ERNEST GELLNER Nationalism and Modernization

The minimal requirement for full citizenship, for effective moral member¬ship of a modern community, is literacy. This is the minimum: a certain level of technological competence is probably, also required. Only a person possessing these can really claim and exercise his rights, can attain a level of affluence and style of life compatible with current notions of human dignity, and so forth. But only a nation-size educational system can produce such full citizens: only it has the resources to make men of the raw biological material available, resources large enough to keep in being a sufficient number of specialists, of the second-order teachers and intellectuals necessary to produce the ground-level teachers. For this reason, something roughly of the size of a nation is the minimal political unit in the modem world (i.e. one in which universal literacy is recognised to be the valid norm). Time was, when the minimal political unit was determined by the preconditions of defence or economy: it is now determined by the preconditions of education.'
But: an educational system must operate in some medium, some language (both in the literal and the extended sense); and the language it employs will stamp its products. If the educational machinery is effective, its products will be, within reason, substitutable for each other, but less readily substitutable for those produced by other and rival machines. Of course, high-powered special¬ists can still move across educational frontiers: a Werner von Braun is em¬ployable internationally, irrespective of whether he can catch on to allusions in English or Russian literature. But in general, when the tasks to be performed are not such as require the highest, rarest and genuine skills (when allowances are made), they tend to be such that they can only be acceptably performed by a person formed by the local educational machine, using the same idiom as the organisation within which the post is located.
The conditions in which nationalism becomes the natural form of political loyalty can be summed up in two propositions: (1) Every man a clerk. (Univer¬sal literacy recognised as a valid norm.) (2) Clerks are not horizontally mobile, they cannot normally move from one language-area to another; jobs are generally specific to clerks who are produced by some one particular educa¬tional machine, using some one particular medium of expression.
Condition (2) cannot of course be invoked to explain nationalism, for to do so would be circular: in a way, it is a restatement of a crucial aspect of nationalism itself, which is that intellectuals have ceased to be a substitutable commodity, except within the range of any given language or culture. But the importance of (1) - of the fact that only education makes a full man and citizen, and that education must be in some linguistic medium—has been curiously neglected, obvious though it is. It explains why nationalism can and does move such broad masses of humanity. Men do not in general become nationalists from sentiment or sentimentality, atavistic or not, well-based or myth-founded: they become nationalists through genuine, objective, practical necessity, however obscurely recognised.
The contrast for a situation in which conditions (1) and (2) obtain is, of course, a social order such as that of medieval Christendom, or Islam up to the recent impact of modernism: in those conditions, clerks are, and are meant to be, a subclass of the total society, for there is no need, aspiration, or possibility of making them co-extensive with society at large; and at the same time, clerks are horizontally mobile, at any rate within the frontiers of the script and faith within which they are literate. A Muslim lawyer-theologian, literate in written Arabic, or a medieval clerk with his Latin, is employable, and substitutable for another, throughout the region of his religion. Inside the religious zones, there are no significant obstacles to the freedom of trade in intellect: what later become 'national' boundaries, present no serious obstacles. If the clerk is competent in the written language, say Latin or classical Arabic, his vernacular or origin is of little interest; it doesn't matter whether it is one of the languages derived from the written one, say a Romance language or a spoken form of Arabic, or whether it is not recognisably related to it—say a Teutonic or Berber dialect.
Such a world, however, has been replaced by one in which 'national' boundaries constitute a very serious frontier to clerkly mobility and substitut¬ability, and in which the clerk as such disappears, every man being literate—either in fact or in aspiration, this aspiration however being treated with utmost seriousness both by authorities and populations.
There is a certain obvious connection between the two features of the modern situation: if every man is a clerk, it is a great help if the language in which he is literate is identical with, or at least fairly close to, the vernacular in which he was reared in the family context. Continuity between the idioms of home and school facilitate the task of education. A specialised clerkly class can be expected to master a special clerkly language—indeed it has a strong incentive in this direction, in so far as the additional difficulty helps both to restrict entry and greatly augments the mystery and prestige of the occupation. But when a total population achieves or approaches literacy, the restriction and the prestige become irrelevant, and the proximity of the languages of writing and of daily speech become in advantage. This point does, however, call for a qualification. The facilitation of literacy through the use of a vernacu¬lar no doubt favoured 'nationalist' tendencies in Europe: for instance, it is clearly easier to turn Hungarian into a written language than to teach all Hungarian peasants Latin. But in extra-European contexts, the vernaculars are often too numerous and diversified, without any one of them having a mani¬fest predominance, to be used as the literate language. If one of them were arbitrarily selected, no advantage would be gained—for most of the popula¬tion would still suffer from a bifurcation between the language of school and home—and an additional serious disadvantage would be incurred, in so far as the selected vernacular would lack the conveniences of an old-established literate idiom (availability of technical vocabularies, a body of technical lit¬erature, etc.). It would be rash to predict precisely what will happen ultimately in these cases, and indeed there is no reason to suppose that the same thing will happen in each case. (The range of alternative is: the arbitrary elevation of one of the vernaculars into the language of a national educational system, turning it into a literate language; the borrowing of a literate language from a colonial power, with the advantage of taking over a language already equipped with all modern linguistic conveniences, but a disadvantage in terms of national pride; or the borrowing of a pre-existing non-European literate language, or regional lingua franca, such as Arabic or Hausa or Swahili.) In these cases, it can be supposed that the tendency towards the congruence of the languages of home and school will operate in the opposite direction, the language of school ultimately also pervading the home. This process is of course not unknown in Europe: the present reasonably neat linguistic blocks of Eastern Europe, re¬placing the earlier complicated patchwork, are due to such a process (when they are not due to actual forcible transfers of population).
The connection between nationalism and the situation in which fully human men can only be made by educational systems, not by families and villages, underlines an amusing fact—the inverse relationship between the ideology and the reality of nationalism. The self-image of nationalism involves the stress of folk, folklore, popular culture, etc. In fact, nationalism becomes important precisely when these things become artificial. Genuine peasants or tribesmen, however proficient at folk-dancing, do not generally make good nationalists. It is only when a privileged cousin of the same lineage, and later their own sons, and finally even their own daughters, all go to school, that the peasant or tribesman acquires a vested interest in the language that was employed in the school in which that cousin, son or daughter were educated. (Should a rival nationalism prevail—i.e. a nationalism centred on a language other than that of the school in question, and possibly hostile to it—much of the valuable investment in the kinsman's education might well be wasted.) Ein Zollverein ist keine Heimat, but an educational system and its medium of instruc¬tion do make a homeland. The famous Three Generations law governing the behaviour of immigrants into America—the grandson tries to remember what the son tried to forget—now operates in many parts of the world on popula¬tions that have not migrated at all: the son, who arduously acquires a new idiom at school, has no desire to play at being a tribesman, but his son in turn, securely urbanised, may do so.
The pre-existing genuine folk cultures are of course not totally irrelevant to the operation of nationalism. If a nationalism crystallises around language X, the peasants speaking various demotic versions of X do of course form the natural and preferred catchment area for the nationalism in question. But in practice, nationalist leaders and organisations have seldom if ever been very fastidious about this. Although they discern the simple, robust, noble virtues primarily in X-speaking peasants, they do not really object to incorporating Y-or Z-speaking peasants, provided their sons can be X-ified: indeed, the leaders, once in charge of a state machine, do not object to employing forceful persua¬sion when canalising rustics, previously lacking in national consciousness or even tempted by a 'wrong' one, into the right national trough. In brief, they are perfectly happy to poach on each other's natural catchment areas.
So far, the argument—starting from the erosion of local all-embracing social structures and the consequent importance of culture, and from the role of educational systems and the linguistic media in which they operate in forming acceptable human beings—has taken us some of the way towards a schematic explanation of nationalism: these factors explain why in general (abstracting from local complications) modern loyalties are centred on political units whose boundaries are defined by the language (in the wider or in the literal sense) of an educational system: and that when these boundaries are made rather than given, they must be large enough to create a unit capable of sustaining an educational system. In other words, we have explained why modem loyalty-evoking units are not very small (local, like tribal, feudal or classical units), and why they are cultural units. But we have not really ex¬plained the upper limit of these units: the curious fact that loyalty-engendering units are often smaller than those of pre-existing faiths-civilisations (e.g. Islam, Christendom), notwithstanding the fact that these wider civilisations, where they exist at all, would provide a convenient prefabricated 'shared' language. In other words, we have not explained the divisive aspects of nationalism, as opposed to its unifying tendency.

A Model
Consider any arbitrary pre-industrial 'empire', a largish territory under one ultimate political sovereign. (The model can accommodate, with possible minor modifications, both a continuous, land-mass empire, and one separated by seas, of the 'colonial' type.) The chances are that (a) the territory comprises a multiplicity of languages; (b) that notwithstanding nominally unique sover¬eignty at the centre, there is in fact a certain diffusion of power, a multiplicity of local, semi-autonomous power centres. The semi-autonomous centres guard their measure of independence thanks to the difficulties encountered by any attempts at really effective centralisation in pre-modern conditions: but in turn, they are probably the best means of controlling the rural populations of the backwoods. In this set-up, language is not an important issue. The lan¬guage privileged at court may not be identical with the one privileged in religion (e.g. as in Ottoman Turkey); and there may be a multiplicity of both vertical, regional, and of horizontal (occupational, estate, religious) groupings, all of which are of direct concern to people: 'culture' as such however is not, even though the membership of existing groups may and generally will ex¬press itself in 'cultural' form.
Now consider the possible forms of the impact of modernity on such a society: increase in the proportion and in the importance of literacy, con¬sequent on the transformation of economic life; greater mobility of various kinds; the emergence of an industrial proletariat; and above all, the fact that one of the languages—perhaps the language of the old heartland of the empire—has become the language of the modern organisations, of the new industrial, governmental and educational machines. The local structures are being eroded.'
This much has already been indicated above: and these factors already imply that henceforth, identification, loyalty and effective citizenship depends on literacy and education in the one favoured language. But the factors indicated so far only suggest that there will be a rush for the acquisition of this particular passport to full citizenship, accompanied by a sentiment of loyalty conceived in terms of it. But why should there also be new divisive nationalism?—why should some territories, and in extreme cases even territorially discontinuous populations, decide to opt for a new citizenship other than that of the one privileged language (and henceforth, 'nation') on the territory of the ancien regime? It cannot be stressed enough that the answer is not that the language in question, and hence its 'nation', is not really their own. This is also true of the many, the very many, who do adopt a new language and style of being. Changing one's language is not the heart-breaking or soul-destroying business which it is claimed to be in romantic nationalist literature. Highlanders in Glasgow become Anglophone, Berbers in Marrakesh become Arabophone, Czechs in Vienna, etc., etc., etc.; if switching of language were the only problem, no new divisive nationalism need ever arise.
The reason isn't really far to seek. Sometimes the entry into the dominant nation is very difficult, or almost impossible (though not owing to a difficulty in learning a language, literally); sometimes, even if it is possible, it seems or is advantageous to set up a rival 'nation' of one's own instead. There is a type of superficial reason why it is sometimes difficult: it is difficult to change basic cultural traits (i.e. consider the requirement that an Algerian had to abjure Muslim personal law to become a Frenchman), and it is impossible to change one's pigmentation, in cases where the nation to be 'entered' is defined partly in terms of colour. But these factors are themselves consequences rather than causes. There is nothing in the nature of things which decrees that a viable large political unit must contain only members of the same kind of pigmenta¬tion, any more than it requires similarity in the colour of hair or eyes. And even nations which subsequently made a fetish of colour, such as the Boers, did not find it difficult at earlier stages to incorporate 'colour'.
Industrialisation and modernisation notoriously proceed in an uneven man¬ner. just as notoriously, it is the early stages, the first few generations, of these processes which cause the greatest disruption, the greatest misery, and which provide the maximum opportunity for political revolution and for the re¬thinking and re-drawing of loyalties. This ghastly tidal wave does not hit various parts of the world simultaneously: on the contrary, it hits them suc¬cessively (though of course not in any neat and orderly succession). Essentially, nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact of this wave generates a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past societies, is (a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which (b) is not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities and incentives for revolution, and which (c) is rem¬ediable, and is seen to be remediable, by 'national' secession. Under these circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.
Consider the tidal wave of modernisation, sweeping over the world, in a devastating but untidy flood, aided or obstructed by pre-existing currents, deflected or canalised by the rocks and sandbanks of the older social world. Suppose it passes, in succession, territories A and B, where both these are initially under the same sovereignty (suppose both, for instance, to be parts of our hypothetical empire). The fact that the wave hit A first and B later, means that at the time when dislocation and misery are at their height in B, A is already approaching affluence or, in Rostow's phrase, the period of mass consumption. B, politically united with A, is a slum area of the total society comprising both A and B. What happens to the men originating from B?
Here two alternatives must be considered: is B fairly homogeneous cultur¬ally with A or not? Suppose first of all that it is so. The men of B, less educated, more 'backward', more recently torn from the land or its traditional equilib¬rium, will provide the lower ranks of the proletariat of the total society A&B; but being reasonably similar to the more 'advanced' and privileged workers of A, it would be difficult to exclude them wholly from the advantages gained by workers from A: some of these perks will spill over. Their exclusion from the moral community, their material disinheritance, will not be complete. More¬over, their potential leaders, including the small group of those from B possess¬ing advanced education, will have no particular difficulty in rising up within A&B. So, all in all, it is likely that region B, though discontented, will remain within the larger society, either awaiting the moment when the high tide of prosperity reaches it as well, or anticipating events by large-scale migration.
But suppose instead that the men of B are fairly radically differentiated from those of A: that they can easily be picked out in the street—in virtue of pigmentation, or deeply rooted and religiously sanctioned customs, say. Their situation is correspondingly worse: far less, if anything, of the benefits accruing to the more 'advanced' proletariat, spills over to them. Above all, their discon¬tent can find 'national' expression: the privileged are manifestly different from themselves, even if the shared 'nationality' of the under-privileged men from B starts off from a purely negative trait, i.e. shared exclusion from privilege and from the 'nation' of the privileged. Moreover, the men from B now do have leaders: their small intellectual class probably cannot easily pass into A, and even if it can, it now has an enormous incentive not to do so; if it succeeds in detaching B-land, by the rules of the new national game, in which intellectuals are not substitutable across frontiers, it will have a virtual monopoly of the desirable posts in the newly independent B-land.
Why should it have been difficult for the low proletarians from B to be incorporated, at least on the level of their native-A fellow workers, in A-land? In general, advanced lands do not have any interest in sharing their prosperity with the ill-trained latest arrivals. The solidarity of the working class is a myth. The tomatoes thrown in Algiers at Monsieur Guy Moller, to bring home to him the need for an illiberal policy, were not thrown by members of the aristocracy, nor even, I believe, of the haute bourgeoisie. In cases when, how¬ever, the new entrants in the industrial world aren't markedly distinguishable from the older ones, they cannot really be excluded—it is not practically feasible. This is where culture, pigmentation, etc., become important: they provide means of exclusion for the benefit of the privileged, and a means of identification, etc., for the under-privileged. Distance, seas to be crossed, can serve as well to reinforce chromatic or cultural differences. Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they
do not exist—but it does need same pre-existing differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, these are purely negative (i.e. consist of disqualifying marks from entry to privilege, without any positive similarity between those who share the disqualification and who are destined to form a new 'nation'). This incidentally shows how mistaken Rostov is, in a way, in crediting 'react¬ive nationalism' with the crucial role in economic development.' This observa¬tion needs to be turned upside-down. It is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa.
The two prongs of nationalism tend to be a proletariat and an intelligentsia. The proletariat is in general morally uprooted, but it need not always be literally uprooted, i.e. physically removed from its previous rural habitat. For instance, the beginnings of the Algerian national revolution were in the Aures mountains, amongst villagers least removed, in a superficial sense, from the traditional tribal order, who had remained in their old area, and who were geographically furthest removed from the modern urban and industrial centres. Yet, as Germaine Tillion showed, they were disrupted by a kind of sociological action at a distance: they were, in her expressive phrase, clochar¬disies.4 Yet this kind of phenomenon should not lead one to generalise and suppose that 'the peasants' must always constitute the 'vanguard' of such movements, and that the industrial proletariat proper has been 'bribed' and has 'sold out', an idea that can be part of a generalised mystique of the tiers monde such as can be found, for instance, in the works of the late Frantz Fanon. For instance, no-one bribed the literally uprooted inhabitants of the Moroccan bidonvilles, and it was they who effectively carried out the struggle for national independence.
In general, both an intelligentsia and a proletariat is required for an effective national movement. Their fates diverge after the achievement of national independence. For the intellectuals, independence means an immediate and enormous advantage: jobs, and very good jobs. The very numerical weakness of an 'underdeveloped' intelligentsia is its greatest asset: by creating a national unit whose frontiers become in effect closed to foreign talent (except in 'advisory' short-term capacity), they create a magnificent monopoly for them¬selves. For the proletarians, on the other hand, independence must in the short run bring disillusion: the hardships are not removed, indeed they are likely to be increased by the drive for rapid development and the fact that a national government can sometimes afford to be harsher than a foreign one.'
['Nationalism', in Thought and Change (Weidenfeld and Nicholson: London, 1964), 158-69.]