Nations and Nationalism 3 (l), 1997, 3-23. 0ASEN 1997
Nationalism and historicity
PATRIK HALL
Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, S-221 00, Sweden
ABSTRACT. In this article the nation is shown to be a historical subject. As such, it is
constructed and constantly reconstructed by discursive practices of power and
knowledge. The author argues that the symbiotic interlinkage between nationalism
and the organising knowledge principle of historicity, is an example of a power
practice in the modern state. Throughout the article, it is shown that this practice is
produced by interaction between the institutionally represented, sovereign or objective
state and intellectual knowledge and its institutionalisation within the state as an
academy, which acquires sovereignty in the production of objective truth. This
peculiar discursive representation of making what really is personal interactions and
struggles into official institutions has managed to produce the subject of the historical
nation. The empirical case of Sweden is briefly discussed. During the age of great
power, an exclusivist discourse of noble genealogical distinction of the `Goths' was
established. In modem Sweden, this genealogical myth is transformed to a popular-
national myth of exclusivity, a myth with great power potentials in the `national
projects' of modem politics.
Introduction
The aim of this article is to discuss nationalism and historicity as they are
seen as having entered into a symbiotic relationship (which appears
`natural'), in which they are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by
different practices of power and knowledge. The article intends to show that
the nation is not a historical subject, but instead a social relation of power
and knowledge. However, this relation becomes represented as a discursive
regime, where the nation appears to be the historical subject.
This process of representing things and people as `national' is quite
possible to analyse by focusing attention, first of all upon the discursive
development of nationalism and historicity, and second by taking into
consideration the interpersonal projects and networks which create and
sustain the nation. By this method of inquiry, nations and nationalism are
seen as concrete practices of power and knowledge, in contrast to a
common stream of thinking which regards nations and nationalism as
definable concepts, the contents of which are ready to be found `out there' if
only we were to refine our methods and theories. The abstraction of the
nation as a subject of history, standing above the individuals who together
4 Patrik Hall
constitute the nation, is a correlation to the belief in an impersonal objective
knowledge as well as an impersonal state power.
Since this perspective is a complex one, it is necessary to give a brief
clarification (if not exact definitions) of the key concepts involved here. The
power/knowledge perspective is a historical theory outlined by Michel
Foucault (1979, part I; 1980). Foucault holds interaction by a surveilling,
disciplinary power and standardised techniques of knowledge to be the
dominant mode of social organisation in modern time (a mode of
organisation first reflected in the army reforms of the seventeenth century).
To put it briefly, this implies a view of power as constructive of realities. It
also implies a view of knowledge where `truths' are mediated through new
scientific disciplines which, in turn, is a central technique in the production
of control over defined individual subjects.
Knowledge operates through `discourses', which I view as authorised
systems of representation. For instance, the nation is a discourse which
represents action as `national'. It establishes itself through the creation of
authoritative knowledge disciplines such as history, economy and so forth.
Apart from this it also makes its way into `common sense' by practical
definitions of reality. This implies that we may see discourse either in the
structuralist version as all-embracing systems, or we may restrict discourses
to denote ideas and institutions which are constructed in relation to other
discourses, and where the discourses only may represent human action in an
imperfect way. The latter view is employed here.
Needless to say, there is more to the social world than discourses.
Human beings exist, interacting in projects and networks, for which
discourses are necessary, but not all-embracing. An important `mediator'
between discourses and concrete human interaction is institutionalisation.
Through the formation of new institutions changes are reflected in the
relationship between discourse and human practice. A number of discourses
struggle to win influence over politics, and by establishing interdiscursive
relations or coalitions they may create a kind of `hegemony'over the sphere
of politics.
Nationalism in modern times is an expression of a discursive hegemony:
it represents political action by a wide range of subtle institutional methods
(Billig 1995), and establishes norms which are very difficult to argue against,
given the authority, universality and apparent self-evidence of the national
state. The factor of institutionalisation (far too often overseen in theories of
nationalism) has led commentators to the mistaken belief that nationalism
does not even exist in developed Western states. However, nationalism lies
at the basis of the institutional formations in the modern state.
Thus nationalism is here seen as a social relation of power and
knowledge. Discourses interpellate subjects and thus define their appropriate
relations by techniques of institutionalisation. Human beings (who, by the
way, are not the same as `discursive subjects') establish relations with each
other through projects and networks, laden with discursive definitions.
Nationalism and historicity 5
Nevertheless, human beings also shape the discourses themselves. The
power/knowledge relation is a relation between predominant institutions
such as the state and the academy, but these relations are shaped on a
concrete level, where the interpersonal interactions look very different from
the relational systems of representative discourses. A peculiar quality of the
power/knowledge symbiosis between nationalism and historicity is the
image of unity it brings to bear upon the inherently dubious relational
quality of politics in a `post-religious'era. Hence the Nation as Historical
Individual may be seen as a `surrogate religion' of modern society (Hayes
1960;Anderson 1983:ch. 2).
Before going into detail of what is meant by the peculiar symbiosis
between nationalism and historicity, let me give a short example. In 1740
Olof von Dalin, a historian and journalist, often called one of the first
modern authors of Sweden, published his allegory Sagan om hlisten (`The
Tale of the Horse'). This short tale has been read by generations of Swedish
school-childrenuntil this day. In the tale, the Swedish state is represented as
a horse, Grdlle, subsequently ridden by different kings. It begins with the
`father of the country' Gustav Vasa who in 1521 takes possession of the
horse from the Danish king (the union between the Nordic countries, 1397-
1521, was seen by Dalin, as all other Swedish commentators before modern
times, as a Danish dictature). The highlights of the tale are when the
warrior heroes Gustav I1 Adolf and Charles XI1 become horsemen. At last
the bloody and torn great power horse returns to its old peaceful meadows.
Dalin is not one of the great nationalist intellectuals of Sweden. But still
his tale points towards future national constructions of the past. The tale
has a secular tone (religion should not be confused with public affairs), and
presumes a historical progress; elements which are both new inventions in
Swedish historiography. The Swedish state is represented as a continuous
historical object, filled by conscious national actions of various kinds. This
image presupposes a unitary meaning of history, where specific subjects are
attached to it in the direct fashion of interlinking `horse and rider'. The
nation as an individual organism is foreshadowed quite some time before
the invocation of the Volksgeist by the Romantics. In short, the formation
of a unitary state, given consciousness by national history is an invention,
within which we still live.
Historicity
History is `no longer merely a collection of examples but rather the sole
path to the true knowledge of our own condition' (Savigny 1815, quoted in
Koselleck 1985: 38). According to the methodological principle of historicity
everything has a history and is explainable according to its own singular
emergence. History is a structure, which attributes moral and explanatory
qualities to things, perceived as `developing'. Thus history ought to be seen
6 Patrik Hall
as a structural potential inflicted upon the world of practice, a potential
conceived as an individual development. On an aggregate level this principle
leads to general stories of `development' (for instance, national develop-
ment) which define social and political relations as `natural' or `necessary'
(in an era of Western self-adoration, there is even talk of an `end' to this
development since it is said to have reached its `final'stage). It thus becomes
apparent that historicity is an ordering principle with huge power potentials,
which of course not only tells us stories about `national' history, but also of
the history of institutions, individuals and so on.
Thus historicity is a practice of individualisation, of conceiving things as
emerging individual empirical states. Whether we think of nations, cultures
or economies, we think of an individual marching progressively through
time, even when we acknowledge the apparent fuzziness of every phe-
nomena. Historical individualisations may thus be thought of as essences
which through the workings of time become realised, or alternatively, as
practices ordering relations between things operationalised as objects or
subjects, such as institutions (Penrose 1995: 402-5). Indeed, the principle of
historicity lies at the basis of modern anthropological knowledge, and must
not be confused with the German project of `historicism' (Iggers 1968),
though this project has had importance in the development of historicity.
Koselleck (1985: xxiii, 200) has devoted much attention to historicity `in
and for itself' as an organising principle of knowledge. For him, this
principle emerges by the separation of past, present and future by a modern
secularised notion of time. Whereas time earlier on was limited by God, and
history was taught to bring forth moral examples of life and living (historia
magistra vitae), time now became domesticised and was consequently seen
as a medium for a progressively marching history. The relevance of
universal examples partly withered away, since one must learn the qualities
in or the nature of historical development to be able to learn lessons, and,
anyway, everything is always about to change into something qualitatively
new. This makes necessary nothing less than a general world-historical
outlook, a philosophy of history, in order to grasp the relation of every
significant part to the progressive whole (Koselleck 1985: 24659). The
perfect manifestation of such a philosophy is of course the philosophy of
Hegel, in which history becomes `knowledge of itself', both subject and
object (1985: 82).
Central to Koselleck is the grasp of the present as a period of transition
to something qualitatively new, the future's past. Developing a prognosis of
the future from a theoretical position becomes both possible and necessary
(and of course a tremendous power potential). Here Koselleck has paid
special attention to the emergence of concepts with social, political and
scientific significances, such as `revolution', `modernity', `socialism', `liber-
alism' and `conservatism'. These concepts, by forecasting the future through
a theoretical position of the past, shapes this very future in our presence.
This view of development signals an important discovery: different histories
Nationalism and historicity 7
do not take place `at the same time'. Cultures, societies, nations, are in
different `stages' of development, which can be grasped only by a historical
position. The discovery of relativism is indeed accompanied by its twin, the
`universalism', which `relativism'is in symbioticrelation to (Koselleck 1985:
114-15,200-4,246-62).
Anderson (1983: 31) echoes this view with regard to nationalism. Since
time is `emptied' by the generalised `subject'of God, it must be `filled' with
other subjects, such as the nation. According to Anderson (1983: 29) `the
medieval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain
of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present'. The
universe was cosmically linked into a system of simultaneity, where past,
present and future were just the same according to the divine plan. The
cosmic simultaneity is substituted by the simultaneity of the national
imagined community, and its relativist lack of simultaneity externally, vis-u-
vis other nations. For example, if we do not see our fellow countrymen, or
hear about them, we know that they carry on, existing in a similar way to
us, in the territory called Sweden. Eventually, with the arrival of ether
media, the possibility of imagining simultaneity and oneness throughout the
nation becomes greater than ever (Calhoun 1991: 110-1 1; Billig 1995). This
quality of imagination is as important for space as it is for time; the modern
world is permeated by non-physical demarcations of otherwise `empty'
spaces, in the forms of public and private, national and non-national spaces
(Sack 1986).
In the modern world, the claims to truthfulness on the part of
historiography, in comparison with older transmissions of tradition, grants
a stronger sense of historical, individualised national development by
lending it scientific authority (Shils 1981: 55). The search for the truth
becomes `a genetic and self-analyzing enquiry' (Berlin 1976: 57), providing
the model for biological evolutionary theory as well as psycho-analytic
practices. On the basis of scientific authority, intellectuals bring about a
`naturalisation' of the nation as historic individual. In the same mode as
religion and nature was indivisible before, now history and nature become
symbiotically related. If the nation is not in accordance with `the natural
world', it will exist in a state of chaos and alienate individuals from their
societies(Giesen 1993: 54).
The thematics of this new academic, didactic, as well as fictional style of
writing history, is to make both hero and followers into one historical
person, the nation, who has its heroes and followers, but is a fundamentally
equal person with a peculiar life history of golden ages and decays, for
which `dynastic'or `strategic' motives are foreign. This nation fills the body
of the state with spiritual life and will (the Volksgeisz). No state actions are
furthermore conceivable which do not influence, or are not influenced by,
the will of the nation. The nationally defined historians and novelists engage
in symbiotic interaction with a history which is per se defined as national by
the very authority of knowledge.
8 Patrik Hall
Even if the discussion in this section has been carried out in terms of the
`ancient/modern-debate', I can see no point in becoming too embroiled in it.
Even if we recognise quite new developments in the nationalist discourse
(such as its populist dimension), and its tight linkages with authoritative
knowledge in the form of historicity during the nineteenth century, it is
perfectly clear that the nation as well as history have been important
categories before `the Modern Age', as will be shown in the next section.
With regard to nationalism, Herder's discovery of the Volksgeist as well as
Hegel's recognition of the identity between the individual spirit of the
nation and the forces of history are very important intellectual develop-
ments, as well as the spread of general education and mass communication,
which are extremely important on the practical level. But an exclusive focus
upon modernity will neglect important formative periods in the development
of many European states, and their continuously developing state tradition.
Historicity, nationalism and the state in Sweden: the Gothic myth
At the Church Council in Basel, 1434, there were (as usual) huge disputes
about the placing of the delegates in order of precedence and prestige. The
Swedish delegate, Bishop Nicolaus Ragvaldi, was heavily engaged in these
quarrels. He insisted upon himself taking the principal position at the
Council. The reasons why a delegate from remote Sweden could make such
a claim, were given to the surprised delegates in a short oration. Therein,
for the first time in Swedish history, a coherent national myth was put
forward: the Gothic myth. In the dawn of history, Sweden had in fact
conquered all the nations involved in this quarrel of rank. Hence it was self-
evident that the Swedish bishop should receive the best position. Otherwise,
he concluded, he would be pleased with the second best (Ragvaldi in Petreio
1614).
Sweden was domesticised by the Goths under their first king, Magog
Japhetson, the grandson of Noa. According to the Byzantine historian,
Jordanes (the primary source of this myth), these Goths were later to spread
over Europe `as swarms out of a beehive', led by their great king Beric.
They conquered large parts of Europe and Asia, fought in the Trojan war,
against Cyrus, Alexander the Great (a great Amazonic/Gothic queen even
gave birth to his son) and Rome, and at last they established great
kingdoms in Italy and Spain. As Jordanes said, Sweden was the `mother's
womb of the peoples'.
This theme was to be developed. When in exile in Italy, Johannes
Magnus, the last Catholic Archbishop of Sweden, wrote his Gothorum
sveonumque historiu (1554). Before the eyes of an astonished learned world,
a complete Swedish list of 143 monarchs from Magog Japhetson (88 after
the Flood) to the present times was put forward in excellent Latin. But,
most prominently, the successive emigrations of all Gothic peoples from
Nationalism and historicity 9
Scythians and Amazones to Langobards were described in detail. Their
deeds in the Trojan war, against Hercules and Alexander the Great, and of
course, their occupation of Italy and Spain was retold at length, and made
an integral part of national history.
Although a `papist', the work of Johannes Magnus became the
authoritative work of Swedish history, tremendously important in the
political and scientific rhetoric of Great Power Sweden (1630-1718). For
instance, we have many proofs that the great Swedish king, Gustav I1 Adolf,
was seen as, and apparently viewed himself as, the new Beric, making a re-
entrance into European great power politics when he landed in Germany in
1630 to take part in The Thirty Years War (Nordstrom 1934: 70).
But Johannes Magnus was to be surpassed by one of the most
distinguished natural scientists in the late seventeenth century. Between 1679
and 1702, Olof Rudbeck published the four volumes of his astonishing
Atlantica, one of the most ingenious and terrifying works of Swedish
scientific history. Profiting from the methodological development in ethy-
mology, archaeology and the natural sciences, Rudbeck managed to prove
that Sweden was identical with the Atlantis of Plato. But most important of
all, Sweden was the island of the mystic Hyperboreans of whom Herodotus
and other Greek authors had spoken; the people from whom Apollo came
to Delphi, and the people from whom Hercules stole the three golden apples
- symbolising for Rudbeck the letters and the classical arts. Finally,
Rudbeck revealed the secret truth which no one before him had realised: all
human knowledge had spread from Sweden, which, according to Rudbeck,
was traceable in both classical and contemporary languages. In fact, all of
these languages were of Swedish origin (Rudbeck 1937: part 1; Nordstrom
1934).
If Johannes Magnus indicated the political priority of Sweden over all
other nations, Rudbeck added their priority in the sphere of knowledge,
which is important for my purposes. There is an omnipotence in the
grandiose claims put forward by Rudbeck. It is like the discovery of a new
Genesis. This omnipotent claim, I would argue, has certain political and
intellectual significance. It is not by chance that Sweden at the same time
develops from the medieval household-state into an impersonal and unitary
sovereign state. And it is not by chance that the development of a rational
and secular science takes place at the same time. Here nationalism and
historicity have extremely suggestive roles to play in the state as political
project, linked to the intellectual project of shaping superior (`omnipotent')
and distinguished knowledge.
However, it is important to point out that the state or knowledge should
not only be discussed in the form of discourses. We must not forget that
knowledge also entails concrete projects involving concrete persons acting in
concrete networks. As `projects' I see everything from individual plans to
highly complex, collective strategies. Projects are articulated within dis-
courses. They combine these discourses in new ways, delimiting and
10 Patrik Hall
changing them under way. This implies that it is not possible for one single
actor to obtain superior control over any project. Nevertheless, change is
possible through new constellations of projects and networks, and their
institutionalisation. One such project undergoing tremendous change is the
state, having reached a very high degree of discursive and institutional
complexity. Though this must not lead us to believe that the state `exists' in
any mode other than discursively; it still consists in practice in personal
networks of interaction and political projects.
In the development of the modern state, we may find a rather low degree
of discursive and institutional complexity before the seventeenth century. It
is here that the fundamental development takes place, by which the state
becomes abstracted from the people in charge of it:
The decisive shift was made from the idea of the ruler `maintaining his state' - where
this simply meant upholding his own position - to the idea that there is a separate
legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to
maintain. One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that
of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government. (Skinner 1978: ix-x)
This does imply a historicising of the state discourse. The state becomes an
object of history, apprehended as one and indivisible, within inviolable
territorial integrity. An important point of development along these lines
was the first manifestation of international law and principles for mutual
recognition with the Westphalian Peace Treaty 1648. The treaty indicates
the formation of a sovereign state discourse in European affairs during the
seventeenth century (Ringmar 1995). Likewise, in the internal affairs of
Sweden, the state becomes institutionally represented by the establishment
of councils in 1634 (originally five: the State Council, War Council, Admiral
Council, Tax Council and the High Court). The state becomes divided from
the personal household of the king, and `state officials' are appointed. Thus
an altogether new discursive field for personal and institutional interactions,
quests for power, and invocations of knowledge is established.
Indeed these types of formative moments are of extraordinary importance
in the life cycles of all institutions, since conflicts over appropriate conduct,
meaning, roles and norms are likely to be visible at early stages, while
subsequently becoming partly hidden. These often highly personal conflicts
between different projects and networks do carry on, but in the disguise of
the representational discourses: in the case of the state, for instance its
various institutions, the academic disciplines and the official discourse of
nationalism. The state is a complex constellation of forces in the tension-
ridden area between theory and practice; where the very intellectual
speculation of the state as well as political practices within it, partly shapes
the state:
There is, in other words, a complex interaction between theory and practice and
between the state as an institution that rests on an ideology, the articulate ideas that
politicians, administrators and lawyers have about it and theories of the state, that
Nationalism and historicity 11
are held by intellectuals ... Experience of living within a particularkind of inherited
institutional and cultural framework shapes the manner in which the character of
political, legal and societal arrangements is considered. Equally, intellectual
characterizations of these arrangementsprovide an orientation for elites towards the
framework within which they operate and a distinct vocabulary in terms of which
public affairscan be considered. (Dyson 1980 81)
This discursive-institutionalapproach on the state is in my view left out of
some of the most influential analyses of the role of the state in relation to
nationalism (Tilly et al. 1975; Breuilly 1982; Brass 1991). These analyses are
instrumental, and view the discourse of nationalism as instrumental to the
interests of rational state elites. However, this `rationality'is only rational in
its relation to a discursive field of institutions, projects and networks. In
other words, even if the Gothic war propaganda could be seen to be
`instrumental' to the Swedish state in the seventeenth century, this
instrumentality is projected backwards by current analyses, while notions of
noble exclusivity, honour, and distinguished moral quality were normative
contexts (greatly influenced by religion) towards which the persons in charge
had to orient themselves. The `instrumentality'of these measures may only
be recognised when a developed state-national discourse exists.
Thus the problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the
same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of
tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the
problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative language.
(Skinner 1978, I: xii-iii)
Thus the very notion of the state having `interests' - using `instruments'
such as nationalism to make internal subjects or external state subjects
respond `instrumentally' to these interpellations - are themselves shaped by
a modern nationalist discourse. Skinner's (1978) point when investigating
the development of the modem state discourse is to conceive of the
normative discussion of the state not as efforts to come up with solutions to
the `eternal problems' of political thought, but rather as practical discus-
sions oriented towards concrete problems in a peculiar political and
intellectual context. Reification of the state is thus to a large extent
effectuated by practices of self-reflexivity among intellectuals as well as
other key actor groups. Historicity becomes a central practice of self-
reflexivity within the state as well as in the reflexively monitored relations
between states (Giddens 1985: 212).
In the light of this discussion we may see the Gothic myth in Sweden and
its explosion in the Atlantica as a rhetoric of exclusivity, where a
distinguished over-individual or genealogy of the state is in a formative
moment. In the words of Koselleck (1985: 160), `a given group makes an
exclusiveclaim to generality', and thus they singularise a unitary agency on
the part of the nation. This exclusivity does of course lack many of the
populist qualities developed in modern nationalism. Even if there is a
12 Patrik Hall
certain admiration for the primitive and puritan life of the Goths as
compared to that of the `decadent' Greeks and Romans, the Gothic warriors
are all depicted as noblemen. In an era obsessed by personal genealogy, the
actual nobility is linked to the Gothic heroes by blood `chains'. This
exclusive genealogy will later melt into national history-writing and become
abstracted into the spirit of the Volksgeist.
For Rudbeck, this genealogical exclusivity of the Gothic descendants is
indistinguishable from their exclusivity in knowledge. By spreading over
Europe and Asia, the Goths brought with them the classical arts
(erroneously attributed to the Greeks), rememberances of a godly original
revelation. Although Rudbeck uses the methods of a developing rational
science; comparative ethymology, archaeological excavation (it is shown
that Sweden has the deepest layer of vegetable mould in the world, and is
thus the first cultivated land after the Flood), and biological observations
(since there are more fish in the Nordic countries than anywhere else, all
peoples must have settled here first after the Flood), he is also obsessed with
giving Sweden its rightful place in the Bible. For instance, by cabbalistic
methods it is possible to show that many biblical references concern
Sweden. Hence, at this stage the sacral quality and the rational secularity of
the national mythology cannot be separated.
The omnipotence of Swedish political and intellectual achievements, as
discovered by Rudbeck, is parallel to the institutionalisation of an
omnipotent and sovereign state discourse. This state discourse was not
depersonalised at this moment. Sovereignty was still to a great extent
attributed to the person of the king. The methods of a secular historicity are
not developed, and history-writing is a kind of grandiose personal
genealogy. It was when the state was first thought of as an abstract
historical object, that the abstract individual of the Volksgeist, and thus
modern nationalism, is born. These claims to omnipotence and sovereignty
(or exclusivity) are formative moments of national historiography, when the
state as historical object, and the particular people attached to it (the
Swedes), may be described and explained by reliable methods of a national
and institutionalised (or exclusivist) science. The national and the historical
are merged together by the powerful method of scientific truth.
The academy and the intellectuals
A political or intellectual project may be observed at a microscopic level, for
instance, when a social scientist takes advantage of the state sector to do
research on it. But here a general state project is also mirrored, which it is
arguably possible to call `a hegemonic state project' (Jessop 1990: 207-12).
According to Jessop there can never be only one state project. However,
one project may be dominant, as, for example, `the welfare state project' in
Sweden. Intellectuals possess a key role in making such projects appear to
Nationalism and historicity 13
confirm a `substantive'unity of the state: `it is typically the role of organic
intellectuals ... to elaborate hegemonic projects, rather than members of the
economically dominant class or class fraction' (Jessop 1990: 214). They
`interpellate subjects, endow them with interests and organize them in
conjecturally specific ways' (Jessop 1990: 217). In line with this argument,
the state is a social relation, and is only on a discursive level objectified and
substantial. Here a crucial interaction between politics and science is
established:
Time and again, the social sciences have profited from such interaction in terms of
institutional support. They have been able to portray themselves as contributing to
the solution of social problems by scholarly means, i.e. means that only they could
provide, and were honoured by policy-makers with institutional recognition and
resources. The policy-makers, in turn ... used the recourse to scientific argument to
bolster their position in political argumentation and struggle. (Wagner and Wittrock
1991: 334)
Hence intellectual projects of scientific or professional kinds cannot be
grasped as `advances'in the process towards the fulfillment of sciences, but
instead they are formed within the tensions of intellectual and political
domains and linked to the local constellation of forces at work (Wagner and
Wittrock 1991: 345). In the modern welfare state, the discourse coalitions
between power and knowledge have reached a high degree of both thematic
affinity, formal cooperation, and ad hoc interaction. Of course, these
processes may vary a great deal between different contexts (ibid.). However,
Wagner and Wittrock (1991: 332-3) have discussed academic development
within the social sciences very generally in the terms of scientisation and
professionalisation.
Scientisation is, first, the project by which academic and non-academic
discourses are categorically separated, with the academy becoming author-
itatively recognised as holding the monopoly of true or reliable knowledge
(Wagner and Wittrock 1991: 332-3). But, second, it is also, and importantly
so, a process by which distinctions appear between different disciplines,
which are categorically separated into different institutions within the
academy, often with strong barriers between them, shaping concrete
identities and knowledge-monopolies within different peculiar domains.
According to Bourdieu (1988: 99, these distinctions imply an institutional
refusal of all non-institutional thought and an exalted belief in `academic
reliability'.
Professionalisation is the method by which a community of scientific
specialists is shaped out of solitary intellectuals. Professionals within the
academy can broadly be seen to perform two roles: the first role is
concerned with the mainly self-referentialdiscoursesof science; the second is
concerned with educating and training groups of people from the outside
world (within the sphere of the social sciencestypically for posts in the vast
state apparatus). Of course these two roles may be performed perfectly by
14 Patrik Hall
the same person, but this also lays the ground for outright conflict between
`the scientists' and `the educating professionals' (among other things,
conflicts about the appropriate role of the academy); what Bourdieu (1988:
48) has called a conflict between the cultural hierarchy and the social
hierarchy of the academy. As Bourdieu (1988: 567) has pointed out, a
peculiar habitus is formed within academic professions. This habitus is a
combination of acting, speaking and writing in distinct ways, which is
reproduced internally and it is the most serious obstacle for groups from the
lower classes who want to enter the discourses of the academy. This
behavioral structure is equally important for both the scientist and the
professionalist strategies.
This discussion could be seen as a specification of Foucault's theory of
power and knowledge, discussed in the introductory section. Foucault, in
his empirical works (1979) studies this process as a part of what he labels
the `power/knowledge-sequence'. Power, by its disciplinary techniques,
shapes an ordered cohort of knowledge out of chaos and confusion, and
brings forward technicians, who carry out its meticulous rituals. Knowledge,
in its turn, is awarded ordered domains where subjects of power and new
authoritative knowledge are to be shaped.
Of course, there is a degree of functionalism inherent in Foucault's
model, as well as in the types discussed above. The argument does not
seem to allow for any opposition against the power of the state, an
opposition which we know often emanated from intellectual circles. We
may see the argument of Wagner and Wittrock as a model for the
institutionalisation of the hegemonic project of the state in the sphere of
knowledge, and not as an accurate description of what exactly has
happened. However it serves as a useful counter-point to the still prevailing
myth of scientific `freedom' and `development' (a myth which obviously
hides the social power at work within the discourses of knowledge). But
what is of importance here is the implications of this project for
nationalism and historicity.
Intellectuals have always been interested in defining and distinguishing
themselves. Such self-defining activities reinforce `a given (or claimed) status
for the group' (Bauman 1987: 8-9). In fact, as Hqbermas (1989: 43) has
argued, the very notion of the `public' emerges from such intellectual self-
definitions in the seventeenth century. But with the establishment and
considerable growth of the modern academy from the late eighteenth
century onwards, this distinction takes on a new quality. Scientists and
professional intellectuals are henceforth `national' intellectuals with the role
of producing, reflecting, and transmitting authoritative knowledge for the
nation. The intellectual melts into the state and seems to disappear (with
few exceptions) as an individual.
This can be illustrated, for instance, by official government reports in
Sweden. These reports are an integral aspect of the state with, in some
cases, great importance for the activities of government, parliament and
Nationalism and historicity 15
bureaucracy. By fading into invisibility, intellectual knowledge becomes an
integral part of official power. However, this knowledge is produced by
methods which are by no means neutral. Of course, we have the same case
within general education. `Official'knowledge supported by the state has the
peculiarity of concealing its particularity. It becomes apparent then, that
there is a parallel between official knowledge and the state. Official knowl-
edge is sovereign in the same manner as the state is the sovereign political
power (Bartelson 1993: 5). Hence it is only institutional definitions which
separate the academy and the state in modern states.
To return to the Swedish case, we observe that Swedish history was seen
as a state matter before the late eighteenth century (Lindroth 1975: 242-56,
320-7, 338-44). The office of `state historiographer' (installed in 1644) and
the official institutions of the Antiquity Council (1666) and the Custodian of
National Monuments (1630), with the public record office, were all
concerned with Swedish documents and monuments, as well as with writing
officially sanctioned national histories. This indicates that a special
importance was attached to history, or rather, that national history was not
just an academic discipline but an integral part of the state. When the highly
internationalised pre-modern science was exchanged for a rigid and
disciplinary national science, history could be introduced into this new
structure, built on institutional identities of biology, physics, economy and
so forth.
The academic discipline of history developed from the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Generally, it distinguished itself from the natural
sciences and the mechanistic world-view of the Enlightenment, and instead
proclaimed history itself as `the key to the understanding of man as a social
and political being' (Iggers 1968: 33). Needless to say, the outlook of the
discipline came to differ a lot from country to country. However, what is
general is the new position of a defined group of intellectuals authorised to
proclaim official narratives; narratives which have great importance in most
Western countries when mass education becomes institutionalised. What is
of interest here however, is the general principle of historicity, with the
institutionalisation of the historical discipline as only part of it.
Historicising individual subjects as part of a developing whole thus
becomes a macro practice of knowledge. There is not only a `national
history' as part of a `world history', but there is also history of literature,
culture, religion, economy and natural sciences as parts of national history.
And there is a decentralised historicisation of all institutions as developing
parts of the societal unit. Institutions are not conceived of as interpersonal
networks but as developing objects or subjects, where the historicity of the
social welfare office or the department of treasury have great discursive
power both for themselves and in relation to the public whole. The
discursive representation these institutions perform disguises the interper-
sonal interaction within and between them. Such a discursive system of
institutional representations is inconceivable without official historicity.
16 Patrik Hall
Hence historicity by its categorical separation of developing official bodies
conceals the level of interpersonal practice:
people have come increasingly to conceive of themselves as members of very large
collectivities linked primarily by common identities but minimally by networks of
directly interpersonal relationships - nations, races, classes, genders, Republicans,
Muslims, and `civilized people'. (Calhoun 1991: 95-6)
We may make the list longer by adding the most ordinary social institutions;
ordinary but still inconceivable as official representations, without a peculiar
historicity to themselves, but, primarily, in relation to the national whole.
Hence the `self-evidence' (or `banality', see Billig 1995) of nationalism in
modern Western states. The intellectual construction of historicity in
practice has become hidden by an intellectual inclusion in the state under
the banner of `official truth'. `Die in der monologischen Reflexion
geschaffenen Codes haben so die Spuren ihres Entstehens verwischt und
werden als Elemente eines ungebundenen symbolischen Universums fur viele
Situationen verfugbar' (Giesen 1993: 82).' The nation is such a categorical
concept, hiding the contexts of its construction, imagined as a historical
object or subject in and for itself, but also shaping objects and subjects in
contemporary social practices.
Historicity, nationalism and the state in Sweden: the populist myth
In the same mode as abstract, individualised bodies of knowledge are
created, the state develops from person to institution, from physical
concretion to abstraction. The body of the state becomes superior and
precedent to the body of the king. The state acquires a historicity of its
own, divided from the genealogy of the dynasty. When the state starts
taking precedence over living beings, when it contains more than the land
and its inhabitants, masters as well as servants, it becomes an abstract
object moving through history in its own peculiar development. From this,
different kinds of policy orientations could be derived, such as political
ideologies, educational programmes for its citizens, reform programmes
such as infrastructure, predictable systems of coercion, extraction, jurisdic-
tion and the like (for a superb analysis of France, see Weber 1976). The
appropriate rules, operations and outcomes of these processes are cate-
gorised and explained by the scientific professionals, who also earn their
living from the continuing existence of this superior being.
As has been indicated throughout this article, the state becomes
continuous and abstracted from the people in charge of it. By the growth of
institutions within the state sphere, a growing number of people are
employed in the public sphere. Specifically, as I have shown, the develop-
ment of bodies of categorised knowledge within academies brings forward a
scientist and professional intelligentsia, whose members devote themselves
Nationalism and historicity 17
to intellectual distinction and disciplinary historicism. In this situation,
abstract discourses of the state and knowledge come into being, which could
be grasped as normative orientations for action and interpretation. The
earlier preoccupation with relating oneself to a genealogy gives way to an
individualised historicity. Here, the state and the nation are action subjects
in their own right. On the discursive level, the nation as a living organism of
history is brought forward to fill the empty shell of the state as `a ghost in a
machine' (Tivey 1981: 70), and will be observable by distinct historical
knowledge. However, on the practical level, something else also happens.
On the practical level, the historicised nation does not only come into
being as a consequence of intellectual discourses, but by concrete inter-
actions between people in projects and networks. Nationalism as a project is
performed by certain persons acting in certain contexts, with political,
normative or other motives. Through their network interaction these
persons may develop similar value orientations. The members of such
interactions may see themselves as a `national class', the bearers of the
supreme national values, and the only ones with a general overview of how
things are and ought to be ordered. Even though it may not be solely a need
of the upper classes to manipulate or dominate the population at large, it
may indeed have such consequences. In Sweden during the nineteenth
century, workers were excluded from the national discourse, while the
assiduous and unsophisticated yeoman for the first time in history was
celebrated as the national hero (though typically the founders of the
discourse were more diverted from agriculture than ever). Such features
transmit important messages about the ideal society, and are echoed
primarily within education. But they are not `calculated' messages, or
simply fakes; on the contrary, a real nation comes into existence by the very
anticipation of it (Koselleck 1985: 94):
Nationalism helps naturalize the recency and contingency of the nation-state
through providing its myths of origin.But at the same time, the discourse of national
solidarity helps block off other possible discursive articulations of interest. The
discursive arena of the modern polity treats what `politics'is as inherently to do with
the bounded sphere of the state. Thus if programmes of reform on the part of
subordinate classes (or other groupings) are to succeed, they have normally to be
made to appear in `the national interest'. But dominant classes have much less
difficulty representing their own policies as `in the national interest' than do
oppositional groups, since they have much more influence over the style and form of
what can be discursively articulated. (Giddens 1985:221; see also Jessop 1990:ch. 7)
In Germany, a well-researched area (Kohn 1944; Kedourie 1960; Berlin
1976: part 11; Giesen 1993), the people as a collective, historical individual
appears around 1800 in the writings of intellectuals such as Herder, Fichte
and Jahn. The emergence of a historicist nationalism with sharp populist
undertones in Germany has in some instances been explained as a reaction
against the exclusion of the intellectuals from the mainly Francophone
nobility and the humiliation of Germany in the Napoleonic war (Kedourie
18 Patrik Hall
1960; Greenfeld 1992). However, these explanations are far too specific to
account for the enormous spread of historicist nationalism in Europe during
the nineteenth century. In the case of idealist treatments of nationalism such
as those of Kohn, Kedourie and Greenfeld, I suspect that the purpose is to
blame the German romantic movement for all the catastrophes and
holocausts to come (and, in the case of Greenfeld, to contrast this with the
superb tradition, according to her, of American nationalism).
It is obvious that this new historicist nationalism was of great importance
to many intellectual movements not yet recognised with the honour of
`national self-determination' in Central and Eastern Europe in the nine-
teenth century. A totally new interest in the traditions of `the people', their
folklore, tales, music and the like became an object of tremendous
intellectual fascination (a fascination for `the popular' or `the common'
which, it seems, is still with us, at least in matters of exotic cultures).
Sweden may lack the populist radicalism of the intellectual national
movements in great parts of Europe. Still it contains a similar development
of a historicist nationalism with a populist rhetoric within the frame of the
existing state. The Gothic myth which culminated in Rudbeck's Atlantica
(1937 [1679]) seems to have vanished. But, in my view, the exclusivity and
omnipotence of this myth is brought into the modern national discourse in
Sweden. However, now the humble man of the people, `the yeoman', was
awarded entrance in this national exclusivity, although on the conditions of
the intellectual discourse (as was the case, of course, in the rest of Europe
too). Genealogical exclusiveness becomes popular or national exclusiveness,
with its characteristic categorical distinction between internal equality and
external inequality. The warrior-kings of Sweden personify the people, not a
noble Gothic distinctiveness.
In fact, the yeoman can be seen as the peaceful part of his warrior-twin,
the Viking, who by the discovery of the Icelandic tales entered the national
myth. Hence it is no coincidence that the professor of history and
conservative politician, Erik Gustaf Geijer, published the twin poems `The
Viking' and `The Yeoman', standard reading for generations of Swedish
schoolchildren, in the first article of Zduna, the journal of the Gothic Society
(1811-45). The Gothic Society aimed at reviving `the old Goths' spirit of
liberty, manliness, and common sense' (quoted in TragHrdh 1990: 33). A
large part of the cultural elite joined the society for ceremonious meetings
where mjod (the beer of the Vikings) was consumed and the members hailed
each other by old Norse names.
Though the society was an elitist network, it still cherished a myth of the
equal peasant society, united under the king; an egalitarianism which is
absent from the Great Power myth (Traglrdh 1990: 34). This populist myth
may both be seen as a vision of democracy (as it was constantly used by the
pro-democratic intellectuals at the last turn of the century, Stenkvist 1987),
and a conservative vision of a stable alliance, a sort of contract, between
king and people. In Geijer's mind the two meanings seem to merge in a
Nationalism and historicity 19
populist-national vision. The concept of `the people', symbolised by the
assiduous yeoman, asserts the rightful power of the king, but stands as one
man when their ancient freedom is threatened. As in all populist myths
significant exclusions are made of individuals not representative of this
`people'.
Geijer is the father of a modern nationalist history writing in Sweden.
The image of history as an alliance between a metaphysical people
(represented by `nationally relevant' persons such as the yeomen) and their
king (who represents all the best features of this `people'in his own person)
becomes a potent national representation in a popular era, communicated
by education and mass media. Conflicts and crises are explained as instances
when this alliance has been threatened, as most commonly by foreigners,
but also by self-seeking noblemen and prelates. It is exactly this populist
image which the intellectual critics of democracy reproduced at the turn of
the last century, when they heavily attacked the `party fanatics', who were
said to know nothing of any fatherland, but only to recognise their own
divisive interests.
It would be wrong to say, however, that this populist myth disappears
with the anti-democratic arguments. The place of the yeoman is taken by
`the worker', `the modern Swede', who departed from his earlier premodern
stage, to build a new society. The place of the king is taken by `the welfare
state' which, by detailed planning and organisation, shapes an image of
stability and predictability. This unity state/people managed much more
thoroughly to alter the discursive system, supported by new systems of mass
communication, than any earlier national myths. This popular nationalism
has far from vanished, but rather it has become `banalised' into everyday
socialpractices, and it was not until recent years that the significantomissions
of this nationalism (immigrants, the role of women) was problematised.
As Giddens pointed out in the quotation above, dominant classes have
great possibilities in representing their own projects as the national interest.
A relevant example from the Swedish context is the case of the official
report on emigration (compiled 1907-1 3). From an unproblematic accep-
tance of the huge emigration, after 1900a growing concern for it developed
among the political and educated elite. The idea that a large population was
the foundation of a prosperous country was influential at the time. The loss
of strength and vitality needed in the expanding Swedish industry was
perceived as especially threatening. A National Society against Emigration
was founded, interesting as a case since it was a network of `national
interest', with prominent members from the Riksdag, the academy, industry
and the army. This network managed, by lobbying, to produce the report
which was carried out by the statistician Gustav Sundbarg, himself being
actively engaged in the National Society.
Sundbarg's conclusions provided a call for national integration, both
mentally and practically, most developed in his aphorisms over The Swedish
Mentality (191I), which, breaking the rules of common official reports,
20 Patrik Hall
became a huge best-seller, published in fourteen editions in ten years. Here,
the tendency was as usual in the literature about national characters. The
Swedish people possesses superb qualities but their self-assertion is weak,
and they have a tendency to admire everything foreign. Only if we awake
from our pre-national slumber, our young people will think it worthwhile to
stay in the country. Parts of the report bear a clear resemblance, though in
a democratic version, to the nationalisme intigral, originally advocated by
the French right-wing party Action FranGaise (Alter 1989: 28-40).
However, the report is not only an investigation of the Swedish soul, but
also of the body. By advanced statistics (Sundbarg's population statistics
over Sweden became internationally renowned and gained for him Sweden's
first professor's chair in statistics, yet another example of the interactions
between power and knowledge), Sundbarg produces a picture of the
Swedish state as a national household, an organism, symbolising the new
interactions of power and knowledge in obtaining control over the
population, and giving the state an image of being predictable, of being
subject to knowable laws of its operations and sequences of actions. What
we see in the report is an early version of the Swedish welfare state, an
image of a historically developing unitary state machine (this time given
historical depth by the dull facts of statistics).
At this stage we have reached a new `formative moment' of the state. Its
institutional representations and its exclusivity or sovereignty as a historical
object were first shaped during the seventeenth century. Now a kind of
totalist official policy of rational prognosis is envisioned. The state must
have an industrial policy, a social policy, a cultural policy, and all these
undertakings ought to be based in authoritative knowledge. `Alliances'
(projects and networks) of national interest are formed in a variety of
contexts, and subsequently given various institutional representations. This
institutional complexity also means a tremendous spread of historicity as
organising principle. Now the representational historic objects of people and
state emerge in every area of society, more significantly observed in their
parts than in a dubious centre. But on the discursive level the state is a
household, a gigantic public household, which floats through history as a
historical object, so self-evident in the order of things, that it never could be
questioned.
Concludingreflections
It is not possible to investigate historicity and nationalism on the isolated
level of representational discourse, but instead the motors behind discursive
development in terms of concrete interactions between people in projects
and networks must be dragged forward. Only then it is possible to show
how different practices of power and knowledge continually reshape what
the nation-state and its history is. As the example of the emigration report
Nationalism and historicity 21
shows, networks of influential people are able to present certain issues as
representing a `national interest'. Intellectual speculation on the national
character shapes the historical subject of the Swede. Investigations of the
state may shape new, powerful images of what the state historically has
been and how `it' currently ought to `act'. Intellectual distinction in the
form of scientisation and professionalisation profits from such power-
knowledge interactions, in the case of the emigration report by being
awarded a new scientificdiscipline.
Few theories recognise the importance of nationalism in contemporary
social practices, for instance, the institutional practices of the modern state.
Instead, nationalism is often theorised on the level of concrete political
movements, often of an extreme character. But the national movements in,
say, contemporary Yugoslavia could never have emerged as they have
without an already defined discursive field of nationalism, without inter-
national principles of recognition, historical definitions of nationality, and
normative expectations upon the relation between `peoples' and the state.
The importance of `history' in the Yugoslav case is illuminating. Instead of
accepting the violence and bloodshed at face value, one must, it is said,
trace the `historical roots' of the conflict. By such investigations, the conflict
becomes `explainable'. No example is more apt to prove the symbiotic
interlinkages between nationalism and historicity, and thus between the
state and knowledge.
The nation is not a subject of history, but is constructed as a historical
subject out of discursive practices of power and knowledge. It is of the
utmost importance to trace the practical logic of its construction, in order
to understand which current political practices nationalism supports. Thus,
nationalism does not contain anything `natural' in itself (such as a genetic
or psychological predisposition towards nationalism). And just because
national identity is seen as a primary source of identification for individual
beings and peoples, one cannot simply accept it as the ultimate basis of
political community (such as some normative theories of nationalism
suggest, e.g., Walzer 1995;Tamir 1993).
In this article, the interlinking of nationalism and historicity has been
discussed and placed in relation to intellectual knowledge and the state. The
scientisation and professionalisation of intellectuals into academies bring
them into a new relation with the state, where they benefit from it as well as
construct its categories. Intellectual distinction and category constructing
have had a profound influence in making the singular emergence of the
historicised nation seem to be a natural order of the modern world. In the
modern context of today's Bosnia, we have made the conflict `natural' by
explaining it as the outcome of ancient ethnic hatred. This provides yet
another victory for the naturalising orders of historicity and nationalism,
which also clearly shows the huge normative problems inherent in these
order; problems which lie beyond the scope of this article.
22 Patrik Hall
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