Nationalism Study PDF

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Javier Alcalde, IAU-ACM WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW: CLASSIC INSIGHTS REVISITED ERNEST RENAN (1823 - 1892) The nation is a spiritual and voluntary unity, based on a shared will to live together and a commitment to the fu...

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Javier Alcalde, IAU-ACM WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW: CLASSIC INSIGHTS REVISITED ERNEST RENAN (1823 - 1892) The nation is a spiritual and voluntary unity, based on a shared will to live together and a commitment to the futur National identity is shaped by both memory and forgetting: people choose to remember some aspects of their shared past while consciously forgetting others to preserve unit Citizenship and civic engagement are central to the nation’s existence; it is not based on ethnic or cultural purity but on political participation Nationalism is democratic and voluntary, not imposed by external powers The nation is a collective pact, continually renewed through the active consent of its citizens e y THE GERMAN ROMANTICS: HERDER For Herder, a nation is defined by its cultural and linguistic cohesion, not necessarily by political borders or institution He believed that nations naturally emerge from groups of people who share a common language, history, and customs He famously argued, "The soul of a people is its language" (Die Sprache ist die Seele eines Volkes). s THE GERMAN ROMANTICS: FICHTE A nation is not simply a cultural or linguistic entity, but a group of people bound together by a shared will and a desire to promote the common goo A nation is a moral and political community, where the individuals share a collective moral/ethical purpose Education is key to shaping the collective consciousness and ensuring the survival/flourishing of the natio The state’s primary role is to protect and promote the national spirit He saw the German people as a unique and superior people whose mission was to preserve and spread a particular kind of freedom and moral purpos Foreign domination (i.e. Napoleon) was a threat to the identity and independence of the German nation d e n GERMAN ROMANTICS: SUMMARY Herder and Fichte were both foundational figures in the development of nationalist thought, but they approached nationalism from different angle Herder’s emphasis on cultural identity, language, and the Volksgeist shaped early ethnic nationalis Fichte’s focus on the nation-state, moral unity, and political activism helped to define the modern conception of the natio Together, their ideas laid the groundwork for more political and educational forms of nationalism m n s AN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH FIELD Prominent historians wrote on the subject: E.H. Carr, Carlton Hayes, Otto Hintze, Miroslav Hroch, Elie Kedourie, Hans Kohn, Friedrich Meinecke, Robert William Seton-Watson, and Eugen Joseph Weber Political scientists did not systematically study nationalism until the latter half of the 20th centur Articles on nationalism published in political science journals were mostly case studies authored by historians, sociologists, or psychologists y KARL DEUTSCH (1912 - 1992) In the 50s-60s Karl Deutsch was a pioneer in the comparative study of nationalism, hypothesizing that changes in mass social mobilization and political communication are intimately related to the global rise of nationalism : KARL DEUTSCH Karl Deutsch’s theory of nationalism centers around the idea of political integration through effective communicatio Nationalism was essential for uniting disparate social, ethnic, and cultural groups into a cohesive political entity—the nation-stat By emphasizing the importance of communication networks, Deutsch argued that shared symbols, languages, and institutions were key to fostering a national identit At the same time, he recognized that nationalism could be both a force for social cohesion and a source of conflict, especially in multi-ethnic societies n e y 1983: A BREAKTHROUGH YEAR Traditionally nationalism failed to become a topic of mainstream research in political science. Exceptions: Arendt 1945, Bendix 1964, Coleman 1954, Emerson 1960, Shoup 1962, Rotberg 1962, Rosenblatt 1964, Rokkan 1971, Connor 1972, Young 197 In 1983, 3 influential studies of nationalism were simultaneously published: Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and Hobsbawm & Ranger’sThe Invention of Tradition These scholars all shared a conception of the nation and nationalism as modern phenomena that grew out of industrialization, urbanization, print-capitalism, and resistance to colonialism 6 ERNEST GELLNER (1925 - 1995) Industrialization needed an adequately trained labor force that spurred elites to introduce standardized national educational curricula favoring a “high culture” Gradually, the introduction of national education curricula was expanded and rural hinterlands became more integrated into a single national community BENEDICT ANDERSON (1936 - 2015) Anderson looked at non-European cases and explained the emergence of nationalism in colonized Latin America partially as the result of the blocked social mobility of colonizing settlers MODERNIST SCHOLARS These scholars understand nationalism as a by-product of modernization, either inevitable or consciously developed by state elite As it grew out of the seismic changes of the Industrial Revolution, it is different from premodern social identities such as castes, clans, or tribe Posner’s empirical work tracing linguistic homogenization in Zambia illustrates such structural arguments s s  PERENNIALIST AND ETHNOSYMBOLISM Perennialist and ethnosymbolism scholars alike reacted to modernist views by arguing that some form of nations and nationalism existed prior to the advent of modernity Some perennialist scholars singled out religion as an important building block for nationalis These scholars were not citing German Romantics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder or Johann Gottlieb Fichte, nor the organic intellectuals of various nascent national states who viewed nations as political entities awaiting awakening (known as primordialists) Nations were built upon pre-existing ethnic and cultural building blocks m THE WARWICH DEBATES These debates over the origins of the nation were epitomized in the well-known Warwick Debates between Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smit They were held s held in 1983 at the University of Warwick, U These debates centered around their differing views on nationalism and the origins and nature of nation Gellner and Smith represent two different intellectual traditions in the study of nationalism, and their disagreement encapsulates a broader division in the field s K h ERNEST GELLNER'S VIEW Nationalism as a product of modernization "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist" Nationalism was a response to the needs of modern industrial societies, which required uniformity in culture, education, and political organization to function effectivel The importance of cultural homogeneity Modern industrial societies, require a standardized culture (especially in terms of language, education, and work discipline) to enable efficient economic and political organizatio Nationalism emerged as a way to create that cultural homogeneity across diverse regions and communitie Nationalism and political centralization The modern state was crucial for promoting such national unity and standardization of social practices y n s ANTHONY D. SMITH'S VIEW Nationalism as a pre-modern extension of ethnic identity Ethnic communities existed long before the rise of the modern nation-stat Defined by shared culture, language, history, provided the foundation upon which nationalism was buil The persistence of ethnic ties Ethnic ties and historical narratives remain central to the formation of nation The role of historical memory: Nationalism is tied to shared historical memories and the symbolic use of culture, myths, and tradition These elements came from ethnic histories, reinterpreted and mobilized by nationalist movements e s s t ANTHONY D. SMITH (1939 - 2016) Representing the perennialists, Smith contended that there is such deep continuity between ancient cultures and ethnic communities on the one hand, and modern nation-states on the other, that they are inseparable. All nations and nationalisms are ultimately ethnic “History is no sweetshop in which its children may ‘pick and mix’.... The challenge for scholars as well as nations is to represent the relationship of ethnic past to modern nation more accurately and convincingly” : THE ESTONIAN EXAMPLE Representing the modernists, Gellner countered that nations do not always have ethnic pasts; therefore, ethnic building blocks are neither necessary nor sufficient for nations to emerg Estonians, for example, possessed no ethnic consciousness nor even a name for themselves at the start of the 19th century, but they created a nation, national consciousness, and a nation-state within 100 years Consequently, though nations may reflect cultural continuities with premodern ethnic sensibilities, this relationship is contingent and inessential e  LEGACY OF THE WARWICK DEBATES The accumulation of research has favored the modernist understanding of nationalism by verifying testable implications and by accumulating country studies that specify how industrialization, urbanization, and mass education both create and strengthen nationalism Perennialist theories struggle to explain the timing of initial national awakenings and the modifications of a country’s constitutive stor States themselves were active agents in creating nations and popularizing nationalism, both because nationalism secured internal legitimacy for increasingly centralized states and because nationalism enabled the creation and perpetuation of more powerful mass armies y THE CONSTRUCTIVIST TURN The broader constructivist turn in comparative politics reverberated into nationalism scholarship, demonstrating how peoples could be organized into a wide range of overlapping identity dimensions such as race, tribe, religion, ethnicity, regio Such research showed that tribes, religious groups, clans, and kinship groups existed long before modern nations emerged and that they did not always become politically activated Only those groups that were motivated by a desire for political self- determination could be understood as nations n THE CURRENT CONSENSUS Recent research strengthened the modernist view that nations and nationalism were not inevitable but rather emerging out of contextual circumstances Explanations for when and why nationhood emerges range from instrumental and coordinative to episodic and situational motivation Classic and contemporary scholarship have thus converged to understand the nation-state as one possible outcome of macrohistorical, contingent social processes of identification rather than as an entity with fixed relevance or meaning s