Eric Hobsbawm: The Nation as Invented Tradition

In this connection, one specific interest of 'invented traditions' for, at all events, modern and contemporary historians ought to be singled out. They are highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation, the 'nation', with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest. All these rest on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty implies innovation. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism or nations must be novel, whatever the historic continuities of Jews or Middle Eastern Muslims, since the very concept of territorial states of the currently standard type in their region was barely thought of a century ago, and hardly became a serious prospect before the end of World War I. Standard national languages, to be learned in schools and written, let alone spoken, by more than a smallish elite, are largely constructs of varying, but often brief, age. As a French historian of Flemish language observed, quite correctly, the Flemish taught in Belgium today is not the language which the mothers and grandmothers of Flanders spoke to their children: in short, it is only metaphorically but not literally a 'mother-tongue'. We should not be misled by a curious, but under-standable, paradox: modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so 'natural' as to require no definition other than self-assertion. Whatever the historic or other continuities embedded in the modem concept of 'France' and 'the French'—and which nobody would seek to deny—these very concepts themselves must include a constructed or 'invented' component. And just because so much of what subjectively makes up the modern 'nation' consists of such constructs and is associated with appropriate and, in general, fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse (such as 'national history'), the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the 'invention of tradition'.
* * *
Nevertheless, the state linked both formal and informal, official and unofficial, political and social inventions of tradition, at least in those countries where the need for it arose. Seen from below, the state increasingly defined the largest stage on which the crucial activities determining human lives as subjects and citizens were played out. Indeed, it increasingly defined as well as registered their civil existence (état civil). It may not have been the only such stage, but its existence, frontiers and increasingly regular and probing interventions in the citizen's life were in the last analysis decisive. In developed countries the 'national economy', its area defined by the territory of some state or its subdivisions, was the basic unit of economic development. A change in the frontiers of the state or in its policy had substantial and continuous material consequences for its citizens. The standardization of administration and law within it, and, in particular, state education, transformed people into citizens of a specific country: 'peasants into Frenchmen', to cite the title of an apposite book.1 The state was the framework of the citizens' collective actions, insofar as these were officially recognized. To influence or change the government of the state, or its policy, was plainly the main objective of domestic politics, and the common man was increasingly entitled to take part in it. Indeed, politics in the new nineteenth-century sense was essentially nation-wide politics. In short, for practical purposes, society ('civil society') and the state within which it operated became increasingly inseparable.
It was thus natural that the classes within society, and in particular the working class, should tend to identify themselves through nation-wide political movements or organizations ('parties'), and equally natural that de facto these should operate essentially within the confines of the nation.2 Nor is it surprising that movements seeking to represent an entire society or 'people' should envisage its existence essentially in terms of that of an independent or at least an autonomous state. State, nation and society converged. [ ... ]
In terms of the invention of tradition, three major innovations are particularly relevant. The first was the development of a secular equivalent of the church—primary education, imbued with revolutionary and republican principles and content, and conducted by the secular equivalent of the priesthood—or perhaps, given their poverty, the friars—the instituteurs.3 There is no doubt that this was a deliberate construction of the early Third Republic, and, given the proverbial centralization of French government, that the content of the manuals which were to turn not only peasants into Frenchmen but all Frenchmen into good Republicans,. was not left to chance. Indeed the 'institutionalization' of the French Revolution itself in and by the Republic has been studied in some detail.4
The second was the invention of public ceremonies.5 The most important of these, Bastille Day, can be exactly dated in 1880. It combined official and unofficial demonstrations and popular festivities—fireworks, dancing in the streets—in an annual assertion of France as the nation of 1789, in which every French man, woman and child could take part. Yet while it left scope for, and could hardly avoid, more militant, popular manifestations, its general tendency was to transform the heritage of the Revolution into a combined expression of state pomp and power and the citizens' pleasure. A less permanent form of public celebration were the occasional world expositions which gave the Republic the legitimacy of prosperity, technical progress—the Eiffel Tower—and the global colonial conquest they took care to emphasize.6
The third was the mass production of public monuments [...]. It may be observed that the Third Republic did not—unlike other countries—favour massive public buildings, of which France already had a large supply—though the great expositions left some of these behind them in Paris—nor gigantic statuary. The major characteristic of French 'statuomania'7 was its democracy, anticipating that of the war memorials after 1914-18. It spread two kinds of monuments throughout the cities and rural communes of the country: the image of the Republic itself (in the form of Marianne which now became universally familiar), and the bearded civilian figures of whoever local patriotism chose to regard as its notables, past and present. Indeed, while the construction of Republican monuments was evidently encouraged, the initiative, and the costs of, such enterprises were undertaken at a local level. The enterpreneurs catering for this market provided choices suitable for the purses of every Republican commune from the poorest upwards, ranging from modest busts of Marianne, in various sizes, through full-figure statues of varying dimensions, to the plinths and allegorical or heroic accessories with which the more ambitious citizenry could surround her feet.8 The opulent ensembles on the Place de la République and the Place de la Nation in Paris provided the ultimate version of such statuary. Such monuments traced the grass roots of the Republic—particularly in its rural strongholds—and may be regarded as the visible links between the voters and the nation.
Some other characteristics of the official 'invented' traditions of the Third Republic may be noted in passing. Except in the form of the commemoration of notable figures from the local past, or of local political manifestos, it kept away from history. This was partly, no doubt, because history before 1789 (except perhaps for 'nos ancêtres les Gaulois') recalled church and monarchy, partly because history since 1789 was a divisive rather than unifying force: each brand—or rather degree—of Republicanism had its own corresponding heroes and villains in the revolutionary pantheon, as the historiography of the French Revolution demonstrates. Party differences were expressed in statues to Robespierre, Mirabeau or Danton. Unlike the USA and the Latin American states, the French Republic therefore shied away from the cult of Founding Fathers. It preferred general symbols, abstaining even from the use of themes referring to the national past on its postage stamps until long after 1914, though most European states (other than Britain and Scandinavia) discovered their appeal from the mid-1890s onwards. The symbols were few: the tricolour (democratized and universalized in the sash of the mayor, present at every civil marriage or other ceremony), the Republican monogram (RF) and motto (liberty, equality, fraternity), the Marseillaise and the symbol of the Republic and of freedom itself, which appears to have taken shape in the last years of the Second Empire, Marianne. We may also note that the Third Republic showed no official hankering for the specifically invented ceremonies so characteristic of the First—'trees of liberty', goddesses of reason and ad hoc festivals. There was to be no official national day other than 14 July, no formal mobilizations, processions and marches of the civilian citizenry (unlike the mass régimes of the twentieth century, but also unlike the USA), but rather a simple 'republicanization' of the accepted pomp of state power—uniforms, parades, bands, flags, and the like.
The Second German Empire provides an interesting contrast, especially since several of the general themes of French Republican invented tradition are recognizable in its own. Its major political problem was twofold: how to provide historical legitimacy for the Bismarckian (Prusso-Little German) version of unification which had none; and how to deal with that large part of the democratic electorate which would have preferred another solution (Great Germans, anti-Prussian particularists, Catholics and, above all, Social Democrats). Bismarck himself does not seem to have bothered much about symbolism, except for personally devising a tricolor flag which combined the Prussian black-white with the nationalist and liberal black-red-gold which he wished to annex (1866). There was no historical precedent whatever for the Empire's black-white-red national banner.9 His recipe for political stability was simpler: to win the support of the (predominantly liberal) bourgeoisie by carrying out as much of its programme as would not jeopardize the predominance of the Prussian monarchy, army and aristocracy, to utilize the potential divisions among the various kinds of opposition and to exclude political democracy as far as possible from affecting the decisions of government. Apparently irreconcilable groups which could not be divided—notably the Catholics and especially the post-Lassallean Social Democrats—left him somewhat at a loss. In fact, he was defeated in his head-on confrontations with both. One has the impression that this old-fashioned conservative rationalist, however brilliant in the arts of political manoeuvre, never satisfactorily solved the difficulties of political democracy, as distinct from the politics of notables.
The invention of the traditions of the German Empire is therefore primarily associated with the era of William II. Its objects were mainly twofold: to establish the continuity between the Second and First German Empires, or more generally, to establish the new Empire as the realization of the secular national aspirations of the German people; and to stress the specific historical experiences which linked Prussia and the rest of Germany in the construction of the new Empire in 1871. Both, in turn, required the merger of Prussian and German history, to which patriotic imperial historians (notably Treitschke) had for some time devoted themselves. The major difficulty in the way of achieving these objects was firstly the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation was difficult to fit into any nineteenth-century nationalist mould, and secondly that its history did not suggest that the denouement of 1871 was historically inevitable, or even likely. It could be linked to a modem nationalism only by two devices: by the concept of a secular national enemy against whom the German people had defined their identity and struggled to achieve unity as a state; and by the concept of conquest or cultural, political and military supremacy, by means of which the German nation, scattered across large parts of other states, mainly in central and eastern Europe, could claim the right to be united in a single Greater German state. The second concept was not one which the Bismarckian empire, specifically 'Little German', cared to stress, though Prussia itself, as its name implied, had been historically constructed largely by expansion into Slavonic and Baltic areas outside the range of the Holy Roman Empire.
Buildings and monuments were the most visible form of establishing a new interpretation of German history, or rather a fusion between the older romantic 'invented tradition' of pre-1848 German nationalism and the new regime: the most powerful symbols being those where the fusion was achieved. Thus, the mass movement of German gymnasts, liberal and Great German until the 1860s, Bismarckian after 1866 and eventually pan-German and antisemitic, took to its heart three monuments whose inspiration was basically not official: the monument to Arminius the Cheruscan in the Teutoburg Forest (much of it constructed as early as 1838-46, and inaugurated in 1875); the Niederwald monument above the Rhine, commemorating the unification of Germany in 1871 (1877-83); and the centenary memorial of the battle of Leipzig, initiated in 1894 by a 'German Patriotic League for the Erection of a Monument to the Battle of the Peoples at Leipzig', and inaugurated in 1913. On the other hand, they appear to have showed no enthusiasm for the proposal to turn the monument to William I on the Kyffhäuser mountain, on the spot where folk myth claimed the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa would appear again, into a national symbol (1890-6), and no special reaction to the construction of the monument to William I and Germany at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle (the 'Deutsches Eck' or German Corner), directed against French claims to the left bank of the Rhine.10
Leaving such variations aside, the mass of masonry and statuary which went up in Germany in this period was remarkably large, and made the fortunes of sufficiently pliable and competent architects and sculptors.11 Among those constructed or planned in the 1890s alone, we may mention the new Reichstag building (1884-94) with elaborate historical imagery on its facade, the Kyffhäuser monument already mentioned (1890-6), the national monument to William I—clearly intended as the official father of the country (1890-7), the monument to William I at the Porta Westfalica (1892), the William I monument at the Deutsches Eck (1894-7), the extraordinary Valhalla of Hohenzollern princes in the 'Avenue of Victory' (Siegesallee) in Berlin (1896-1901), a variety of statues to William I in German cities (Dortmund 1894, Wiesbaden 1894, Prenzlau 1898, Hamburg 1903, Halle 1901) and, a little later, a spate of Bismarck monuments, which enjoyed a more genuine support among nationalists.12 The inauguration of one of these monuments provided the first occasion for the use of historical themes on the postage stamps of the Empire (1899).
This accumulation of masonry and statuary suggests two comments. The first concerns the choice of a national symbol. Two of these were available: a vague but adequately military 'Germania', who played no notable role in sculpture, though she figured extensively on postage stamps from the start, since no single dynastic image could as yet symbolize Germany as a whole; and the figure of the 'Deutsche Michel', who actually appears in a subordinate role on the Bismarck monument. He belongs to the curious representations of the nation, not as country or state, but as 'the people', which came to animate the demotic political language of the nineteenth-century cartoonists and was intended (as in John Bull and the goateed Yankee—but not in Marianne, image of the Republic) to express national character, as seen by the members of the nation itself. Their origins and early history are obscure, though, like the national anthem, they are almost certainly first found in eighteenth-century Britain.13 The point about the 'Deutsche Michel' is that his image stressed both the innocence and simple-mindedness so readily exploited by cunning foreigners, and the physical strength he could mobilize to frustrate their knavish tricks and conquests when finally roused. 'Michel' seems to have been essentially an anti-foreign image.
The second concerns the crucial significance of the Bismarckian unification of Germany as the only national historical experience which the citizens of the new Empire had in common, given that all earlier conceptions of Germany and German unification were in one way or another 'Great German'. And within this experience, the Franco-German war was central. Insofar as Germany had a (brief) 'national' tradition, it was symbolized in the three names: Bismarck, William I and Sedan.
This is dearly exemplified by the ceremonials and rituals invented (also mainly under William II). Thus the chronicles of one Gymnasium record no less than ten ceremonies between August 1895 and March 1896 recalling the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Franco-Prussian war, including ample commemorations of battles in the war, celebrations of the emperor's birthday, the official handing-over of the portrait of an imperial prince, illuminations and public addresses on the war of 1870-1, on the development of the imperial idea (Kaiseridee) during the war, on the character of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and so on.14
A more detailed description of one such ceremony may elucidate their character. Watched by parents and friends, the boys marched into the school yard singing the 'Wacht am Rhein' (the 'national song' most directly identified with hostility to the French, though, interestingly, neither the Prussian nor the German national anthem).15 They formed up facing representatives of each class who held flags decorated with oak leaves, which had been bought with money collected in each class. (The oak had associations with Teutonic-German folklore, nationalism and military virtues—still remembered in the oak leaves which marked the highest class of military decoration under Hitler: a suitably Germanic equivalent to the Latin laurel.) The head boy presented these banners to the headmaster, who in turn addressed the assembly on the glorious days of the late Emperor William I, and called for three ringing cheers for the reigning monarch and his empress. The boys then marched under their banners. Yet another address by the headmaster followed, before the planting of an 'imperial oak' (Kaisereiche) to the accompaniment of choral singing. The day concluded with an excursion into the Grunewald. All these proceedings were merely preliminaries to the actual commemoration of Sedan Day two days later, and indeed to a scholastic year amply punctuated by ritual gatherings, religious and civic.16 In the same year an imperial decree was to announce the construction of the Siegesallee, linking it with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Franco-Prussian war, which was presented as the rising of the German people 'as one man', though 'following the call of its princes' to 'repel foreign aggression and achieve the unity of the fatherland and the restoration of the Reich in glorious victories' (my italics).17 The Siegesallee, it will be recalled, represented exclusively the Hohenzollern princes back to the days of the Margraves of Brandenburg.
A comparison of the French and German innovations is instructive. Both stress the founding acts of the new regime—the French Revolution in its least precise and controversial episode (the Bastille) and the Franco-Prussian war. Except for this one point of historic reference, the French Republic abstained from historical retrospect as strikingly as the German Empire indulged in it. Since the Revolution had established the fact, the nature and the boundaries of the French nation and its patriotism, the Republic could confine itself to recalling these to its citizens by means of a few obvious symbols—Marianne, the tricolour, the 'Marseillaise', and so on—supplementing them with a little ideological exegesis elaborating on the (to its poorer citizens) obvious if sometimes theoretical benefits of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Since the 'German people' before 1871 had no political definition or unity, and its relation to the new Empire (which excluded large parts of it) was vague, symbolic or ideological, identification had to be more complex and—with the exception of the role of the Hohenzollern dynasty, army and state—less precise. Hence the multiplicity of reference, ranging from mythology and folklore (German oaks, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa) through the shorthand cartoon stereotypes to definition of the nation in terms of its enemies. Like many another liberated 'people', 'Germany' was more easily defined by what it was against than in any other way.

['Introduction: Inventing Traditions', and 'Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe,1870-1914', in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (CUP: Cambridge, 1983), 13-14,264-5, 271-8.1

Միջանկյալ քննության Էսսեների թեմաներ

Փորձագիտական հասարակությունը գլոբալացված աշխարհում
Ազգային գաղափարախոսություն և ժողովրդավարություն
Լեզուն որպես ազգային ինքնության մաս
Ցեղասպանության ճանաչման հարցը արտաքին քաղաքականության օրակարգում
Հայ թուրքական հաշտեցման գործընթացը ազգայնական տրամադրությունների լույսի ներքո

TOM NAIRN The Maladies of Development

'[N]ationalism' in its most general sense is determined by certain features of the world political economy, in the era between the French and Industrial Revolutions and the present day. We are still living in this era. However, we enjoy the modest advantage of having lived in it longer than the earlier theorists who wrestled with the problem. From our present vantage-point we may be a little more able than they were to discern some overall characteristics of the process and its by-products. Indeed it would not say much for us if we were not able to do this.
Next, we must inquire what are those features of general historical develop¬ment which give us some clue about nationalism. At this point it may help to dip briefly into the mythology of the subject. If someone were producing an up-dated version of Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idiees recues for the use of politics and social-science students, I think the entry 'Nationalism' might read as follows: 'Nationalism: infrequently used before the later nineteenth century, the term can nonetheless be traced back in approximately its contemporary meaning to the 1790s (Abbe Baruel, 1798). It denotes the new and heightened significance accorded to factors of nationality, ethnic inheritance, customs and speech from the early nineteenth century onwards. The concept of national¬ism as a generally necessary stage of development for all societies is common to both materialist and idealist philosophies. These later theoretical formula¬tions agree that society must pass through this phase (see e.g. texts of F. Engels, L. von Ranker, V. I. Lenin, F. Meinecke). These theories also agree in attribut¬ing the causes of this phase to specific forces or impulses resident within the social formations concerned. Nationalism is therefore an internally-determined necessity, associated by Marxists with, for example, the creation of a national market economy and a viable national bourgeois class; by Idealists with the indwelling spirit of the community, a common personality which must find expression in historical development. Both views concur that this stage of societal evolution is the necessary precondition of a subsequent, more satisfactory state of affairs, known as "internationalism" ("proletarian" or "so¬cialist" internationalism in one case, the higher harmony of the World Spirit in the other). This condition is only attainable for societies and individuals who have developed a healthy nationalism previously. While moderate, reasonable nationalism is in this sense praised, an immoderate or excessive nationalism exceeding these historical limits is viewed as unhealthy and dangerous (see entry "Chauvinism", above).' The gist of this piece of global folklore (which unfortunately embraces much of what passes for 'theory' on nationalism) is that nationalism is an inwardly-determined social necessity, a 'growth-stage', located somewhere in between traditional or 'feudal' societies and a future where the factors of nationality will become less prominent (or anyway less troublesome in human history). Regrettably, it is a growth-stage which can sometimes go wrong and run amok. This is mysterious. How can adolescence become a deadly disease?
Whatever the doctors say about this, they agree on the double inwardness attaching to nationalism. It corresponds to certain internal needs of the society in question, and to certain individual, psychological needs as well. It supplies peoples and persons with an important commodity, 'identity'. There is a distinctive, easily recognizable subjectivity linked to all this. Whenever we talk about nationalism, we normally find ourselves talking before too long about 'feelings', 'instincts', supposed desires and hankerings to 'belong', and so on. This psychology is obviously an important fact about nationalism.
The universal folklore of nationalism is not entirely wrong. If it were, it would be unable to function as myth. On the other hand, it would be equally unable to function in this way if it were true—that is, true in the sense that concerns us in this place. It is ideology. This means it is the generally acceptable 'false consciousness' of a social world still in the grip of 'nationalism'. It is a mechan¬ism of adjustment and compensation, a way of living with the reality of those forms historical development we label 'nationalism'. As such, it is perhaps best regarded as a set of important clues towards whatever these forms are really about.
The principal such due is the powerful connection that common sense suggests between nationalism and the concept of development or social and economic 'growth'. It is true that the distinctively modern fact of nationalism (as opposed to nationality, national states and other precursors) is somehow related to this. For it is only within the context of the general acceleration of change since about 1800, only in the context of 'development' in this new sense, that nationhood acquired this systemic and abstract meaning.
However, it is not true that the systemic connotation derives from the fact of development as such. This is the sensitive juncture at which truth evaporates into useful ideology. It is simply not the case (although humanity has always had plenty of reasons for wishing it were the case) that national-ism, the compuls¬ive necessity for a certain socio-political form, arises naturally from these new developmental conditions. It is not nature. The point of the folklore is of course to suggest this: to award it a natural status, and hence a 'health' label, as if it were indeed a sort of adolescence of all societies, the road we have to trudge along between rural idiocy and 'modernity', industrialization (or what¬ever).
A second significant clue is that pointing towards social and personal subject¬ivity. It is true that nationalism is connected with typical internal movements, personnel and persons. These behave in similar ways and entertain quite similar feelings. So it is tempting to say (e.g.) that the Italian nationalism of the 1850s or the Kurdish or Eritrean nationalism of the 1970s rest upon and are generated by these specific internal mechanisms. They express the native peculiarities of their peoples, in a broadly similar way—presumably because the people's soul (or at least its bourgeoisie) needs to.
However, it is not true that nationalism of any kind is really the product of these internal motions as such. This is the core of the empirical country-by¬country fallacy which the ideology of nationalism itself wishes upon us. Welsh nationalism, of course, has much to do with the specifics of the Welsh people, their history, their particular forms of oppression and all the rest of it. But Welsh nationalism—that generic, universal necessity recorded in the very term we are interested in—has nothing to do with Wales. It is not a Welsh fact, but a fact of general developmental history, that at a specific time the Welsh land and people are forced into the historical process in this fashion. The '-ism' they are then compelled to follow is in reality imposed upon them from without; although of course to make this adaptation, it is necessary that the usual kinds of national cadres, myths, sentiments, etc., well up from within. All national¬isms work through a characteristic repertoire of social and personal mechan¬isms, many of them highly subjective. But the causation of the drama is not within the bosom of the Volk: this way lie the myths of blood and Geist. The subjectivity of nationalism is an important objective fact about it; but it is a fact which, in itself, merely reposes the question of origins.
The real origins are elsewhere. They are located not in the folk, nor in the individual's repressed passion for some sort of wholeness or identity, but in the machinery of world political economy. Not, however, in the process of that economy's development as such—not simply as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization and urbanization. They are associated with more specific features of that process. The best way of categorizing these traits is to say they represent the uneven development of history since the eighteenth cen¬tury. This unevenness is a material fact; one could argue that it is the most grossly material fact about modern history.. This statement allows us to reach a satisfying and near-paradoxical conclusion: the most notoriously subjective and ideal of historical phenomena is in fact a by-product of the most brutally and hopelessly material side of the history of the last two centuries. [ ... ]
The unforeseeable, antagonistic reality of capitalism's growth into the world is what the general title 'uneven development' refers to. It indicates the shambling, fighting, lop-sided, illogical, head-over-heels fact, so to speak, as distinct from the noble uplift and phased amelioration of the ideal. Modern capitalist development was launched by a number of West-European states which had accumulated the potential for doing so over a long period of history. The even-development notion was that this advance could be straightforwardly followed, and the institutions responsible for it copied—hence the periphery, the world's countryside, would catch up with the leaders in due time. This evening-up would proceed through the formation of a basically homogeneous enlightened class throughout the periphery: the international or 'cosmopol¬itan' elite in charge of the diffusion process. But no such steady diffusion or copying was in fact possible, and neither was the formation of this universal class (though there have been and are caricatural versions of it, in the shape of comprador bourgeoisies allying themselves to metropolitan capital instead of to their own people).
Instead, the impact of those leading countries was normally experienced as domination and invasion. The spirit of commerce was supposed to take over from the traditional forms of rapine and swindle. But in reality it could not. The gap was too great, and the new developmental forces were not in the hands of a beneficent, disinterested elite concerned with Humanity's advance. Rather, it was the 'sordid material interests' (as Marx and Engels relished saying) of the English and French bourgeois classes which were employing the concepts of the Enlightenment and classical political economy as a smoke¬screen. Even with the best will in the world (which they did not have), Progress could not help identifying herself to some degree with these particu¬lar places, classes and interests. And in this way she could not help fomenting a new sort of 'imperialism'.
On the periphery itself, outside the core-areas of the new industrial-capitalist world economy, people soon needed little persuasion of this. They learned quickly enough that Progress in the abstract meant domination in the con¬crete, by powers which they could not help apprehending as foreign or alien. In practice as distinct from the theory, the acculturation process turned out to be more like a 'tidal wave' (in Ernest Gellner's phrase) of outside interference and control. Humanity's forward march signified in the first instance Anglici-zation or Frenchification, for as long ahead as the people most conscious, of the change could see. As was said later on, more globally: 'Westernization' or 'Americanization'.
There was never either time or the sociological space for even development. The new forces of production, and the new state and military powers associ¬ated with them, were too dynamic and uncontrolled, and the resultant social upheavals were far too rapid and devastating for any such gradual civilization-process to take place. There was to be no 'due time' in modern history. All time was undue once the great shock-wave had begun its course. For those outside the metropolis (where in unique and unrepeatable circumstances things had matured slowly) the problem was not to assimilate culture at a reasonable rate: it was to avoid being drowned.
The Enlightenment was borne into wider reality by bourgeois revolutions which shook the older social world around them to pieces. In these less-developed lands the elites soon discovered that tranquil incorporation into the cosmopolitan technocracy was possible for only a few of them at a time. The others, the majority, saw themselves excluded from the action, rather than invited politely to join in; trampled over rather than taught the rules of the game; exploited rather than made partners. It was no consolation to be told that patience was in order, that things would even up in the next generation, or the one after that. Was this true at all? Would not the actual configuration of the new forces of change merely put the English even more firmly in charge of an even more unIndian India; the Germans even more in control of second-class, Slav lands? True or not, the point came to seem academic. Given the violence and rapidity of the changes in act, patience and time were no longer human possibilities anyway.

The Necessary Resort to Populism

Huge expectations raced ahead of material progress itself. The peripheric elites had no option but to try and satisfy such demands by taking things into their own hands. 'Taking things into one's own hands' denotes a good deal of the substance of nationalism, of course. It meant that these classes—and later on sometimes the masses beneath them, whom they felt responsible for—had to mobilize against 'progress' at the same time as they sought to improve their position in accordance with the new canons. They had to contest the concrete form in which (so to speak) progress had taken them by the throat, even as they set out to progress themselves. Since they wanted factories, parliaments, schools and so on, they had to copy the leaders somehow; but in a way which rejected the mere implantation of these things by direct foreign intervention or control. This gave rise to a profound ambiguity, an ambivalence which marks most forms of nationalism.
Unable to literally 'copy' the advanced lands (which would have entailed repeating the stages of slow growth that had led to the breakthrough), the backward regions were forced to take what they wanted and cobble it on to their own native inheritance of social forms. In the annals of this kind of theorizing the procedure is called 'uneven and combined development. To defend themselves, the periphery countries were compelled to try and advance 'in their own way', to 'do it for themselves'. Their rulers—or at least the newly-awakened elites who now came to power—had to mobilize their so¬cieties for this historical short-cut. This meant the conscious formation of a militant, inter-class community rendered strongly (if mythically) aware of its own separate identity vis-a-vis the outside forces of domination. There was no other way of doing it. Mobilization had to be in terms of what was there; and the whole point of the dilemma was that there was nothing there—none of the economic and political institutions of modernity now so needed.
All that there was was the people and peculiarities of the region: its inherited ethnos, speech, folklore, skin-colour, and so on. Nationalism works through differentiae like those because it has to. It is not necessarily democratic in outlook, but it is invariably populist. People are what it has to go on: in the archetypal situation of the really poor or 'under-developed' territory, it may be more or less all that nationalists have going for them. For kindred reasons, it had to function through highly rhetorical forms, through a sentimental culture sufficiently accessible to the lower strata now being called to battle. This is why a romantic culture quite remote from Enlight¬enment rationalism always went hand-in-hand with the spread of national¬ism. The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood.
It is unnecessary here to explore the process in detail. Everyone is familiar with its outline, and with much of its content. We all know how it spread out from its West-European source, in concentric circles of upheaval and reaction: through Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and then across the other continents. Uniformed imperialism of the 1880-1945 variety was one episode in this larger history, as were its derivatives, anti-colonial wars and 'de¬colonization'. We have all studied the phenomena so consistently accompa¬nying it: the 'rediscovery' or invention of national history, urban intellectuals invoking peasant virtues which they have experienced only through train windows on their summer holidays, schoolmasters painfully acquiring `national' tongues spoken only in remote valleys, the infinity of forms assumed by the battle between scathing cosmopolitan modernists and emotional defen¬ders of the Folk ... and so on.
But [... ] let me try to sum up this part of the argument. Real, uneven development has invariably generated an imperialism of the centre over the periphery; one after another, these peripheric areas have been forced into a profoundly ambivalent reaction against this dominance, seeking at once to resist it and to somehow take over its vital forces for their own use. This could only be done by a kind of highly 'idealist' political and ideological mobiliza¬tion, by a painful forced march based on their own resources: that is, em¬ploying their 'nationality' as a basis. The metropolitan fantasy of even development had predicted a swelling, single forward march that would in¬duct backward lands into its course; in reality, these lands found themselves compelled to attempt radical, competitive short-cuts in order to avoid being trampled over or left behind. The logistics of these short-cuts brought in factors quite absent from the universalizing philosophy of Progress. And since the greater part of the globe was to be forced into detours of this kind, these factors became dominant in the history of the world for a long period, one still not concluded.
[The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn. (New Left Books: London, 1977), 332-6, 337-41.)

ERNEST GELLNER Nationalism and High Cultures

[But] nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state. It uses some of the pre-existent cultures, generally transforming them in the process, but it cannot possibly use them all. There are too many of them. A viable higher culture¬sustaining modern state cannot fall below a certain minimal size (unless in effect parasitic on its neighbours); and there is only room for a limited number of such states on this earth.
The high ratio of determined slumberers, who will not rise and shine and who refuse to be woken, enables us to turn the tables on nationalism-as-seen¬by-itself. Nationalism sees itself as a natural and universal ordering of the political life of mankind, only obscured by that long, persistent and mysterious somnolence. As Hegel expressed this vision: 'Nations may have had a long history before they finally reach their destination—that of forming themselves into states'.' Hegel immediately goes on to suggest that this pre-state period is really 'pre-historical' (sic): so it would seem that on this view the real history of a nation only begins when it acquires its own state. If we invoke the sleeping-beauty nations, neither possessing a state nor feeling the lack of it, against the nationalist doctrine, we tacitly accept its social metaphysic, which sees nations as the bricks of which mankind is made up. Critics of nationalism, who de¬nounce the political movement but tacitly accept the existence of nations, do not go far enough. Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one. Those who are its historic agents know not what they do, but that is another matter. [ ... ]
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, the other way round. It is not the case that the 'age of nationalism' is a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social conditions make for standardized, homogeneous, cent¬rally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minorities, a situation arises in which well-defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now seem to be the natural repositories of political legitimacy. Only then does it come to appear that any defiance of their boundaries by political units constitutes a scandal.
Under these conditions, though under these conditions only, nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and of culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units. In these conditions, men will to be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cul¬tures, and to protect and impose their culture with the boundaries of their power. The fusion of will, culture and polity becomes the norm, and one not easily or frequently defied. (Once, it had been almost universally defied, with impunity, and had indeed passed unnoticed and undiscussed.) These condi¬tions do not define the human situation as such, but merely its industrial variant.
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round. Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited prolifera¬tion of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically. Dead languages can be revived, tradi¬tions invented, quite fictitious pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, positively inventive aspect of nationalist ardour ought not to allow anyone to conclude, erroneously, that nationalism is a contingent, artifi-cial, -ideological invention, which might not have happened, if only those damned busy-body interfering European thinkers, not content to leave well alone, had not concocted it and fatefully injected it into the bloodstream of otherwise viable political communities. The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism itself, as opposed to the avatars it happens to pick up for its incarnations, is itself in the least contingent and accidental.
Nothing could be further from the truth than such a supposition. National¬ism is not what it seems, and above all it is not what it seems to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions, or are modified out of all recognition. Nonetheless the nationalist principle as such, as distinct from each of its specific forms, and from the individually distinctive nonsense which it may preach, has very very deep roots in our shared current condition, is not at all contingent, and will not easily be denied.
Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own camou¬flaged image. In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage. At Nuremberg, Nazi Germany did not worship itself by pretending to worship God or even Wotan; it overtly wor¬shipped itself. In milder but just as significant form, enlightened modernist theologians do not believe, or even take much interest in, the doctrines of their faith which had meant so much to their predecessors. They treat them with a kind of comic auto-functionalism, as valid simply and only as the conceptual and ritual tools by means of which a social tradition affirms its values, con¬tinuity and solidarity, and they systematically obscure and play down the difference between such a tacitly reductionist 'faith', and the real thing which had preceded it and had played such a crucial part in earlier European history, a part which could never have been played by the unrecognizably diluted, watered-down current versions.
But the fact that social self-worship, whether virulent and violent or gentle and evasive, is now an openly avowed collective self-worship, rather than a means of covertly revering society through the image of God, as Durkheim insisted, does not mean that the current style is any more veridical than that of a Durkheimian age. The community may no longer be seen through the prism of the divine, but nationalism has its own amnesias and selections which, even when they may be severely secular, can be profoundly distorting and decep¬tive.
The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffu¬sion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the require¬ments of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. That is what really happens.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalism affirms and what national¬ists fervently believe. Nationalism usually conquers in the name of putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist self-presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officials of another, an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national libera¬tion. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted) culture of its own, though admittedly one which will have some links with the earlier local folk styles and dialects. But it was the great ladies at the Budapest Opera who really went to town in peasant dresses, or dresses claimed to be such. At the present time in the Soviet Union the consumers of 'ethnic' gramophone records are not the remaining ethnic rural population, but the newly urbanized, appartment-dwelling, educated and multi-lingual population,' who like to express their real or imagined senti¬ments and roots, and who will no doubt indulge in as much nationalist behaviour as the political situation may allow.
So a sociological self-deception, a vision of reality through a prism of illu¬sion, still persists, but it is not the same as that which was analysed by Durkheim. Society no longer worships itself through religious symbols; a modem, streamlined, on-wheels high culture celebrates itself in song and dance, which it borrows (stylizing it in the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be perpetuating, defending, and reaffirming.
The Course of True Nationalism Never Did Run Smooth
A characteristic scenario of the evolution of a nationalism [ ... ] ran something like this. The Ruritanian were a peasant population speaking a group of related and more or less mutually intelligible dialects, and inhabiting a series of discontinuous but not very much separated pockets within the lands of the Empire of Megalomania. The Ruritanian language, or rather the dialects which could be held to compose it, was not really spoken by anyone other than these peasants. The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalomanian court, which happened to belong to a language group different from the one of which the Ruritanian dialects were an offshoot.
Most, but not all, Ruritanian peasants belonged to a church whose liturgy was taken from another linguistic group again, and many of the priests, especially higher up in the hierarchy, spoke a language which was a modern vernacular version of the liturgical language of this creed, and which was also very far removed from Ruritanian. The petty traders of the small towns serving the Ruritanian countryside were drawn from a different ethnic group and religion still, and one heartily detested by the Ruritanian peasantry.
In the past the Ruritanian peasants had had many griefs, movingly and beautifully recorded in their lament-songs (painstakingly collected by village schoolmasters late in the nineteenth century, and made well known to the international musical public by the compositions of the great Ruritanian na¬tional composer L.). The pitiful oppression of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked, in the eighteenth century, the guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian social bandit K., whose deeds are said still to persist in the local folk memory, not to mention several novels and two films, one of them produced by the national artist Z., under highest auspices, soon after the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.
Honesty compels one to admit that the social bandit was captured by his own compatriots, and that the tribunal which condemned him to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Furthermore, shortly after Ruritania first attained independence, a circular passed between its Ministries of the Interior, justice and Education, considering whether it might not now be more politic to celebrate the village defence units which had opposed the social bandit and his gangs, rather than the said social bandit himself, in the interest of not encouraging opposition to the police.
A careful analysis of the folk songs so painstakingly collected in the nine¬teenth century, and now incorporated in the repertoire of the Ruritanian youth, camping and sports movement, does not disclose much evidence of any serious discontent on the part of the peasantry with their linguistic and cultural situation, however grieved they were by other, more earthy matters. On the contrary, such awareness as there is of linguistic pluralism within the lyrics of the songs is ironic, jocular and good-humoured, and consists in part of biling¬ual puns, sometimes in questionable taste. It must also be admitted that one of the most moving of these songs—I often sang it by the camp fire at the holiday camp to which I was sent during the summer vacations—celebrates the fate of a shepherd boy, grazing three bullocks on the seigneurial clover (sic) near the woods, who was surprised by a group of social bandits, requiring him to surrender his overcoat. Combining reckless folly with lack of political aware¬ness, the shepherd boy refused and was killed. I do not know whether this song has been suitably re-written since Ruritania went socialist. Anyway, to return to my main theme: though the songs do often contain complaints about the condition of the peasantry, they do not raise the issue of cultural nationalism.
That was yet to come, and presumably post-dates the composition of the said songs. In the nineteenth century a population explosion occurred at the same time as certain other areas of the Empire of Megalomania-but not Ruritania—rapidly industrialized. The Ruritanian peasants were drawn to seek work in the industrially more developed areas, and some secured it, on the dreadful terms prevailing at the time. As backward rustics speaking an obscure and seldom written or taught language, they had a particularly rough deal in the towns to whose slums they had moved. At the same time, some Ruritanian lads destined for the church, and educated in both the court and the liturgical languages, became influenced by the new liberal ideas in the course of their secondary schooling, and shifted to a secular training at the university, ending not as priests but as journalists, teachers and professors. They received encourage¬ment from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists and historians who had come to explore Ruritania. The continuing labour migra¬tion, increasingly widespread elementary education and conscription provided these Ruritanian awakeners with a growing audience.
Of course, it was perfectly possible for the Ruritanians, if they wished to do so (and many did), to assimilate into the dominant language of Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep religious custom, differentiated an educated Ruritanian from a similar Megalomanian. In fact, many did assimil¬ate, often without bothering to change their names, and the telephone direct¬ory of the old capital of Megalomania (now the Federal Republic of Megalomania) is quite full of Ruritanian names, though often rather comically spelt in the Megalomanian manner, and adapted to Megalomanian phonetic expectations. The point is that after a rather harsh and painful start in the first generation, the life chances of the offspring of the Ruritanian labour migrant were nor unduly bad, and probably at least as good (given his willingness to work hard) as those of his non-Ruritanian Megalomanian fellow-citizens. So these offspring shared in the eventual growing prosperity and general embour¬geoisement of the region. Hence, as far as individual life chances went, there was perhaps no need for a virulent Ruritanian nationalism.
Nonetheless something of the kind did occur. It would, I think, be quite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants in the movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the motives and feelings which are so vigorously expressed in the literature of the national revival. They deplored the squalor and neglect of their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be found in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their co-nationals were subject, and the alienation from their native culture to which they were doomed in the proletarian suburbs of the industrial towns. They preached against these ills, and had the hearing of at least many of their fellows. The manner in which, when the international political situ¬ation came to favour it, Ruritania eventually attained independence, is now part of the historical record and need not be repeated here.
There is, one must repeat, no need to assume any conscious long-term calculation of interest on anyone's part. The nationalist intellectuals were full of warm and generous ardour on behalf of the co-nationals. When they donned folk costume and trekked over the hills, composing poems in the forest clearings, they did not also dream of one day becoming powerful bureaucrats, ambassadors and ministers. Likewise, the peasants and workers whom they succeeded in reaching felt resentment at their condition, but had no reveries about plans of industrial development which one day would bring a steel mill (quite useless, as it then fumed out) to the very heart of the Ruritanian valleys, thus totally ruining quite a sizeable area of surrounding arable land and pas¬ture. It would be genuinely wrong to try to reduce these sentiments to calcula¬tions of material advantage or of social mobility. The present theory is sometimes travestied as a reduction of national sentiment to calculation of prospects of social promotion. But this is a misrepresentation. In the old days it made no sense to ask whether the peasants loved their own culture: they took it for granted, like the air they breathed, and were not conscious of either. But when labour migration and bureaucratic employment became prominent features within their social horizon, they soon learned the difference between dealing with a co-national, one understanding and sympathizing with their culture, and someone hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of social mo¬bility. In stable self-contained communities culture is often quite invisible, but when mobility and context-free communication come to be of the essence of social life, the culture in which one has been taught to communicate becomes the core of one's identity.
So had there been such calculation (which there was not) it would, in quite a number of cases (though by no means in all), have been a very sound one. In fact, given the at least relative paucity of Ruritanian intellectuals, those Rurita¬nians who did have higher qualifications secured much better posts in inde¬pendent Ruritania than most of them could even have hoped for in Greater Megalomania, where they had to compete with scholastically more developed ethnic groups. As for the peasants and workers, they did not benefit immedi¬ately; but the drawing of a political boundary around the newly defined ethnic Ruritania did mean the eventual fostering and protection of industries in the area, and in the end drastically diminished the need for labour migration from it.
What all this amounts to is this: during the early period of industrialization, entrants into the new order who are drawn from cultural and linguistic groups that are distant from those of the more advanced centre, suffer considerable disadvantages which are even greater than those of other economically weak new proletarians who have the advantage of sharing the culture of the political and economic rulers. But the cultural / linguistic distance and capacity to differ¬entiate themselves from others, which is such a handicap for individuals, can be and often is eventually a positive advantage for entire collectivities, or potential collectivities, of these victims of the newly emergent world. It en¬ables them to conceive and express their resentments and discontents in intelligible terms. Ruritanians had previously thought and felt in terms of family unit and village, at most in terms of a valley, and perhaps on occasion in terms of religion. But now, swept into the melting pot of an early industrial development, they had no valley and no village: and sometimes no family. But there were other impoverished and exploited individuals, and a lot of them spoke dialects recognizably similar, while most of the better-off spoke some¬thing quite alien; and so the new concept of the Ruritanian, nation was born of this contrast, with some encouragement from those journalists and teachers. And it was not an illusion: the attainment of some of the objects of the nascent Ruritanian national movement did indeed bring relief of the ills which had helped to engender it. The relief would perhaps have come any way; but in this national form, it also brought forth a new high culture and its guardian state.
[Nations and Nationalism (Blackwell: Oxford, 1983), 48-9, 55-62.]

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.]

ELIE KEDOURIE Nationalism and Self-Determination

It is sometimes argued that there are two or more varieties of nationalism, the linguistic being only one of a number, and the Nazi doctrine of race is brought forward to illustrate the argument that there can be racial, religious, and other nationalisms. But, in fact, there is no definite clear-cut distinction between linguistic and racial nationalism. Originally, the doctrine emphasized language as the test of nationality, because language was an outward sign of a group's peculiar identity and a significant means of ensuring its continuity. But a nation's language was peculiar to that nation only because such a nation constituted a racial stock distinct from that of other nations. The French nationalist writer, Charles Maurras (1868-1952), exemplified this connexion between race and language when he remarked that no Jew, no Semite, could understand or handle the French language as well as a Frenchman proper; no Jew, he remarked, could appreciate the beauties of Racine's line in Berenice: 'Dans l'orient desert quel devint mon ennui.' It was then no accident that racial classifications were, at the same time, linguistic ones, and that the Nazis distinguished the members of the German Aryan race scattered in Central and Eastern Europe by a linguistic criterion. [... ]
In nationalist doctrine, language, race, culture, and sometimes even reli¬gion, constitute different aspects of the same primordial entity, the nation. The theory admits here of no great precision, and it is misplaced ingenuity to try and classify nationalisms according to the particular aspect which they choose to emphasize. What is beyond doubt is that the doctrine divides humanity into separate and distinct nations, claims that such nations must constitute sover¬eign 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. All these different facets of the doctrine are admirably summed up in an utterance of Schleier¬macher's: 'How little worthy of respect,' he exclaims, 'is the man who roams about hither and thither without the anchor of national ideal and love of fatherland; how dull is the friendship that rests merely upon personal simi¬larities in disposition and tendencies, and not upon the feeling of a greater common unity for whose sake one can offer up one's life; how the greatest source of pride is lost by the woman that cannot feel that she also bore children for her fatherland and brought them up for it, that her house and all the petty things that fill up most of her time belong to a greater whole and take their place in the union of her people!' Behind such a passage lie all the assumptions of nationalist metaphysics and anthropology. It may serve to distinguish nationalism from patriotism and xenophobia with which it is often confused. Patriotism, affection for one's country, or one's group, loyalty to its institutions, and zeal for its defence, is a sentiment known among all kinds of men; so is xenophobia, which is dislike of the stranger, the outsider, and reluctance to admit him into one's own group. Neither sentiment depends on a particular anthropology and neither asserts a particular doctrine of the state or of the individual's relation to it. Nationalism does both; it is a comprehens¬ive doctrine which leads to a distinctive style of politics. But far from being a universal phenomenon, it is a product of European thought in the last 150 years. If confusion exists, it is because nationalist doctrine has annexed these universally held sentiments to the service of a specific anthropology and metaphysic. It is, therefore, loose and inexact to speak, as is sometimes done, of British or American nationalism when describing the thought of those who recommend loyalty to British or American political institutions. A British or an American nationalist would have to define the British or the American nation in terms of language, race, or religion, to require that all those who conform to the definition should belong to the British or American state, that all those who do not, should cease so to belong, and to demand that all British and American citizens should merge their will in the will of the community. It is at once clear that political thought of this kind is marginal and insignificant in Britain and America, and that those who speak of British or American nation¬alism do not usually have such views in mind.
Nationalism is also sometimes described as a new tribalism. The analogy is meant to indicate that like the tribe, the nation excludes and is intolerant of outsiders. But such characteristics, as has been said, are common to all human groups, and cannot serve to define either tribe or nation. But the analogy is not only unable to shed light on the matter, it can also mislead. A tribesman's relation to his tribe is usually regulated in minute detail by custom which is followed unquestioningly and considered part of the natural or the divine order. Tribal custom is neither a decree of the General Will, nor an edict of legislative Reason. The tribesman is such by virtue of his birth, not by virtue of self-determination. He is usually unaware that the destiny of man is pro¬gressive, and that he can fulfill this destiny by merging his will into the will of the tribe. Nationalism and tribalism, then, are not interchangeable terms, nor do they describe related phenomena.
Another assertion often made is that nation-states have been in the process of formation at least since the sixteenth century; but this, again, seems a confusion, which results from using nationalist categories in historiography. When the peculiar anthropology and metaphysics of nationalism are used in the interpretation of the past, history takes on quite another complexion. Men who thought they were acting in order to accomplish the will of God, to make the truth prevail, or to advance the interests of a dynasty, or perhaps simply to defend their own against aggression, are suddenly seen to have been really acting in order that the genius of a particular nationality should be manifested and fostered. Abraham was not a man possessed with the vision of the one
God, he was really the chieftain of a beduin tribe intent on endowing his horde with a national identity. Moses was not a man inspired by God in order to fulfil and reaffirm His covenant with Israel, he was really a national leader rising against colonial oppression. Muhammad may have been the seal of the Prophets, but even more important, he was the founder of the Arab nation. Luther was a shining manifestation of Germanism; Hus a precursor of Masa¬ryk. Nationalists make use of the past in order to subvert the present. One instance of this transformation of the past occurs in a letter written against Zionism by an orthodox rabbi of Eastern Europe in 1900. In this letter, the Dzikover Rebbe contrasts the traditional view which the community of Israel had of itself, and the new nationalist interpretation of the Jewish past. Bitter¬ness gives his speech a biting concision, and this letter thus exhibits in a clear and striking manner the operations of nationalist historiography, as well as the traditional interpretation which it has challenged. 'For our many sins,' writes the Rebbe, 'strangers have risen to pasture the holy flock, men who say that the people of Israel should be clothed in secular nationalism, a nation like all other nations, that Judaism rests on three things, national feeling, the land and the language, and that national feeling is the most praiseworthy element in the brew and the most effective in preserving Judaism, while the observance of the Torah and the commandments is a private matter depending on the inclina¬tion of each individual. May the Lord rebuke these evil men and may He who chooseth Jerusalem seal their mouths." Nationalist historiography operates, in fact, a subtle but unmistakable change in traditional conceptions. In Zionism, Judaism ceases to be the raison d'etre of the Jew, and becomes, instead, a product of Jewish national consciousness. In the doctrine of Pakistan, Islam is transformed into a political ideology and used in order to mobilize Muslims against Hindus; more than that it cannot do, since an Islamic state on classical lines is today an impossible anachronism. In the doctrine of the Action Françoise Catholicism becomes one of the attributes which define a true Frenchman and exclude a spurious one. This transformation of religion into nationalist ideo¬logy is all the more convenient in that nationalists can thereby utilize the powerful and tenacious loyalties which a faith held in common for centuries creates. These loyalties can be utilized even when they are not explicitly spoken of. There is little doubt that the appeal of modern Egyptian, or Pana¬rab, or Armenian, or Greek nationalism derives the greater part of its strength from the existence of ancient communal and religious ties which have nothing to do with nationalist theory, and which may even be opposed to it. The Patriarch of Constantinople Gennadius (d.1468) may illustrate the traditional religious attitude towards ties of race and language: 'Though I am a Hellene by speech, yet I would never say that I was a Hellene,' he wrote, 'for I do not believe as the Hellenes believed. I should like to take my name from my Faith, and if anyone asked me what I am answer "Christian".' But today, with the spread of nationalist doctrine, this opposition, between Hellenism and orthodoxy is itself rejected. Orthodoxy and Hellenism are thought to go together and imply one another, as witnessed in the civil war of which Cyprus has been the stage.
Similarly, when nationalist historiography applies itself to the European past, it produces a picture of nations slowly emerging and asserting themselves in territorial sovereign states. It is, of course, undoubtedly the case that a number of territorial sovereignties succeeded in establishing themselves in Europe in modern times, and that gradually these sovereignties were streng¬thened and made durable by centralizing kings who were able to defeat particularisms and to establish everywhere the authority of their agents and of their 'state'. But these sovereignties were far from being 'nations', as the word is understood in nationalist parlance. The Habsburg Empire was a most powerful state, yet it was not a 'nation'; Prussia was the state at its most perfect, but it was not a 'nation'; Venice was a state which lasted for centuries: was it then a 'nation'? And such states have to be cited in illustration of the political development of modern Europe. Yet how easy is the confusion when, not these, but other European states are being considered; for it is but one step from talking about the French state under Philip the Fair, Henry the Fourth, and Louis the Fourteenth, to talking about the French 'nation' and its develop¬ment under these monarchs. The continuity of the French state, or of the Spanish state, and their territorial stability, make it easy to adduce them as examples of the growth and development of European 'nations': the shift is vital, yet almost imperceptible. How vital it is may be appreciated when we remember that France is a state not because the French constitute a nation, but rather that the French state is the outcome of dynastic ambitions, of circum¬stances, of lucky wars, of administrative and diplomatic skills. it is these which maintained order, enforced laws, and carried out policies; these which made possible at last the cohesive existence of Frenchmen within the French state. it is such things which make possible the continuous existence of political com¬munities, whether or not they are the 'nations' of nationalist theory. The matter becomes even clearer when nationalist historiography is made to deal, not with certain countries in modern Europe, where it has a kind of plau¬sibility, but with countries in almost any other part of the world at almost any period of history. In the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Mogul India, pre-Conquest South America, or China the categories of nationalist histori¬ography, taken seriously, must lead to a contorted, paradoxical, untenable picture of the past. What nationalist historiography professes to explain in the case of modern France or Spain or Italy or Germany, it must in so many other cases, immediately hasten to explain away. The Ottoman Empire was not a 'nation', the Roman Empire was not a 'nation', and yet they were able, as few contemporary states have yet shown themselves able, to continue for cen¬turies, to maintain the cohesion of the social fabric and to attract the loyalties of men. This confusion between states and 'nations' is facilitated by a particular feature of European political history, namely the existence of a European society of states in constant intercourse and conflict, who regulated their relations, however unwillingly and imperfectly, by a universally acknow¬ledged ius gentium. Since nationalism sees the world as a world of many states, it seems but natural to consider a society of nations as the equivalent and continuation of the European society of states. But in reality the two are far removed. The European society of states knew a great diversity of govern¬ments and constitutions; a society of nations must be composed of nation-states, and any state which is not a nation-state has its title and its existence perpetually challenged. The national principle, then, far from providing con¬tinuity in European diplomacy, means a radical subversion of the European state system, an endless attempt to upset the balance of power on which the system must rest.
If nationalism cannot provide a satisfactory account of past political develop¬ments, neither can it supply a plain method whereby nations may be isolated from one another and constituted into sovereign states. The world is indeed diverse, much too diverse, for the classifications of nationalist anthropology. Races, languages, religions, political traditions and loyalties are so inextricably intermixed that there can be no clear convincing reason why people who speak the same language, but whose history and circumstances otherwise widely diverge, should form one state, or why people who speak two different languages and whom circumstances have thrown together should not form one state. On nationalist logic, the separate existence of Britain and America, and the union of English and French Canadians within the Canadian state, are both monstrosities of nature; and a consistent nationalist interpretation of history would reduce large parts of it to inexplicable and irritating anomalies. The inventors of the doctrine tried to prove that nations are obvious and natural divisions of the human race, by appealing to history, anthropology, and linguistics. But the attempt breaks down since, whatever ethnological or philological doctrine may be fashionable for the moment, there is no convin¬cing reason why the fact that people speak the same language or belong to the same race should, by itself, entitle them to enjoy a government exclusively their own. For such a claim to be convincing, it must also be proved that similarity in one respect absolutely overrides differences in other respects. What remains in the doctrine is an affirmation that men have the right to stand on their differences from others, be these differences what they may, fancied or real, important or not, and to make of these differences their first political principle. Of course, academic disciplines, like philology, can make a powerful auxiliary for such a political doctrine, and enable it to secure conviction and assent, but they do not constitute the ultimate ground on which it takes its stand. Ernest Renan, in his lecture of 1882, What is a Nation, saw that this must be the case, and having examined the different criteria which are used to distinguish nations, and having found them wanting, concluded that the will of the individual must ultimately indicate whether a nation exists or not. Even if the existence of nations can be deduced from the principle of diversity, it still cannot be deduced what particular nations exist and what their precise limits are. What remains is to fall back on the will of the individual who, in pursuit of self-determination, wills himself as the member of a nation. The doctrine occasionally appears in its pure state, stripped of academic flannel and acciden¬tal accretions. The Jewish nationalist Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927) has a passage in which he discusses the fundamentals of Jewish nationality. It is a mistake, he writes, to think that Jewish nationality exists only when there is an actual collective national ethos. No doubt this national ethos came into being in consequence of a life lived in common over a number of generations. 'Once, however,' he argues, 'the spirit of nationality has so come into being. . . it becomes a phenomenon that concerns the individual alone, its reality being dependent on nothing but its presence in his psyche, and on no external or objective actuality. If I feel the spirit of Jewish nationality in my heart so that it stamps all my inward life with its seal, then the spirit of Jewish nationality exists in me; and its existence is not at an end even if all my Jewish contemporaries should cease to feel it in their hearts.' Here are no superfluous appeals to philology or biology, no laboripus attempts to prove that because a group speaks the same language, or has the same religion, or lives in the same territory, it therefore is a nation. All this is casually brushed aside, and the nation, says Ahad Ha'am, is what individuals feel in their hearts is the nation. Renan's own description of the nation is that it is a daily plebiscite. The metaphor is felicitous, if only because it indicates so well that nationalism is ultimately based on will, and shows how inadequate the doctrine is in describ¬ing the political process, for a political community which conducts daily plebiscites must soon fall into querulous anarchy, or hypnotic obedience.
National self-determination is, in the final analysis, a determination of the will; and nationalism is, in the first place, a method of teaching the right determination of the will. [ ... I
But the restlessness was the work not only of the revolutionary legend; it proceeded from a breakdown in the transmission of political habits and relig¬ious beliefs from one generation to the next. In societies suddenly exposed to the new learning and the new philosophies of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism, orthodox settled ways began to seem ridiculous and useless. The attack was powerful and left the old generation bewildered and speech¬less; or if it attempted to speak, it merely gave voice to irritated admonition, obstinate opposition, or horror-stricken rejection, which only served to widen the rift and increase the distance between the fathers and the sons. [ ... I
This violent revolt against immemorial restraints, this strident denunciation of decorum and measure, was inevitably accompanied by powerful social strains which may explain the dynamic and violent character of nationalist movements. These movements are ostensibly directed against the foreigner, the outsider, but they are also the manifestation of a species of civil strife between the generations; nationalist movements are children's crusades; their very names are manifestoes against old age: Young Italy, Young Egypt, the Young Turks, the Young Arab Party. When they are stripped of their meta¬physics and their slogans—and these cannot adequately account for the frenzy they conjure up in their followers—such movements are seen to satisfy a need, to fulfil a want. Put at its simplest, the need is to belong together in a coherent and stable community. Such a need is normally satisfied by the family, the neighbourhood, the religious community. In the last century and a half such institutions all over the world have had to bear the brunt of violent social and intellectual change, and it is no accident that nationalism was at its most intense where and when such institutions had little resilience and were ill-prepared to withstand the powerful attacks to which they became exposed. This seems a more satisfactory account than to say that nationalism is a middle-class movement. It is the case that the German inventors of nationalist doctrine came from a class which could be called the middle class, and that they were discontented with the old order in which the nobility was predominant. But the term middle class is closely tied to a particular area and a particular history, that of Western Europe. It presupposes and implies a distinct social order of which feudalism, municipal franchises, and rapid industrial development are some of the prominent features. Such features are not found in all societies, and it would therefore be misleading to link the existence of a nationalist movement to that of a middle class. In countries of the Middle and the Far East, for instance, where the significant division in society was between those who belonged to the state institution and those who did not, nationalism cannot be associated with the existence of a middle class. It developed, rather, among young officers and bureaucrats, whose families were sometimes ob¬scure, sometimes eminent, who were educated in Western methods and ideas, often at the expense of the State, and who as a result came to despise their elders, and to hanker for the shining purity of a new order to sweep away the hypocrisy, the corruption, the decadence which they felt inexorably choking them and their society.
[Nationalism (Hutchinson: London, 1960),71-81, 99-102.]

Theories of Nationalism INTRODUCTION

Whatever their views about the relationship of nationalism to pre-modern ethnic sentiments, most scholars agree that nationalism, the global polit¬ical movement that we know today, is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. They differ, however, over such things as the causes of nationalism, its rela¬tionship to modernization and to political power, and whether it is a weak or strong agent of change.
Elie Kedourie's approach is that of a historian of ideas. Nationalism is a form of secular millenarianism that has arisen from Kantian conceptions of human beings as autonomous, which, in turn, has led to politics replacing religion as the key to salvation. When synthesized by Fichte with Herder's doctrines about the natural language differences within humanity, these ideas produced the 'mature' romantic doctrine of nationalism. This prescribes that individuals achieve an independent state animated by the unique culture of their natural community. Kedourie regards nationalism as an extremely powerful, if de¬structive, force. Its appeal is explained by social breakdown occasioned by a collapse in the transmission of traditional values, and the rise of a restless, secular, educated generation, ambitious for power but excluded from its proper estate.
Ernest Gellner turns Kedourie on his head. Whereas Kedourie places weight on the power of ideas which act as a homogenizing force, Gellner argues that it is the need of modern societies for cultural homogeneity that creates nation¬alism. Nationalism is thus sociologically rooted in modernity, but it itself is a relatively weak force, a product of the transition from 'agro-literate' societies, regulated by structure, to industrial societies, integrated by culture. Important components ofhis complex explanation include the unevenness of industrialization; the leading role of an excluded intelligentsia in the invention of the nation; mass, public education; and the discrepancy between the romantic aspirations of nationalists and the utilitarian outcomes.
Tom Nairn, a Marxian thinker, combines Gellner's modernization perspect¬ive with that of Gramsci in order to provide a 'materialist' explanation of the dynamism of 'romantic' nationalism; its appeal to an educated middle class; and its ability to mobilize large-scale inter-class support. Nationalism arises in threatened and underdeveloped 'peripheral' societies whose intelligentsias 'invite the people into history' and then use and modernize their vernacular cultures. In this way they are able to mobilize the masses around the develop mental goals of a local bourgeoisie. Nairn, unlike Gellner, regards the cultural project of nationalism as an important agent of social change. Nationalism is invariably populist, and its effect is to induct the masses into politics.
These theorists provide an 'instrumentalist' approach to nationalism. This is memorably articulated by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who argues that the nation was one of many traditions 'invented' by political elites in order to legitimize their power in a century of revolution and democratization. Paul Brass, a political scientist, takes a similar position in the debate with Francis Robinson (see section V) about the relative weight accorded to 'primordial' or 'instrumental' factors. The study of elite competition and manipulation is the key to an understanding of nationalism, but Brass admits that elites are con. strained by mass cultures and institutions.
Benedict Anderson also regards the modern as an artefact, 'an ima¬gined political community'. Rather than thinking of it as fabricated, one should understand national distinctiveness in terms of its style of imagination and the institutions that make that possible. Pre-eminent among the latter are 'print-capitalism' and the new genres of newspaper and novel which portray the nation as a sociological community moving along 'homogeneous, empty time'. In contrast, Pierre van den Berghe offers a socio-biological interpreta¬tion of ethnic and national ties. Nationalism, like racism, is seen as an extension of kinship selection and 'nepotism' which has become salient in the modem world because of large-scale population movements, colonialism, and con¬quest.
Several theorists identify the rise of the modem bureaucratic state as a central factor in the genesis of nationalism. John Breuilly argues that a conflict began to emerge between the claims of state and civil society in the seven¬teenth century to which nationalism seemed to offer a superior, historicist solution: the authentic state is an outgrowth of a historical community. Anthony Smith also accords a pivotal role to the modem 'scientific state', but the problem of legitimacy is more far-reaching. Nationalism arises out of a perva¬sive moral crisis of'dual legitimation', where divine authority is challenged by secular state power; from this situation, three solutions—neo-traditionalist, assimilationist, and reformist—emerge, all of which are conducive to different forms of nationalism.
Finally, John Hutchinson argues against the identification of nationalism with statist politics, and reveals the dynamics of cultural nationalism as a separate project focused on the moral regeneration of the community. Reject¬ing the sometimes negative connotations of cultural nationalism, he argues that the evocation of a golden age is used as a modernizing and integrative device which can offer an alternative political model when the statist type of political nationalism has failed.