The formation of Croatian national identity

Alex Bellamy

• Éditeur: Manchester University Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847795731
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Ciencias sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociología

This volume assesses the formation of Croatian national identity in the 1990s. It develops a framework, calling into question both primordial and modernist approaches to nationalism and national identity, before applying that framework to Croatia.

1
National identity and the ‘great divide’

According to Tom Nairn, ‘the reason why the dispute between modernists and primordialists is not resolved is because it is irresolvable’.¹ This is because the two approaches place different emphases on different aspects of identity formation. Nairn described the so-called ‘Warwick debate’, between Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner, as a ‘courteous difference of emphasis’.² He insisted that the debate provided an inadequate set of approaches to the problem of nation formation and that there appeared to be little prospect of progress. Hence, ‘the old presuppositions of modernism are losing their hold; but no one is quite sure what new ones will replace them’.³ The ‘great debate’ in nationalism studies, captured at Warwick, is one between so-called ‘primordialists’ and ‘modernists’. Put simply, primordialists argue that the nation derives directly from a priori ethnic groups and is based on kinship ties and ancient heritage. For their part, modernists insist that the nation is an entirely novel form of identity and political organisation, which owes nothing to ethnic heritage and everything to the modern dynamics of industrial capitalism. This chapter provides a brief overview of the two positions but concludes that primordialism and modernism, and the scope of the debate between them, fail to offer a satisfactory account of the formation of national identity.

Primordialist approaches to national identity

The intellectual link that joins primordialists is the assertion that there was a ‘pre-nationalist’ period in which political, economic and cultural relationships were not well enough defined, regulated or homogenised to be conducive to the formation of national identity. Primordialists claim that the nation was not therefore ‘imagined’ or constructed outside prior forms of social community and neither was it a revolutionary or completely novel product of the march towards modernity. Instead, they argue that national identity is based directly on previous forms of group identity and draws upon the myths, languages and social practices of these pre-national groups.

Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz are often cited as the ‘fathers’ of the primordialist school, though primrodialist thinking can be traced back to Herder, Rousseau, and Weber. Shils and Geertz argued that ethnic groups were the direct antecedents of nations. Edward Shils suggested that modern society ‘is held together by an infinity of personal attachments, moral obligations in concrete contexts, professional and creative pride, individual ambition, primordial affinities and a civil sense which is low in many, high in some, and moderate in most persons’.⁴ Shils focused on immediate family groups and tried to understand how primary group ties were bound together into larger structures.⁵ He argued that large social groups are constituted by face-to-face interaction. From here, they continue to expand through the enlargement and joining together of primary groups to form ethnicities. The nation comes about as a result of the amalgamation of ethnicities, which in turn, therefore, are the amalgamation of family groups. Clifford Geertz shared Shils’ perspective to a large extent, arguing that a primordial attachment is one that is based upon social ‘givens’ such as language, religion, or particular social practices.⁶ Geertz identified six forms of primordial tie which, when present, convert loose social groups into nations. They were: assumed blood ties, race, language, region, religion and custom.

Such approaches claimed parsimony but did so at the expense of accuracy. They drew three criticisms from Anthony Smith. First, Smith asked how are we to know who is genetically related when they are outside our own family? Second, Smith insisted that this simplistic primordialist approach could not account for the way that national identity unites distant strangers. Finally, he argued, they failed to discriminate between social phenomena with differing degrees of power, inclusiveness and complexity, and thus completely disregarded epochal change.⁷

John Armstrong, Adrian Hastings and Joshua Fishman offered alternative primordialist accounts. These writers all rejected the modernist claim that nations were new, novel and revolutionary.⁸ They argued that nations and national identities had existed in diverse times and places before the supposed ‘birth of nations’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus they insisted that national identity existed before nationalism rather than being constructed by it as modernists claim. They used historical study to show that pre-modern social groups shared traits associated with national identity such as a vernacular language and social rituals. The main problem with such an approach, however, is that it is tempocentric. That is, such approaches create an illusion ‘in which the “naturalized” and “reified” present is extrapolated backwards in time to present all historical systems as “isomorphic”’.⁹

Anthony Smith and Walker Connor offered a more sophisticated brand of primordialism. These writers often refer to themselves as ‘ethno-symbolists’ rather than primordialists. Connor insisted that the important point that is often overlooked when studying the nation is that it is not what is that is important but rather what people believe it to be.¹⁰ It is important that subjects believe there to be kinship ties between themselves and fellow members of the same nation, and it is this emotional and non-rational belief that makes national identity so important and nationalism such a potent political force.

The idea that national identity is a form of non-rational subjectivity that defies empirical and historical debunking lies at the heart of Connor’s work.¹¹ He makes the primordialist account of nation formation more sophisticated by asserting that nations do not necessarily have a tangible essence that transcends historical epochs.¹² Connor used many examples to demonstrate cases where the supposed tangible essences of nations, such as language or religion, have changed, but the nation itself and the communal ties within it have persisted. He argued that nations were held together by a ‘sense of kinship’, so that the nation should be understood as ‘a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related’.¹³ Although he identifies a direct link between the nation and an a priori social group, the relationship is understood as subjective rather than necessarily actual.¹⁴

Like Connor, Anthony Smith argued that nations are predicated on an ethnic core, which he labelled ethnie. He concurred with the idea that ethnies were largely subjective social entities. However, Smith attempted to draw limits on the extent to which the ethnie could be understood as being subjective. For instance, in his consideration of Ernest Renan’s insight that a nation is ‘an everyday plebiscite’, he observed that the idea that a nation was wholly subjective could lead to any social group being described as a nation.¹⁵ The cornerstone of Smith’s so-called ‘ethno-symbolist’ approach is a critique of the modernist approach to national identity formation.¹⁶ Smith’s central argument is that national identity derives from an ethnic core. This core has six characteristics. They are: a collective proper name, a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more differentiating elements of common culture, an association with a specific homeland, and a sense of solidarity for significant sectors of the population.¹⁷ He argued that the most important of these are the ones that refer to a shared historical memory, because ethnies are perpetuated not by lines of physical descent but by a sense of continuity, shared history and common destiny.¹⁸ For Smith, as for Connor, the durability of the ethnie lies not in the cultural traits of the group but in the sharing of a historical memory that is made all the more potent by being related to a specific territory. The shift from ethnie to nation occurred with the perpetuation of three revolutions – administrative, economic, and cultural. The local intelligentsia played a role in mobilising a formerly passive community into a vernacular community that acted as the main focus for the polity.¹⁹ As such, the nation is understood to be both modern (in that the revolutions generally occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and ‘deep-rooted’ (in that it is predicated upon a prior ethnic core).

Primordialist accounts of national identity formation therefore tend to take one of three approaches:

• Nations are directly derived from prior social groups, which themselves derive from family groups.

• Nations existed in pre-modern times and are therefore neither recent nor novel.

• Nations are based on a well-rooted subjective belief of a shared history and common destiny.

The limits of primordialism

The turn towards a greater focus on the subjective nature of national identity by writers such as Connor and Smith saves the primordialist approach from straightforward empirical debunking. Nevertheless, primordialism has been attacked on many grounds. Benedict Anderson observed that it tended to overlook the sharp historical discontinuities, discrepancies and contingencies that lay hidden beneath dominant historical discourses about the continuity of nations.²⁰ History, he argued, is not characterised by continuity and progress but by perpetual political struggle. John Breuilly challenged the idea that there was even a subjective relationship between the nation and an a priori ethnic group. He argued that national identity was initially a minority pastime pursued by the intelligentsia and linguists that was ignored by the majority peasantry.²¹ Moreover, he pointed out that national identity is a peculiar and exclusionary form of identity that excludes the possibility of alternative and overlapping identities, which according to Breuilly were a feature of prenational group identities. Within the Holy Roman Empire, for instance, it was possible to be Catholic, German and Austrian without any conflict of identity.²² This goes against the focus on the development of a single identity that is at the heart of primordialism. Likewise, far from being historically sensitive, primordialism is based on tempocentrism because it utilises modern conceptions of the nation and tries to find historical justifications for them, applying modern concepts to the very different contexts of the past.²³

A further set of criticisms focus on Smith and Connor’s insistence that the links between nations and prior ethnic groups are subjective. First, neither Smith nor Connor discusses how this subjectivity is formed and maintained. For example, Smith argued that the modernist school is flawed because men and women would surely ...