Nationalism

What is nationalism?
•Culture
•Pride
•Identity
•Sport
•Food
•Landscape
•Independence
•Self-government
Nationalism as Politics

Ernest Gellner “nationalism is primarily

a political principle that holds that
the political and the national unit should
be congruent”.
 Types of nationalism

•Unification nationalism
•State nationalism
•Secessionist nationalism
•Irredentist nationalism
But what is the national unit?
Europe 1648
Economic Europe. Prosperity
Economic Europe. Blue Banana
Stateless nations of Europe
Economist
29-04-10
 Objective
•State
•Ethnicity
•Common descent
•Land
•Language
•History
 Subjective

• Individuals feel national

• But nation needs others
 Intersubjective
• Mutual recognition
• Negotiation
• Socialization
• Community
• Negotiated, contested
 Renan
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- daymconsent, the desire to live together,
the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has
received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not
improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination
of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of al
cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the
ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great
men, glory, this is the social capital upon which one bases a
national idea. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the
metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence
is a perpetual affirmation of life.
For, the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals
must have many things in common but it must also have
forgotten many things.
 Writing on nationalism

• Nineteenth century
• Herder, Fichte, Mazzini, Mill,
Renan
• Interwar and post-war
• Kohn, Carr
• 1980s
• Gellner, Anderson, Breuilly,
Hobsbawm, Smith
Constructing the nation

• Ascriptive, ‘ethnic’
• Ancestry
• Visible markers
• birth
• Institutional ‘civic’, citizenship
• Voluntary
• Beware of dichotomies!
When was the nation and
nationalism?

•Primordialists
•Perennialists
•Modernists
•Post-modernists
 Modernist consensus

• Modern nation is modern

• With historical origins
• Constructed
• With available materials
 Varieties of Modernism
• What about modernity?
• Too broad?
• Counter-factual?
• Economics, industrialization
• Social change
• Mass politics
• Culture, literacy
• State-building
 Economics and Social
Structure
•Industrial society, urbanization Ernest
Gellner
•New social and economic roles
•Status, excluded middle class
•Literacy, common language
•Education system in vernacular
•mobilization
•Problems
• Teleology, functionalism
• time
• Place
 Literacy
• Benedict Anderson
• Imagined communities
• Literacy
• Common language
• Print capitalism
• Circulation of elites
• Problems
• Place (Latin America)
• Timing
• Print capitalism
 Politics

• Nationalism as political phenomenon

• French, US revolutions, popular sovereignty
• Who are the people?
• Universal values but realized in place
• Export of French revolution, Spain, Italy, Germa
• Revolutions of 1848.
• Nation for trust, politics, liberalism and democra
Mill)
• John Breuilly, nationalism is essentially political
• Problems
• Timing
• Illiberal nationalism
 State Building
• State-bulding by force (Charles
Tilly)
• Rulers construct nation by
assimilation
• Problems
• Top-down and bottom- up
• Pro-state and anti-state
• nationalisms
• State precedes nation or
follows it
• Later Tilly work, capital and