Community of Citizens

On the Modern Idea of Nationality

Dominique Schnapper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138508347
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351290906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this critically acclaimed work, for which she was awarded the Prix de L'Assemblee Nationale in 1994, sociologist Dominique Schnapper offers a learned and concise antidote to contemporary assaults on the nation. Schnapper's arguments on behalf of the modern nation represent at once a learned history of the national ideal, a powerful rejoinder to its contemporary critics, and a masterful essay in the sociological tradition of Ernest Renan, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Raymond Aron. If Schnapper asserts, the fate of liberal democracy is coterminous with that of the national ideal, then the nation's fate—and the answer to this question—must be of pressing interest to us all. Reflecting deeply on both the nation's past and future, Schnapper places her hopes in what she terms "the community of citizens."

No mere exercise in sociological abstraction, Schnapper's case for the nation also entails a practical political objective. In a time of radical difference, the national ideal may be the last, great social unifier. This book deserves a place alongside the works of Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith, and other classics in the study of nationalism and nationality. This work will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and political scientists alike.

1

Definitions

Because these terms are so heavily laden with values and emotions, it is common to speak of the necessity of clarifying the terms of the debate over ethnies, ethnicity, state, nations, and nationalisms. Still, one rarely succeeds in doing so. In everyday life, as well as in the social scientific literature, it is common to use the terms “ethnic” and “national” interchangeably. Nor is it unusual to make contradictory reproaches to the nation because, on the one hand, it is a matter of the nation and, on the other hand, of the ethnic group. To overcome these difficulties, the sociologist must make explicit the vocabulary used in the controversies of everyday life. He must eliminate semantic quarrels, especially since the latter are not only the instruments of political and scientific discussions, but also their object. It is important to distinguish the nation from other terms with which it is confused and to criticize the political, ideological, and scientific ambiguities of the word. Indeed, there is a tie between the concepts used and the theoretical presuppositions of an author: a definition of the nation is in itself already an implicit theory of the nation.

I do not pretend that the following definitions are valid once and for all. I do not believe that they may be imposed at the expense of all those that preceded them and all of those that will follow. It is not a matter of choosing sides among innumerable definitions, some juridical-political, and others cultural, which have already been proposed. My only goal is to make my remarks clear and to put forward an analysis which may be submitted to rational discussion and would prove, to repeat Popper’s term, falsifiable, that is to say, susceptible of being either invalidated or confirmed. These definitions will eventually be justified a posteriori. That is, if they prove fruitful and if the analysis that they allow permits a better consideration of historical realities—such as the long history of the formation of democratic nations, the strength of nationalisms after the collapse of communism, or recent breaks between Czechs and Slovaks, who had been organized in the Czechoslovakian nation since 1919, or between Flemish and Walloons, who had been so organized since 1830.

These definitions are founded on a nominalist conception, according to which concepts are instruments of comprehension, but not concrete realities. Accordingly, these definitions take issue with those nationalist thinkers who presume, on the contrary, an essentialist mode of thinking and who strive to demonstrate the immateriality and the eternity of their “nation” (that is to say, their ethnie), in order to justify that it be recognized as a political nation. Nations, Mazzini said, are the product of a divine project. It is difficult for nationalists to concede that the same populations are defined, according to historical periods, in terms of ethnie or nation. Contrary to these nationalists, one must be reminded both of the historical character of the nation, as of any political organization, and the instrumental character of the concepts which permit us to analyze it.

Between the Ethnie and the State

Nation and Ethnie

The nation is a particular form of political unit, whose uniqueness should be analyzed in terms of rigorous definitions—without forgetting that every definition is a theory. Like any political unit, the nation is defined by its sovereignty, exercised internally to integrate the populations that it includes and, externally, to assert itself as an historical subject in a global order founded on the existence and relations between politically constituted nations. But its uniqueness is that it integrates populations in a community of citizens, whose existence legitimates the internal and external action of the state.¹

The nation is to be distinguished from ethnic groups, which are not themselves politically organized. I will therefore designate as ethnies those groups of men who live as heirs of an historical and cultural community (often expressed in terms of common descent) and who share the desire to maintain it. In other words, the ethnie is defined by two dimensions: the historical community and cultural specificity.²

The ethnie is often called nation. One of the sources of the confusion owes to the fact that from the thirteenth century to the birth of the modern political nation, contemporaries have designated as “nation” what we today term the ethnie. The term itself appeared in England around 1250; two decades after, the “French nation” designated the whole group of French. Historiography was hereafter narrative released from the shackles of the church and the flat narrative of annals; the genre of the gesta found a new object, the people. In the whole of Western Europe, as in Hungary, historiography became national and contributed developing the consciousness of that which one termed nations.³ Authors competed to find a prestigious inheritance for their people, preferably in antiquity: the English, the Celts of Wales and of Brittany, the French, and the Germans pretended alike to be descended from Trojans. Hereafter, in French or in German, “nations” designated groups of origin: students of the University of Paris, for instance, were gathered in four nations, “the honorable nation of France, the faithful nation of Picardy, the venerable nation of Normandy and the constant nation of Germany.”

But if modern political nations have been the inheritors of, if not the borders, then at least, the feelings and initial statist institutions of these “nations” of the Middle Ages, they nonetheless constitute a different historical and political reality. They must be distinguished from ethnies, or whatever the name given by contemporaries and historians to ethnies: nations before the Revolution; nationalities of the nineteenth century; protonationalisms, defined as “certain variants of feelings of collective belonging which already existed and which could operate, as it were, potentially on the macro-political scale which would fit in with modern states and nations”;⁴ “prepolitical matrix of institutions, beliefs and solidarities”;⁵ or even “subnations.”⁶

These definitions effectively demonstrate that ethnies are as varied in their forms as the organization of humans in society. But, in any case, the ethnie has two characteristics: it is a group of belonging; and it does not necessarily have a political expression.

Ethnies are not more “natural” than nations. In both cases, there are historical forms, that should not be reified or substantified. Contrary to that which has been put forward by some sociologists, John Armstrong for instance, ethnic identity is not necessarily more fundamental, solid, or durable than the national reality and sentiment.⁷ Ethnies are not essences but are also products of a political situation, in the widest sense of the term. The rivalry between Yorubas and Ibos is often mentioned as an example of ethnic rivalries within the Nigerian nation. But the very term of Yorubas to designate various peoples of Western Nigeria was invented by Anglican missionaries who came to Abeokuta in the nineteenth century. They unified the languages of the region and organized these peoples as an entity recognized by the colonial administration: the Yuroba ethnie is hardly more ancient than the Nigerian nation.⁸ More generally, African ethnies have often been created in and of themselves by the policies of the colonizer. Similarly, in 1968 Tito invented the united “Muslim” ethnie of Bosnia-Herzegovina to reinforce his power. That is to say, he constituted populations which shared the same religion into an entity which was endowed with specific rights, thereby reinforcing and even arousing feelings of ethnic identity. Ethnies can be divided, gathered and reorganized by defining new social “borders,”⁹ by processes of “amalgamation,” of “incorporation,” of “division,” or of “proliferation,” depending on economic or political circumstances.¹⁰ But if ethnies are, like nations, historical constructions, individuals nonetheless experience ethnic belonging as a natural given, even if the ethnie does not have a proper political organization. Ethnies are distinguished from the modern or political nation, which was born in England, precisely by the fact that ethnies do not possess an autonomous political organization. The modern or political nation had already been conceived by the classic authors of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu or Rousseau), but it symbolically arrived as political actor with the American and French revolutions. Since then, it is not the size, or any other objective characteristics which distinguish the ethnie from the nation, but rather the nature of the tie which unites humans.

Even the scientific literature, however, does not always retain this distinction. Walker Connor, for instance, holds that the nation is the ethnie which has consciousness of itself. “An ethnic group may be readily discerned by an anthropologist or other outside observer, but until the members are themselves aware of the group’s uniqueness, it is merely an ethnic group and not a nation.”¹¹ He adopts Hugh Seton-Watson’s conception, who, after having observed: “Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists,” adopts the definition according to which “a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.”¹² Neither John Armstrong in Nations Before Nationalism,¹³ nor Suzanne Berger, in treating the Bretons, Basques, Scots and other European nations,¹⁴ distinguishes between ethnies and nations, since both designate by nations those subpolitical collectivities without proper political expression and without a state. But isn’t this an implicit justification of eventual claims for the transformation of ethnies into nations, leading us to think that the nature of one is as legitimate as that of the other?

The rebirth of the concept of ethnicity, which has become the key term of contemporary social scientific literature, particularly in the United States,¹⁵ has contributed to maintaining this equivocation. By discovering within the United States the strength of belongings in particular communities and by assigning the term “ethnic groups” to mean at once blacks, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jews and Native Americans, sociologists could avoid pursuing the potentially emotional theorizing on the nature of the individual’s belonging to the collective: racial in the case of blacks and Native Americans? National in the case of Irish and Italians? National and/or religious for Jews? In that way, one could avoid raising the question, now taboo, of race—even if one affirms that it is a socially constructed concept—or one of culture—which has commonly become the socially accepted way to designate what one once called race—to define groups. In particular, Jewish sociologists, prominent among theoreticians of ethnicity in the United States, could refrain from formulating the issue of Jewish identity made heated by secularization and the construction of nations in the modern epoch. That is, when the political order is organized by nations, can Jews constitute a simple religious or cultural group within non-Jewish nations by renouncing their possession of specific political rights, or do they remain a people with an essentially national vocation, hence destined to build their own sovereign nation?¹⁶

The classic argument between the two schools of thought—the “primordialist,” which holds that nations, as natural units of human association, have existed for eternity, and the latter, termed “modernist,” which insists on the essentially modern character of national construction—has always appeared to me to be based on the fact that its terms were not clearly defined. If one designates by “nation” any form of historical collectivity instead of speaking of the ethnie, then it is clear that humans have always belonged in collectives, even if its form has varied considerably throughout the ages. In that sense, nations, that is to say ethnies, have always existed. On the other hand, if one calls “nation,” as I do, the political form of the contemporary democratic age, it is a recent construction, even if it was not born from nothing, and if it perpetuates, even while transcending them, various preexisting ethnic feelings and institutions. Sentiments of belonging in a historical collectivity might very well have existed for centuries, but it is only in contemporary times that they founded and justified a particular form of political organizat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Definitions
• 2 The Political and the National
• 3 Transcendence by Citizenship
• 4 The Institution of National Uniqueness
• 5 Conceiving the Nation
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index of Names
• Index of Places and Themes