Nation and NationalismTheories

Ernest Gellner Anthony Smith

Benedict Anderson

What is a nation by Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan (1832– 1892)He was a French scholar of language and history. A Professor at the Sorbonne. He is best known for his historical works on early Christianity and his political theories.

Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (What is a Nation), 1882

“The desire of nations to be together is the only real criterion”

Nation and Nationalism: Ernest Renan

Renan rejects to define the nation by objective criteria such as shared language, physical characteristics, culture, custom…etc.

Two things to constitute principle of a nation: past and present

Past – the possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrance (common sufferings)

Present – the consent, the desire to live together to continue to value the heritage which all hold in common.

Nationalism

Nationalism connects individuals to the state

Nationalism connects individuals they become sentimentally attached to

the homeland they gain a sense of identity and self-

esteem through their national identification

they are motivated to help their fellow nationals and countries

Nationalism is a “process”

Ernest Gellner Professor of Philosophy at the London School

of Economics Professor of Social Anthropology at

Cambridge University Nation and Nationalism (1983)

Nations and Nationalism are products of industrialization.

Emerge of nations and nationalism marks a sharp disjunction between elder agrarian societies and modern industrial society.

Mobility and Cultural Homogenization

Mobility Universal literacy standardization of language, general sophistication

Cultural homogenization“…it must be one in which they can allbreathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high (literate, training-sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition” (p38)

Cultural Homogenization

Who does all ? create and maintain:

one kind of cultureone style of communication, one centralized and

standardized educational system.

The Birth of State

State “… nations and states are not the same

contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other” (p6)

Ethnicity “… nationalism is a theory of political

legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries 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.” (p1)

Anthony Smith

Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics.

He has specialized in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, especially the theory of the nation.

His major influential works are: theories of Nationalism (1971), The Ethnic Revival (1981), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), and National Identity (1991).

His concern is “When did the nations emerge?”

The nation is not old

Before, nations were generally assumed to be old; they could be traced back to the early Middle age.

Today, both nation and nationalism are understood as modern phenomena. The nation is a product of nationalist

ideologies. The nationalism is an expression of

modern, industrial society. The nations are phenomena of a

particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.

Ethnie Smith questions the modernists’ arguments,

“Is the nation a new thing?” Smith argues that modern nations have an

“ethnic origin, ethnic core”: Ethnie1. a collective name2. a common myth of descent3. a shared history4. a distinctive shared culture 5. an association with specific territory6. a sense of solidarity

Ethnic origin of the Nation

In pre modern communities, people are connected among the members and through generation by their ethnic core.

The cultural homogeneity was actually due to nation’s ethnic past prior to the nation.

It is because of its ethnic origin the modern nation is able to attract the allegiance of so many people.

Three revolutions When would people’s ethnic sentiment

transform to nationalism and to form a nation?

“The origins of the transition to nationhood are shrouded in obscurity.”

Three types of revolution (Gemeinschaft Geselleshaft) Economic: the division of labor Political: the control of administration Cultural: the cultural coordination

The Economic Revolution

The division of labor (capitalism) State controlled over key resources like

mining State regulated trade and commodity

exchange Every region of a country was integrated

as a state-supervised economy The division of labor was reorganized

around the center (production, supplier)

The Political Revolution The control of administration

In the latter half of the 17th c. a new class of military professional with a high degree of training and expertise in science and technology emerged

They required the highly trained bureaucrats supports

Centralized institutions for higher education The new type of bureaucratic state encouraged

the growth of a wealthy bourgeois class and an allied intelligentsia ( in opposition to the nobility)

Strengthen nationalistic policies

The Cultural Revolution

The cultural coordination (educational revolution)The expansion of secularism to

weaken the power of churchMonarchs claimed that their right

to rule was given by the god. Promise the salvation in this life

Centralized education standardized patriotic culture citizens

Spreading the Nations The revolutions achieved:

Territorial centralization and consolidation Cultural standardization

Nation was gradually formed “Because these three revolutions were highly discontinuous, because their effects were felt at different times in different areas, the nation that was gradually formed revealed differences in both content and form.”

What about non-Western communities? The West first and non-Western societies were

stimulated to follow because of their military and economic success.

Benedict Anderson

Anderson – Professor of International Relations at Cornell University.

He specializes in the politics of Southeast Asia.

His major work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, had become one

of the most cited texts in the field. He argues that the nation is “imagined.”

The Imagined Communities

The nation is imagined

… the nation in anthropological sprit; it is an imagined political community, and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. (p6)

Nation/ Nationalism as cultural artifacts

“nation-ness as well as nationalism are cultural artifacts of particular kind” (p4)

“nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that precede it, out of which – as well as against which- it came into being” (p12)

The Nation is imagined in a particular way

The community whose size is beyond face-to-face contact are all imagined.

The nation is imagines as limited because a nation holds limited number of people.

The nation is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in the age in which realm of absolutism was destroying by revolution.

The nation is imagined as community because the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

it is this fraternity that makes it possible for so many millions of people willingly die for their nation.

Print CapitalismWhat makes such imagining possible?Print capitalism (the novels and newspapers) Origins of national consciousness was print

capitalism: The nation was imagined through language In early time: international publishing

houses, ignoring national frontiers, Latin readers.

In the mid 16th century, vernacularizing of print industry.

Vernacular Language Press and National consciousness

The vernacular print language laid the bases fornational consciousness in 3 ways:1) They created unified fields of exchange and

communication * Print language made possible for people

who speak different dialects to communicate

* The fellow- readers were connected through print, and they formed the embryo of the nationally imagined community.

Vernacular Language Press and National consciousness

1) Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language which helped to build the image of antiquity of the nation. * Archive

2) Print-capitalism created language of power.

* High German, King’s English or Central Thai, Tokyo dialect

Spread of Nations The nation came to be imagined, and

once imagined; it was modeled, adapted and transformed.

In the colonized countries, the colonial state conditioned the natives to imagined a nation: education for native people

Native bureaucrats in colonial administration, Bilingual intelligentsias have learned nationalism and copied, adapted and improved it.

Imagined ColonyImagined nation of colonized countries The nation’s model of colonized countries

was colonial state Three institutions made such imagination:

Census Before it was for tax and military but

now individual persons are counted Map and Map-as-logo

The model for drawing the national borders, not the model of

Necessity for administrative mechanisms for troops to back their claims.

Museum Victorious past (conquest)

Further studies of Theories of Nation and Nationalism

http://www.nationalismproject.org/