Summary of the book "The Nation in History" by Anthony Smith., Sintesi del corso di Storia Delle Relazioni Internazionali

Scarica Summary of the book "The Nation in History" by Anthony Smith. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Storia Delle Relazioni Internazionali solo su Docsity! THE NATION IN HISTORY INTRODUCTION Smith believes that there can be no single “history of the nation” or of nationalism, but it's possible to distinguish four main paradigms of understanding of nations and nationalism: 1) Primordialist, 2) Perennialist, 3) Modernist; 4)Ethnosymbolic (in Smith”s opinion —> the most comprehensive and potentially richer understanding of the complex historical role of nations and nationalism). Smith defines the concepts of “nation” and “nationalism” as such: NATION: a named human population occupying a historic territory or homeland and sharing common myths and memories, a mass, public culture; a single economy; and common rights and duties for all members. NATIONALISM: an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some ofits members to constitute an actual or potential “nation.” CHAPTER1: VOLUNTARISM AND THE ORGANIC NATION (1) PRIMORDIALISM: In general terms it refers to the idea that certain cultural attributes and formations possess a prior, overriding, and determining influence on people’s lives, one that is largely immune to “rational” interest and political calculation. We are compelled by the attachments that spring from these attributes and formations. They stand apart from the rational choices and the pursuit of material interests. Among these attachments, those deriving from such cultural attributes as kinship and descent, language, religion, and customs, as well as historical territory, assume a prominent place; they tend to give rise to that sense of communal belonging we call ethnicity and ethnic community; and they form the basis for the subsequent development of nations and nationalism. For these reasons, nations and nationalisms possess a special character and occupy a privileged place in history; in this sense, they can be termed primordial, existing, as it were, before history, in nature’s “first order of time.” We can distinguish between three main versions of primordiali: I. Organicist, II. Sociobiological; II. Cultural. (D ORGANIC NATIONALISM: In “The Idea of Nationalism”, Hans Kohn distinguishes between two ideological versions of nationalisms: a) Voluntaristic: were dominant in the West. b) Organicist: prevailed in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East and much of Asia. For both, the individual must belong to a nation because there is no possibility of survival outside of'it; the fundamental difference lies in the fact that in the voluntarist version the individual can choose which nation to belong to, whereas in the organic version the individual is bom into a nation and throughout their life always retains their origin, wherever they go (—> the individual is born into a nation, and is indelibly stamped with its character for life. Migrate where he or she may, the individual always retains his or her nationality of birth). Another opposition lies in the fact that the voluntarist version regards the nation as a a rational territorial association of citizens: the members are bound together by laws based on a contract freely entered into, and they come to form a political community living according to a single code of laws and sharing a single political culture in a recognized historic territory. By contrast, in the organic version of nationalism, the nation is conceived of as a spiritual principle and as a seamless whole transcending the individual members; the members are bound together by a myth of common origins and a shared historic culture, and they forma single cultural community living according to vernacular codes in a historic homeland. The contrast is explained by Kohn in social and geopolitical terms. » Voluntarist nationalism requires a strong, rational bowgeoisie to act as a “bearer class” in the task of leading the mass citizen-nation, just as it also needs the competition of equal states to ensure the necessary stability, liberties, and powers ofthe bourgeois property owners. Organic nationalism, on the other hand, normally appears in the absence of a strong bourgeoisie and interstate competition. We find it, argued Kohn, in the agrarian lands of the East, dominated by semifeudal landowners and ruled by imperial autocrats. Here the national movement is led by a small urban intelligentsia; and in the absence of wider support it acquires a shrill, authoritarian tone and often a mystical character. This dichotomy did not come out of nowhere, but came from a long tradition of nationhood and nationalism in the 18th century. However, at the beginning ofthe 18th century, the idea ofa specific national character had already taken root and for instance found expression in Montesquieu's espirit général de la nation. Later, distinctions between naturalism and voluntarism, between culture and politics, began to emerge in Rousseau's writings. The philosopher had initially subscribed to the general Enlightenment belief in the nation as a contractual or voluntary association dedicated to liberty and justice. But by the 1760s he began to impart to this rationalist ideal a new emotional fervor and religious zeal. Rousseau identified the foundation of society in the pre-existing bonds of culture and belonging to a community/population, that is in its national character. Moreover, the price ofintegration can be just as high under civic forms of nationalism. Minorities, like the Jews who sought French citizenship, had to pay a high price for acceptance: the surrender of their ethnic particularity and their collective rights and culture (and even this did not grant them acceptance in the country, as later on they were persecuted from both the Left and the Right, in the name of equality as much as of tradition. Equality proved to be a very French ideal; it was open only to French citizens — modern France had been forged under the auspices of Catholicism and that it was underpinned by the history of a Christian kingdom, even if both religion and monarchy were rejected during the Revolution). One could conclude that French nationalism is not a species of civic but of “cultural” nationalism, a form to be distinguished from the genealogical basis of ethnic nationalism and the territorial referent of civic nationalism and one that requires of outsiders only full socialization into the host language and culture to gain social acceptance. Smith highlights how, in practice, it is difficult to find a pure cultural nationalism, free of ethnic ties. Ethnic origin is always a factor affecting acceptance. What such a distinction (between ethnic and civic nationalism) assumes is a secular trend from ethnic toward civic nationalism, with cultural nationalism as a kind of halfway house along the road. But the evidence for such a trend, even in the West, is dubious: Italians are not prepared to accept Albanians, nor French are willing to accept North African Muslims. These examples do not indicate any tendency towards a decrease in exclusive boundaries or ethnic consciousness, even in advanced industrial societies. All this, of course, is far removed from the biological (and even racial) assumptions that underlay the organic analogy and that sometimes permeated the earlier organic kind of nationalism. Ethnicity here is more a matter of cultural than biological origins and growth. Nevertheless, given this vital qualification, in the confusion of the post-Cold War world we are witnessing as many movements toward ethnic nationalism, notably in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but also in the West (not to mention Asia and Afîtica), as there are trends toward more civic forms ofnationalisms; and in most cases civic elements are mingled, in varying proportions, with ethnic components. . CULTURAL PRIMORDIALISM Should we then infer that ETHNIC ATTACHMENTS are indispensable to nations and nationalisms, as the organic historicists assumed? That is what the previous analysis seems to suggest. However, we need to set aside simplistic distinctions to uncover the deeper sources of popular attachments to collective cultural identities. This is where the so-called cultural primordialists have made an important contribution. They point to the continuing force of ethnic attachments, which are often at the basis of the contractual rights and duties of a modem civic order. Communities of language, myths of origin, shared memories and customs, are just some of the enduring cultural attributes that Shils and Geertz sought to highlight when they distinguished primordial from civil ties in modem societies. For Geertz, ethnic and national attachments spring from the “cultural givens” of social existence — from contiguity and kinship, language, religion, race, and customs. “By a primordial attachment”, he claimed, “is meant one that stems from the assumed ‘givens’ of social existence. ... These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times, overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves.” In other words, primordial attachments rest on perception, cognition, and belief. Itis individual members who assume that these cultural features are givens, who attribute overwhelming importance to these ties, who feel an overpowering sense of coerciveness, and so on. Their strength goes beyond rational interest or calculation, but does not derive from the primordial bond itself. These, then, are the subjective sources of collective cultural identities, and they should form the main object of analysis for historians and social scientists of ethnicity and nationalism (e.g.: politics of new states in Africa and Asia —> the push to create organised civil society exacerbated primordial bonds, as the sovereign state introduced a new prize for rival ethnic communities over which to fight and a frightening new force with which to contend). This is an anthropological interpretation: what are the limits of this approach for a historiography of nations and nationalism? This was the subject of an interesting debate between Paul Brass and Francis Robinson on the historical factors involved in the formation of PAKISTAN. Brass had argued that the Muslim elites had mobilized the Muslim masses by manipulating Islamic symbols, to preserve their own economic and political position at a time when British rule in India seemed to tum against their interests in favor of the Hindu elites that dominated the Indian Congress Party. Therefore opted for a more instrumentalist framework, which saw Muslim ethnicity in India and the rise of Pakistani nationalism as products of elite manipulation of existing symbolic resources. For Robinson, on the other hand, Muslim attachments and the ideology of the umma played a crucial role in persuading Muslim elites of the need to safeguard their distinctive heritage and community by seeking greater autonomy and ultimately independence for the Muslims concentrated in present-day Pakistan. For Robinson, the growth of Muslim sentiment, the presence of collective historical memories and the centrality of the tradition of the umma, meant that “Islamic ideas and values ... both provide a large part of the framework of norms and desirable ends within which the United Provinces Muslim elite take their rational political decisions, and on occasion act as a motivating force”. In other words, premodern religious attachments and historical memories were crucial in constraining the Muslim elites and molding their outlooks and actions. It is important not to overstate the differences between these two positions. Robinson is quite ready to analyze the political rationality of Muslim elite actions in creating a Pakistani state fora Muslim ethnic community. On his side, Brass concedes the importance of cultural traditions in molding elite outlooks and actions. Nevertheless, the primordialist contribution is significant in stressing exactly those dimensions of subjective emotion and intimate belonging that the cultural nationalists had singled out and that political, economic, and military history failed to address. Fishman, instead, claimed that to grasp the meaning and force of ethnicity, we must set aside the liberal, radical, and sociological assumptions of modernism. Ethnicity is perennial, if not primordial. He believes ethnicity to be a matter of “being,” “doing,” and “knowing”: » Being: ethnicity has always been experienced as a kinship phenomenon, a continuity within the self and within those who share an intergenerational link to common ancestors. Ethnicity is experienced as being ‘bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, and blood of their blood.” » Doing: ... » Knowing: ethnicity demands from its members authentic activities and behavior that seek to preserve and augment the heritage of ancestors, preferably in an authentic linguistic medium. This means that ethnicity is never fixed. Itis always adaptable and forward-looking; its only requirement is that new things should be done “in our own way” and that we remain “rue to our genius.” This type of analysis, however, poses many problems: « It is not clear how we can verify the collective sentiments of most people of an etAnie; « For all his claims about ethnic adaptability, there is a curiously static feeling about Fishman'’s depiction of the immemorial persistence of ethnicity as “a tangible, living reality that makes every human a link in an eternal bond from generation to generation, particularly when we think of the modern world with its mass migrations, refugees, colonization, genocide, large-scale intermarriage, bilingualism, and mixed heritages. « Fishman fails to address the question of the relationship between a perennial ethnicity, on the one hand, and nations and nationalism, on the other hand. These weaknesses, according to Smith, derive from primordial elements in Fishman's approach, who is convinced of the power, ubiquity, and durability of ethnic attachments throughout history. As a transhistorical paradigm that derives ethnicity and nationhood from the ties of kinship and territory, . It can offer only a very general and rather speculative thesis about the continuing role of the cultural givens — kinship and territory, language and religion — butitisa thesis that ofits nature can never amount to a causal historical explanation. 5. CONCLUSION With all its limitations, cultural primordialism is important for two reasons: » At the theoretical level, it exposes the weaknesses of instrumentalist historical accounts (exaggerated beliefin the powers of elite manipulation of the masses + failure to take seriously the symbolic aspects ofnationalism + ethnocentric bias, with the West as the norm + blindness to the roles of both the sacred and ethnicity in kindling mass fervor). » At the empirical level, it exposes the failure of purely voluntaristic and interest-based explanations to see how ethnic and cultural dimensions have been present even in the most secular and rationalist kinds of nationalism. For instance, can trace back the role of the “sacred ethnicity” also in the rituals and ideals of the French Revolution. In other words, each nationalism and every concept of the nation is composed of different elements and dimensions, which we choose to label voluntarist and organic, civic and ethnic, primordial and instrumental. No nation, no nationalism, can be seen as purely the one or the other, even if at certain moments one or other of these elements predominates in the ensemble of components of national identity. Our is a world of complex nations, powered by nationalisms that have fused the drive for popular sovereignty and participation with the widespread desire for intimate belonging in a historic culture community. church, but instead he includes both Germany and the Jews. Concerning the latter, he does so because he claims how since the Babylonian Captivity, Jews seem never to have desired a Jewish political state until the advent of Zionism. Therefore, Hobsbawm is convinced in the idea that Israel is a wholly modern nation (not just a modem state); but such a view is hardly acceptable, as it omits the raison d’étre of the modern Jewish nation and state — its name, its location, its language, its memories, symbols, values, myths, and traditions. 3. THE PERENNIALIST CRITIQUE: In recent years, modermist historiography has been criticized from (1) those historians who regard at least some of today’s nations and their nationalisms as premodern and perennial, and by (2) those scholars who see the nation as a transhistorical phenomenon, recurring in many periods and continents, irrespective of economic, political, or cultural conditions. In this “neo-perennialist” camp we can distinguish two tendencies (though the boundaries between these two are not rigid): © Continuous perennialism: it sees the roots of present-day nations extending back several centuries and even millennia (= perception of nation as immemorial and perennial). This group of scholars tend to stress continuity. While acknowledging breaks and ruptures throughout history, they point to the cultural continuities and identities over long time periods, which link medieval or ancient nations to their more recent counterparts. In this perspective, modernity has been, if not irrelevant, certainly of lesser significance to the origins and development of nations and nationalism. (11) Recurrent perennialism: it sees the nation-in-general as a category of human association that can be found everywhere throughout history. As a result, they stress recurrence of an identical phenomenon. Particular nations, national identities and even nationalisms may come and go, but the phenomenon itselfis universal. Both tendencies attack modernist historiography for its historical superficiality; its narrowly modernist definitions of the nation and nationalism; its preoccupation with citizenship, capitalism, and other aspects of modernization; and frequently for an excessive instrumentalism that fails to give due weight to subjective factors. 4. CONTINUOUS PERENNIALISM: Hugh Seton-Watson didn’t accept a fully modernist position. He agreed that nationalism (ideology and movement) was both recent and novel, but he distinguished between: » The “old, continuous nations”, as France, Scotland and Portugal, which can trace their origins back to the Middle Ages. The long process by which in Europe sovereign states arose began with the collapse of the Roman Empire. This process was slow and spontaneous, not willed by anyone (differently from the process which brought the creation of the following kind of nations). » The much more recent nations created deliberately by nationalism, especially in Eastern Europe (Slovaks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats...) and Asia (Pakistans, Indonesians). Those were usually the outcome of treaties issued after periods of protracted warfare, like the Napoleonic wars or the First World War. For Reynolds, barbarian kingdoms such as those of the Saxons, Lombards, Franks, Visigoths and Anglo-Saxons were also communities of custom and law, each possessing a fabulous myth of origins, and they shared many of the characteristics of the modern nations. This is also the burden of much recent scholarship on the nature and extent of medieval collective cultural identities and sentiments. For instance, some scholars highlight the rise of a strong national sentiment among the nobles and clerical elites in late medieval Poland, or the rise of a sense of national identity in France from at least the XIV century. The most controversial case is, however, the English one. For most historians, an English (# British) national sentiment can be found only from the late XVI century onwards. Greenfeld, instead, pushes the date back to the 1520s, as he claims that in this period we find numerous poems written by a rising gentry that reveal an identification of an English nation with the whole people. Queen Mary’s persecution of Protestants and later English translations of the Bible reinforced this phenomenon. The scholar also claims that “the birth of the English nation was not the birth ofa nation, it was the birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism”. Later nationalisms strongly differentiated themselves from the English example, adding feelings of ressentiment against more advanced nations to the internal competition for status mobility within the aristocratic elite. 10 (HASTINGS) Some scholars even asked themselves why we should stop at the XV century. Hastings attacks modernist historiography and claims that the English post-Reformation nationalism is just a new expression of something already present several centuries earlier. He believes England to be the first example of the nation and its nationalism (origins back to the IX century), which prompted the rise of the other Western European nations. Hastings’ thesis is part of the category of continuous perennialism. He claims that: 1) Ethnicity is the basis of nationhood, and oral ethnicities lie at the roots of specific nations. 2) Ethmicities become nations only when they produce vernacular written literatures. 3) The nation is a Christian phenomenon, because Christianity was the only religion which sanctioned the use of vernacular languages. 4) Christianity incorporated the Old Testament and therefore presented to its followers the ancient Jewish nation of the Old Testament as the ideal polity. 5) The first ethnicities to become nations were the English, because they were the first to produce a written vernacular literature. 6) The post-1789 secularizing examples are some kind of “second version” of nationalism, and modernists have wrongly those for the original and complete kind of nationalism. Hastings acknowledges that these post-1789 nationalisms are more numerous and are created with the help of a outline, the theory of nationalism. But he sees nationalist theory as unimportant, because nations and nationalisms are powerfully particularist in nature. This basically means that modernists got it wrong: there can be premodem nations. So nations and nationalism have no necessary connection with modernization and modermty. The date of commencementis the key issue for continuous perennialism. From this derives two main problems: * continuous perennialism assumes that there is a specific point of origin of the nation and that the nation is also a well-defined, homogenous unit (you either have it, or you don't), but such a view conflicts with what we know about actual, named nations, with their many conflicts and transformations and their frequent lack of ethnic homogeneity. to give so much importance to the creation of a single vernacular language and literature is too restrictive, as that undoubtedly helps to bind populations, but other factors may be equally unifying (religion, geography...) Hastings”s refusal to accord more importance to nationalist ideology (which is clearly modern), reveals his inability to accept the contextualization of phenomena in the modern world. Indeed, nationalism can encourage and stimulate groups to seek undreamt of political goals and has often done so. Moreover, since Hastings argues that nations are a product of European Christianity and emerged in an exclusively Christian world, he refuses to allow any premodern Islamic or Buddhist nations. Hastings states Islam”s inability to generate nations, as he claims that the concept of the umma does against it, and Islam’s insistence on Qu’ranic Arabic precludes the sanctioning of vernaculars. Yet, Persians managed to maintain their own collective cultural identity after Islamisation, and they produced their own national epic. Even in the Far East, world religions adapted to existing ethno- cultural communities well before Christianity. Did Japan, China and Korea only become nations after contact with Chuistianity? ll 5. RECURRENT PERENNIALISM: But can one lose one’s nationhood? Can we legitimately ask if a given population constituted a nation in a certain period, then cease to be one, only to be subsequently reconstituted as a nation, albeit in changed circumstances? And are we justified in regarding this latter nation as one and the same nation throughout history? It is a question that has been asked of more than one nation. Hastings thinks the Jews lost their nationhood, only to find it once again after two thousand years. What, then, did they constitute during the intervening period? Are nations without states recurrent phenomena? And can the same population and culture reappear, as it were, in different epochs in the form of nations? This is the point of departure of the other main tendency, that ofrecurrent perennialism. It is an issue taken up by some ancient historians. According to Meyer, there were only three nations in ancient times: Greeks, Persians and Jews. But were these nations similar to their modern counterparts? And did they continue to be nations throughout the intervening period? The alternative, entertained by some earlier is to see fluctuations ofnationhood throughout history: an age of nations in antiquity, followed by a period of national decline and absorption under the Roman empire, only to reemerge in the early medieval period. The implication here is that national continuity has been broken: the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, and Persians are not the ancestors of their modern namesakes. Yet they are equally nations in the full sense of the term. 6. ANCIENT NATIONS?: These questions of national identity and its recurrence and continuity can be best addressed by considering Meyers three ancient nations in tum. THE GREEKS: » Nation/Political nationhood? While Mario Attilio Levi argued that the ancient Greeks constituted a nation, even if this was torn apart by the divisions between the different po/eis, Moses Finley denied to the ancient Greeks any sense or conception of political nationhood. Indeed, he claimed, political loyalties focused exclusively on the polis, every other identity was familial or cultural, but still apolitical. However, a clarification must be made, because political loyalties could also be driven by ethnic solidarities (Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian, and Boeotian) that went beyond Greek dialects; in fact ITonians and Dorians had distinct calendars, games, family rituals, architectural styles, etc. There was also a political pan-Hellenism stimulated by the Persian Wars, which led to the invention of the “barbarian” and an awareness of the political boundaries of the “civilized” Greek world. Relationship with modern Greeks/Continuity? Ifit is unclear to what extent the ancients constituted a nation and not an ethnic community, even more doubtful is their relationship with the modern Greeks. « Demographic view: Most scholars deny contemporary Greeks? direct descent from the ancient Greeks. Indeed, given the massive migrations of Slavs, and Albanians into mainland Greece from the VI century C.E., the population of modern Greece is as ethnically heterogeneous as most other modern nations (# Greek ancestral continuity). * Cultural view: Can we trace Greek cultural and symbolic continuities through the medieval epoch into modern times? For Kitromilides, one can only speak of a re-appropriation of elements of the classical tradition by modern Greek intellectuals. It's still possible to identify some cultural continuities. Despite the adoption of Christianity, certain traditions, such as a dedication to competitive values, have remained fairly constant, as have the basic forms of the Greek language and the contours of the Greek homeland. THE PERSIANS: » Continuity? Names, basic Farsi linguistic forms, and the concentration of Farsi speakers in their homeland on the Iranian plateau shows a considerable measure of overall continuity, despite the Islamization of the population. And once again, there is plenty of evidence of a desire by modern Iranian elites to reappropriate different aspects and periods of a “Persian” past. » Nation/National identity? But on the Iranian plateau, with its many ethnic communities and religions, there is no clear evidence pf a Persian national identity in premodem eras. This is not to say there was no sense of ethnocultural difference between Persians and their neighbors. Indeed, a Persian cultural identity CHAPTER 3: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND ETHNIC GENEALOGY In the past two decades the idea of the nation as a text to be narrated and an artifact and construct to be deconstructed has gained currency. This remains essentially a modernist perspective and one that often has a post-Marxist lineage. At the same time, it seeks to go beyond modernism to encompass an era of “postmodernity”;, and because it sees nations and nationalism as phenomena intrinsic to modemity, it predicts the imminent demise of‘oth as we move into a postmodem, global era. The viewpoints that can be grouped under this postmodern rubric are many and varied, but they all share a fundamental beliefin the socially constructed quality ofthe nation and nationalism, and for this very reason we can define them as “CONSTRUCTIONIST” approaches or perspectives. The basic ideas of social constructionism include the following: 1) The assumption that nationalism created and continues to create nations, rather than the opposite; 2) The belief that nations are recent and novel products of modemity, so far sharing the modernist view; 3) A view of nations as social constructs and cultural artifacts deliberately engineered by elites; 4) The idea that nationalists “invent” and “imagine” the nation by representing it to the majority through a variety of cultural media and social rituals; 5) The belief that only in modern conditions is such invention and imagination possible and likely; 6) A sense of the supersession of the age of nations along with that of modernity in a more globalizing epoch. Novel in this view are the elements of cultural representation and social engineering and the importance of deliberate elite innovation that this implies. Nations, in these views, 1. INVENTED TRADITIONS, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: The most literal and influential of these constructionist schemes is that presented by Eric Hobsbawm, who believes the nation to be a creation of nationalism and hence entirely novel and recent. He claims how: » The age of nationalism commences around 1830 with an INCLUSIVE MASS- DEMOCRATIC and POLITICAL NATIONALISM of the large nations. » But after 1870 the previous kind of nationalism is followed by a DIVISIVE, ETHNOLINGUISTIC and often RIGHT-WING NATIONALISM of small nations. Itis in this latter era that we witness a proliferation of invented traditions of the nation. Unlike their earlier counterparts, these recent invented traditions are deliberate and invariant creations. They do not adapt and evolve, like customs and traditions in preindustrial societies. They are sociopolitical constructs forged by cultural engineers, who design symbols, mythologies, rituals, and histories to meet modern mass needs. Not only were entirely new symbols (e.g. flags and anthems) created but also “historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past. These constructs make up a large part of what we mean by nations and national identities, therefore Hobsbawm believes the study of invented traditions to be fundamental for the “nation”, which is a completely recent innovation. —> Example: Israeli and Palestinian nationalism and nations are necessarily novel, whatever the historic continuities of Jews and Middle Eastern Muslims, since the very concept of territorial states in their region was barely thought of a century ago, and only became an actual prospect with the end of World War I. These invented traditions emerged and were disseminated in a period of mass democracy and mobilization consequent on large-scale urbanization and industrialization. Indeed, the invented traditions of the nation tumed out to be the most potent and durable instrument of social control (of the newly enfranchised masses, by the ruling classes). But after the Second World War and the Cold War, the growth of vast globalizing forces has undermined the efficacy of the nation-state. In these circumstances we may begin to celebrate the demise of nationalism. But what exactly are these invented traditions and why do they exercise such a powerful appeal? Hobsbawm mentions as examples the modern origin of the Scottish kilt, and the nineteenth-century institution of archery societies in Switerzawnd. He believes those to be all modern inventions that pretend a deep historical continuity with a distant past that is largely fictitious. 15 But is it so fictitious? And does that actually matter? For a study of nations and nationalism and their role in history, how important is the documented truth content of nationalist rediscoveries, as against their memory content? For the success of a nationalist enterprise, is not the quality ofa population's living memory more important than any well-documented testimony? Smith specifies how he is not, however, arguing that historical truth content is irrelevant. Clearly, historians need to document lies and explode pure fictions, but he believes that this must be balanced by other factors, such as the energizing force of myths, the resonance of shared memories, and the vivid appeal of symbols, all of which carry across generations to establish a chain of felt and willed continuity. Taking the Israelis as an example, Zerubavel claims how some elements of the Zionist consciousness, like the veneration of Trumpeldor and Tel Hai and the cult of the Zealots of Masada, can be viewed as recent invented traditions. Those served the immediate needs of Zionist pioneering elites in the 1920s and 1930s as they sought to portray an activist, heroic “new Jew” in Palestine — in contrast to the burdened and victimized “old Jew” of the diasporic exile. One could go further and claim that the very concept of the According to Brubaker and the “new institutionalism” in sociology, this is very much what the Soviet leaders contrived in the former Soviet Union — engineering languages and ethnicities — and it was these ethnolinguistic units that often became the bases for the post-Soviet ethnic republics. So it is not “nations without nationalism” but “nationalism without nations” that we need to analyze and thereby cease to treat the state-created effect called nations as a causal factor or substantial entity. Nonetheless, it is difficult, on this logic (a reductio ad absurdum), to see why we should credit the “state” with any more reality and substance than the nation. This whole idea of the construction of the nation, moreover, fails to grasp the central point of historical nations: their strongly felt and willed presence, the feeling shared by so many that they belong to a transgenerational community of history and destiny. In Smith”s view, all these accounts raise more questions than they answer. In what sense are these national traditions and practices, cults and commemorations, “invented’? What does this term exactly mean? As a matter of fact, Anderson is right when he accuses Gellner and Hobsbawm of assimilating ““invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsehood’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. The idea that nationalists or other elites fabricated national cultural artifacts that, once deconstructed and delegitimated and their artificiality and hybridity revealed, will fragment and melt in the fires of globalization seems remote from historical and contemporary fact. Rather, we must ask, why are so many of these cultural artifacts so successful? How do we account for their character and resilience? Why are they felt to be necessary? (IMAGINED POLITICAL COMMUNITY) This is where that other great postmodern concept, the imagined political community, is so enlightening. Anderson’ account, like Hobsbawm”s, has Marxist underpinnings. This is most obviously visible in the motive power attributed to “print capitalism” in the dissemination of printed books and newspapers from the sixteenth century on and the rise of anonymous reading publics to whom and for whom the imagined community of the nation is represented and served. Yet it is the idea of the nation as an imagined political community and hence as a cultural artifact, at once sovereign, finite, and horizontally cross-class and moving along linear, “empty homogenous time,” that has so tangibly captured the imagination of postmodern scholars. This idea has, however, become a topos of the literary imagination, a metaphor for the constructed quality of all communities. But for Anderson, the idea of the imagined political community was historically embedded. Indeed, print capitalism could begin to create the basis for the imagined community of the nation only when certain conditions had been met. These included the basic fatalities of fear of death and oblivion, the decline of sacred monarchies, and a revolution in our ideas of time (in which messianic time is replaced by linear time measured by clock and calendar). But Anderson overplays the ruptures with premodern societies and cultures. As a matter of fact, some scholar shave pointed out how in the Middle Ages people did have a clear linear conceptions of time, and how many modern nationalisms have indeed benefitted from the attentions ofimperial monarchs, churches, and religious dignitaries. How else can we explain the spate of radical “religious nationalisms” in so many parts of the modern world?! 1 Kitromilides’s example of relations between these imagined new communities ofthe nation and older religious communities ] 6 in the late-18th and early-19th century (new) conception of secular Greek, Serb, Bulgarian, and Rumanian nations: orthodoxy did not simply wither away, to be replaced by secular Greek, Bulgar, or Serb nationalisms. Rather, the latter coexisted with and drew upon the myths, symbols, and traditions of older identities (Byzantine Orthodox ecumene). It is, of course, perfectly true that the nation as a community of people, most of whom will never know or meet one another, is an imagined community. However, Anderson points out how s0 is. . More important, the nation is equally a felt and a willed community (example of how the Ancient Greek died fighting the Persians: it was a matter of love for and duty to their beloved). Emphasizing imagination as the key attribute ofthe nation overlooks these other vital dimensions of will and emotion. Indee po These are the very dimensions of nationalism that even so eminent a world historian as McNeill overlooks. For McNeill, human history is marked by THREE STAGES: I) Premodern epoch: marked by polyethnic hierarchies of skilled labor; II) From 1750 to 1914: a combination of factors, such as the classicism ofthe intelligentsia, the new conscript armies, the new reading publics, fed the dream of national unity and cultural homogeneity (this is ‘the age of nations’); II)Contemporary era: transition to a post-national era that will produce a fragmented and hybrid society (due to immigration and mass communication). 2. A CRITIQUE OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM: Central to the many varieties of social constructionism is the idea ofthe nation as a malleable and modern cultural artifact. Unlike the classical modernists, social constructionists treat the nation as a narrative text or a cultural artifact that, once deconstructed, dissolves into its component ethnic parts; or alternatively they reject altogether any notion of the nation as a real community. 1) In that case, however, why should so many people continue to define themselves as a living and substantial national community or choose to lay down their lives for an elite construct and artifact, even after it has been deconstructed by the postmodernists? Billig has shown how the ideas of nation and home are deeply embedded in our language and everyday practices, suggesting a social reality that cannot be easily dissolved. 2) A second problem with social constructionism is its elitism. It is the ideas, strategies, and choices of elites that dominate the social constructionist portrayal ofnationalism. Little attention is given to the popular basis of nationalism or to the involvement of other classes in the creation or preservation of the nation. While we can document many instances of elite manipulation of wider constituencies, it is equally important to analyze the ways in which popular outlooks, cultures, and traditions have influenced the actions of elites. 3) Constructionists, moreover, are unable to grasp and credit the emotional depth of loyalties to historical nations and nationalisms. It remains the case that, only recently, millions of human beings were prepared to sacrifice their possessions and lives for “the defence of the motherland”. Nationalism was singularly suited to tap into needs and problems specific of recent times, as mass volunteering for war. Individuals were powerfully attracted to a nationalism that drew on past symbols exactly because it simultaneously answered to their changed needs and interests in a secular age. 4) In their concern to avoid imposing a “retrospective nationalism” on premodern communities and collective sentiments, modernists and constructionists have been blinded by a “blocking presentism,” insisting that the needs and preoccupations of the present determine our view of the past. What is decisive in their eyes is the view of the ethnic past entertained by present generations of the nation rather than the influence of that past on the national present. But Smith argues how our view of the past is only partly shaped by present concerns; that past has the power also to shape present concerns by setting the cultural parameters and traditions for our present understandings, needs, and interests. This is not to say that every emergent nation is formed through a specific ethnic model, much less that there is a one-to-one relationship between each modern nation and “its” antecedent ez/rie. Things are never so straightforward, and even the strongest contemporary nations can point to diverse ethnic origins and can be shown to have incorporated elements from several etfies over a long period of time (as the English). At the same time, a rough correspondence of dominant etnie and subsequent nation has given legitimacy to the myths and memories of nationhood imparted to successive generations; and the model of the earlier ethnie continues to resonate through its traditions, memories, and symbols. (V) ROUTES OF NATION FORMATION: How, then, may we trace the genealogies and the formation of modern nations? An important assumption of an ethnosymbolic approach is the need to analyze the rise of nations in terms of antecedent ethnic ties and popular formations. Kingdoms tended to be formed around certain “ethnic cores”—dominant populations united by presumed ties of common descent and vernacular culture, which, in certain cases, gradually expanded to incorporate outlying regions and their etfies as well as lower classes. For Armstrong, a variety of factors over the /ongue durée have influenced the emergence of nations, including differences in nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, the influence of great religious civilizations like Christianity and Islam, the impact of imperial administrations, different patterns of ecclesiastical organization exc. For Hutchinson, nations emerge through an oscillation and interplay between cultural. regenerative kinds of nationalism and state-oriented political movements. For Smith, the starting point of the process is the TYPE OF ETHNIE, which he divides in three kinds: 1) The “lateral” or aristocratic enies (Western Europe?): they tend to be extensive, with ragged boundaries and little social depth. They rarely resort to cultural penetration of “the people,” whom they may fail to recognize as ‘“theirs,)” as occurred in Eastern Europe. Here the route to modern nationhood proceeds through the establishment by the nobles of a strong, centralized state and through the bureaucratic incorporation of outlying regions and lower strata by that state and its aristocratic culture. This was the pattern found in Western Europe and repeated by the excolonial “state nations” of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. li) The “vertical” or demotic enies (Eastern Europe and the Middle East): they are intensive, with relatively compact boundaries, high barriers to entry, and deep cultural penetration of all classes. Concerning the route to modern nationhood, here an indigenous intelligentsia rediscovers, authenticates, and appropriates for political use the vernacular cultures of the lower strata and through the vernacular mobilization of these strata attempts to rouse them to political action so as to create ethnic nations iii) The “fragmentary” or immigrant etlnies (America, South Africa, Australia): these actually are part-ethnies, whose members have migrated from their community to form a new colony, for economic, religious, or political reasons. Over time such ethnic fragments may become estranged from their ez/mzie and form a new nation. (VI) THE ROLE OF NATIONALISM: Therefore, the routes of nation formation are not explicable wholly in terms of antecedent structures and processes. They involve vital elements of conscious agency: elite choices, popular responses, and ideological motivations. Of the last, the most important has been the modern ideology of nationalism itself. The BASIC TENETS ofthis ideology may be summarized as follow: 1) The world is divided into nations, each possessing a distinctive character, history, and destiny. 2) Political power resides solely in the nation, and loyalty to the nation overrides all other loyalties. 3) To be free, human beings must identify with a nation. 4) To be authentic, nations must have maximum autonomy. 5) World peace and justice can be built only on a society of 20 autonomous nations. Such a doctrine holds up THREE IDEALS that all political programs must realize: national autonomy, national unity, and national identity. These, the nationalist argues, are the preconditions for a free society and of a peaceful and just international order, and thereby nationalism provides a blueprint for the aspirations and liberation of all would-be nations. The power of nationalism is not only a matter ofideology. Perhaps even more potent than nationalist principles have been national symbols. These give concrete meaning and visibility to the abstractions of nationalism. The representations and images of the nation exert a profound influence over large numbers of people, exactly because they can be very widely disseminated by the media. In each ofthese media, specific images of the nation and its liberation, its heroic past, and its glorious future can be created and purveyedì, so that the nation ceases to be the abstract property of intellectuals and becomes the immemorial imagined community of all those designated as its members and citizens. Also crucial is the role of artists in the dramatic recreation of the heroic past. This tangibility is also present in the many festivals and ceremonies celebrating the nation and commemorating its fallen soldiers and the “glorious dead.” Mosse argued that nationalism should be regarded as a popular form of civic religion, with a specific liturgy and rites appropriate to a secular, political religion of the masses. He dated the rise of such orchestrated and choreographed mass civic religions from the great celebrations of the French Revolution and traced their course in Western Europe, culminating in the fascist rallies and commemorations. Where Mosse’s account departs from classic modernism is not only in its emphasis on the mass symbolic and cultural elements of the nation but in its analysis of the persistence and revival of premodern Chuistian and classical motifs and imagery in the liturgy and symbolism of nationalism. (VII) PERSISTENCE AND CHANGE OF NATIONS: We have not yet entered a postnational epoch. It is true that national identities in advanced Western societies are undergoing significant transformations consequent on the loss of empire and the large-scale immigration of culturally different peoples, but none of this implies the disintegration of nations and the fading away of national identities, only their transformation by global forces. Ethnosymbolic approaches argue that we are unlikely to realize the supersession of nationalism or the transcendence of nations for many decades to come. They do not base their predictions only on the vivid and widespread evidence of contemporary surges of nationalisms in various parts of the globe nor only on the importance that many people, even in the most developed parts of the world, still attach to their national identities. Both of these phenomena, ethnosymbolists would claim, derive from the preexisting symbols and cultural ties and sentiments in which nations are embedded. It is therefore a grave error to commence analyses of nations and nationalism from the nineteenth century or later, since this standpoint fails to appreciate the immense cultural networks and resources on which modern nations draw. This is why even a political entity as strong as the European Union finds it so difficult to transcend and understand the nations of Europe: the unifying symbols it may be tempted to draw on are in fact divisive and unacceptable (e.g. Catholicism, the Holy Roman Empire or the world wars). Outside Europe ethnic nationalism continues to unfold (ethnic conflicts Asia and Africa). In Europe itself, in the aftermath of the cold war we are witnessing once again the territorialization of memory, the politicization of chosenness, and the reappropriation of a heroic past. CONCLUSION Taken together, these themes and the ethnosymbolic approach from which they spring have the potential to clarify many of the debates surrounding ethnicity and nationalism and to provide a deeper approach to the problem of the role of nations and nationalism in history. The major debates between primordialists, perennialists, and modemists fall into place if we adopt the distinction between ezrzie and nation and employ a methodology of la longue durée to reveal the complex relations of past, present, and future and the place of etlnies and nations within them. It then becomes possible to avoid a retrospective nationalism while doing justice to the widespread presence and significance of collective cultural identities in premodern epochs. Ethnosymbolic approaches point to ways in which these earlier collective cultural identities may be related to modern nations while allowing for historical discontinuities between them and for the possibility of novel combinations of ethnic categories and communities in the making of recent nations. Ethnosymbolic approaches also are helpful in directing our attention away from an exclusive concern with elites and their strategies, for they seek to go beyond the “top-down” approaches of modernism in order to bring the popular, emotional, and moral dimensions of national identity back into focus. But they do so in a manner that avoids the reifying tendencies of primordialism and the politically dangerous ideas of organic nationalism. Most of all perhaps, an ethnosymbolic approach can help us to understand both the durability and the transformations of ethnicity in history and the continuing power and persistence of nations and nationalism at the start of the third millennium. This is because it directs our gaze to the inner worlds of the etnie and the nation. to undermine the sense of the past and detach it from the immediate present and future.