Writing the History of Nationalism

Stefan Berger, Eric Storm, Stefan Berger, Eric Storm

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350064317
• eBook ISBN: 9781350064331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is nationalism and how can we study it from a historical perspective? Writing the History of Nationalism answers this question by examining eleven historical approaches to nationalism studies in theory and practice. An impressive cast of contributors cover the history of nationalism from a wide range of thematic approaches, from traditional modernist and Marxist perspectives to more recent debates around gender. postcolonialism and the global turn in history writing. This book is essential reading for undergraduate students of history, politics and sociology wanting to understand the complex yet fascinating history of nationalism.

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Introduction: Writing the History of Nationalism – in what way, for whom and by which means?

Stefan Berger and Eric Storm

Introduction

A spectre is haunting the world (once again) – it is the spectre of nationalism. This adaptation of Karl Marx’s famous quote highlights the simple fact that nationalism has been a far more powerful ideology in the modern world than Communism; so powerful that even most of the Communist regimes, for as long as they existed, developed nationalist sentiments and ideas.¹ Ever since modern nationalism and nationalist movements arose (and when they did so is a matter of some debate), it has been continuously holding the world spellbound. Hyper-nationalism led to two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century and left much of Europe in rubble. The European Union and the United Nations were attempts to overcome old nationalist enmities and develop a culture of cooperation. When the Cold War came to an end in 1989, it looked as though Eastern Europe could now join their Western European neighbours to build a peaceful and, some hoped, postnational continent, even if nationalism had been very much alive and kicking in the non-European post-Second World War world.²

Yet, the 1990s brought the first signs that this vision of a postnational Europe would not be easy to put into place. The Yugoslav Wars, above all, but also the more peaceful separation of ways between the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as the rise of strong nationalist movements in post-Communist societies across Eastern Europe were signs that Eastern Europeans would not easily subscribe to the postnational vision of key Europeanists in the West.³ However, the latter were also challenged closer to home. On the one hand, regionalism turned to nationalism in some parts of Western Europe, notably in Scotland, Catalonia and Flanders. But nationalism also returned to mainstream politics in some of the larger West European democracies: UK Independence Party in Britain, the Front National in France, the Swedish Democrats in Sweden, the True Finns in Finland and most recently the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany are right-wing movements adapting nationalism to their cause and mobilizing in the name of the nation against an allegedly overpowering elite project of European unification.⁴ As the second decade of the twentieth century draws to a close and as Europe has been commemorating the key disaster of the twentieth century, the First World War, nationalism is also back on the agenda in Europe – the one place in the world which arguably went furthest in distancing itself from ‘hot’ forms of nationalism after 1945. If we look at the non-European world, nationalism arguably always has been far more virulent throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War period, and with Trump in the United States, Modi in India and Abe in Japan, nationalist leaders are doing extremely well.

The field of nationalism studies and the purpose of this volume

Given the contemporary relevance of nationalism, it is little surprising that nationalism studies has been, over the last decades, a fast-growing field of studies. Much of nationalism studies has been engaging critically with the phenomenon it studies. Many scholars have a strong inner distance to nationalism. However, there have also been studies promoting nationalism, sometimes using different words for it, such as patriotism, and there is a body of literature that seeks to naturalize national sentiment and make it seem ‘normal’.⁵ Although the latter strategy can, of course, also build on a long and distinguished tradition, ranging all the way back to Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it seems a clear minority among scholars of nationalism today.

The renaissance of nationalism studies preceded the tearing down of the Iron Curtain by about a decade, but it was also a direct reaction to political developments. In the immediate post-Second World War world and during the heyday of the ascendancy of European integration many scholars argued that nationalism was a spent force. It could be assigned to a dead past and dead pasts are rarely the object of true fascination among historians. Yet in the 1980s nationalism returned to Europe – in a variety of different guises. The political victory of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 saw attempts to return the United Kingdom to Victorian values, although her ambitious neo-liberal programme for fundamental change was, to a large extent, only dressed up in Victorian garb. Nevertheless, neo-liberalism was accompanied with high dosages of traditionalist nationalism in the United Kingdom which spun into hyper-nationalism during the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982. It was in the aftermath of this conflict that left wingers such as Raphael Samuel began to look into the phenomenon of nationalism again.⁶

In Germany, a new Christian Democrat-led government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl vowed to stop the liberal rot of its predecessor and instigate a ‘spiritual-moral turn’ that included re-establishing national pride among West Germans.⁷ In Italy, it was the threat of the dismantling of the nation state that led patriots to engage on a new promotion of nationalism that was supposed to counter the challenge by the Lega Nord.⁸ In many parts of Europe, therefore, nationalism was back in the 1980s and hence it is no coincidence that three fundamental books that can be said to have started the boom in nationalism studies appeared in 1983. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism looked at the relationship of economic and social modernization with the rise of nationalism.⁹ Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities was the starting point of a culturalist turn in nationalism studies, for he perceived nationalism, above all, in terms of cultural processes constructing a sense of national identity.¹⁰ And Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s edited collection entitled The Invention of Tradition combined Marxist perspectives on social and economic processes with cultural processes of constructing national identities.¹¹ All three books emphasized the importance of the construction of national identities and all three perceived nationalism as a modernist phenomenon. The same was true for another landmark publication in nationalism studies. John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State amounted to a magisterial comparative treatment of how state power was crucial for nationalist movements in many parts of the European and non-European world.¹² It was, however, not long that other authors were beginning to challenge both the constructivism and modernism that was to remain characteristic of many nationalism studies.¹³

Hence, right from the beginning of the renaissance of nationalism studies particular bodies of theory influenced conceptualizations of nation and nationalism in a major way. And yet, much historical work that was being produced over the next four decades did not reflect in a major way on the interconnection between specific bodies of theory and particular ways of framing both nation and nationalism. In this volume we would like to foreground bodies of theory that have had a major impact on nationalism studies in order to allow students of history to see that, depending on which theory you find most convincing, you will end up with quite different ideas about the meaning of nations and nationalism.

There are, of course, many excellent introductions to nationalism studies and to the history of nationalism. We cannot list them all in this introduction, yet selectively we would like to outline their scope. Thus, for example, Joep Leerssen wrote an extremely wide-ranging and nicely argumentative overview of the development of nationalism in Europe from around 1800 to the present.¹⁴ Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1789 is still a highly stimulating overview, even if he, writing just before the downfall of Communism and the end of the Cold War, seriously underestimated the power of nationalisms about to be reborn.¹⁵ Oliver Zimmer has penned an authoritative comparative book on the impact of nationalism from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War.¹⁶ Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson provided a rich texture of European nationalism in their excellent attempt to move beyond the tired distinction between a West European civic and a Central and Eastern European ethnic nationalism – another theorization of nationalism with a deep impact on scholarship for many decades.¹⁷ Most recently, John Breuilly’s edition of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism provides an in-depth global introduction to the many facets of research on nationalism over the past decades.¹⁸

When, in the post-Cold War world, there was a renewed turn to global history, scholars had to contend with the power of nation states and nationalist movements. Therefore, both in Christopher Bayly’s and in Jürgen Osterhammel’s celebrated introductions to global history, the nation looms large as a container that was, in many ways, at the very heart of transnational processes and globalizing tendencies.¹⁹

From within the social sciences there have also been attempts to provide more theoretical introductions to nationalism studies. Thus, for example, Anthony D. Smith has provided an early survey of works in nationalism studies trying to group them around central theoretical debates on constructivism, perennialism and modernism.²⁰ Later on Smith provided a magisterial attempt to map the landscape of nationalism studies.²¹ A chronolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Writing the History of Nationalism – in what way, for whom and by which means?
• 2 National histories and the promotion of nationalism in historiography – the pitfalls of ‘methodological nationalism’
• 3 Marxism and the history of nationalism
• 4 Modernism and writing the history of nationalism
• 5 Nations are (occasionally) forever: Alternatives to the modernist perspective
• 6 Cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to nationalism
• 7 Constructivism in the history of nationalism since 1945
• 8 Deconstructing nationalism: The cultural turn and poststructuralism
• 9 Postcolonialism and the history of anti-colonial nationalism
• 10 Gender approaches to the history of nationalism
• 11 The spatial turn and the history of nationalism: Nationalism between regionalism and transnational approaches
• 12 The global turn in historical writing and the history of nationalism
• Index
• Copyright Page