Nationalism and Modernism

Prof Anthony D Smith, Anthony Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134923335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first major study in over three decades to explore the essential arguments of all the major theoretical interpretations of nationalism, from the modernist approaches of Gellner, Nairn, Breuilly, Giddens and Hobsbawm to the alternative paradigms of van den Bergh and Geertz, Armstrong and Smith himself.
In a style accessible to the student and the general reader Smith traces the changing view of this hotly discussed topic within the current political, cultural and socioeconomic arena. He also analyses the contributions of such historians, sociologists and political scientists as Seton-Watson, Reynolds, Hastings, Horowitz and Brass. The survey concludes with an analysis of post-modern approaches to national identity, gender and nation, making it indispensable reading to all those interested in gaining full and authoritative knowledge of nationalism.

1 The rise of classical modernism

Three main issues have dominated the theory of nations and nationalism.

The first is ethical and philosophical. It concerns the role of the nation in human affairs. Should we regard the nation as an end in itself, an absolute value which is incommensurable with all other values? Or should we understand the nation and national identity as a means to other ends and values, a proximate value, and therefore bound to time, place and context, and especially to the conditions of a modern epoch?

The second is anthropological and political. It concerns the social definition of the nation. What kind of community is the nation and what is the relationship of the individual to that community? Is the nation fundamentally ethno-cultural in character, a community of (real or fictive) descent whose members are bound together from birth by kinship ties, common history and shared language? Or is it largely a social and political community based on common territory and residence, on citizenship rights and common laws, in relation to which individuals are free to choose whether they wish to belong?

The third is historical and sociological. It concerns the place of the nation in the history of humanity. Should we regard the nation as an immemorial and evolving community, rooted in a long history of shared ties and culture? Or are nations to be treated as recent social constructs or cultural artefacts, at once bounded and malleable, typical products of a certain stage of history and the special conditions of a modern epoch, and hence destined to pass away when that stage has been surpassed and its conditions no longer apply?

These three issues and the debates they have engendered recur continually in discussions of nations and nationalism. As we would expect, they often overlap and intertwine, and it is not unknown for theorists to take up clearcut positions on one issue, only to ‘cross over’ to the unexpected ‘side’ in one or other of the debates, to hold for example that nations are recurrent and immemorial yet means to other ends, or that they are social and political communities but constitute absolute values. Moreover, the third and last debate conflates two separate issues: the issue of the antiquity or modernity of the nation in history, and the question of its evolved or socially constructed nature. As we shall see, this conflation of issues makes it difficult to adhere to any simple characterisation of theorists or classification of approaches and theories in the field. Nevertheless, there is enough consistency among analysts and theories to propose a general classificatory scheme based in particular on the third of the above three issues. Such a classification reveals the main lines of debate in the field in recent decades, though it can serve only as an approximation to understanding of the logic at work behind particular approaches and theories.

The roots of classical modernism

Early forerunners

The earliest scholars of nationalism were in fact happy to conflate these issues, mingling an evolutionary account of the development of nations with a degree of voluntarism, and a prescription for political activism with a sense of the long-term ethno-cultural roots of nations. Michelet, for example, viewed the nation as the best defence for individual liberty in the era of fraternity. The French Revolution had ushered in a Rousseauan religion of patriotism, of ‘Man fraternising in the presence of God’, with France, ‘the common child of nations’, surrounded by sympathetic countries like Italy, Poland and Ireland, whose nationalisms belonged to Mazzini’s Young Europe movement. At the same time, he shared the naturalist assumption of Sieyes and others for whom nations existed outside the social and legal bond, in nature.¹

For Lord Acton, on the other hand, the central question is ethical: the extent to which the (French) theory of national unity ‘makes the nation a source of despotism and revolution’, whereas the libertarian (English) theory of nationality harks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and regards the nation ‘as the bulwark of self-government, and the foremost limit to the excessive power of the State’. For Acton, the continental idealist view of

nationality does not aim at either liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind.

(Acton 1948:166–95)

Acton’s conservative analysis nevertheless vindicates multinational empires, like the Habsburg, on the ground that, unlike the national state, it can ‘satisfy different races’. His general commitment to diversity is not unlike that of Moser and Herder; and his belief in liberty he shares with John Stuart Mill who argued for the right of national self-determination and collective voluntarism.²

Perhaps the most influential of these early analyses was that contained in a lecture of 1882 by Ernest Renan, which he delivered to counter the militarist nationalism of Heinrich Treitschke. Renan combines a sense of ethno-cultural formation in Europe over the longue durée with a belief in the active political commitment of members of the nation. Renan starts with a contrast that is to have a long history: between the fusion of ‘races’ in the nations of Western Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe. In France, by the tenth century, the idea of any difference in race between Gallic and Frankish populations had disappeared; what counts today are the shared experiences and common memories (and forgettings) of the members, which makes the nation

a soul, a spiritual principle…. A nation is a great solidarity, created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and of those which one is disposed to make in the future. It presupposes a past; but it resumes itself in the present by a tangible fact: the consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue life in common. The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every day, as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.

(Renan 1882, cited in Kohn 1955:135–40)

In these early commentaries on the principle of nationality, written with specific political developments in mind, there is no attempt to fashion a general theory applicable to all cases, or to resolve the antinomies of each issue in a coherent and systematic manner. This was left to the next generation. By the late nineteenth century, when the concept of ‘nation’ was often used interchangeably with that of ‘race’, more comprehensive and reductionist schemes emerged. The racist schema of biological struggle for mastery of organic racial nations was only one, albeit the most striking and influential. Even the Marxists were not immune, despite their official instrumentalist attitude to nationalism. In judging nationalisms by their revolutionary uses, Marx and Engels had also been swayed by their German Romantic and Hegelian inheritance, with its stress on the importance of language and political history for creating nation-states and their animus against small, history-less, as well as backward, nations. Their followers took over this contempt for the ‘unhistorical nations’, thereby allowing to the concept of the nation a certain historical and sociological independence, and blurring the insistence on the dependance of nationality on the growth of capitalism and its bourgeois ruling classes.³

We can see this ambivalence on all the major issues—ethical, anthropological and historical—in the work of the Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer. On the one hand, Bauer traces the long evolution of European nationalities from their ethnic foundations and class formations into ‘communities of character’; on the other hand, he and his associates believed it was possible to influence the course of national (and international) evolution by active political intervention which would separate the principle of cultural nationality from territorial location and political rights. In this conception, the principle of nationality is both an absolute and a proximate value, both an evolved ethno-cultural community and a class-constructed social category. By organising nations within a wider multinational state, it would be possible both to preserve their unique historical character and also ensure that they contributed to wider societal integration and the realisation of social freedom and abundance.⁴

Even among the nationalists themselves, we find the same permutations and inconsistencies. Some, it is true, followed the principles of German Romanticism to their conclusion and became full-blooded organicists, believing in the seamless, immemorial and even biological character of nations. Others were less consistent, believing with Mazzini that, though geography, history, ethnic descent, language and religion might determine much of the character and situation of the nation, political action and the mobilisation of the people were essential if the nation was to be ‘reawakened’ and recalled to its sacred mission. From an early period, these dilemmas of evolution and intervention, of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, were as acute for nationalists as they were for communists.⁵

Intellectual foundations

It is during this period, at the turn of the twentieth century, that we can discern the intellectual foundations of the classical modernist paradigm of nationalism. Broadly speaking, there were four major streams of influence: Marxism, crowd psychology, Weberian and Durkheimian. I shall deal briefly with the contribution of each to the formulation of a coherent modernist approach to the understanding of nations and nationalism.

• 1 It is important to stress at the outset that none of these traditions were concerned more than peripherally with the analysis of nations or nationalism. In the case of the Marxist tradition, this might be ascribed to the early period in which the founding fathers wrote; though in the world of 1848, nationalism was already a powerful, if limited, force in Europe. This lack of concern must rather be attributed to the conscious decision on the part of both the founders and their followers, in reacting against German idealism, to relegate environmental and cultural influences to the background, and concentrate on the explication of the role of economic and class factors in the evolution of humanity. This in turn meant that, in relation to the explanatory role attributed to class conflict and to the contradictions in the mode of production in the successive stages of historical development, ethnic and national principles and phenomena had to be accorded a secondary or even derivative role, becoming at most catalysts or contributory (or complicating) rather than major causal factors. There was also a crucial ethical consideration. Given the inbuilt propensity of human evolution to self-transendence through stages of political revolution, and given the fundamental role of class conflict in generating revolution, there was no place for any other factor, especially one that might impede or divert from the ‘movement of history’, except insofar as it might contribute to hastening that movement in specific instances. It was in these circumstances that Marxists identified particular nationalist movements in strategic terms, judging their ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ character in relation to a given revolutionary situation. It was from this perspective that Marx and Engels passed favourable judgments on Polish and Irish nationalism, as they were likely to weaken Tsarist feudal absolutism and British capitalism respectively and hasten the next stage of historical evolution; whereas nationalist movements among the ‘backward’ small nations of the western and southern Slavs could only evoke their contempt or disapproval, as they were judged likely to divert the bourgeoisie or proletariat from their historic task in the evolution of Europe (Cummins 1980; Connor 1984).
  Neither Marx nor Engels, Lenin nor Stalin, Luxemburg nor Kautsky, endeavoured to present a theory or model of nations and nationalism per se, not only because these phenomena were viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, even by those who conceded their political significance, but because the ‘science’ with which they were concerned was intimately linked to a specific worldview and political strategy that sought to reduce all phenomena, at the explanatory level at least, to their economic basis, deriving cultural and political identities and movements from the class alignments thrown up by a specific stage in the development of the mode of production. It was in this context that the ‘formalism’ associated with Marxist analysis became prominent: the idea that nations provided the forms and vessels, while class formations and their ideologies provided the content and ends to which the next stage of history aspired. This type of reductive reasoning has left a strong imprint on some latterday approaches to the study of nationalism, even where the theorists no longer accept the worldview and strategy in which it was embedded, and even when they eschew the cruder forms of economic reductionism and ideological formalism found in some of Marx’s followers.⁶
  Equally important for the legacy of the early Marxist tradition has been its historical and global emphasis, and its Eurocentric bias. For Marx, Engels, Lenin and their followers, nations and nationalism were intrinsic to the development of the modern capitalist era. They were to be understood as manifestations both of European capitalism’s need for ever larger territorial markets and trading blocs, and of the growing distance between the modern capitalist state and bourgeois civil society and the levelling of all intermediate bodies between state and citizen characteristic of advanced absolutism. Of course, these themes were not confined to Marxists, and they remained relatively undeveloped in the early Marxist corpus. But it is fair to say that with the rediscovery of the early Marx’s writings and their debt to Hegel and the Left Hegelians, they assumed a new importance at the very moment when a significant number of scholars were increasingly turning their attention to the theory of nationalism. Similarly, the current interest in the concept of ‘globalisation’ which can in part be traced to Marxist concerns with the development of late capitalism, has been increasingly linked to the role of nation-states and nationalism in advanced industrial society and as such reasserts the Western and modernist bias characteristic of the Marxist tradition (Davis 1967; Avineri 1968; Nairn 1977).
• 2 The influence of the second tradition of crowd psychology and Freud’s later social psychological work has been more pervasive but also more limited. It would be difficult to point to particular theorists of national identity and nationalism who have made explicit use of the crowd psychology of Le Bon or the herd instinct of Trotter, or even of the analyses of Simmel, Mead, Adorno and the later theories of Freud—despite the work of Leonard Doob or Morton Grodzins. On the other hand, many of their insights have permeated the thinking of recent scholars of nationalism. Perhaps the most obvious case is that of Kedourie’s portrait of the social psychology of restless, alienated youth resentful of parental traditions and the humiliations of authority. But we can also discern the influence of an earlier crowd psychology in some of the functionalist analyses of mass-mobilising nationalism as a ‘political religion’ in the work of David Apter, Lucian Pye and Leonard Binder, and of crowd behaviour in social movements in the work of Neil Smelser. There is also a measure of influence exerted by the later Freud, as well as Mead and Simmel, in recent theories that emphasise the role of significant Others in the formation of national identities and the oppositional framework of inclusion and exclusion in nationalism.⁷
  What these approaches have in common is a belief in the dislocating nature of modernity, its disorientation of the individual and its capacity for disrupting the stability of traditional sources of support. It is in these respects that the influence of certain kinds of earlier social psychology contributed to the overall picture of nations and nationalism presented by classical modernism. More generally, social psychological assumptions drawn from a variety of sources can be found in the most unexpected places—among social anthropologists and sociologists as well as historians and political scientists—but these are not confined to those who adhere to the modernist framework (see Brown 1994).
• 3 The third major influence derives from the work of Max Weber. Strongly imbued with the prevailing tide of German nationalism, Weber never managed to produce the study of the rise of the nation-state which he intended to write; yet his writings contain a number of themes that were to become central both to classical modernism and its subsequent development. These included the importance of politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The modernist paradigm
• 1 The rise of classical modernism
• Part I Varieties of modernism
• Part II Critics and alternatives
• Conclusion: problems, paradigms and prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index