Nation and memory – exam prep

Week 2 – what is a nation?

- It can mean a group of people bonded by the same ethnic group.

- Synonymous of state – not just the people living in the territory.

Primordialist vs modernist view –

1. Johann Gottfried von Herder

- Writing before the French Revolution
- 1744-1803
- Idea that nations always existed – value in itself
- nations are real process – not something that is invented, natural invention,
logical outcome of history.
- National sentiment is no construct – it exists; people identify with their nation
through natural instinct.
- Nations are eternal or at least go back to ancient times
- People are the carriers of the nation
- “nature brings forth families; the most natural state therefore is also one people,
with a national character of its own. For thousands of years this character
preserves itself within the people and, if the native princes concern themselves
with it, it can be cultivated in the most natural way…”
- the family, the climate, the way of life, education is what creates the conditions
of the nation
- “no greater injury can be inflicted on a nation than to be robbed of her national
character, the peculiarity of her spirit and her language.”
- Why can the Latvians and Lithuanians not have their own nation? Cannot fully
develop their own nation, many 19th century East-European nation-builders
referred to Herder.
- The culture of no nation should be lost.

Nationalist and Primordialist key assumptions –

- Nations are real process: not invented, not a product of modernity, natural
developments, it is a logic outcome of history
- Not transmitted, or a result of propaganda, it exists, it comes natural to people –
national sentiment is no construct
- It is rooted in a feeling of kinship
- Nations are eternal or at least go back to ancient times – not conscious they were
part of a nation, talking about a national awakening, national sentiments were
asleep. In fact, people were always a part of the nation.
- NOT A MODERN CONSTRUCT
- MODERNITY, FRENCH REVOLUTION, ARE NOT A PRECONDITION FOR NOTIONS.

Challenged by a modernist interpretation –

2. Ernst Renan
 - Writing after the French Revolution
- 1823-1892
- rejects or disagrees with Herder – “man is a slave neither of his race, nor his
language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken
by mountain chains. (…)
- “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one,
constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present.
One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is
present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value
of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (…)
- creating memories, these memories are shared, and bound people together
- present-day consent: to speak of a nation, the members of the nation HAVE to
have the wish to live together. Desire to live together is very important.
- Not enough to share traditions, language or culture – there needs to be a will
to want to live together.
- Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs,
for they impose duties, and require a common effort.
- Suffering is more important that positive experiences.
- What is a nation according to Renan: “A nation is therefore a large-scale
solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the
past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a
past; it is summarised, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely,
consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s
existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite…” – Ernst Renan

it is thought that post-eighteenth century nations differ in certain critical respects from
earlier communities.

3. Ernst Gellner
- “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents
nations where they do not exist.”
- Nations are a myth
- Not a natural development, not a logical outcome of history – they are
contingent
- State makes a group of people into a nation
- There is often something already there – shared religion, shared language,
shared culture, it is not necessary, these things can be created, constructed by
the nationalists
- Historical contexts that led to the creation of the modern German nation –
Austrians, in 1830, no one would have denied their Germanness, most Austrians
today believe they belong to a different nation.
- Modern outcome of industrialisation and modernisation
- Nations are produced by nationalism – they are an invention; nations are a myth.
- “Nation as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent… political
destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures
 and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-
existing cultures: that is reality.”
- Is a hard-core modernist
- Nations accompany the transition from agrarian societies to modern industrial
societies.
- Nations are functional for modern industrial society.
- Need a language – strong efforts from nation-builders to consolidate a
universally-accepted language. This is the same for industrialisation – functional
and communicate with one another. Have to have a shared language of
command for armies. Need one language in schools, making it easier to migrate
for one part of the country to another.
- Modern economy works better if there are expansive spaces – this goes hand in
hand with the formation of the modern nation.
- Modern nation creates the best conditions for a modern industrial society
- The most important tool in forming nations is the modern education system –
teach the same version of high language, the same history, the same sort of
culture, creating a sort of universally accepted group of authors and poets, key
members of the respective national high literature. To make and form the
nature.
- The replacement of “low” by “high” cultures marks industrial society and nation
building. High culture is used as a tool of nation-building in the replacement of
folk culture.
- Nationalism imposes the new high culture on the population and uses material
from old “low” cultures as raw material, see also The invention of tradition - Eric
Hobsbawm.
- Nations are necessary for the formation of the modern industrial society, every
single nation is contingent.

4. Benedict Anderson
- Modernist
- Anderson defines the nation as, “an imagined political community – and
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign…It is imagined because the
members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-
members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.6).
- Running its own affairs
- Nation conveyed through LANGUAGE – groups with different bloodlines and
ancestors can still belong to this ‘imagined community’ – anyone willing to
assimilate
- “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them,
encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself
coterminous with mankind…It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was
born in an age in which the Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the
legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm…Finally, it is
imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and
 exploitation that may occur in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep
horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.7).
- views nationalism as a positive force, not one that is linked with racism: “The fact
of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while
racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time
through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history…The
dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in
those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or
‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies” (Anderson, 1983, p.149).
- falls into the “historicist” or “modernist” school of nationalism along with Ernest
Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, argues that nations and nationalism are products of
modernity.
- School stands in direct opposition to primordialists – who believe that nations, if
not nationalism, had existed from the beginning of time.
- What makes him different from Gellner and Hobsbawm? Is not hostile to the
idea of nationalism.

Preconditions of nations –
- Capitalism as a modern system of production and productive relations
- Print as a modern technology of communication
- Human linguistic diversity – people speak different language

5. Eric Hobsbawm
- “nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around”

Modernist view – key assumptions

- Nations are a product of modernity
- Nations are constructed by elites
- Nationalists created nations

Critics of the modernist position –

- “for the diffusion of national ideas could only occur in specific social settings.
Nation-building was never a mere project of ambitious or narcissistic
intellectuals… intellectuals can “invent” national communities only if certain
objective preconditions for the formation of a nation already exist.”
- Miroslav Hroch, From National Movement
- Needs to be something there to bind people together – nations can thus not be
formed, he dosent specify what it is, but there needs to be something in
common to kick-start the nation-building project.

Ethno-symbolism –
- Intermediary position
- Something we have in common
- Belonging together, common future
- Shared by a specific group, that would be a nation
- Ethnie – group of people that have things in common, not yet a modern nation
definitions of Nation and Ethnie –
- “A nation can therefore be defined as…
- a named human population
- sharing an historic territory.
- Common myths and historical memories,
- A mass public culture,
- A common economy
- And common legal rights and duties for all members.” - Anthony D. Smith

Ethnies (characteristics) –
- A common name
- A common historic territory (homeland) or an association with one
- A set of myths of common origins and descent and some common historical
memories
- One or more elements of common culture – language, customs, religion;
- A sense of solidarity among most members of the community: things in common
with one another
- A mass public culture – you need newspapers, books, common economy
- Nation has to have a state
- This is what they aim to have
- Noble man has the same duties and rights as a peasant

Ethno-symbolism –
- Modern nations and pre-modern ethnies are linked
- Ethnies are crucial for the formation of nations
- Myths, symbols, folk tales, histories, memories, cultural traditions play important
roles in transforming ethnies in nations
- They are the basis for social cohesion
- How far did the culture of the elite trickle down to the masses of the population?
This is explored by Smith: “the point at issue is how far the modern, mass public
culture of the national state is a modern version of the premodern elite high culture
of the dominant ethnie, or how far it simple uses ‘materials’ from that culture for its
own quite different, and novel, purposes.” Nationalism and Modernism, p. 42

Ethno-Symbolism key assumptions –

- Nations are a modern phenomenon, but have roots in pre-modern eras and cultures
- Modern nations are directly or indirectly related to older ethnies with their
distinctive mythology, symbolism and culture; roots in the period before 1800; roots
in the feudal period
- Nations are expression of the “need for collective immorality through posterity” –
nationalists have managed to convince people to call to arms and fight, even if they
are dying, they are securing the future of the nation through their death, you
continue to exist, if you internalise the nation.
- NATIONS ARE BOTH CONSTRUCT AND REAL PROCESS
 - “A nationalist argument is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions –
1. there exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.
2. The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and
values.
3. The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the
attainment of political sovereignty.” John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State
(Chicago, 1985), p.3

Two types of nationalism (Hobsbawm) –

1. Mass, civic and democratic political nationalism
After the French Revolution, esp. 1830-1870
Nations claim self-determination as sovereign, independent states
Large in territory and population
Top-down and elite based
Germany, Italy, Hungary modelled after France and Britain

2. Ethno-linguistic nationalism
Dominant in Europe 1870-1914
Not the dominant group of the state
Trying to leave the existing empire, creating their own state
VERY much community based
Did not control the education system, did not have a state
Reading clubs, using the opportunities of the liberalism of some of the empires
Secessionist and state building
Smaller groups
From below and community based
Ukrainians, Czechs, Estonians, Serbs

Types of Nationalism (Michael Hechter)

- State-building nationalism: England, France
- Peripheral nationalism: Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia
- Irredentist nationalism: Sudeten Germans, Hungarians in Romania
- Unification nationalism: Germany, Italy
Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism

Comparing the definitions – separatism versus irredentism:

- Irredentism – irredentist – advocating annexation of territory of one state by another
state based on common ethnicity or historical ‘rights’: Kosovo
- Separatism – separatist: advocating autonomy or an own state/government for part
of the territory of an existing state: Scotland

Pattern of a successful national movement from below (M. Hroch) –

- A crisis of legitimacy
- A certain amount of vertical social mobility: some people need to take the lead,
some sort of elite, to lead the non-dominant nation
- High level of social communication
 - Nationally relevant conflicts of inflict

Nation-building in non-dominant ethnies –

(Phase A) Groups in the ethnic community start to discuss their own ethnicity and conceive
of it as a nation-to-be: scholarly enquiry into and dissemination of an awareness of the
linguistic, cultural, social and historical attributes of the nation-to-be
(Phase B) A new range of activists try to “awaken” national consciousness and to persuade
as many members as possible of the ethnic group – the potential compatriots – that it is
important to gain all the attributes of a fully-fledged nation: (1) development of a national
culture based on the local language and its use in education, administration and economy,
(2) civil rights and self-administration, (3) creation of a complete social structure – beginning
of a national movement
(Phase C) A mass movement is formed which pursues these aims: a fully-fledged social
structure of the would-be nation comes into being

Reading –

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March
11th, 1882, in Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, Presses-Pocket, 1992.
(translated by Ethan Rundell)

- Nations as something rather new in history

- Roman empire – assemblages of people, without central institutions or dynasties