Nation and Nationalism The nation is novelty and the nation is a artefact
Anderson “Nationality […], nation-ness, as well as nationalism are cultural artefacts […]. To
understand them properly it is necessary to consider carefully how they have come into historical
being, in what was their meaning have changed over time, and why, today, they command such
profound emotional legitimacy (1991: 4)
Gellner “Nations as a natural, od-given way of classifying men, as an inherent political destiny
are a myth: nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turn them into nations,
sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is reality.” (1983: 48)
Hobsawm “With Gellner I would stress the element of artefact, of invention and social
engineering which enters into the making of nations […] for purposes of analysis nationalism comes
before nations. Nation does not make states and nationalism but the other way around. (1990:10)
GELLNER
- Relation between culture and organisation
- Foraging, agrarian, industrial age (societal transition)
- Nationalism as necessary consequence of certain conditions
- Where in the agrarian age culture was used to underline differences in status and class, in the
industrial age the need for homogenisation emerged
- Mass production demanded that people could communicate with each other to produce better
economic rationale
- The modern society needs a homogeneity of culture
HOBSBAWM
- First nationalism was economic or liberal, based on economic viability
- This definition of the nation was based on the threshold principle: the nation had to be of
sufficient size to form a viable unit of development
- If it fell below this threshold, it had no historic justification
- Economic expansion and unification was important
- Issues such as language, ethnicity, and religion were not seen important
- The only thing that contended was to create nation-states that could bring within their territory
the various branches of production
ANDERSON
- The nation as an imagined political community, inherently limited and sovereign
- Imagined members of even smallest nation will never meet most of their fellows, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion
- Limited even the largest nation has boundaries, beyond which lie other nations
- Sovereign all nations dream of being free, the emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state
- Community regardless of inequality, the nation is conceives as a deep horizontal comradeship,
this fraternity makes it possible for so many people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for their
nation (1991: 6-7)