nationalism in comparative perspective

• The inclusion of a chapter on nationalism in a political sociology handbook reflects nationalism's acknowledged political importance in the 21st century.
• Academic interest in nationalism has previously fluctuated, hindering a deeper understanding of the phenomenon post-World War II.

Early Efforts to Understand Nationalism

• Hans Kohn's work is a useful early attempt to understand nationalism in historical perspective.
• Kohn stresses that nationalism is fundamentally an idea rather than a static, structural phenomenon.
• Kohn can be criticized for an insufficiently rigorous definition of the nation.
• For Kohn, the nation is a sovereign community.
• He fails to recognize nationalism's secular quality and the structural implications of national consciousness.

Dominant Thinkers on Nationalism (Late 1970s-1980s)

• Work on nationalism was largely dominated by thinkers often considered canonical: Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith, and Benedict Anderson.
• Hobsbawm and Gellner are considered structuralists, judging nationalism as fundamentally a "structural" or "material" phenomenon.
• Their approach to nationalism owes a great deal to Karl Marx.
• Gellner considers the state the fundamental structural phenomenon, defining it as the institution concerned with order enforcement.
• Gellner posits that a nation depends on industrialization.
• For Gellner, a nation has a shared culture ("a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating").
• That nation depends on the recognition of its members.
• He states that a mere category of persons becomes a nation when members recognize certain mutual rights and duties due to shared membership.
• He also defines nationalism as a distinctive species of patriotism dominant under modern social conditions.
• The characteristics of patriotism are "homogeneity, literacy, and anonymity," sometimes identified with "cultural chauvinism."
• Hobsbawm takes the nation to be an "objective" phenomenon.
• Hobsbawm defines a nation by its members' consciousness of belonging to it.
• Hobsbawm says the nation is a social entity insofar aligns with a modern territorial state, the nation-state.
• The "modern" state causes nationalism, but Hobsbawm rejects defining the phenomenon, recommending "agnosticism" as the best approach.
• Smith defines the modern nation as "a named human population which shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity, and equal rights and duties for all members."
• Nations have roots in "ethnies" - units of population with common ancestry myths, shared culture, a historic territory link, and elite solidarity, appearing in the historical record since the late third millennium.

Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities"

• Anderson's "Imagined Communities" may be the most influential account of nationalism.
• Anderson is identified as a "constructivist," viewing nations as historically contingent products of human cultural construction.
• He stresses that the nation as an "imagined community" exists because inhabitants do not know most fellow members face to face.
• Anderson writes society consist of imagined communities, since social forces are ultimately moral (mental, not physical).
• Even the most organizationally simple societies exist through "collective representations" that reside in individuals' imaginations.
• According to Anderson, what' important is the “style” in which political communities are imagined.
• Anderson understands nations to be imagined communities that are "inherently limited and sovereign."
• Nations are limited because even the largest has boundaries beyond which lie other nations.
• Anderson takes popular sovereignty to be a function of the fact that the concept of the nation was born in an age when Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained dynastic realm.
• All communities are based on "a deep, horizontal comradeship" that facilitates willingness to die for limited imaginings.
• Nationalism is an imagined, sovereign, and limited human society based on egalitarian "comradeship."

Shortcomings of Existing Theories

• Political sociology has not fully grasped nationalism.
• Despite ontological similarities (convergence on structural materialism), there is no consensus in political sociology.
• Including a chapter on nationalism in the context of "political action" in civil society indicates deepening understanding.
• Only recently has "nationalism" even in scholarly literature, carried negative connotations, disengaged from civil society associations.
• In popular discussion, this pejorative meaning prevails, with it seeming to be an ancient and ubiquitous psychological phenomenon that's the same as ethnicity, race etc.

Modernist vs. Primordialist Perspectives

• Academic experts since the 1980s have leaned toward the "modernist" side of the "modernist/primordialist" or "modernist/perennialist" divide.
• "Modernists" admit nationalism was an outgrowth of ethnicity, but see solely as a modern processes, development of capitalism/industrialization/modern bureaucratic state, and "unimaginable" outside that framework.
• Representative modernist theorists were Marxist, meaning they assumed the fundamental nature of "material" (economic) processes, and the epiphenomenal nature of "ideal" (symbolic or cultural) processes.

The Author's Perspective

• The authors define nationalism as a "perspective or a style of thought" with "the idea of the 'nation'" at its core, defining a community as fundamentally equal and sovereign.
• In the national world, the mass of the population becomes the nation.
• Popular sovereignty implies a secular worldview: people, not transcendence, are the source of authority.
• Sovereignty and equality give diginity.
• Kohn definitions meet objections.
• First, if definitions can not have items we call nations that definitions does capture and second the definition doesn't capture items that clearly aren't nations.
• "Voluntarist" or "constructivist" approach meaning of existence nations depends on imaginations.
• This is well specified with France, the United States, Russia, Japan as the nations.

Nationalism as a Form of Consciousness

• Nationalism is a form of consciousness a an umbrella term for national identities that contains national sentiment, national pride, national patriotism etc
• It gives a over arching blueprint for culture and experience of reality and modernity.
• Modernity may defined as nationalism institutionalization that is of course patterned by such underlying forms of consciousness.
• Nationalism is a to be thought of a root to political action that generates and makes things conceivable of society.
• As framework for culture so is it distinctive and analogous to religion, for instance monotheism.

Political Effects Compared to Other Forms of Consciousness

• Nationalism is analogous to broad forms of religion, but distinguished by its secular character.
• Though religion may be given prominence, it exists on nationalism's sufferance.

Nationalism's Secular Focus

• Nationalism focuses on this world, which it deems self-sufficient rather than dependent on transcendental forces.
• This secular focus shows in the equality of national membership, popular sovereignty, and the power given to science.
• Not a "civil religion," nationalism best understood as relating to transcendent.
• Secular,image sovereignty is a key part to explain aspects too like democratisation.
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Consequences of Nationalism

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Political Action as a Result

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Modern Government and Nationalism

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Open Recruitment and Equality

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Social Mobility and Expectations

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The Nature of Nationalism's Transformation

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Characteristics of Idealogical Politics

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National and Collective Liberty

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Types of Political Systems

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Transforming Nationalisms

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Explore the evolution of nationalism studies, from Hans Kohn's early conceptualizations to the influential works of Hobsbawm, Gellner, Smith, and Anderson. This lesson examines nationalism as a political force and idea, while addressing critiques and the secular, structural implications of national consciousness.