6


Rethinking Nationhood: Nation as institutionalized form, practical category, contingent event

Rogers Brubaker


Most discussions of nationhood are discussions of nations. Nations are understood as real entities,
as communities, as substantial, enduring collectivities. That they exist is taken for granted,
although how they exist – and how they came to exist – is much disputed.

A similar realism of the group long prevailed in many areas of sociology and kindred disciplines.
Yet in the last decade or so, at least four developments in social theory have combined to
undermine the treatment of groups as real, substantial entities. The first is the growing interest
in network forms, the flourishing of network theory, and the increasing use of network as an
overall orienting image or metaphor in social theory. Second, there is the challenge posed by
theories of rational action, with their relentless methodological individualism, to realist
understandings of groupness.[1] The third development is a shift from broadly structuralist to a
variety of more “constructivist” theoretical stances; while the former envisioned groups as
enduring components of social structure, the latter see groupness as constructed, contingent, and
fluctuating. Finally, an emergent postmodernist theoretical sensibility emphasizes the fragmentary,
the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed forms and clear boundaries. These developments are
disparate, even contradictory. But they have converged in problematizing groupness, and in
undermining axioms of stable group being.

 Yet this movement away from the realism of the group has been uneven. It has been striking, to
take just one example, in the study of class, especially in the study of the working class – a term
that is hard to Use today without quotation marks or some other distancing device. Indeed the
working class – understood as a real entity or substantial community – has largely dissolved as an
object of analysis. It has been challenged both by theoretical statements and by detailed empirical
research in social history, labor history, and the history of popular discourse and
mobilization.[2] The study of class as a cultural and political idiom, as a mode of conflict, and
as an underlying abstract dimension of economic structure remains vital; but it is no longer
encumbered by an understanding of classes as real, enduring entities.

At the same time, an understanding of nations as real entities continues to inform the study of
nationhood and nationalism. This realist, substantialist understanding of nations is shared by
those who hold otherwise widely diverging views of nationhood and nationalism.

At one pole, it informs the view of nationalism held by nationalists themselves and by nationally
minded scholars. On this view, nationalism presupposes the existence of nations, and expresses
their strivings for autonomy and independence. Nations are conceived as collective individuals,
capable of coherent, purposeful collective action. Nationalism is a drama in which nations are the
key actors. One might think that this sociologically naive view has no place in recent scholarship.
But it has in fact flourished in recent years in interpretations of the national uprisings in the
former Soviet Union.[3]

But the realist ontology of nations informs more sober and less celebratory scholarship as well.
Consider just one indicator of this. Countless discussions of nationhood and nationalism begin with
the question: what is a nation? This question is not as theoretically innocent as it seems: the
very terms in which it is framed presuppose the existence of the entity that is to be defined. The
question itself reflects the realist, substantialist belief that “a nation” is a real entity of
some kind, though perhaps one that is elusive and difficult to define.

The treatment of nations as real entities and substantial collectivities is not confined to
so-called primordialists, meaning those who emphasize the deep roots, ancient origins, and emotive
power of national attachments.[4] This view is also held by many “modernists” and
“constructivists,” who see nations as shaped by such forces as industrialization, uneven
development, the growth of communication and transportation networks, and the powerfully
integrative and homogenizing forces of the modern state. Nor is the substantialist approach
confined to those who define nations “objectively,” that is in terms of shared objective
characteristics such as language, religion, etc.; it is equally characteristic of those who
emphasize subjective factors such as shared myths, memories, or self-understandings.

Paradoxically, the realist and substantialist approach informs even accounts that seek to debunk
and demystify nationalism by denying the real existence of nations. On this view, if the nation is
an illusory or spurious community, an ideological smokescreen, then nationalism must be a case of
false consciousness, of mistaken identity. This approach reduces the question of the reality or
real efficacy of nationhood or nationness to the question of the reality of nations as concrete
communities or collectivities, thereby foreclosing alternative and more theoretically promising
ways of conceiving nationhood and nationness. The problem with this substantialist treatment of
nations as real entities is that it adopts categories of practice as categories of analysis. It
takes a conception inherent in the practice of nationalism and in the workings of the modern state
and state-system – namely the realist, reifying conception of nations as real communities – and it
makes this conception central to the theory of nationalism. Reification is a social process, not
only an intellectual practice. As such, it is central to the phenomenon of nationalism, as we have
seen all too clearly in the last few years.[5] As analysts of nationalism, we should certainly try
to account for this social process of reification – this process through which the political
fiction of the nation becomes momentarily yet powerfully realized in practice. This may be one of
the most important tasks of the theory of nationalism. But we should avoid unintentionally
reproducing or reinforcing this reification of nations in practice with a reification of nations in
theory.

To argue against the realist and substantialist way of thinking about nations is not to dispute the
reality of nationhood.[6] It is rather to reconceptualize that reality. It is to decouple the study
of nationhood and nationness from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities, or
communities. It is to focus on nationness as a conceptual variable, to adopt J. P. Nettl’s
phrase,[7] not on nations as real collectivities. It is to treat nation not as substance but as
institutionalized form; not as collectivity but as practical category; not as entity but as
contingent event. Only in this way can we capture the reality of nationhood and the real power of
nationalism without invoking in our theories the very “political fiction” of “the nation” whose
potency in practice we wish to explain.[8]

We should not ask “what is a nation” but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form
institutionalized within and among states? How does nation work as practical category, as
classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame? What makes the use of that category by or against states
more or less resonant or effective? What makes the nation-evoking, nation-invoking efforts of
political entrepreneurs more or less likely to succeed?[9]

This might seem an unpropitious moment for such an argument. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the
national conflicts in the successor states, the ethnonational wars in Transcaucasia and the North
Caucasus, the carnage in the former Yugoslavia: doesn’t all this – it might be asked – vividly
demonstrate the reality and power of nations? Doesn’t it show that nations could survive as
solidary groups, as foci of identity and loyalty and bases of collective action, despite the
efforts of the Soviet and Yugoslav states to crush them?

In a context of rampant ethnonationalism, the temptation to adopt a nation-centered perspective is
understandable. But the temptation should be resisted. Nationalism is not engendered by nations. It
is produced – or better, it is induced – by political fields of particular kinds.[10] Its dynamics
are governed by the properties of political fields, not by the properties of collectivities.[11]

Take for example the case of Soviet and post-Soviet nationalisms. To see these as the struggles of
nations, of real, solidary groups who somehow survived despite Soviet attempts to crush them – to
suggest that nations and nationalism flourish today despite the Soviet regime’s ruthlessly
antinational policies – is to get things exactly backwards. Nationhood and nationalism flourish
today largely because of the regime’s policies. Although antinationalist, those policies were
anything but anti-national. Far from ruthlessly suppressing nationhood, the Soviet regime
pervasively institutionalized it. The regime repressed nationalism, of course; but at the same
time, as I argue in detail in Chapter 2, it went further than any other state before or since in
institutionalizing territorial nationhood and ethnic nationality as fundamental social categories.
In doing so it inadvertently created a political field supremely conducive to nationalism.

The regime did this in two ways. On the one hand, it carved up the Soviet state into more than
fifty national territories, each expressly defined as the homeland of and for a particular
ethnonational group. The top-level national territories – those that are today the independent
successor states – were defined as quasi-nation states, complete with their own territories, names,
constitutions, legislatures, administrative staffs, cultural and scientific institutions, and so
on.

On the other hand, the regime divided the citizenry into a set of exhaustive and mutually exclusive
ethnic nationalities, over a hundred in all. Thus codified, ethnic nationality served not only as a
statistical category, a fundamental unit of social accounting, but also, and more distinctively, as
an obligatory ascribed status. It was assigned by the state at birth on the basis of descent. It
was registered in personal identity documents. It was recorded in almost all bureaucratic
encounters and official transactions. And it was used to control access to higher education and to
certain desirable jobs, restricting the opportunities of some nationalities, especially Jews, and
promoting others through preferential treatment policies for so-called “titular” nationalities in
“their own” republics.

Long before Gorbachev, then, territorial nationhood and ethnic nationality were pervasively
institutionalized social and cultural forms. These forms were by no means empty. They were scorned
by Sovietologists – no doubt because the regime consistently and effectively repressed all signs of
overt political nationalism, and sometimes even cultural nationalism. Yet the repression of
nationalism went hand in hand with the establishment and consolidation of nationhood and
nationality as fundamental cognitive and social forms. Under glasnost, these already pervasively
institutionalized forms were readily politicized. They constituted elementary forms of political
understanding, political rhetoric, political interest, and political identity. In the terms of Max
Weber’s “switchman” metaphor, they determined the tracks, the cognitive frame, along which action
was pushed by the dynamic of material and ideal interests. In so doing, they contributed powerfully
to the breakup of the Soviet Union and to the structuring of nationalist politics in its aftermath.

I have argued that we should think about nation not as substance but as institutionalized form, not
as collectivity but as practical category, not as entity but as contingent event. Having talked
about nationhood as institutionalized form, and as cognitive and sociopolitical category, I want to
say a few words in conclusion about nationness as event. Here my remarks will be even more sketchy
and programmatic. I want simply to point to a gap in the literature, and to suggest one potentially
fruitful line of work.

In speaking of nationness as event, I signal a double contrast. The first is between nation as
entity and nationness as a variable property of groups, of relationships, and of what Margaret
Somers has recently called “relational settings. “[12] The second contrast is between thinking of
nationhood or nationness as something that develops, and thinking of it as something that happens.
Here I want to focus on this second contrast, between developmentalist and eventful perspectives. I
borrow the latter term from a recent paper by William Sewell, Jr.[13]

We have a large and mature developmentalist literature on nationhood and nationalism. This
literature traces the long-term political, economic, and cultural changes that led, over centuries,
to the gradual emergence of nations or, as I would prefer to put it, of nationness. The major works
of the last decade on nationhood and nationalism – notably by Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson,
Anthony Smith, and Eric Hobsbawm[14] – are all developmentalist in this sense.

By contrast, we lack theoretically sophisticated eventful analyses of nationness and nationalism.
There are of course many studies of particular nationalisms geared to much shorter time spans than
the decades or centuries characteristic of the developmentalist literature. But those conducted by
sociologists and political scientists have tended to abstract from events in their search for
generalized structural or cultural explanations, while historians, taking for granted the
significance of contingent events, have not been inclined to theorize them.[15]

 I know of no sustained analytical discussions of nationness as an event, as something that
suddenly crystallizes rather than gradually develops, as a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating,
and precarious frame of vision and basis for individual and collective action, rather than as a
relatively stable product of deep developmental trends in economy, polity, or culture. Yet a strong
theoretical case can be made for an eventful approach to nationness. As Craig Calhoun has recently
argued, in a paper on the Chinese student protest movement of 1989, identity should be understood
as a “changeable product of collective action,” not as its stable underlying cause.[16] Much the
same thing could be said about nationness.

A theoretically sophisticated eventful perspective on nationness and nationalism is today urgently
needed. To make sense of the Soviet and Yugoslav collapse and their aftermaths, we need – among
other things – to think theoretically about relatively sudden fluctuations in the “nationness” of
groups and relational settings. We need to think theoretically about the process of being “overcome
by nationhood,” to use the poignant phrase of the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic. Drakulic was
characterizing her own situation. Like many of her postwar generation, she was largely indifferent
to nationality. Yet she came – against her will – to be defined by her nationality alone,
imprisoned by an all-too-successfully reified category.[17] As predicaments go, in the former
Yugoslavia, this one is not especially grave. But it illustrates in personal terms a more general
and fateful occurrence – the relatively sudden and pervasive “nationalization” of public and even
private life. This has involved the nationalization of narrative and interpretative frames, of
perception and evaluation, of thinking and feeling. It has involved the silencing or
marginalization of alternative, non-nationalist political languages. It has involved the
nullification of complex identities by the terrible categorical simplicity of ascribed nationality.
It has involved essentialist, demonizing characterizations of the national “other,”
characterizations that transform Serbs into Chetniks, Croats into Ustashas, Muslims into
Fundamentalists.

We know well from a variety of appalling testimony that this has happened; but we know too little
about how it happened. This is where we need an eventful perspective. Following the lead of such
thinkers as Marshall Sahlins, Andrew Abbott, and William Sewell, Jr., we must give serious
theoretical attention to contingent events and to their trans-formative consequences.[18] Only in
this way can we hope to understand the processual dynamics of nationalism. And it is the close
study of such processual dynamics, I think, that will yield the most original and significant work
on nationalism in the coming years, work that promises theoretical advances as well as a richer
understanding of particular cases.[19]

I began with the question: how should we think about nationhood and nationness, and how are they
implicated in nationalism? Reduced to a formula, my argument is that we should focus on nation as a
category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalized cultural and political form, and
nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from using the analytically dubious
notion of “nations” as substantial, enduring collectivities. A recent book by Julia Kristeva bears
the English title Nations without Nationalism; but the analytical task at hand, I submit, is to
think about nationalism without nations.

Ours is not, as is often asserted, even by as sophisticated a thinker as Anthony Smith, “a world of
nations.”[20] It is a world in which nationhood is pervasively institutionalized in the practice of
states and the workings of the state system. It is a world in which nation is widely, if unevenly,
available and resonant as a category of social vision and division. It is a world in which
nationness may suddenly, and powerfully, “happen.”

But none of this implies a world of nations – of substantial, enduring collectivities.

To understand the power of nationalism, we do not need to invoke nations. Nor should we, at the
other extreme, dismiss nationhood altogether. We need, rather, to de couple categories of analysis
from categories of practice, retaining as analytically indispensable the notions of nation as
practical category, nationhood as institutionalized form, and nationness as event, but leaving “the
nation” as enduring community to nationalists.


In: Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.13-22
________________________________

[1] In this tradition, the collective action literature, from Mancur Olson’s The Logic of
Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971) through Michael Hechter’s Principles of Group Solidarity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), has been particularly important in challenging common-sense understandings
of groupness and group-formation.

[2] The great book of E. P. Thompson on The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage,
1963) marked the beginning of this process. While stressing on the one hand that class is not a
thing, that “it [i.e. class understood as a thing] does not exist,” that class is rather
“something. . . which happens,” a “fluency,” a “relationship” (pp. 9-11), Thompson nonetheless ends
up treating the working class as a real entity, a community, an historical individual,
characterizing his book as a “biography of the English working class from its adolescence until its
early manhood,” and summing up his findings as follows: “When every caution has been made, the
outstanding fact of the period from 1790 to 1830 is the formation of the working class” (pp. 9-11,
194).

[3] It mars even the work of so eminent a specialist on Soviet nationality affairs as Helène
Carrère d’Encausse. See The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations (New York: Basic
Books, 1993).

[4] I stress that I am not simply criticizing primordialism – a long-dead horse that writers on
ethnicity and nationalism continue to flog. No serious scholar today holds the view that is
routinely attributed to primordialists in straw-man setups, namely that nations or ethnic groups
are primordial, unchanging entities. Everyone agrees that nations are historically formed
constructs, although there is disagreement about the relative weight of premodern traditions and
modern transformations, of ancient memories and recent mobilizations, of “authentic” and
“artificial” group feeling. What I am criticizing is not the straw man of primordialism, but the
more pervasive substantialist, realist cast of mind that attributes real, enduring existence to
nations as collectivities, however those collectivities are conceived.

[5] As Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the symbolic dimensions of group-making suggests, reification is
central to the quasi-performative discourse of nationalist politicians which, at certain moments,
can succeed in creating what it seems to presuppose – namely, the existence of nations as real,
mobilized or mobilizable groups. Bourdieu has not written specifically on nationalism, but this
theme is developed in his essay on regionalism, “L’identité et la represéntation: éléments pour une
réflexion critique sur l’idée de région,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (November
1980), part of which is reprinted in Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 220-8; see also the conclusion to “Social Space and the
Genesis of Classes” in that same collection (pp. 248-51).

[6] Here I differ from those who, finding “nation” inadequate or hopelessly muddled as a designator
of a putative real entity or collectivity, avoid engaging the phenomenon of nationhood or
nationness altogether. This was the case notably for the influential work of Charles Tilly and his
collaborators, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975). As Tilly wrote in the introductory essay to that volume, “nation remains one of the
most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon” (p. 6). Tilly shifted the focus of
analysis from nation to state, marking a deliberate break with the older literature on
nation-building. The adjective “national” appears throughout the book; yet it is strictly a term of
scale and scope, meaning essentially “state-wide”; it has nothing to do with the phenomenon of
nationhood or nationness.

[7] See J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968).

[8] On nation as political fiction, see Louis Pinto, “Une fiction politique: la nation,” Actes de
la recherche en sciences sociales 64 (1986), a Bourdieuian appreciation of the studies of
nationalism carried out by the eminent Hungarian historian Jenö Szücs.

[9] For suggestive recent discussions of nationalism that avoid treating “the nation” as a real
entity, see Richard Handler, “Is ‘Identity’ a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?,” in John Gillis, ed.,
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Katherine Verdery, “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’?,” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (1993), and Craig
Calhoun, “Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1993).

[10] Not only political fields but economic and cultural fields too can generate nationalism. See
for example Katherine Verdery, “Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania,”
Slavic Review 52 (1993) for an argument about the nationalism-generating power of post-socialist
economic restructuring.

[11] I develop this line of analysis in detail in Chapter 3, using “field” in a sense broadly akin
to that developed by Pierre Bourdieu. For a particularly clear exposition of the concept, see
Pierre Bourdieu, and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 94ff.

[12] Margaret R. Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English
Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16 (1992), 608ff. For an anthropological approach
to the study of nationness as something produced and reproduced in everyday relationships, see John
Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see also
Verdery, “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’?,” 41.

[13] William Sewell, Jr., “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology,” forth-coming in
Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press).

[14] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
revised edn, 1991); Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986);
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[15] Sewell, “Three Temporalities”; cf. Marshall Sahlins, “The Return of the Event, Again: With
Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau
and Rewa,” in Aletta Biersack, ed., Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology (Washington
and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 38.

[16] Craig Calhoun, “The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,” in Joan Huber, ed., Macro-Micro
Linkages in Sociology (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991), p. 59.

[17] “Being Croat has become my destiny. . . I am defined by my nationality, and by it alone...
Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood – not only by outside
pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself.
That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with
this nationhood, however, is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas,
my character – and, yes, my nationality too – now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because
I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats. . . I am not in a position to choose
any longer. Nor, I think, is anyone else. . . something people cherished as a part of their
cultural identity – an alternative to the all-embracing communism. . . – has become their political
identity and turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. You may feel the sleeves are too
short, the collar too tight. You might not like the colour, and the cloth might itch. But there is
no escape; there is nothing else to wear. One doesn’t have to succumb voluntarily to this ideology
of the nation – one is sucked into it. So right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed
not to be a Croat” (Slavenka Drakulic, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War
[New York: W. W. Norton, 1993], pp. 50-2).

[18] Sahlins, “The Return of the Event, Again”; Andrew Abbott, “From Causes to Events: Notes on
Narrative Positivism,” Sociological Methods and Research 20 (1992); Sewell, “Three Temporalities.”

[19] Here the study of nationalism might fruitfully draw on the recent literature on revolution,
with its attention to transformative events and processual dynamics. See for example the debate in
Contention between Nikki Keddie, “Can Revolutions be Predicted? Can their Causes be Understood?”
(1, no. 2 [1992]) and Jack Goldstone, “Predicting Revolutions: Why We Could (and Should) have
Foreseen the Revolutions o 1989-1991 in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe” (2, no. 2 [1993]).
Although Keddie and Goldstone disagree about the predictability of revolution, they agree about the
importance of transformative events, complex interactions, and rapid changes in ideas, stances, and
behavior.

[20] Anthony Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 176