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Nations and Nationalism.

Ernest Gellner.

“Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the
national unit should be congruent.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.1)

“Nationalism as a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined in terms of

this principle. Nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger aroused by the violation
of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist
movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.1)

“… a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous, in such

cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals.” (GELLNER,
2008, pp.2)

“Violence may be applied only by the central political authority, and those to whom
it delegates this right.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.3)

“The “state” is that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the
enforcement of order (…). The state exists where specialized order-enforcing
agencies, such as police forces and courts, have separated out from the rest of
social life. They are the state.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.4)

“1 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture,
where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and
ways of behaving and communicating.

2 Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as
belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the
artefacts of men´s convictions and loyalties and solidarities. A mere category of
persons (…) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly
recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared
membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which
turns them into a nation, and not the other attributes, whatever they might be,
which separate that category from non-members.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.6-7)

“Literacy, the establishment of a reasonably permanent and standarized script,

means in effect the possibility of cultural and cognitive storage and centralization.
The cognitive centralization and codification effected by a clerisy, and the political
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centralization which is the state, need not go hand in hand.” (GELLNER, 2008,
pp.9)

“In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a small minority of
the population, rigidly separate from the great majority of direct agricultural
producers, or peasants.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.9)

“Contrary to what Marxism has led people to expect, it is pre-industrial society

which is addicted to horizontal differenciation within societies, whereas industrial
society strengthens the boundaries between nations rather tan those between
clases.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.12)

“Political units of the agrarian age vary enormously in size and kind. Roughly
speaking, however, one can divide them into two species, or perhaps poles: local
self-giverning communities, and large empires. On the one hand there are the city
states, tribal segments, peasant comunes and so forth, running their own affairs,
with a fairly high political participation ratio (…), and with only moderate inequality;
and on the other, large territories controlled by a concentration of forcé at one
point. A very characteristic political form is, of course, one which fuses these two
principles; a central dominant authority co-exists with semi-autonomous local
units.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.13-14)

“Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained and
perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement. Not surprisingly, it
was the first society to invent the concept and ideal of progress, of continuous
improvement.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.22)

“If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly linked a priori to

any other, and that everything is open to rethinking, then economic and productive
growth requires exactly the same of human activities and hence of human roles.
Roles become optional and instrumental. The old stability of the social role
structure is simply incompatible with growth and innovation. Innovation means
doing new things, the boundaries of which cannot be the same as those as those
of the activities they replace. No doubt most societies can cope with an occasional
re-drawing of job specification and guild boundaries, just as a football team can
experimentally switch from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity.
One change does not make progress. But what happens when such changes
themselves are constant and continuous, when the persistence of occupational
change itself becomes the one permanent feature of a social order?
When these question is answered, the main part of the problem of nationalism is
thereby solved. Nationalism is rooted in a certain kind of división of labour, one
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which is complex and persistently, cumulatively changing.” (GELLNER, 2008,

pp.23-24)

“Time was when education was a cottage industry, when men could be made by a
village or clan. That time has now gone, and gone forever. (In education, small can
now be beautiful only if it is covertly parasitic on the big.) Exo-socialization, the
production and reproduction of men outside the local intimate unit, is now the
norm, and must be so. The imperative of exo-socialization is the main clue to why
state and culture must now be linked, whereas in the past their connection was
thin, fortuitous, varied, loose, and often minimal. Now it is unavoidable. That is
what Nationalism is about, and why we live in an age of nationalism.” (GELLNER,
2008, pp.37)

“The most important steps in the argument have now been made. Mankind is
reversibly commited to industrial society, and therefore to a society whose
productive system is based on cumulatuive science and technology. This alone
can sustain anything like the present and anticipated number of inhabitants of the
planet, and give them a prospect of the kind of standard of living which men now
take for granted, or aspires to take for granted. Agrarian society is no longer an
option, for its restoration would simply condemn the great majority of mankind to
death by starvation, not to mention dire and unacceptable poverty for the minority
of survivors. Hence there is no point in discussing, for any practical purpose, the
charms and the horrors of the cultural and political accompainments of the agrarian
age: they are simply not available. We do not properly understan the range of
options available to industrial society and perhaps we never shall; but we
understand some of its essential concomitants. The kind of cultural homogenity
demanded by nationalism is one of them, and we had better make our peace with
it.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.38)

“Nationalism has been defined, in effect, as the striving to make culture and polity
congruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more tan one roof
at that. Culture, an elusive concept, was deliberately left undefined. But an at least
provitionally acceptable criterion of culture might be language, as at least a
sufficient, if not a necessary touchstone of it. Allow for a moment a difference of
language to entail a difference of culture.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.42)

“But nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that
is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of
social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high
cultures, each protected by its own state. It uses some of the pre-existent cultures,
generally transforming them in the process, but it cannot possibly use them all.
They are too many of them. A viable higher culture-sustaining modern state cannot
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fall below a certain minimal size (unless in efect parasitic on its neighbours); and
ther is only room for a limited number of such states on this earth.” (GELLNER,
2008, pp.46-47)

“(…) is nationalism strong or not? (…) the conclusion must be that it is a very
strong force, though not perhaps a unique or irresistible one.” (GELLNER, 2008,
pp.48)

“The process of industrialization took place in successive phases and in different

conditions, and engendered various new rivalries, with new gains and losses to be
made and avoided. Internationalism was often predicted by the prophets and
commentators of the industrial age, both on the left and on the right, but the very
opposite came to pass: the age of nationalism.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.51)

“Mankind has always been organized in groups, of all kinds of shapes and size,
sometimes sharply defined and sometimes loose, sometimes neatly nested and
sometimes overlapping or intertwined. The variety of this possibilities, and of the
principles on which the groups were recruited and maintained, is endeless. But two
generic agents or catalyst of group formation and maintanance are obviously
crucial: will, voluntary adherence and identification, loyalty, solidarity, on the one
hand; and fear, coercion, compulsion on the other. These two possibilities
constitute extreme poles along a kind of spectrum. A few communities may be
based exclusively or very predominantely on one or the other, but they must be
rare. Most persisting groups are base don a mixture of loyalty and identification (on
willed adherence), and of extraneous incentives, positive or negative, on hopes
and fears.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.52)

“It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.
Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of
cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses them very selectively, and it most often
transforms them radically.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.54)

“(…) nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society,
where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some
cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffusion of a
school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of
reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the
establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable
atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in
place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures
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reproduced locally and idiosincratically by the micro-groups themeselves. That is

what really happens.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.56)

“Industrial society is different. Its territorial and work units ar ad hoc: membership is
fluid, has a great turnover, and does not generally engage or commit the loyalty
and identity of members. In brief, the old structures are dissipated and largely
replaced by an internally random and fluid totality, within which there is not much
(certainly when compared with the preceding agrarian society) by way of genuine
sub-structures. There is very little in the way of any effective, binding organization
at any level between the individual and the total community. This total and ultimate
ploitical community thereby acquires a wholly new and very considerable
importance, being linked (as it seldom was in the past) both to the state and to the
cultural boundary. The nation is now supremely important, thanks both to the
erosion of sub-groupings and the vastly increased importance of a shared, literary-
dependent culture. The state, inevitably, is charged with the maintenance and
supervisión of an enormous social infraestructura (the cost of which
characteristically comes close to one half of the total income of the society). The
educational system becomes a very crucial part of it, and the maintenance of the
cultural/ linguistic médium now becomes the central role of education. The citizens
can only breathe conceptually and opérate within that médium, which is co-
extensive with the territory of the state and its educational and cultural apparatus,
and whic needs to be protected, sustained and cherished.” (GELLNER, 2008,
pp.62-63)

“The role of culture is no longer to underscore and make visible and authoritative
the structural differentiations within society (even if some of them persist, and even
if, as may happen, a few new ones emerge); on the contrary, when on occasion
cultural differences do tie in with and reinforce status differences, this is held to be
somewhat shameful for the society in question, and an index of partial failure of its
educational system.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp.63)

“High cultures tend to become the basis of a new nationality (…) when before the
emergence of nationalism the religión defined fairly closely all the under-privileged
as against the privileged, even or especially if the under-privileged had no other
positive shared characteristic (such as language or common history).” (GELLNER,
2008, pp.71)
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“Agrarian society – unlike, it would seem, both its predecessor and succesor
societies - is Malthusian: both productive and defence necessities impel to seek a
growing population, which then pushes close enough to the available resources to
be occasionally stricken by disasters. The three crucial factors operating in this
society (food production, political centralization and literacy) engender a social
structure in which cultural and political boundaries are seldom congruent.”
(GELLNER, 2008, pp.106)

“Industrial society is quite different. It is not Malthusian. It is based and dependent

on cognitive and economic growth which in the end both outstrips and discourages
further dramatic population growth. Various factors in it – universal literacy, mobility
and hence individualism, political centralization, the need for a costly educational
infraestructure – impel it into a situation in which political and cultural boundaries
are on the whole congruent. The state is, above all, the protector, not of a faith, but
of a culture, and the maintainer of the inescapably homogeneous and standarizing
educational system, which alone can turn out the kind of personnel capable of
switching from one job to another within a growing economy and a mobile society,
and indeed of performing jobs which involve manipulating meanings and people
rather than things. For most of these men, however, the limits of their culture are
the limits, not perhaps of the world, but of their own employability and hence
dignity.” (GELLNER, 2008, pp. 106-107)

“There are two possible visions of the future of culture in industrial societies, and
any number of intermediate compromise positions between the poles which they
represent. My own conception of world histroy is clear and simple: the three great
stages of man, the hunting-gathering, the agrarian and the industrial, determine our
problems, but not our solution.”(GELLNER, 2008, pp.110)

BIBLIOGRAFÍA.

GELLNER, Ernest. (2008). Nations and Nationalism. (Second Edition). Ithaca- New
York. Cornell Paperbacks.