How to define the self-defined?
A century after Algernon Sidney had introduced the concept of the nation in the 1680s, a similar definition of the nation was provided by the French Encyclopaedists, who defined the nation as a group of people inhabiting a given territory and obeying the same laws and government (Smith 1986: 135). The nation was defined as a community of laws and legal institutions: without exceptions on grounds of race, religion, age, or gender, its members were bound by common laws and had uniform rights and obligations stemming from a single source, the sovereign state. Thus this concept emerged first in England and then in France, under the ideological umbrellas of liberalism and the Enlightenment, with the rising capitalism in the background. Probably the most comprehensive among those early definitions is to be found in the lecture What Is a Nation, delivered in 1882 by Ernest Renan:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two things, actually, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrances; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage which all hold in common. […] A nation is a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those that one is disposed to make again. […] The existence of a nation is an everyday plebiscite; it is, like the very existence of the individual, a perpetual affirmation of life.
(Renan 1882: 26–29, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 17)
The existence of the nation is “an everyday plebiscite”, akin to “a perpetual affirmation of life”, says Renan. By implication, without that everyday plebiscite, without that persistent affirmation of life, the nation would dissolve and cease to exist. In Renan's view, the will of the individual to participate in such a prosaic, principally metaphoric plebiscite (idealised as daily, yet only occasional in practical manifestation) plays the crucial role in the formation and perpetuation of any nation. This will is not confined only to affirming membership in an aggregate of individuals; it is, rather, extended to include the perpetuation of all those values which are needed to constitute and preserve the nation as a community. Chief among such values, deemed essential, is the possession of a common ethno-cultural heritage. The will of the community's members, the self-conscious striving to preserve this presupposed heritage through the continuation of life in common, is what transforms them into active participants. As Elie Kedourie explained it, “the will of the individual must ultimately indicate whether a nation exists or not”: ‘objective’ criteria may well be used to define an ethnic group, yet are inadequate to define a nation (Kedourie 1993: 75).
A hundred years later, Renan's implicit distinction between ethnic community and the nation found explicit, and less flexible, expression in the words of Walker Connor:
A nation is a self-aware ethnic group. 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. While an ethnic group may, therefore, be other-defined, the nation must be self-defined.
(Connor 1978, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 46)
In this sense, “all that is irreducibly required for the existence of a nation is that the members share an intuitive conviction of the group's separate origin and evolution”. Thus Connor defines the nation as “the largest group that can command a person's loyalty because of felt kinship ties”, where this ancestral feeling is by no means understood as an objective category based on factual history (Connor 1994: 202). The sense of common and unique descent is fundamentally psychological. It is also non-rational: citing Chateaubriand's statement that “[m]en don't allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions”, Connor asserts that “people do not voluntarily die for things that are rational” (ibid.: 206). This emphasis on the subjective nature of an intuitive conviction in a common origin shared by members of a group, however, does not seem sufficient to clearly distinguish the phenomenon of the nation from that of an ethnic group. According to Max Weber's definition, ethnicity is also characterised by a similar sense of presumed common ancestry:
We shall call ethnic groups those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent. […] Ethnic membership (Gemeinsamkeit) differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity.
(Weber 1968: I, 389, cited in Connor 1994: 102)
The claim that the nation must be self-defined, whereas an ethnic group may be defined by others, led Connor to the question of when does the nation come into being? The answer he offers is that the nation comes into existence when most of the ethnic group's members become aware of themselves as such. Thus every ethnic group represents a potential nation. However, what precedes its members’ self-definition in terms of what they are is the awareness of what they are not: before they define their common identity, they need to experience and feel their otherness in relation to members of other groups (Connor 1994: 103).
This emphasis on ethnicity as the only basis for the nation's emergence stands in sharp contrast to those theories which claim the state provides such a basis. This view is founded on an assumption that the ‘original’ or ‘civic’ nations of Western Europe and the Americas were created by the nationalising efforts of these already existing states: in these parts of the world, the state promoted the concept of presumed, imagined, or invented ancestral ties between its subjects to homogenise society into the community of the nation. This approach was most conspicuously expressed by Hans Kohn:
The growth of nationalism is the process of integration of the masses of the people into a common political form. Nationalism therefore presupposes the existence, in fact or as an ideal, of a centralized form of government over a large and distinct territory.
(Kohn 2005: 4)
Anthony Giddens agrees that “a nation […] only exists when a state has a unified reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed” (Giddens 1985: 119). A nation is “a collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state apparatus and those of other states” (ibid.: 116). This approach follows the logic of Sidney's definition, albeit with an emphasis on executive, rather than legislative power. According to Giddens, it was the rise of an ‘objective’ factor, in the form of a stable, bureaucratic administration that distinguished the nation-state from other polities. However, it is not clear what distinguishes such a nation-state from, for example, centrally administered European empires; this is a categorisation that would describe the Habsburg Empire as well as the French Republic.
The intellectual foundations of this view are mainly rooted in Weber's theory, wherein bureaucracy is held to exemplify the spirit and actions of the modern, rationalised state; consequently, its intimate association with, and interpenetration of, the state (ibid.: 70). However, Weber himself never defined the nation as an offspring of the state, let alone identified it with the state's reach. For Weber, the nation is to be defined as “a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own” (Weber 1948: 171–179, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 25).
Thus Renan's “will to continue life in common” may transform an ethno-cultural community into a nation, provided that the claim to common life is based on the assumption that its continuation can in actuality only be realised within the framework of the common state. Or, in Kohn's words, “nationality is formed by the decision to form a nationality” (Kohn 2005: 15).
The will to create the (supposedly necessary) conditions for living in common through the pursuit of a common, autonomous state is what – to paraphrase Gellner – serves to constitute nations where previously they did not exist; the will to perpetuate these conditions, through the preservation of the common state, is what maintains already existing nations. This tendency towards an autonomous state is what distinguishes the nation from other solidarity groups, including those with presumed ancestral ties: it is exactly this quality that separates the nation from an ethnic group.
However, Weber's emphasis on the role of the state in the nation's self-definition did not prevent him from noting that,
The idea of the nation is apt to include the notions of common descent and of an essential, though frequently indefinite, homogeneity. The nation has these notions in common with the sentiment of solidarity of ethnic communities, which is also nourished from various sources. But the sentiment of ethnic solidarity does not by itself make a nation. […] Thus it seems that a group of people under certain conditions may attain the quality of a nation through specific behaviour, or they may claim this quality as an ‘attainment’.
(Weber 1948: 171–179, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 22–23)
Here Weber anticipated those post-modernist views which interpret the nation in an absolutely ‘subjective’, behavioural way: only when people behave the nation can we speak of the nation's existence. Mark Beissinger made such a claim central to his theory:
Nationalism achieves political potency only in the form of collective discourse, mass mobilisation or state practice, although it manifests itself in other areas of social behaviour as well. […] But it is not because people ‘think the nation’ (B. Anderson) that we believe that nations exist, but rather because people ‘behave the nation’. They engage in collective behaviours and actions which signal to us that the nation is a category of substance.
(Beissinger 1998, cited in Hall 1998: 171)
Referring to Benedict Anderson's theory of nations as ‘imagined communities’, Beissinger claims that “nationalism is not simply about imagined communities; it is much more fundamentally a struggle for control over defining communities – and particularly a struggle for control over the imagination about community” (ibid.: 175). Beissinger's ‘behaviourist’ approach corresponds, to a significant extent, with the once-popular communication theory, whose most prominent representative was Karl W. Deutsch. In his view,
In the age of nationalism, a nationality is a people pressing to acquire a measure of effective control over the behaviour of its members. It is a people striving to equip itself with power, with some machinery of compulsion strong enough to make the enforcement of its commands sufficiently probable to aid in the spread of habits of voluntary compliance with them.
(Deutsch 1966: 105, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 28)
For Deutsch, a community, which he calls ‘a people’, is linked by complementarity of habits and facilities of communication. This complementarity “consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wide range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders”. It is, therefore, this communicative efficiency that holds peoples together, and Deutsch stresses that such ‘ethnic complementarity’ is both a ‘subjective’ and an ‘objective’ category; something that is both felt and measurable by performance tests. However, until a people possess the power to effectively control the behaviour of its members, they are not deemed to be a nation. The instruments of power, whatever these are considered to be in any given context, “are used to strengthen and elaborate those social channels of communication, the preferences of behaviour, the political (and sometimes economic) alignments which, all together, make up the social fabric of the nationality” (ibid.: 26–29). The most efficient instrument of power is the state, and Deutsch claims that the state is the decisive factor which is capable of turning nationalities into nations: only the machinery of the state is powerful enough to turn enforcement of its commands into a habit of voluntary compliance with them. As such, it is only the state that can efficiently make people behave the nation.
The complementarity of social communication is also central in Ernest Gellner's definition of membership in the nation, where this complementarity is construed as culture: “Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond” (Gellner 1997: 3–4). According to Gellner, modern industrial production in the capitalist economy imposed the imperative for the homogenous mass of anonymous, mobile, and replaceable individuals to be extended so as to embrace the whole of modern society, thus destroying the stratified, inegalitarian structure of the preceding, agrarian one. The historical emergence of nations and nationalism is seen as a mechanical, even teleological process, stemming from the changed conditions of material production in the age of industrial capitalism. Hence, the domination of ostensibly egalitarian concepts in modern society is to be treated as a mere by-product of that society's need for homogeneity, as required by the nature of industrial production. For Gellner, it is the need for perpetual economic growth, as the dominant principle of industrial capitalism, that demands a homogenous society; this, in turn, generates the need for society's homogenisation, and this task is to be performed by nationalism: “It is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa” (Gellner 1964: 168, cited in Hutchinson/Smith 1994: 62).
The rise of nationalism is thus interpreted as a consequence of industrial capitalism's need for growth. The need for growth (or, to be more precise, the need for perpetual profit) is certainly one of capitalism's founding principles, and that refers to industrial capitalism, as well. However, industrial capitalism is only an episode in capitalism's development, one that does not precede the emergence of nationalism. This will be explained in the Part II of this book, which demonstrates that nationalism is capitalism's deliberate creation, rather than its unintentional corollary, as implied in Gellner's theory.
In contrast to Gellner's historical materialism, Elie Kedourie's theory attempts to identify ideological sources of the nationalist doctrine through the prism of the history of ideas. Kedourie sees nationalism as rooted in the Kantian conceptions of human beings as autonomous from the divine will, which in turn introduces politics as a replacement for religion. According to Kedourie,
The doctrine divides humanity into separate and distinct nations, claims that such nations must constitute sovereign states, and asserts that the members of a nation reach freedom and fulfilment by cultivating the peculiar identity of their own nation and by sinking their own persons in the greater whole of the nation.
(Kedourie 1993: 67)
Although Kedourie's definition of nationalism accurately encompasses most of its aspects, he also neglected the fact that liberal philosophers John Locke and Algernon Sidney postulated the nationalist doctrine in the early days of English capitalism, a century before the German Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant. Kedourie also overlooked the fact that the Enlightenment in Germany was also a consequence of the development of capitalism in this country.
For John Breuilly, the nation is a conscious attempt to bridge the gulf between society and the state; that is, between private and public spheres; that is, between cultural and territorial boundaries:
The idea of the ruled society which might only be definable in terms of its private character, that is, in terms of its ‘culture’; of the sovereign territorial state; of a world made up of such states in competition with one another – these are the essential premises upon which nationalist ideology and nationalist politics build.
(Breuilly 1993: 375)
According to Breuilly, the form of culture that nationalism presupposes is based on ‘authenticity’; Breuilly views the theme of such a restoration of the glorious past as a self-referential quality of nationalist discourse, the quality that distinguishes nationalism from other ideologies and leads to nationalism's celebration of the community itself: “Nationalists celebrate themselves rather than some transcendent reality, whether this be located in another world or in a future society, although the celebration also involves a concern with transformation of present reality” (ibid.: 64). Nationalist intellectuals are crucial to the formation of the discourse of the nation: they propose the category of the nation, they promote its distinctiveness through the establishment of its symbolic boundaries, and they endow it with emotional significance.1
However, the question remains, what historical circumstances required the formation of the discourse of nation, and why? Also, whether ethnic identity was relevant for its formation, or not? Anthony D. Smith, unlike Connor, does not claim a physical continuity between pre-modern ethnic communities and modern nations. In his view, the key to the rise and existence of modern nations is to be found in the complex of myths, symbols, memories, and values, which links modern nations to pre-modern ethnic communities. The survival of these comm...
