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

• MobilityUniversal LiteracyStandardization of languageGeneral 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 cultureOne style of communicationOne 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 self-evidently 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 dynastic-religious 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 ideologiesThe nationalism is an expression of modern, industrial

societyThe 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 revolutionEconomic – the division of laborPolitical – the control of administrationCultural – 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 administrationIn 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 supportsCentralized 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

churchMonarchs 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 consolidationCultural standardization

• Nation was gradually formedBecause 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 stateThey become sentimentally attached to the homelandThey gained a sense of identity and self esteem through

their national identificationThey 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 self-consciously 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 communicationPrint language made possible for people who speak

different dialects to communicateThe 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 countriesThe nation model of colonized countries was colonial stateThree 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”.