but little else was to hand. These things might have ushered in the twentieth century, but they were not meant to usher it out. Mid-century developments were deemed to have ‘solved’ the problem. Fascism was dead, and post-war states had evolved a safer form of economic nationalism where they sought to harness popular support for economic competition with other states in ‘the national interest’.

By the 1980s, when it was no longer possible to ignore nationalism, the weight of ‘informed opinion’ was largely hostile. The British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, issued a leader—‘Don’t put out more flags!’—on the premise, as Tom Nairn pointed out, ‘if enough new flags were put out, the Old Demon would wreak havoc with the New World Order’ (Nairn, 1993:3), as if more flags would lead inexorably to ethnic cleansing. This new order was rapidly turning into a New World Disorder, and opinion educated in the binary divides of the Cold War translated easily into a new Manichean view: ‘Armageddon has been replaced by the ethnic abyss’ (ibid.).

By the 1980s and 1990s the political orthodoxies of the Right and Left were also uncomfortable with new forms of nationalism. The New Liberalism on the Right gave primacy to the market, which was gifted with the powers to reduce all conflicts to economic competition, and hence resolve them by recognisable means. An older form of Conservative thought which laid greater stress on national units as the core of economic, political and cultural relations was superseded by this neo-liberalism, only to be revived by the perceived threat of supra-state bodies like the European Union to ‘national sovereignty’. The problem with its analysis is that it failed to resolve the contradiction between global markets and national self-determination; it assumed the triumph of economics over politics. The Right, certainly in the UK, had so firmly hitched its wagon to the neo-liberal horse in the 1980s that to belatedly dispute the direction in which it was going was not very convincing. In many ways the old nineteenth-century association of liberalism and nationalism—that national and social liberation went together—had been lost. Reducing society to marketplace meant that there was little room in the intellectual canon of the New Right for the ‘nation’.

The Liberal-Left too was ill-prepared to analyse new forms of nationalism. In both its socialist and social democratic forms, nationalism was an ill-fitting garment. In his monumental study of the history of socialism, Donald Sassoon (1997) makes it plain that the social democratic state operated within a highly organised and de facto nationalism, which was nevertheless usually implicit. Yet, at an ideological level, it often defined itself over and against nationalism which was associated with bourgeois or right-wing political parties. Before it finally imploded, communism had put its faith in workers of the world (not nations) uniting. Social democrats preferred the diffuse and eroding qualities of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to see off nationalist particularism, and were especially ill-prepared when it emerged in their own western backyards. (Scotland and Wales continue to cause political and intellectual difficulties for the Labour Party.) A few brave souls have worked at fusing socialism and nationalism—‘neo-nationalism’—but by and large the major social democratic parties of Europe have found that this does not come naturally to them.

Nationalism: what is it?

If political parties struggle to come to terms with nationalism, then the academy is far less reticent. It is difficult to open a publisher’s catalogue these days without encountering another slew of books on the subject. (This one, of course, takes its share of the blame.) Nationalism studies is a burgeoning subject, and scholarly treatises on theories of nationalism sit alongside studies of new empirical instances in all parts of the world. The student of nationalism can quickly become disillusioned, for there are no neat definitions of the key concepts. There simply is no agreement about what nationalism is, what nations are, how we are to define nationality.

On reflection, why should there be? Like many/most concepts in social sciences, conceptual definitions and differences are theoretically rooted. Just as we would not expect social scientists to agree what ‘social class’ is, neither is it surprising that they disagree about nations and nationalism. No single universal theory of nationalism is possible, for as John Hall points out, ‘As the historical record is diverse, so too must be our concepts’ (1993:1). Like ‘social class’, the ‘nation’ is bound up with social praxis. In Rogers Brubaker’s words:

‘Nation’ is a category of ‘practice’, not (in the first instance) a category of analysis. To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category ‘nation’, the ways it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organise discourse and political action.

(Brubaker, 1996:10)

Here, we are on familiar, if somewhat boggy, terrain in the social sciences. Are nations ‘real’, or are they simply terms of discourse which are caught up in political and social practice? Do we focus on historical events and processes in which the ideology of nationalism and nations operate, or do we stand outside and deconstruct them? We might follow Brubaker who argued that it is important to decouple the study of nationhood and ‘nation-ness’ from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities and communities. He comments: ‘We should not ask “what is a nation?”, but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalised within and among states?’ (ibid.: 16). This may seem to be sound advice, but if we think about it, it can be applied to almost any other social category we care to mention—social class, gender, ethnicity and so on—and can too often lead to an obsession with deconstruction which never actually gets down to analysing what happens ‘on the ground’.

The question ‘what is a nation?’ has, of course, a particular resonance in nationalism studies. It is the title of a famous lecture by Ernest Renan in 1882 which has subsequently become an obligatory reference for all scholars of the subject. Taking as his starting-point nations with ‘full national existence’ such as France, England, Italy and Spain (but not Germany, for reasons we will come to), Renan was more interested in the problematic cases. For example, why is Holland a nation, and Hannover not? How did France continue as a nation when the dynastic principle which created it was swept away? Why is Switzerland, with three languages, three religions and three or four ‘races’, a nation when Tuscany is not? Why, he asked, is Austria a state but not a nation?

Renan examined in turn the ‘objective’ bases of nations. As regards ‘race’, it is plain that in modern nations blood is mixed whereas in the tribes and cities of antiquity it was not (or far less so). In a comment unwittingly loaded with the weight of future twentieth-century history, he ridiculed the blood definition: One does not have the right to go through the world fingering people’s skulls and taking them by the throat saying: ‘You are of our blood; you belong to us!’ (Eley and Suny, 1996:49). Renan died a decade after delivering his lecture, and did not live to see precisely such fingering and measuring in the first half of the twentieth century culminating in fascism. Just as race cannot define nations, neither can the usual suspects of language, religion, physical or material interests. For example, language ‘invites people to write, but it does not force them to do so’ (ibid.: 50). There are nations which speak the same language as their oppressors. Liberation movements in Latin America had, for instance, little difficulty in using Spanish as a linguistic means of mobilising their populations (Williamson, 1992), and English was the main language of nationalism in India and Ireland, despite the misgivings of some indigenous nationalists. Max Weber pointed out that in reality many states have more than one language group, and a common language is often insufficient to sustain a sense of national identity (Weber, 1978:395–6). Neither can religion supply a sufficient basis for nationalism despite its ideological power and the powerful ways in which modern nationalism appeals to what Hayes called a ‘religious sense’ (Hayes, 1960). Despite this, there is no simple mapping of God onto nation.

Material factors cannot be discounted either, but self-contained trading patterns do not a nation make. In a comment resonant of the future European Community/ Union, Renan observes: ‘a Zollverein [customs union] is not a patrie’ (Eley and Suny, 1996:51), although he predicted that a European confederation would probably replace nations, a comment manifestly ahead of its time. While material and economic interests cannot be ignored, there is more to nationalism than these. To echo Chateaubriand’s comment: ‘Men [sic] do not allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions’ (quoted in Connor, 1994:206). We should be careful here not to assume a dichotomy between ‘interests’ and ‘passions’, for to do so would be to ignore the significance of ‘national’ interest which is every bit as ‘rational’ (in a geo-political sense) as economic interests. Finally, nationalists may make great play of geography—rivers, mountains, soil—but such geo-politics ignores the fact that the nation ‘is a spiritual family not a group determined by the shape of the earth’ (Renan, in Eley and Suny, 1996:52).

So, what is required, according to Renan? Speaking the language of the nineteenth century, he observes that the nation is in essence a ‘soul’, a spiritual principle, a kind of moral conscience. He concludes: ‘A nation is therefore a largescale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those one is prepared to make in the future’ (Eley and Suny, 1996:53). This is very close to what Benedict Anderson meant by his now-celebrated definition of the nation as ‘an imagined community’, written a century after Renan’s lecture. Much ink was wasted in the intervening period by scholars trying to distil the objective essence of the nation. What is less well-remembered about Renan’s lecture is its purpose. He was making a political statement, not simply an academic one. He was a (French) liberal nationalist who was horrified at the defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Prussia on the grounds that this territory was ‘objectively’ part of the Reich. Renan was at pains to point out that people’s day-to-day commitment to the territory in which they were governed was essential—what he memorably referred to as the ‘daily plebiscite’ of the nation’s existence: ‘a great aggregation of men [sic] with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates a moral conscience which is called a nation’ (ibid.: 53). Plainly his plea fell on deaf ears, and it was a point which took another sixty-odd years and two world wars to drive home.

By the 1990s, Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ is undoubtedly the dominant one. Like Renan, he takes a ‘spiritual’ view of these things. His point of departure is:

that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.

(Anderson, 1991:4)

In essence, says Anderson, the nation is an imagined political community, in the following ways (ibid.: 6-7).

• ‘It 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.’
• ‘The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.’
• ‘It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic realm.’
• ‘It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’

We should note, following Anderson, that the nation is ‘imagined’ not ‘imaginary’. In his essay, he rebukes Ernest Gellner for the famous line that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner, 1964:169). Anderson points out that Gellner confuses ‘invention’ with ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’ rather than ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’; in other words, the nation is imagined rather than imaginary. This is an important but easily overlooked point, and will form the basis of this book. In counter-criticism of Anderson, we might say that he does not develop the ways in which this process of ‘imagining’ is carried out and sustained. For example, we would not have much difficulty showing that the fons et origo of a nation is false, but it is quite another matter to trace the institutional mechanisms which sustain and shape the belief in a people’s distinctiveness. As we shall see in the next section, many of the key debates about nationalism are formed around this disputed point.

Kedourie’s comment that ‘nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (1960:9) begs more interesting questions than it answers. Can we be sure, for example, that nothing like it predated the ‘modern’ era? And if not, why has it transformed itself into so many different forms, and will it last into the twenty-first century?

Nationalism is full of puzzles. It is a form of ‘practice’ rather than ‘analysis’ (Brubaker); it presents itself as a universal and global phenomenon, but is ineluctably particular and local (Anderson); it is a feature of the modern age, but has its roots in something much older (Smith); it is essentially about cultural matters—language, religion, symbols—but cannot be divorced from matters of economic and material development (Nairn).

We will use these conundrums to review the main disputes and debates about nationalism of recent years. Perhaps the most fundamental of these concerns the relationship between the cultural and the political or, to put it another way, between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’. So successfully have these two ideas been grafted on to each other, that our vocabulary struggles to distinguish between them. Put simply, the ‘nation’ is usually a synonym for the state. We talk for example of the ‘British nation’ while (usually) recognising that it is actually a multinational state. Even historians of this problematic subject such as Linda Colley (1992) speak of how this ‘nation’ was forged in the eighteenth century. Sociologists too tend to equate nation and state. Anthony Giddens, for example, defines the nation as a ‘bordered power-container’ in the following way: ‘a “nation”, as I use the term here, only exists when a state has a unified administrative reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed’ (1985:119), and a ‘nation-state’ is ‘a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence’ (ibid.: 121).

This (con)fusion of nation and state is a common one, and must be taken seriously. It is not simply a slip of Giddens’ illustrious pen. What it signifies is that so closely allied have the cultural and the political become in the modern state that we usually treat nation and state as synonyms. In its conventional expression—the nation-state—it is implied that the cultural and the political are in alignment, that the ‘people’ who are governed by the institutions of the state are by and large culturally homogeneous in having a strong and common linguistic, religious and symbolic identity. Because the author of this book stands—in time—at the end of the twentieth century, and—in space—in a ‘stateless nation’, Scotland, where the lack of alignment is more and more obvious and increasingly problematic, the conventional wisdom seems misplaced. Perhaps we see more clearly than most the ‘impending crisis of the hyphen’ (Anderson, 1996b:8). Some scholars such as Connor (1994: ch. 4) have pointed out that very few so-called nation-states are actually such (he claims less than 10 per cent in 1971), and historical sociologists like Charles Tilly are at pains to distinguish between ‘nation-states’ and ‘national...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE SOCIOLOGY OF NATIONALISM
• INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIOLOGY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: THE FALL AND RISE OF NATIONALISM
• 2: TRIBE, PLACE AND IDENTITY: ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM
• 3: INVENTING THE PAST: HISTORY AND NATIONALISM
• 4: ‘DEVILS AT HIS BACK’: NATIONALISM AND ERNEST GELLNER
• 5: NATION AS STATE: NATIONALISM AND STATE-BUILDING
• 6: DIALECTIC WITH THE OTHER: LIBERATION NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• 7: IN AND OUT OF THE STATE: THE RISE AND RISE OF NEO-NATIONALISM
• 8: THE UNFORESEEN REVOLUTION: POST-COMMUNIST NATIONALISM
• 9: NATIONALISM AND ITS FUTURES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY