Origin of Nationalism

11 Key excerpts on "Origin of Nationalism"

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  Nationalism in the New World

  • Don Doyle, Marco Pamplona(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  56 While many favor specific factors as primary explanations, most recognize that several causes are interrelated. Many nationalists but few scholars see nationalism as ubiquitous in history and simply the “normal” way of organizing large-scale collective identity. Most social scientists point instead to the variety of political and cultural forms com-mon before the modern era (e.g., empires and great religions) and the trans-formations wrought by the rise of a new kind of intensive state administration, cultural integration, popular political participation, and international relations. Many of these social scientists argue that nations and nationalism in their mod-ern sense are both new. In particular, they would argue that ethnicity as a way of organizing collective identity underwent at the least a substantial reorganization when it began to be deployed as part of ethnonationalist rhetoric in the modern era. Others, however, including notably Anthony Smith and John Armstrong, argue that there is more continuity in the ethnic core of nations, though they too would agree that modernity transformed—if it did not outright create— nationalism. 57 The attraction of a claimed ethnic foundation to nations lies largely in the im-plication that nationhood is in some sense primordial and natural. Nationalists typically claim that their nations are simply given and immutable rather than nationalism matters 33 constructions of recent historical action or tendentious contemporary claims. Much early scholarly writing on nations and nationalism shared in this view and sought to discover which were the “true” ethnic foundations of nationhood. 58 It is no doubt ideologically effective to claim that a nation has existed since time immemorial or that its traditions have been passed down intact from heroic founders. In no case, however, does historical or social science research support such a claim.

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  Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century

  Challenges and Responses

  • Claire Sutherland(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  25 1 Why the Nation? Theories of Nationalism Can any one theory explain nationalism? What are the differences between today’s nationalisms and nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalisms? Definitions of the nation are necessarily linked to different theoretical approaches that attempt to explain nationalism. Theories of nationalism have tended to revolve around the issue of origins, principally through the long-standing academic debate between so-called primordialist, ethno-symbolist and modernist scholars, which turns on the question of how we can date nations and explain how they came about. This controversy is only of indirect relevance here, as the present text is more concerned with how existing nation-states and nationalist movements respond to current challenges. Nonetheless, the question of origins does matter to how nation-alists and nation-builders define their respective nations. The point at issue has been summed up as ‘do nations have navels?’ (Gellner 1996). In other words, were they born of some pre-existing entity, such as an ethnic group, or were they new creations brought about by a unique concatena-tion of events? Did they spring from the European industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Gellner 1964; 1983), the exploitation of print technologies by dissatisfied, colonised intelligentsia (Anderson 1991), or the evolution of a form of ‘proto-nationalism’ from the medieval period onwards (Greenfeld 1993; Llobera 1994)? The first section of the chapter examines the (limited) usefulness of established theories of nationalism for explaining contemporary nationalism. The second section of the chapter goes on to look at some theoretical approaches to contemporary nationalism. So-called ‘neo-nationalisms’ (McCrone 1998) are shown to be adaptable in articulating the link between the individual and the collective in the pursuit of legitimacy.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism

  • Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar, Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Nationalism, as a conscious attribution of meaning, gives them the profile and momentum needed for action on a historical scale. For Kohn, the nationalist infusion of mean-ing into group identities produced by history was one of the three main currents of modern history. The others were democracy and indus-trialism. The combination of these three irre-sistible forces had – since the late eighteenth century – transformed Europe and was now transforming the rest of the world along the same lines. But if nationalism is to be analysed as a distinctively modern and revolutionary movement, it is also true that adequate under-standing is impossible without tracing its pre-modern ancestry. As Kohn puts it: ‘Both the idea and the form of nationalism were developed before the age of nationalism’ (1945: 19). The idea emerged in two cultures with more pro-nounced national characteristics than any other peoples of the ancient world, Greece and Israel; the form is the centralized, sovereign state that took shape under dynastic rule in late medieval and early modern Europe. Kohn did not clarify the concepts of idea and form. But the implica-tions of his statements are far-reaching indeed: if the historical foundations of modern nation-alism include the cultural and political legacies to which he refers, and if pre-modern develop-ments went far enough for both the ideologi-cal content and the structural framework of nationalism to be clearly prefigured, the radical novelty of modern trends becomes much less obvious. Moreover, the very different cultural and political traditions of non-European civi-lizations could be expected to affect their respective versions of nationalism, even when the ideologies and movements in question drew on European sources. This would open up a vast field for comparative studies.

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  Handbook of Social Theory

  • George Ritzer, Barry Smart, George Ritzer, Barry Smart(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  13 Religion has played a role too, but this has mostly been marginal, exceptions being Ireland, Poland and Israel. Important as language is, the cultural component of nationalism more or less always contains an identification with history in the sense of a myth of origins. Mention must also be NATIONALISM 475 made of the role of territory in defining the nation, relevant in the case of Serbia (Hooson, 1994). However, it is important to stress that the nation as a cultural community is more than an ethnos: nationalism and ethnicity are not coeval. The nation is also a political community, a dimension which is closely related to the state, though is not reducible to the state. In this context the nation is closely identified with a particular territory, a legal order, a state, and even a governing elite. Nations can thus be defined in terms of the kind of community to which they give substance. Closely related to the political dimension of community there is the additional question of the role of ideology. Nationalism can be put alongside liberalism, conservatism and socialism as one of the great ideological doctrines of modern times. As a political ideology, national-ism is a doctrine codified by elites who sought to mobilize the masses or, in other cases, sought to provide a system of legitimation for a political order. Of particular importance in this regard is the pivotal role of intellectuals in the codification of nationalism (Giesen, 1993). Arguably, the two most influential ideologies of modern nationalism were those of Giuseppe Mazzini and Woodrow Wilson. Mazzini was the apostle of modern republican nationalism and argued that nations of a certain size have a right to states of their own. In his conception the nation is essentially a territorially large cultural community which has a historical right to be realized in a sovereign state.

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  Modern Political Ideologies

  • Andrew Vincent(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  14

  Finally, some scholars have argued that nationalism is a product of the early nineteenth century. Hobsbawm, for example, claims that the modern usage of the term ‘nationalism’, as distinct from ‘ethnicity’, is in fact comparatively recent (Hobsbawm 1992 ). The modern idea probably only dates from the 1830s, although some aspects of its populist meaning were traceable to the American and French Revolutions. This latter point more or less coincides with the thrust of Gellner’s work, which also presents nationalism as a modern term corresponding to the growth and modernization of states in the nineteenth century (Gellner 1983 ). My own sympathies lie with those scholars who see nationalism as a distinctly modern movement emanating from the French Revolutionary era. This does not deny that there were earlier forms of group loyalty and allegiance. However, they were not nationalist in the context of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century understandings.

  Many of the above accounts identify phases of nationalist development. One of the more popular theories, which is widely quoted in the recent literature, is by Miroslav Hroch. He sees three distinct phases. First, nationalism is embodied in nineteenth‐century folklore, custom, and the like. This is essentially a cultural idea, fostered by the middle and upper classes, with little or no political implication. Second, nationalism is pursued as a political campaign. It is usually connected with and fostered by political parties. Finally, nationalism becomes translated into mass support and mass movements. Each of these phases is linked by Hroch to economic and cultural changes (Hroch 1985 ). Hobsbawm also identifies three phases or periods: initially 1830–80, which is dominated by liberal nationalism; then 1880–1914, which sees a sharp movement to the conservative right in nationalist thinking; and, finally, the apogee of nationalism is identified with the period 1918–50 (see Hobsbawm 1992

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  Catalunya, One Nation, Two States

  An Ethnographic Study of Nonviolent Resistance to Assimilation

  • A. Alland(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Two Framing the Study: The Origin and Meaning of Nationalism The sociologist, Ernest Gelner, offers useful definitions of the nation, the state, and nationalism in his book Nations and Nationalism. Aware that these three terms are often confused, he notes that the def- inition of nationalism is parasitic in relation to two other terms. Following the German sociologist, Max Weber, Gelner sees the state as that “agency within society that possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence” (3). He goes on to say that this definition applies to modern states very well but offers the caveat that in the medieval period, for example, feudal states did not fit the model since they tolerated violence in wars between competing fief-holders. Gelner offers two definitions of nation neither of which he finds completely satisfactory. These are as follows: 1. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating. 2. Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the artifacts of men’s convictions and loyalties and solidarities. (7) For Gelner nationalism “is a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (1). From this it follows that nationalist sentiment “is the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of this principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfillment.” A nationalist movement “is one activated by a sentiment of this kind (1). So that nationalism “is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries within a given state . . . 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” (1).

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  The Roots of Nationalism

  National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600-1815

  • Lotte Jensen(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 One can argue, as I have done, that this statement goes too far. 5 Still, if I were to rewrite The Cult of the Nation today, I would give the French colonies, and France’s place within various Atlantic systems, a far more prominent place. REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE AND THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM 69 These changes, both in the world at large and within historical scholar-ship, have driven home the point that a great deal of earlier writing on the history of nationalism – including, mea culpa , my own book – was unduly teleological. In other words, it took nationalism as a necessary constituent element, a sine qua non , of modernity, and so treated the development of forms of national identif icat ion in the early modern period as necessary steps on the road to this modernity. The single most flagrant example of this tendency was probably the sociologist Liah Greenfeld’s influentia l 1993 book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity . 6 But nearly all of the sociological literature of the late twentieth century that explored the history of national-ism made the same basic assumption to one extent or another. Ernst Gellner, most obviously, labelled modernity ‘the age of nationalism’. 7 The schools of analysis which Anthony Smith has called ‘perennialist’ and ‘primordialist’ have done more to escape the charge of teleology. 8 But they too generally ascribe to nations, and to forms of national identif icat ion, a central place in modern human experience that in fact jibes surprisingly poorly with the experience of the past quarter-century. We need to recognise that what we term nations, national identif ica-tion and nationalism should all be seen as methods and strategies for organising and mobilising populations and territories – but, crucially, as one set of methods and strategies among many others. Simply lining up quotations that invoke nations cannot by itself demonstrate that nations were the principal means for such organisation and mobilisation.

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  Nationalism

  Theories and Cases

  • Erika Harris(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  The individual, the state, the legitimacy of the state and the identity of the political community, and thus the ability to pursue the interests of the people and legitimise the actions on their behalf all merge into the politics of the nation state. This political approach can also explain better the success or failure of nationalist movements seeking greater autonomy within Theories of Nations and Nationalism 59 the state or even the separation from the state and the unification with the neighbouring kin state – once the sentiment is translated into political action, nationalism makes more sense in terms of its aspirations. 31 So, whether we are observing separation-seeking nationalisms of the former Yugoslav republics, or an autonomy-seeking Hungarian minority in post-communist Europe, or the Palestinian struggle for the extrication from Israeli occupation, nationalism is an action-orientated political movement seeking control of a territory. All of those movements will be discussed at greater length in the following chapters. The tools of the nationalist trade, however, are not always forward looking. Nairn spoke of nationalism as being a ‘modern Janus’ – Janus was the Roman god with two faces, one looking forward and one back. The backward glances are looking into the past of the nation to seek joys of victories, recall pains of defeats and appeal to the wisdom of the people who have survived the past and must ‘gather strength’ for the struggle ahead. 32 This, of course, assumes that the story of the nation is a real one and that there is a past that can be tapped into in a constructive way for the task in hand. I don’t want to spend much time reminding the reader that the power of nationalist elites to spin a story is not limitless – it needs the audience to respond and to respond with a sense of recogni-tion and emotiveness which reinforces a sense of common destiny, and therefore a common future.

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  Nations and Nationalism

  A Reader

  • Philip Spencer, Howard Wollman(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments. Concepts and Definitions Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to consider briefly the concept of `nation' and offer a workable definition. Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historians' eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐ Benedict Anderson (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , London: Verso. 48 nationality as a socio-cultural concept ± in the modern world everyone can, should, will `have' a nationality, as he or she `has' a gender ± vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, `Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The `political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers. This `emptiness' easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is `no there there'.

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  Nationalism and Social Theory

  Modernity and the Recalcitrance of the Nation

  • Gerard Delanty, Patrick O′Mahony(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  No plausible account of nationalism could in fact do so. All traditions of scholarship accept that nationalism is located somewhere in the interstices between the culture of the lifeworld and the cultural foundations of the political sphere, where either or both of these dimen-sions of culture and politics can be regarded as stable or volatile depend-ing on theoretical and normative orientation. However, the political dimensions of nationalism tend to be regarded in most, although not all, cases of interpretive analysis as downstream of primary processes of identity formation in the lifeworld and not themselves to act as first-order generators of identity, as is emphasized in different ways in some mobilization and institutionalist approaches. nationalism and social theory 82 In this chapter, therefore, we explore key aspects of interpretive writing on nationalism organized around two central questions: the question of the modernity of the nation and the question of the nature and normative import of the nation form. THE QUESTION OF THE MODERNITY OF THE NATION The general contours of the debate arising from this question have been well described already in a number of general books on nationalism (Hutchinson, 1994; McCrone, 1998; Ozkirimli, 2000). The debate, which by now has many strands and protagonists, addresses the histori-cal origins of contemporary ethnicities and nation-states. In this short treatment, we cannot follow the various strands of the debate between different kinds of primordialists, perennialists, ethno-symbolists and modernists. 1 The core of the debate lies in the question of the degree to which modern nation constructions are dependent on real rather than imagined historical experiences of nationhood. These historical experi-ences, whether real or imagined, are taken on both sides to relate neces-sarily to a popular sense of ethnic belonging and territorial attachment and not simply to the beliefs and values of elites.

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  The Soviet Legacy in Central Asia

  • J. Glenn(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Ethnicity, Nationalism and Nation-Building 41 them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time- honoured disguise and this borrowed language' . 73 The national card is played in order to mobilise the masses to support a particular sectional interest within society, and it is not only written in a language readily understood but it is bolstered by the promise that the national interest i.e. the people's general interest will be guaranteed in the creation of a state that stands above the narrow sectional interests existing within society. The class/instrumentalist approach may be accused of being a class reductionist one i.e. that 'social classes are considered the only possible his- torical subjects'. But the above analysis does not preclude nationalism as a phenomenon independent of class: it only implies that nationalist move- ments, despite appearing to forward the certain general interests, are usually instigated and controlled by certain elites representing definite sectional interests; particularist interests that may be to the detriment of the general interest. 74 As is illustrated below the general idea of disgruntled elites has been combined with the concept of exploitative economic relations between ethnic groups to explain the phenomenon of 'divisive' nationalism. The 'uneven development' school of thought places emphasis on the exis- tence of economic inequality as a primary source of 'divisive' nationalism. As was mentioned earlier there are two different concepts which are covered by the appellation 'uneven development'. The first is a spatio-temporal description of industrialisation and the wave of uneven development that has been associated with its establishment. Nationalist separation move- ments are explained as reactions to the different levels of affluence this creates between ethnic groups.

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