Nation and Nationalism Theories
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Transcript of Nation and Nationalism Theories
Nation and NationalismTheories
Ernest Gellner Anthony Smith
Benedict Anderson
What is a nation by Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan (1832– 1892)He was a French scholar of language and history. A Professor at the Sorbonne. He is best known for his historical works on early Christianity and his political theories.
Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (What is a Nation), 1882
“The desire of nations to be together is the only real criterion”
Nation and Nationalism: Ernest Renan
Renan rejects to define the nation by objective criteria such as shared language, physical characteristics, culture, custom…etc.
Two things to constitute principle of a nation: past and present
Past – the possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrance (common sufferings)
Present – the consent, the desire to live together to continue to value the heritage which all hold in common.
Nationalism
Nationalism connects individuals to the state
Nationalism connects individuals they become sentimentally attached to
the homeland they gain a sense of identity and self-
esteem through their national identification
they are motivated to help their fellow nationals and countries
Nationalism is a “process”
Ernest Gellner Professor of Philosophy at the London School
of Economics Professor of Social Anthropology at
Cambridge University Nation and Nationalism (1983)
Nations and Nationalism are products of industrialization.
Emerge of nations and nationalism marks a sharp disjunction between elder agrarian societies and modern industrial society.
Mobility and Cultural Homogenization
Mobility Universal literacy standardization of language, general sophistication
Cultural homogenization“…it must be one in which they can allbreathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture. Moreover, it must now be a great or high (literate, training-sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition” (p38)
Cultural Homogenization
Who does all ? create and maintain:
one kind of cultureone style of communication, one centralized and
standardized educational system.
The Birth of State
State “… nations and states are not the same
contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other” (p6)
Ethnicity “… nationalism is a theory of political
legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state….. should not separate the power-holders from the rest.” (p1)
Anthony Smith
Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics.
He has specialized in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, especially the theory of the nation.
His major influential works are: theories of Nationalism (1971), The Ethnic Revival (1981), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), and National Identity (1991).
His concern is “When did the nations emerge?”
The nation is not old
Before, nations were generally assumed to be old; they could be traced back to the early Middle age.
Today, both nation and nationalism are understood as modern phenomena. The nation is a product of nationalist
ideologies. The nationalism is an expression of
modern, industrial society. The nations are phenomena of a
particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.
Ethnie Smith questions the modernists’ arguments,
“Is the nation a new thing?” Smith argues that modern nations have an
“ethnic origin, ethnic core”: Ethnie1. a collective name2. a common myth of descent3. a shared history4. a distinctive shared culture 5. an association with specific territory6. a sense of solidarity
Ethnic origin of the Nation
In pre modern communities, people are connected among the members and through generation by their ethnic core.
The cultural homogeneity was actually due to nation’s ethnic past prior to the nation.
It is because of its ethnic origin the modern nation is able to attract the allegiance of so many people.
Three revolutions When would people’s ethnic sentiment
transform to nationalism and to form a nation?
“The origins of the transition to nationhood are shrouded in obscurity.”
Three types of revolution (Gemeinschaft Geselleshaft) Economic: the division of labor Political: the control of administration Cultural: the cultural coordination
The Economic Revolution
The division of labor (capitalism) State controlled over key resources like
mining State regulated trade and commodity
exchange Every region of a country was integrated
as a state-supervised economy The division of labor was reorganized
around the center (production, supplier)
The Political Revolution The control of administration
In the latter half of the 17th c. a new class of military professional with a high degree of training and expertise in science and technology emerged
They required the highly trained bureaucrats supports
Centralized institutions for higher education The new type of bureaucratic state encouraged
the growth of a wealthy bourgeois class and an allied intelligentsia ( in opposition to the nobility)
Strengthen nationalistic policies
The Cultural Revolution
The cultural coordination (educational revolution)The expansion of secularism to
weaken the power of churchMonarchs claimed that their right
to rule was given by the god. Promise the salvation in this life
Centralized education standardized patriotic culture citizens
Spreading the Nations The revolutions achieved:
Territorial centralization and consolidation Cultural standardization
Nation was gradually formed “Because these three revolutions were highly discontinuous, because their effects were felt at different times in different areas, the nation that was gradually formed revealed differences in both content and form.”
What about non-Western communities? The West first and non-Western societies were
stimulated to follow because of their military and economic success.
Benedict Anderson
Anderson – Professor of International Relations at Cornell University.
He specializes in the politics of Southeast Asia.
His major work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, had become one
of the most cited texts in the field. He argues that the nation is “imagined.”
The Imagined Communities
The nation is imagined
… the nation in anthropological sprit; it is an imagined political community, and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. (p6)
Nation/ Nationalism as cultural artifacts
“nation-ness as well as nationalism are cultural artifacts of particular kind” (p4)
“nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that precede it, out of which – as well as against which- it came into being” (p12)
The Nation is imagined in a particular way
The community whose size is beyond face-to-face contact are all imagined.
The nation is imagines as limited because a nation holds limited number of people.
The nation is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in the age in which realm of absolutism was destroying by revolution.
The nation is imagined as community because the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
it is this fraternity that makes it possible for so many millions of people willingly die for their nation.
Print CapitalismWhat makes such imagining possible?Print capitalism (the novels and newspapers) Origins of national consciousness was print
capitalism: The nation was imagined through language In early time: international publishing
houses, ignoring national frontiers, Latin readers.
In the mid 16th century, vernacularizing of print industry.
Vernacular Language Press and National consciousness
The vernacular print language laid the bases fornational consciousness in 3 ways:1) They created unified fields of exchange and
communication * Print language made possible for people
who speak different dialects to communicate
* The fellow- readers were connected through print, and they formed the embryo of the nationally imagined community.
Vernacular Language Press and National consciousness
1) Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language which helped to build the image of antiquity of the nation. * Archive
2) Print-capitalism created language of power.
* High German, King’s English or Central Thai, Tokyo dialect
Spread of Nations The nation came to be imagined, and
once imagined; it was modeled, adapted and transformed.
In the colonized countries, the colonial state conditioned the natives to imagined a nation: education for native people
Native bureaucrats in colonial administration, Bilingual intelligentsias have learned nationalism and copied, adapted and improved it.
Imagined ColonyImagined nation of colonized countries The nation’s model of colonized countries
was colonial state Three institutions made such imagination:
Census Before it was for tax and military but
now individual persons are counted Map and Map-as-logo
The model for drawing the national borders, not the model of
Necessity for administrative mechanisms for troops to back their claims.
Museum Victorious past (conquest)
Further studies of Theories of Nation and Nationalism
http://www.nationalismproject.org/