Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

10 Nations and Nationalisms

The political spectrum that we call ‘nationalism’ is broad and diverse. Recognizing this, John Hall has suggested that, ‘no single, universal theory of nationalism is possible. As the historical record is diverse, so too must be our concepts’ (1993: 1). Anthony Smith is in agreement: ‘the complexity of the empirical issues … rules out the possibility of uncovering law-like regularities or sweeping generalisations in this field’ (1994: 392). Craig Calhoun has reached the same conclusion:

Nationalism is a rhetoric for speaking about too many different things for a single theory to explain it – let alone to explain each of those different movements, cultural patterns, state policies or other projects shaped in part by the rhetoric of nationalism. (1997: 8)

To round out this unusual display of consensus, referring the point back to the theoretical roots in common of most social science discussions of nationalism, Brubaker et al. remark that:

The great range and heterogeneous causal texture of the phenomena grouped under the rubrics of ethnicity and nationalism, emphasised already by Max Weber, render problematic any efforts to construct a general theory. (2006: 357fn.)

That a unified hegemonic theory of nationalism seems to be out of the question, confounded by the variety and complexity of the observable realities in the ‘real world’, does not, however, mean that we should abandon model-building and theorizing. Nor can we – or should we – relativize the notion of nationalism altogether. If the concept is to retain any analytical value, the varieties of whatever-it- is-that-we-persist-in-calling-nationalism must also have something in common. Although they are probably not the only common threads, two, in particular, stand out: first, ethnicity, defined as individual and collective identification which draws upon a repertoire of perceived differences and similarities defined in cultural terms (Connor 1978; B. Williams 1989), and, second, political membership and participation conceived as citizenship (Verdery 1993: 38). Although they are closely related, the first has deep historical roots while the second, although not completely lacking a long history, is more modern.

Nationalism in this view is historically and locally variable, and bound up with ethnicity. Taking these propositions together, the basic anthropological model of ethnicity has a great deal to offer historical and sociological accounts of nationalism (Brubaker et al. 2006; Eriksen 2002). This is particularly true if we emphasize the social constructionist aspects of the model: that ethnicity is perpetually defined and redefined by social actors in the course of interaction, and that the membership of ethnic groups, their boundaries and the ‘cultural stuff’ on which they draw are

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all, to some considerable extent, variable. This Barthian transactional approach starts from the point of view of actors themselves and emphasizes the situational contingency of ethnic identity. While Barth’s later discussions of ethnic diversity and pluralism (1983, 1984, 1989) still focus on interaction and negotiability, something else also emerges: ongoing ‘streams of tradition’ or ‘universes of discourse’ in which individual actors differentially participate, and which – despite the use of imagery which suggests movement and practice – possess a degree of stability over time. History combines with the give-and-take of the moment in the social construction of ethnic boundaries and identities. To paraphrase someone else – from a different tradition – actors may make their own identities, but they do not do so in circumstances of their own choosing.

Ethnicity and nationalism

It is a tribute to the solidity of intellectual boundaries that for many years, ‘The remarkable congruence between theories of nationalism and anthropological theories of ethnicity’ was overlooked, to the extent that, ‘the two bodies of theory have largely developed independently of each other’ (Eriksen 2002: 99). In Chapter 6 I argued that one way to understand nationalism, and other -isms such as localism, communalism, regionalism and racism, is to regard them as ideologies of ethnic identification. They are more-or-less structured bodies of knowledge that make claims about how the world is, and how it ought to be, organized along ethnic lines. Allotropes of the general phenomenon of ethnicity (or, to be more exact, ethnicism), they are historically and locally specific. There is thus no equation of nationalism with ethnicity: first, not all things ethnic are ideological, and second, nationalism differs from other ethnic ideologies and is defined by the specific historical conditions of its emergence.

As a relatively recent reflection of the gradual move of human societies into selfreflexive history which is a concomitant of literacy (Goody 1977), nationalism is an aspect of the growth of ever more complex political units, based, to some degree, on notions of ethnic and cultural commonality (however much, pace Benedict Anderson, imagined). As an ethnic identification which, more than most, is explicitly socially constructed and orchestrated as a historical project, ‘the nation’ is actually a fine example of Barthian transaction and negotiation at work: ‘nationalism can be thought of as a specimen of the big family of we-talks’ (Bauman 1992: 678). Similarly, Smith suggests that ethnicity offers ‘a potent model for human association which has been adapted and transformed, but not obliterated, in the formation of modern nations’ (A.D. Smith 1986: x; see also 1994: 382), and Llobera argues that to make a bid for nationhood, ‘the first thing you must have is a reservoir of ethnic potential’ (1994: 214). Nationalism is rooted in, and is one expression of, ethnic attachments, albeit, perhaps, at a high level of collective abstraction. The ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ or ‘nationality’ are, respectively, varieties of ethnic collectivity and ethnicity, and are likely to be historically contingent, con- text-derived, and defined and redefined in negotiation and transaction. This proposition applies as much to symbolic or ideological content (nationalism) as it does to group boundaries and membership (national identity, nationality, citizenship).

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Not everyone agrees with this. Hobsbawm, for example, argues that nationalism and ethnicity are ‘different, and indeed non-comparable, concepts’ (1992: 4): in this view nationalism is a recent and programmatic political philosophy, while ethnicity expresses authentic or primordial group identity, rooted in the distinction between insider and outsider. Ethnicity may be ‘one way of filling the empty containers of nationalism’, but, for Hobsbawm, there is no necessary relationship between the two (see also 1990: 63ff.). Although Anderson (1983) and Gellner (1983) each recognizes a connection between ethnicity and nationalism, they also share, with each other and with Hobsbawm, an understanding of political modernization as the triumph of the nation-state and of nationalism as a specific philosophy of political legitimacy with eighteenthand nineteenth-century roots in the cultural homogenization produced by industrialization and the bureaucratic state. Thus, nationalism is the product of industrialization and bureaucratic government (Gellner); of the convergence of capitalism and the information technology of printing (Anderson); of all these things plus the French Revolution’s recasting of political membership as citizenship (Hobsbawm). Viewed in this light, nationalism is the modern new broom that sweeps ethnicity clean out the door of the nation-state.

Many more authors could be cited to make the same point. To differing degrees, they offer a similarly functionalist argument: nationalism provided an ideological means, following the collapse of feudalism and absolutism, for the modern incorporation of élites and masses into a shared political space, the nation-state. However much it may incorporate a sense of we-ness, nationalism for these authors marks a distinctively modern break with a traditional past characterized by ethnic fragmentation and small-scale communalism. It is both a consequence of and a cure for the disenchantment produced by the rationalization of modern industrial society.

The functionalism of this argument is not, however, its main weakness. The model of nationalism as a modern replacement for, or supersession of, ethnicity, appropriate to the demands of the industrialized social world of nation-states, depends upon definitions of nationalism and ethnicity that are more constraining than may be defensible. The definition of ethnicity that is implied is certainly more limited and more limiting than Barth’s broad notion of ‘the social organization of culture differences’ (which, if it is what we mean by ethnicity, must include nationalism within its scope). Nor is the difficulty simply definitional: ethnicity is conceptualized, even if only implicitly, as historically and culturally ‘Other’, creating in the process two problems. Historically, the argument tends towards tautology: nationalism is what supersedes ethnicity, which is what precedes nationalism. Culturally, we are left with no authentic place within modern nation-states for ethnicity, other than as axiomatic homogeneity, on the one hand, or an immigrant or peripheral presence, on the Other.

A further criticism is that this school of thought takes modernity’s view of itself – as radically discontinuous with what went before – too much at face value, overemphasizing the centrality to nationalism of the modern (nation-)state. If we accept the absolute modernity of nationalism, what are we to make, for example, of the argument (Runciman 1958: 280–1) that the ‘nascent spirit of nationalism’ was encouraged by the attempts of the late thirteenth century Papacy to undermine the power of the Hohenstaufen Emperors? Or Moore’s characterization (1987: 136) of European rulers of the same period as a ‘new order’, proclaiming a ‘moral fervour’

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that found an expression in the emergence of a number of nation-states? Reynolds has, perhaps, articulated the question most clearly:

The fundamental premise of nationalist ideas is that nations are objective realities, existing through history … It seems normally to be taken for granted that the nation-states of today are the true nations of history and that only they can ever have inspired loyalties which deserve to be called nationalist … The trouble about all of this for the medieval historian is not that the idea of the permanent and objectively real nation is foreign to the middle ages, as so many historians of nationalism assume, but that it closely resembles the medieval idea of the kingdom as comprising a people with a similarly permanent and objective reality. Not all the kingdoms of the middle ages, however, were destined to become modern states, and if we start from nationalist assumptions we are in danger of prejudging the relative solidarity of those which did and those which did not. (Reynolds 1984: 251, 252)

This critique is supported by Llobera’s suggestion (1994) that the beginnings of European nationalism emerged in the early Middle Ages, only to be stalled by the rise of absolutism. Furthermore, to the European examples one can add Duara’s recent argument (1993) that the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are applicable to the study of pre-modern China.

It is, however, necessary at least to take seriously the view that ‘nationalism, as ideology and movement, is a wholly modern phenomenon’ (A. D. Smith 1986: 18). One should certainly beware of the anachronistic use of words such as ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, which did not, apparently, achieve common currency in their modern usages until the late nineteenth century (Østergård 1992a: 17). However, that nationalism is a wholly modern phenomenon is not self-evident. There is a prima facie case for arguing that ideologies and politics that are recognizably nationalist, and identities which can be described as national, predate the rise of ‘classical’ nationalism from the late eighteenth century onwards (cf. also A. D. Smith 1986, 1994). If so, this has implications for the study of modern nationalism. To return to an earlier comment, one way out of the impasse may be to recognize the historical interplay of ethnicity and notions of citizenship – which, we should perhaps remind ourselves, can claim a genealogy extending back to Ancient Greece – in the evolution of ideologies of identification.

If nationalism is an ideology of ethnic identification, and therefore approachable via the basic anthropological model of ethnicity, we should be as much concerned with how nationalisms and nationalists define themselves – and how they are defined by other actors – as with how we as social scientists should define them. This avoids substituting ‘the reality of the model’ for ‘the model of reality’ (Bourdieu 1977: 29) and offers a flexible approach which, instead of fixing the notion too firmly in the post-Enlightenment political landscape of western Europe – as one might socialism, for example – is catholic in its recognition of ethnic identifications as, in some contexts, national(ist) and their ideological and symbolic expressions as nationalism(s). The boundary between ‘ethnicism’ and ‘nationalism’ thus becomes indeterminate, lying somewhere along a continuum of gradual change within historically evolving traditions or universes of discourse.

This argument, that nationalism may be less definitively modern than is commonly accepted,1 differs from Anthony Smith’s thesis about the ethnic origins of nations (1986) in that I do not wish to draw too sharp a line between ethnicism and

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nationalism. I disagree with other aspects of his work too, such as the distinction he draws between ‘ethnic nationalism’ and ‘territorial nationalism’ (1991: 82). From my perspective, all nationalisms are, in some sense, ‘ethnic’. I appreciate the point he is trying to make and its importance, but I would prefer to distinguish between nationalisms that claim territory on the basis of putative common ethnicity and those that attempt to construct ethnic commonality within an already-occupied territory.

These points aside, however, my argument owes much to Smith. There are two reasons for emphasizing the possibility of pre-modern nationalisms. First, I want to loosen the entailment of nationalism in the nation-state. To define a phenomenon wholly in terms of what may, at least arguably, be its historical consequence seems to risk a misunderstanding. Second, following from this, I want to explore the possibility that the goals of nationalism are not exhausted by the project of the ethnically exclusive or culturally homogeneous nation-state (cf. Hutchinson 1994).

The first move in this argument is to offer a minimal heuristic definition of nationalism. Thus nationalism is an ideology of ethnic identification which:

•is historically and situationally contingent;

•characterizes the politics of complex societies (states but not necessarily nation-states);

•invokes culture and ethnicity as criteria of membership and participation in the polity; and

•claims a collective historical destiny for the polity and/or its ethnically defined members.

This model may appear not only too complex, but also unhelpfully vague – which destiny? historical according to whom? how and by whom are such claims defined and pursued? etc. – but I hope that its utility will become more apparent in the comparative discussion of cases which follows.

The full spectrum of nationalist possibilities is not, therefore, likely to be captured by a definition such as Gellner’s (1983: 1):

a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power-holders from the rest.

There are phenomena which are either rhetorically constructed as ‘nationalism’, or which an observer can ostensibly identify as such, which do not fall within such a model.

The second move is, instead of talking about nationalism – in anything other than the most abstract or general of senses – to talk about nationalisms. This is not, of course, a novel suggestion. Other authors have typologized nationalisms (e.g. Alter 1989; Breuilly 1985; Brubaker 1996; Day and Thompson 2004; Hall 1993; McCrone 1998; Smith 1991), typically within a framework that, first, distinguishes, whether explicitly or implicitly, between nationalism-in-general and specific historical instances of nationalist movements (Smith 1991: 79–80), and, second, classifies the latter as ‘liberal’, ‘civic’, ‘ethnic’, or whatever. My proposal is different; its definition of nationalism-in-general is looser, covering a wider range of