Banal Nationalism
Nations and Languages
Contributors: By: Michael Billig
Book Title: Banal Nationalism
Chapter Title: "Nations and Languages"
Pub. Date: 2010
Access Date: April 28, 2020
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780803975255
Online ISBN: 9781446221648
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446221648.n2
Print pages: 13-36
© 2010 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
Nations and Languages
It was an insignificant item, tucked away on an inside page of a British daily paper, the Guardian. It was not
even that page's main story. ‘Flemish leader calls for split’ was the headline. The item, written by the paper's
correspondent in Brussels, reported that the leaders of the main Flemish parties had issued a declaration
which “has stunned the French-speaking political parties”. They had declared that Belgium should be split into
a loose confederation of two independent states – Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.
Special arrangements should be made for “the small German-speaking community in the east of Belgium”.
Hitherto, reported the paper, Flemish demands for separation have “been restricted to small nationalist and
far-right groups”. The Belgian government had hoped that the existing arrangements for devolution would
have enabled “Belgium to survive more or less intact” (Guardian, 14 July 1994).
The item is revealing both for what it reported, and for what it left unsaid. The possible break-up of Belgium as
a nation-state was not sufficiently important to merit the front page of this ‘serious’ British newspaper. This, in
itself, says something about the climate of the times. Although the story was presented as a sudden, stunning
declaration, no background explanation was offered to say why Flemish-speakers might wish to establish
their own state. By the omission, the paper was indicating that readers could be expected to understand such
national aspirations. Other days, the paper might carry stories about French-speaking separatists in Canada,
Basque-speakers in Spain or even Welsh-speakers in the United Kingdom. Language groups wanting their
own state are not mysterious for newspaper readers today.
Such a story bears two messages. The overt message tells British readers something about ‘them’, the Belgians,
who might soon not be known as ‘Belgians’. There is also an implicit message about ‘us’, the British
readers and what ‘we’ are expected to know. We do not need to be told why communities speaking a particular
language might wish to establish their own nation-state. We do not need to be told what a state is; nor
what a language is. All this is common sense, or, rather, ‘we’ are assumed to possess such common-sense
ideas about nations.
This sort of common sense is to be found in academic writings, as much as daily newspapers. Social scientists
often assume that it is natural that speakers of the same language should seek their own political identity.
The author of a book entitled Varieties of Nationalism has written, “in the search for security, people who
speak the same language are irresistibly drawn together” (Snyder, 1976, p. 21). The word ‘irresistibly’ suggests
that this is an inevitable part of human nature. Thus, if the Flemish-speakers are feeling insecure, then
it is little surprise that they are wishing to stick together and to establish a state, in which all citizens speak the
same language. John Edwards has observed that “language is still commonly taken to be the central pillar
of ethnic identity” (1991, p. 269, emphasis in original; see also, Edwards, 1985; Fishman, 1972; Gudykunst
and Ting-Toomey, 1990). Indeed, it is sometimes assumed that nations, comprising different linguistic groups,
are fragile compromises, which might be torn apart by the next set of crises and insecurities (Connor, 1978,
1993). This way of thinking is not new. In the eighteenth century, Herder and Fichte were declaring that the
basis of a nation, and indeed its genius, lay in its language. According to this view, a Belgium, cobbled together
out of Flemish speakers and French speakers, not to mention the small community of German speakers,
cannot be a ‘real’ nation. The Flemish separatists, therefore, are seeking to redraw the map of nationhood in
a way which accords better with natural human inclinations: little wonder, then, that their demands can seem
so comprehensible.
There is a reason for mentioning this. Nationalism is simultaneously obvious and obscure. It appears obvious
that the Flemings and the Walloons might wish to have their own separate nation-states. After all, if they can
hardly communicate with each other, how can they share a common identity, sense of heritage or feeling of
community? The reaction of the Flemish-speakers is understandable; and so is the concern of the Frenchspeaking
Prime Minister, who might suddenly find his country cut in half. There is a further question: where
does this sense of obviousness come from? Is it ‘natural’ to think about community, nationhood and language
in this way? Or is this sense of naturalness itself the issue?
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Eric Hobsbawm (1992), at the beginning of Nations and Nationalism, writes that historians of nationalism
should distance themselves from nationalist myths, for “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can
be a committed political nationalist” (p. 12). Hobsbawm was referring to the sorts of myths which Herder was
formulating about the German nation and language. Analogous myths are today being circulated by Flemish
nationalists who talk about the inalienable and historic Flemish volk (Husbands, 1992). These are the sorts of
myth which, according to Hobsbawm, must be discounted. But there is more distancing to be done by the social
scientist wishing to study nationalism as an ideology. Certainly, the social scientist should put into brackets
the claims of those who, like the Flemish-speaking politicians, wish to create new national units, claiming
that these units correspond to natural or age-old facts. In addition, ‘our’ common sense about nations must be
bracketed. This is harder than distancing ourselves from ‘them’, the Flemings or Walloons and their particular
conflict. Something more universal has to be placed in metaphorical brackets.
To achieve this bracketing, we must distance ourselves from ourselves and from that which we routinely accept
as obvious or ‘natural’. The obviousness must be questioned, if nationalism is to be seen as an ideology,
which deeply affects contemporary consciousness – ‘our’ consciousness, as much as ‘theirs’. Ideologies are
patterns of belief and practice, which make existing social arrangements appear ‘natural’ or inevitable (Eagleton,
1991). Thus, patriarchal ideology makes it appear ‘natural’ (or in accord with the unquestioned, biological
way of things) that men rule and that women serve; racist ideology made it seem ‘natural’ and ‘common
sense’ to Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the white man was superior in the arts of
government to the ‘child-like native’. We, who live in nation-states, paying taxes to support the armaments of
our nations, do we not, too, have a common sense which makes this world of nation-states seem natural?
If we are to understand this part of ourselves, we have to attempt to stand back from our common-sense
assumptions. We cannot rest content that it is actually ‘natural’ that those who speak the same language will
wish to form national groupings. It is not a matter of empirically testing the belief to discover its validity. The
analyst of ideology must ask where this belief – our belief – originated from and what it assumes. We must
question – or put into ideological brackets – the very concepts which seem so solidly real to us and which
enable us to understand the assumptions of the daily news. These include concepts such ‘a nation’, even ‘a
language’. Such concepts should not be used uncritically to analyse nationalism, because they do not stand
outside the topic which is to be analysed. Instead, the history of nationalism continues to run through the
meanings which such concepts routinely bear.
Studying Nationalism as an Ideology
In general, liberal Western academics today find it easier to recognize nationalism in ‘others’ than in themselves.
Nationalists can be identified as extremists who, impelled by a violently emotional psychology, seek
irrational ends; or they can be painted as heroic figures who, in particular, are to be found overseas, battling
against repressive colonialists. Nationalism can be seen almost everywhere but ‘here’. If nationalism is
a widespread ideology, then a different perspective is in order. This would take nationalism to include the patterns
of belief and practice which reproduce the world – ‘our’ world – as a world of nation-states, in which
‘we’ live as citizens of nation-states. In consequence, nationalism is not merely the ideology which is impelling
Flemish speakers to resist the Belgian state. It is also the ideology which permits the states, including the Belgian
state, to exist. In the absence of an overt political challenge, like that mounted by the Flemish speakers,
this ideology might appear banal, routine, almost invisible.
It is always possible to insist that the term ‘nationalism’ should be restricted to the beliefs of ‘others’. When
talking of ‘our’ beliefs, one might prefer other different words such as ‘patriotism’, ‘loyalty’, or ‘societal identification’.
Such terms banish the word ‘nation’, and with it the spectre of nationalism, at least in regard to
‘our’ attachments and identities. The problem is that such terms overlook the object to which the ‘loyalty’ or
‘identification’ is being shown: the nation-state. The present approach does not restrict the term ‘nationalism’
to the ideology of ‘others’, for, as will be suggested, such a restriction carries ideological implications. Instead,
nationalism is broadened as a concept to cover the ways that established nation-states are routinely reproduced.
This frequently involves a ‘banal’ nationalism, in contrast with the overt, articulated and often fiercely
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expressed nationalism of those who battle to form new nations.
There is another reason for using the term ‘nationalism’ to describe what is familiar and ‘here, at home’. ‘Our’
common sense about nationhood and ‘our’ psychology of national attachments should be located within the
history of nationalism. By putting ‘our’ common sense in its historical context, ‘our’ beliefs about nationhood,
and about the naturalness of belonging to a nation, are seen to be the products of a particular historical age.
The obviousness of such beliefs is, thereby, questioned. Indeed, they can be made to appear as eccentric as
the beliefs of other ages.
Many social scientists, especially sociologists and social psychologists, have not treated the topic of nationalism
in this way. They have tended to ignore what is here being called ‘banal nationalism’. In using the term
‘nationalism’ in a limited way, such theorists have often projected nationalism onto others and naturalized
‘our’ nationalism out of existence. This occurs in two types of theorizing, which often, as will be seen in later
chapters, accompany each other.
1 Projecting theories of nationalism. These approaches tend to define nationalism in a
restricted way, as an extreme/surplus phenomenon. Nationalism is equated with the outlook
of nationalist movements and, when there are no such movements, nationalism is
not seen to be an issue. By and large, the authors of such theories are not themselves
partisans of nationalist movements – although there are exceptions. Such theorists often
claim that nationalism is impelled by irrational emotions. Since the theorists are claiming
to produce a rational account of something, which they see as being inherently irrational,
they are distancing themselves from nationalism. The theorists themselves live in a world
of nations: they carry passports and pay their taxes to nation-states. Their theories tend
to take this world of nations for granted as the ‘natural’ environment, in which the dramas
of nationalism periodically erupt. Since the nationalism which routinely reproduces the
world of nations is theoretically ignored, and nationalism is seen as a condition of ‘others’,
then such theories can be seen as rhetorical projections. Nationalism as a condition is
projected on to ‘others’; ‘ours’ is overlooked, forgotten, even theoretically denied.
2 Naturalizing theories of nationalism. Some theorists tend to depict contemporary loyalties
to nation-states as instances of something which is psychologically general, or endemic
to the human condition. Thus, such loyalties might be theoretically transmuted into
‘needs for identity’, ‘attachments to society’ or ‘primordial ties’, which are theoretically
posited to be universal psychological states, and not peculiar to the age of nation-states.
As such, ‘banal nationalism’ not only ceases to be nationalism, but it ceases to be a problem
for investigation. Indeed, the lack of such identities (the lack of patriotism in established
nations) can be seen as the problem for concern. In this way, such theories make
existing conditions of consciousness appear natural, taking for granted the world of na-
tions.
Later chapters will provide examples of the ways in which social scientists have projected and naturalized
nationalism. Some do both simultaneously: ‘our patriotism’ is made to appear ‘natural’, and thereby invisible,
while ‘nationalism’ is seen as a property of ‘others’. Such theories may have the merit of drawing attention to
the particular psychological conditions of overtly nationalist movements. However, in so doing, they tend to
overlook the nationalist aspects of ‘our’ common sense. By contrast, the present approach puts the psychological
focus back on ‘us’. If the world of nations is to be reproduced, then nationhood has to be imagined,
communicated, believed in, remembered and so on. An infinite variety of psychological acts is required for the
reproduction of nation-states. These psychological acts should not be analysed purely in terms of the motives
of the individual actors. An ideological analysis of psychological states stresses that the acts, and, indeed,
the motives of the individuals, are constituted through socio-historical processes, rather than vice versa. This
necessitates reversing the theoretical frameworks of many conventional theories of social psychology, which
presume that psychological variables are universal, rather than historically created (for criticisms of the indi-
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vidualism in most orthodox approaches to social psychology, see, for example: Gergen, 1982, 1985, 1989;
Moscovici, 1983; Sampson, 1993; Shotter 1993a and 1993b).
Language plays a vital role in the operation of ideology and in the framing of ideological consciousness. This
was stressed over 60 years ago by Mikhail Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the book
he wrote under the name of Voloshinov (Holquist, 1990). Bakhtin argued that “objective psychology must
be grounded in the study of ideology”, and that forms of consciousness were constituted through language
(Voloshinov, 1973, p. 13). Therefore, the social psychological study of ideology should examine the concrete
operations of language: “social psychology is first and foremost an atmosphere made up of multifarious
speech performances that engulf and wash over all persistent kinds of ideological creativity” (p. 19, emphasis
in original). Similar points have recently been made by discursive psychologists, who argue that many of the
psychological phenomena, that psychologists have assumed to exist internally within the person, are socially
and discursively created (Billig, 1987a, 1991; Edwards and Potter, 1992, 1993; Potter and Wetherell, 1987;
Potter et al., 1993). Gillett and Harré, (1994) have suggested that emotions, such as anger, fear or happiness,
involve judgements as well as outward social acts. This would include so-called emotions of national loyalty
or xenophobia (Scheff, 1995; Wetherell and Potter, 1992). These emotions depend upon judgements, shared
beliefs, or representations, about nationhood, about ‘us’ and ‘them’. Such emotions are expressed by, and
within, complex patterns of discourse, which themselves are part of wider historical processes.
Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, recounts how the great doctor used to wander through London at night with
Richard Savage, the vagrant poet and convicted murderer. Usually, the two companions were cast down
by the misery of those sleeping rough in doorways. But one night, walking around St James's Square, the
strange couple were “in high spirits and brimful of patriotism”. They traversed the square for several hours,
and “inveighed against the minister and ‘resolved they would stand by their country’” (Boswell, 1906, vol. I, p.
95, emphasis in original).
The words spoken on that evening cannot now be known. The high spirits, which were evident to both, were
manifested within the conversation. Each animated the other, until both declared their patriotic resolution,
condemning the relevant government minister. Through words, gestures and tones, they created the mood.
Similarly, the patriotic spirit, of which they were ‘brimful’, consisted in declarations, resolutions and judgements.
Johnson, in retelling the story to Boswell, could classify the conversation as being ‘patriotic’ and his
biographer could recognize the categorization as appropriate. The patriotism was not something strange lurking
beyond the conversation, like the dark figures in the doorways of the Square. But both speakers could
recognize this spirit in themselves and in the other.
No doubt, the poet and the future lexicographer uttered commonplace judgements as they displayed their patriotic
resolution. To be recognizably brimful of patriotism one must have discourses of patriotism – that is, the
phrases and stances which can be conventionally identifiable as ‘patriotic’. Johnson and Savage may have
repeated stereotypes and uttered declarations of personal feeling. “I am willing to love all mankind, except an
American”, declared Johnson many years later during a conversation at Mr Dilly's house. Johnson's highly
charged nature was, to quote Boswell again, bursting “into horrid fire” (vol. II, p. 209, emphasis in original).
Johnson was, of course, expressing his own views and emotions. But he was doing more than that: he was
repeating commonplace themes of his times: the virtues of loving all mankind and being brimful with patriotism;
and the naughtiness of enjoying an explosive hatred of Americans. All these matters stretch beyond
Johnson, the individual; they reach into the ideological history of nations and nationalism. He was speaking
patriotically, at a time when the British nation-state was being established politically, with its government exercising
rule over the country in the name of all ‘the people’, including vagrants and criminals (Colley, 1992).
When Johnson was excepting Americans from his love of mankind, the colony was engaged in the violent
process of establishing itself as a nation-state, independent from British sovereignty. In other, epochs, in other
places, people might talk differently about loyalties and hatreds. But Johnson's ways of talking – and his
emotions – were part of the ideological consciousness attending the rise of modern nationhood. This ideology
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accompanied his night-time stroll around London; it strode into Mr Dilly's house, and sat down at his table, as
the conversation turned from cookery and religion. Nationalism was filling banal moments of eighteenth-century
English life.
Nationalism and the Nation-State
If nationalism is identified as the ideology that creates and maintains nation-states, then it has a specific
socio-historical location. Not all group loyalties are instances of nationalism, but, as Ernest Gellner has argued,
nationalism belongs to the era of nation-states. There can be no nationalism without nation-states; and,
thus, nationalism, as a way of depicting community, is a historically specific form of consciousness. On the
first page of Nations and Nationalism, Gellner asserts that “nationalism is primarily a political principle, which
holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (1983, p. 1). According to Gellner, nationalism
emerges only when the existence of the state “is already very much taken for granted” (1983, p. 4);
nationalism's core tenet is the belief that “the national state, identified with a national culture and committed
to its protection, is the natural political unit” (Gellner, 1993, p. 409). Not only does Gellner's definition link nationalism
to the nation-state but also, as Gellner suggests, in these circumstances the political principles of
nationalism appear as if they were ‘natural’.
The milieu of the nation-state is, broadly speaking, the modern world, for, as Hobsbawm asserts, “the basic
characteristic of the modern nation and everything associated with it is its modernity” (1992, p. 14). Historians
have disputed exactly when the nation-state first made its appearance in European history. Some historians,
such as Hugh Seton-Watson (1977) and Douglas Johnson (1993), have claimed that feelings or patriotic loyalty
emerged in England and France as early as the seventeenth century. Other scholars, such as Elie Kedourie
(1966), put the date later, claiming that nation-states and nationalist attachments cannot be found until
the eighteenth century. Elshtain even argues that the notion of ‘La France’, the female fatherland, “is a rather
recent historic development, one of this century” (1987, p. 66). Both camps, however, agree that mediaeval
Europe knew no such nation-states.
Anthony Giddens has attempted to specify what new forms of governance were brought into being with the
creation of the nation-state. He defines the nation-state as “a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining
an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries, its rule being sanctioned by law
and direct control of the means of internal and external violence”. Boundedness and possession of the means
of violence are key components, for the modern nation-state is “a bounded power-container” (Giddens, 1985,
p. 120). Most importantly, nation-states do not exist in isolation, but “in a complex of other nation-states” (Giddens,
1987, p. 171). Nationalism embraces ways of thinking – patterns of common-sense discourse – which
make this boundedness and monopolization of violence seem natural to ‘us’, who inhabit the world of nationstates.
This world – ‘our’ world – is a place where nations have their official armies, police forces and executioners;
where boundaries are rigorously drawn; and where citizens, and male citizens in particular, might
expect to be called upon to kill and die in defence of the national border-post.
A glance at mediaeval and modern maps shows the novelty of the bounded state. Not only are European
mediaeval maps less precise; not only do they tend to depict Jerusalem at the centre of things; not only do
they typically indicate an incomplete world, with distant lands shading off into nothingness; but there is also a
further difference. Mediaeval maps represent a world unobsessed with boundaries (Roberts, 1985). General
areas are indicated for kingdoms and empires, without the compulsion to represent the precise place where
one kingdom ends and another starts. The modern map of nations is quite different in this respect. It depicts
a completed world, divided up by precisely drawn boundaries. This is the sort of map which is familiar to ‘us’.
In mediaeval Europe there were few clear territorial boundaries. As Mann (1988) points out, mediaeval Europe
comprised small cross-cutting networks; no single power agency controlled a clear-cut territory or the
people within it. In any case, territories kept changing shape from generation to generation, as early medi-
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aeval monarchs frequently divided their estates between their heirs. Peasantry might feel an obligation to a
local lord, rather than a distant monarch. Even if the local lord actually lived in the locality, almost certainly he
would not speak the language of his peasantry. If kings raised armies, they did so through the major lords,
who in turn might sub-contract the job to lesser nobility. There was a whole pyramidal structure of rights and
obligations. Armies were continually being raised, since politics, on all levels, tended to be conducted through
warfare. These wars were seldom announced with official declarations like the outbreaks of modern interstate
hostility; nor were they brought to formal end-points.
In so many respects, the mediaeval world of Europe looks to modern eyes as an unbelievably messy, disorganized
place. Throughout the Middle Ages, the mass of inhabitants, living in what is now known as France or
England, did not think of themselves as ‘French’ or ‘English’ (Braudel, 1988; Seton-Watson, 1977). They had
little conception of a territorial nation (a ‘country’) to which they owed an allegiance stronger than life itself.
Community was imagined, and lived, in different ways from now. And this, in part, makes the mediaeval world
seem so foreign today.
It is easy for ‘us’, who accept the naturalness of a ‘boundary-consciousness’, to think that the nation-state
system introduced order and organization into a world of disorder and inefficient chaos. The state, whether
represented by monarch or president, now claims the direct and total loyalty of its citizenry. When it comes to
war, the rulers of the state do not depend upon the cooperation of feudal barons. Armies are raised directly
from the people, who are urged to fight for their ‘nation’. Of course, many, who have been so recruited, have
been bribed, coerced or compelled through force of law. But also the modern world has seen mass, voluntary
recruitment of young men, willingly, even enthusiastically, going to battle in the cause of the nation (Reader,
1988).
As the nation-state established a monopoly on the right to the means of violence within its boundaries, so the
era of ‘unofficial wars’ ended (Hinsley, 1986). Henceforth ‘Britain’ would fight against ‘France’ in the Napoleonic
wars; ‘Russia’ would be invaded; the ‘United States of America’ would watch closely. In this new world of
nations-at-war, there was little room for a Duke of Burgundy or an Earl of Warwick to march into the fray at
the head of a private retinue. Today, local ‘warlords’ tend to emerge in places where the state's authority has
collapsed, such as Beirut or Somalia. The other states of the world look with horror on the emergence of ‘unofficial
armies’, dreading such forces within their own borders. With the rise of official wars comes, naturally,
the rise of official peace. For the past 200 years, the end of wars has been marked by conferences to affirm
precisely where state boundaries were to be drawn. The Congress of Vienna, at the end of the Napoleonic
Wars, set an example, which has been much repeated. The ‘new world order’, which President Bush claimed
might be established with the military defeat of Iraq, is nothing new. Since the birth of nation-states, powerful
states, who have proved their power in war, have sought to impose their own vision of a settled order of welldrawn
international boundaries. In this respect, the modern nation-state is the product of an international age.
The International World of Nations
Giddens has described the nation-state system as having “no precedent in history” (1987, p. 166). Why the
system should have emerged in Europe and then spread through the rest of the world is one of the major
puzzles of modern history. Analysts have suggested how the new form of state provided a series of solutions
to problems in a modernizing world. Gellner (1983, 1987) has claimed that industrialization brought a
demand for standardized skills, which could best be dealt with through centrally controlled systems of education.
Thus, economic advantage was given to a centrally organized state, which imposed uniform levels of
literacy. Kennedy (1988) emphasizes the military advantage of the nation-state. It could recruit professional
armies directly from populations who were willing to fight with patriotic fervour and who would not disappear
seasonally to gather in their feudal lord's harvest. Other writers have directly linked the rise of nation-states
with the rise of capitalism. Anderson (1983) connects the rise of the nation-state with the importance of printing,
the replacement of Latin by vernacular languages, and the spread of discursive literacy, all of which were
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necessary for capitalist development. Mann (1992) agrees but stresses the role of commercial, rather than
industrial, capitalism in the formation of the state: in the eighteenth century, the imperialist conquests, which
were to finance the industrial revolutions of western Europe, required state support for their continuing success.
Nairn (1977) pointed to the uneven spread of capitalism, suggesting that the state became a means by
which peripheral regions could haul themselves into capitalist modernity. Hroch (1985), developing this point,
claims that capitalist economies needed the sort of central direction, especially in relation to educational and
commercial policy, which could only be provided by the modern sort of nation-state.
Whatever may have been the reasons for the emergence of the nation-state, there is no doubting its success.
Nationhood, spreading from Europe to the Americas and elsewhere, was established as the universal form of
sovereignty. The world's entire land surface, with the exception of Antarctica, is “now divided between nations
and states” (Birch, 1989, p. 3). If nationalism is the ideology which maintains these nation-states as nationstates,
then nationalism is “the most successful ideology in human history” (p. 3). Liberalism and Marxism
have been territorially limited, as was Christendom or Islam in the Middle Ages, but nationalism is an international
ideology. The nation-state system abhors a territorial vacuum; every space must be corralled behind
official national boundaries. Thus, the boundary-consciousness of nationalism has itself known no boundaries
in its historical triumph.
Nationalism, in its triumphant march, has swept aside rival ideologies. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
Marxists were predicting the end of national division: the imminent collapse of capitalism would herald
a world of universal class consciousness, joining together the working classes from different states. In the
event, Marxist revolutions accommodated themselves to national boundaries. One of the first tasks for the
leaders of the 1917 Revolution in Russia was to secure the borders of the socialist state. The treaty with Germany
and its allies at Brest-Litovsk signed away territory to Turkey. In the ensuing struggles to defend the
revolution from outside attack, the Bolsheviks actually extended the borders of the old Russian empire by annexing
Bokhara and Khiva and tightening Russian control over Outer Mongolia (Seton-Watson, 1977). Thus,
the Bolshevik regime from the outset represented a nation-state among nation-states. First, Lenin, and then
Stalin, played the parts of national leader, planning for ‘socialism within one country’ and willing to defend
the nation against foreign invaders. So it has continued. As Benedict Anderson (1983) points out, in the late
1970s the Marxist regimes of Vietnam, Cambodia and China fought nationalist wars with each other, underlining
the fact that “since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms” (p. 12,
emphasis in original).
There is something decidedly odd about the nation-state system. Nation-states come in all shapes and sizes.
They include entities such as the Republic of China, with its population numbering more than 100 million,
as well as Tuvalo with its 10,000 citizens. The idea of the nation-state has not come with a model of ideal
size, like the Renaissance city-state. Some land masses, like North America, have few national boundaries,
most of which tend to follow straight lines, lakes or rivers. By contrast, Europe is dense with boundaries which
whirl and loop across mountains, plains and rivers. Some groups of islands form a single nation, such as
Japan, whilst in the Caribbean each island seems to boast its own state (with Haiti and the Dominican Republic
sharing the same island). Why Liechtenstein? Why Nauru? Why the United States of America? But no
United States of South America? And no national state of Corsica nor of Hawaii? In short, one could not find
a set of ‘objective’ geographical principles, which, if expressed in a computer program, would produce the
present crop of jealously guarded, national boundaries. Instead, the world of nations has been divided into a
hotchpotch of bizarrely shaped and sized entities, lodging tightly, sometimes uncomfortably, up against one
another.
Nor does the hotchpotch reflect some underlying logic of language or religion. There are monoglot states, and
there are polyglot states. There is a state like Iceland with comparative cultural and linguistic homogeneity,
and a state like India with its mass of religions and languages. Sometimes, different religious groups have
nationalist struggles, such as in Northern Ireland, and sometimes the same groups do not, as in Scotland.
Sometimes language is a symbol of nationalist aspirations, as in Quebec. Sometimes it is not: there appear
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to be few nationalist rumblings by linguistic minorities in Scandinavian countries (Elklit and Tonsgaard, 1992).
The balance between religion and language can change. When the Belgian state was founded in 1830, religious
affinities seemed stronger than linguistic differences, but, apparently, the position is now reversed (Vos,
1993). In Switzerland, a sense of Swiss nationality holds together a state which does not threaten to fragment
along linguistic lines. The so-called ‘Jura question’ concerns the issue of seceding from the Berne canton, in
order to form a new canton within Switzerland (Voutat, 1992). And what computer program – let alone what
theory of objective historical development – would have predicted that the vast Spanish-speaking, Catholic areas
of Central and Southern America would be criss-crossed by national boundaries? Why should Venezuela,
Costa Rica and Bolivia boast their independence, raise their own armies and patrol their own borders?
The system of nation-states does not seem to follow a neat pattern for global division. Historical forces may
have combined to produce the nation-state as modernity's logical form of governance. Yet, a wilful anarchy
seems to have accompanied the way that the logical principle has been established in practice.
Making States and Peoples
If so-called ‘objective’ variables, such as those of language, religion or geography, cannot predict where the
state boundaries are to be drawn, then one might presume that ‘subjective’, or psychological, variables are
the decisive ones. Nations are not ‘objective communities’, in the sense that they are constructed around
clear, ‘objective’ criteria, which are possessed, and seen to be possessed, by all national members: instead,
they are, to use Benedict Anderson's term, ‘imagined communities’. Because there are infinite ways of imagining
communities, then one should expect the world map of nations to be somewhat higgledy-piggledy, as the
boundaries between states follow the boundaries of subjective identity. As will be suggested, there is a grain
of truth in this ‘subjective’ way of conceiving nationhood. Nevertheless, it is an oversimplification. Psychological
identity, on its own, is not the driving force of history, pushing nation-states into their present shapes.
National identities are forms of social life, rather than internal psychological states; as such, they are ideological
creations, caught up in the historical processes of nationhood.
The term ‘nation’ carries two interrelated meanings. There is the ‘nation’ as the nation-state, and there is the
‘nation’ as the people living within the state. The linkage of the two meanings reflects the general ideology
of nationalism. As Gellner implies, nationalism is based upon a principle which is “very widely held and even
more commonly taken for granted in the modern world” (1993, p. 409). This is the principle that any nation-aspeople
should have their nation-as-state. Obviously, the principle assumes that there are such entities as national
peoples. In this respect, nationalism involves the construction of the sense of national identity for those
who are said to inhabit, or deserve to inhabit, their own nation-state. However, nationalism involves more than
the construction of a particular identity (a particular national ‘us’), for it includes the general principle: it is right
that ‘we’ possess ‘our’ own state, because peoples (nations) should have their states (nations).
In this regard, nationalism combines particular and universal features. This combination could be seen in the
way the victors of the French Revolution proclaimed their triumph. They declared their victory to be a triumph
of universal principles, such as ‘liberty, freedom and equality’, which would apply, in theory, to all men – but not
necessarily to all women (see Capitan, 1988). They also claimed this to be a general victory of reason over
prejudice, enlightenment over darkness, the people over despotism. Yet, at the moment of triumph, ‘the people’
were not left dangling as an abstract concept, nor as a universal possibility. The great, universal principles
were being limited to one particular people, situated in a specific place (Dumont, 1992; Freeman, 1992). The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen asserted that “the principle of sovereignty resides essentially
in the Nation: no body of men, no individual, can express authority that does not emanate from it” (quoted in
Kedourie, 1966, p. 12). The Nation was, of course, the French nation. Some sort of indissoluble, ineffable tie
was being asserted between state, people and territory.
In claiming that sovereignty rests with the nation, the revolutionaries were speaking as if the idea of the ‘na-
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tion’ was unproblematic. In reading their words today, it is easy to assume that the term ‘nation’ had a clear,
concrete signification. At the time of the Revolution, the conventional symbols of nationhood, which are so
taken for granted today, were not yet in place. Under the ancien régime, there was no national flag, only regional
ones (Johnson, 1993). The language in which the Declaration had been written was only spoken by a
minority of the population as their first tongue. North of the Loire, but excluding Britanny and Flanders, it might
have been understood by most people, but to the south it was generally incomprehensible (Braudel, 1988).
When the Declaration was announced, only a small percentage of those who lived in the territory, now recognized
as being France, thought of themselves as being ‘French’. As such, ‘the nation’ was not a concrete
entity, whose existence all citizens could take for granted. It was a project to be attained. Because the project
was being pursued in its own name (policies were to be justified in the name of ‘the nation’), it had to assume
its own reality before being effected in practice.
These considerations raise the question ‘which comes first: the nation-as-people or the nation-as-state?’
There has been much debate between those who claim that nation-states have created national identities and
those who trace the genealogy of national identities back to times before the rise of the nation-state. Those
who take the former view claim that, as nation-states were being formed, so national identities were often
invented. Sometimes, the founders of the state were aware of what they were doing. After the Risorgimento,
the nineteenth-century Italian nationalist Massimo d'Azeglio declared: “We have made Italy, now we have to
make Italians” (quoted in Hobsbawm, 1992, p. 44). To make ‘Italians’ it was necessary to present the creation
as a revival, as if something ancient were being continued. During the heyday of nation-making in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many seemingly ancient traditions were invented. New artefacts, such
as Scottish kilts or Coronation rituals, were created, but they were presented as if age-old traditions. ‘Ancient’
epic poems, extolling the nation, were occasionally forged (Cannadine, 1983; Trevor-Roper, 1983).
Through the invention of traditions, national identities were being created as if they were ‘natural’, even eternal,
features of human existence. As Gellner argues, nationalism presents “itself as the affirmation of each
and every ‘nationality’, and these alleged entities are supposed just to be there, like Mount Everest, since
long ago, antedating the age of nationalism” (1983, p. 49). The Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot asserted in
Physics and Politics that nations “are as old as history”. He was suggesting that the particular nations, “which
are so familiar to us”, have always existed throughout history (1873, p. 83). Bagehot's compatriots might have
wished to believe that there had always been Englishmen – a whole trail of bearded Alfreds and Arthurs –
stumping off into misty dawns of time, carrying their swords and English sense of play like Dr Grace and his
cricket bat. Whether these Alfreds and Arthurs actually nourished a sense of ‘Englishness’ qua Englishness
(let alone ‘Britishness’), in ways which Bagehot would have recognized in himself, is very much a moot point:
and ditto for the ‘French’ ancient heroes and heroines, who were being rediscovered across the Channel at
about the same time.
Even more problematic is the case of some former colonies. No prior sense of peoplehood could explain why
a United States of America developed to the north of Mexico, but not to its south. The thirteen colonies, which
under George Washington's leadership overthrew colonial rule, developed into a single nation, while the five
colonies liberated from Spain by Simon Bolivar went their own national ways. In both cases, the sense of
nationhood was to be created after the various declarations of independence, whether it was the sense of
‘Americanness’ (the ‘one nation under God’), or the separate senses of being Bolivian, Peruvian, Venezuelan,
Ecuadorian and Colombian.
On the other hand, as Anthony Smith (1981, 1986, 1994) has repeatedly argued, not all nations-as-people
have been entirely created de novo. Some identities must have existed previously and a general sense of
community was not entirely invented in the eighteenth century. ‘Ethnies’ – or peoples claiming a sense of their
own unique history, culture and loyalties – are to be found in most ages. Often, nation-states were created
out of older loyalties. The ‘ancient’ Highland kilt may have been as much a modern invention as the Coronation
mug, but both mug and kilt were celebrating the much older traditions of the Highland clan system and
the English Coronation oath respectively. Neither of these were entirely invented, at least in the era of the
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state-making. The peoples whom nation-states were claiming to represent often had nurtured a sense of peoplehood
before the age of nationhood, even if this sense was not co-extensive with the peoplehood, claimed
by the state. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen did not itself invent the identity of being
‘French’, and certainly not the identity of being Frankish or Gallic. And the new French nation, in developing
its sense of Frenchness, adapted, as well as invented, much older traditions, stereotypes and myths. Similarly,
Massimo d'Azeglio did not invent the term ‘Italia’. If nationhood provided the outward political form for
states, then this form often took root within, and adapted, older senses of peoplehood. And, so the argument
goes, it is not surprising that the results were at once both uniform and variegated.
The creation of the nation-as-people added something to the pre-existing identities. Seldom has the creation
of nation-states been a harmonious process, in which a traditional ‘ethnie’ grows from small shoot into the
full flower of nationality, as if following a process of ‘natural’ maturation. The process typically is attended
by conflict and violence. A particular form of identity has to be imposed. One way of thinking of the self, of
community and, indeed, of the world has to replace other conceptions, other forms of life. Italians have to be
made: individuals have to stop thinking of themselves merely as Lombardians or Sicilians, or members of this
or that village. If only a minority of those living in France at the time of the Revolution thought of themselves
as French, then it was this minority's outlook, which was to prevail. Paris was to speak metonymically and
literally for the whole of France. The Parisian style of speech was to be imposed, legally and culturally, as
‘French’.
The battle for nationhood is a battle for hegemony, by which a part claims to speak for the whole nation and
to represent the national essence. Sometimes, metonymically the name of the part comes to stand for the
national whole. For example, in Thailand and Burma the identity of the nation has come to be associated with
the values and culture of the dominant group, the Thais and Burmese respectively (Brown, 1989). Few nations
are so homogeneous that they do not contain sub-sections, which fall under Smith's definition of ethnie:
namely a group which maintains a sense of its own historic uniqueness and origins. Connor (1993) estimates
that only 15 of the current 180 nations are not ‘multinational’ in this sense. This estimate ignores the longburied
senses of peoplehood cluttering the cemetries of history.
The achievement of national hegemony is well illustrated by the triumph of official national languages and the
suppression of rivals – a triumph which has so often accompanied the construction of statehood. The Rights
of Man and the Citizen did not spread to the rights of Bretons and Occitans to use their own tongue in the
schoolrooms of France: the northern langue d'oïl was enforced, with the backing of legal statutes, over la
langue d'oc. In the nineteenth century, Welsh and Lowland Scottish were officially banned in British schools
(Kiernan, 1993). The Argentinian government, in a curious by-way of national history, discouraged the use of
Welsh in Patagonia (Williams, 1991). Sometimes when hegemony is assured, or when it is later threatened,
this legal suppression of language is relaxed, either in the interests of recapturing a harmless heritage, or to
ward off demands from separatist or irredentist groups. The suppression of minority languages is not confined
to nationalism's early history. Even in the late twentieth century such policies are pursued, in the name
of the people, by governing groups seeking to consolidate their hold on state power. The 1982 Constitution
of Turkey specifically forbids any political party from concerning itself “with the defence, development or diffusion
of any non-Turkish language or culture” (quoted in Entessar, 1989). After the Indonesian government
occupied East Timor, it officially banned the teaching of Timorese in schools, proclaiming that it was bringing
‘Indonesian civilization’ to the island (Pilger, 1994).
With historical hindsight, it might seem inevitable that the nation-state system emerged, but it is hard to see
an inevitability about the particular nations themselves. After each major European war, the political map
changes: the map drawn by the Treaty of Berlin differs from that of Versailles and certainly from that of today.
Some nation-states, like Poland, change their shape, size and location. Others in the Balkans seem to
come and go, sometimes reappearing, sometimes not. Wallerstein (1991) points out that very few states today
can boast a continuous administrative entity and geographical location from 1450. Hypothetical possibilities
abound. Had forces been deployed otherwise on particular battlegrounds, would there today be other
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nations and other national identities? Had the Confederate forces not been defeated in the American Civil
War, might the territory, currently filled by the USA, now provide the locus for two independent states, each
nurturing its own separate culture and historical myths? It is possible to take a longer historical perspective.
Seton-Watson (1977) suggests that the defeat of the Albigensians in 1213 was of decisive importance. Had
fortunes gone the other way, then, when it came to the making of states several centuries later, a powerful,
united Mediterranean sea-power, stretching from Catalonia to Rome, might have emerged. One can predict
that the loyalty to this state – perhaps to be known as Mediterranea – would have been as fierce and as ‘naturally
age-old’ as that shown to any emerging European state. And la langue d'oc might now be established as
one of the great languages of the world, instead of languishing in its present state of decay (Touraine, 1985).
If it seems that too much is being made to hinge on the outcome of battles, then it should be remembered
that violence is seldom far from the surface of nationalism's history. The struggle to create the nation-state
is a struggle for the monopoly of the means of violence. What is being created – a nation-state – is itself a
means of violence. The triumph of a particular nationalism is seldom achieved without the defeat of alternative
nationalisms and other ways of imagining peoplehood. France might appear to have emerged in its historic
place with a sense of French identity nourished over centuries (Smith, 1994). The Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen implies as much. However, the achievement of this nationhood not only entailed the historical
failure of hypothetical nationalisms – of potential Mediterraneas – but the actual defeat of rival senses
of people-hood. The Bretons and the Occitans needed to be coerced into being French: any national aspirations
which they might have entertained had to be forcefully cropped.
All this is to be done in the name of the people (all the people), the nation (the whole nation) or the father/
motherland (the whole country). This has become a commonplace characteristic of the times. Today, rulers,
however tyrannical their rule, justify their sovereignty as an expression of their nation's will. Even those who
seize power through a minority coup d'état feel the need to declare to the world that their power carries national
legitimacy. Familiar clichés will be employed. For example, when Ernest Shonekan seized power in
Nigeria with the aid of the army and in the face of electoral victory being accorded to rivals, he declared that
he was acting “in the greater interests of the fatherland” (Guardian, 1 September 1993). Shonekan is another
figure, who himself possesses little lasting historical significance, but who follows the modern courtly protocol:
political leaders must claim to act in the interests of the nation, variously described as ‘the people’, ‘the motherland’
or ‘the fatherland’. Mediaeval monarchs would have found these evocations of parent-lands strangely
mystical. Their sovereignty was claimed to be derived from God; the monarch's possession of a magic, healing
touch was taken as evidence of the divine calling (Bloch, 1973). Modern rulers, by contrast, must claim,
as evidence of their calling, a common touch. In the modern state the claim to sovereignty has descended
from heaven to earth, from the clouds to the soil of the homeland and to the collectively invoked bodies of its
inhabitants.
Nationhood and the Development of Language
As the ideology of nationalism has spread across the globe, so it has shaped contemporary common sense.
Notions, which seem to us so solidly banal, turn out to be ideological constructions of nationalism. They are
‘invented permanencies’, which have been created historically in the age of modernity, but which feel as if
they have always existed. This is one reason why it is so difficult to offer explanations for nationalism. Concepts,
which an analyst might use to describe the causal factors, may themselves be historical constructs
of nationalism. A prime example is the idea of languages. As was mentioned earlier, many analysts have
claimed that language is a prime determinant of nationalist identity: those speaking the same language are
liable to claim a sense of national bond. Also, as was mentioned in the previous section, the creation of a
national hegemony often involves a hegemony of language. It would not be difficult to construct a model of
nationalism around the importance of speaking the same or different languages.
To do so would be to treat language itself as an unproblematic concept. It seems so obvious that there are dif-
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ferent languages, and that everyone who speaks must speak an identifiable language. How could the matter
be questioned? Bagehot might have thought that there have always been nations. Perhaps he exaggerated;
or perhaps he was misled by the apparent solidity of invented national permanencies. But surely languages
are different: they have always existed. Yet, a caution should be issued.
Humans might have spoken from the dawn of history, with mutually unintelligible ways of talking being developed
in different places, but this does not mean that people have thought of themselves as speaking ‘a
language’. The concept of ‘a language’ – at least in the sense which appears so banally obvious to ‘us’ –
may itself be an invented permanency, developed during the age of the nation-state. If this is the case, then
language does not create nationalism, so much as nationalism creates language; or rather nationalism creates
‘our’ common-sense, unquestioned view that there are, ‘naturally’ and unproblematically, things called
different ‘languages’, which we speak.
Mediaeval Europe, in contrast with today's world, was not a place of official vernacular languages. By and
large written communication was in Latin. The grammar, which was taught as a basic subject in the curriculum
of the trivium, was Latin grammar (Murphy, 1974). The vernacular tongues, even when used in written
form, were not considered grammatical, nor was the spelling of their vocabularies standardized. In this context,
there were no right and wrong ways to write the vernacular; and in most cases it simply was not written.
The pressures to standardize spelling, to establish correct grammars and to teach an approved form of the
native tongue were to come much later. Michel Foucault (1972) has compared the emergence of grammar
as an academic discipline in the eighteenth century with the development of medicine and economics at the
same time. In each case, the academic study was developing in the context of the emerging modern state,
which was imposing uniformity and order on its citizenry and which, according to Foucault, was “a disciplinary
society” (1986, p. 206).
In the Middle Ages, according to Douglas Johnson, “it was undoubtedly difficult for the ordinary person in one
part of France to be understood in another part of France” (1993, p. 41). Indeed, the situation persisted well
into the nineteenth century in France (Braudel, 1988). One can imagine mediaeval peasants’ relation to their
patterns of speaking. They would share ways of talking with fellow members of their village. They would recognize
these patterns – and perhaps distinctive words – especially when encountering fellow villagers away
from home. The documents of Montail-lou recount one villager, Arnaud Sicre, a shoemaker working in San
Mateo, overhearing a woman entering the workshop and speaking “the tongue of Montaillou” (Ladurie, 1978,
p. 286). He put down his tools to ask whether she did indeed come from Montaillou. The ‘tongue’ may have
been distinctive, yet it was also comprehensible to those living in neighbouring regions, which would also
have their own recognizable ways of speaking. Some words would be unfamiliar to outsiders, whilst others
would not be. As one travelled further from one's home village, the ratio of unfamiliar phrases to familiar ones
would rise, with problems of communication increasing. If one travelled to a particularly inaccessible village,
one might find few common phrases. In the case of fourteenth century Montaillou, Ladurie writes that there
was a continuum of communication between Occitania and Catalonia.
In travelling between villages and along the continuum of communication, there would be no point at which
the peasant would imagine that they had passed through a linguistic boundary, separating one distinct tongue
from another. Moments of intelligibility might get fewer, dribbling away entirely in distant horizons. The travelling
peasant, however, would not stop to ask ‘do these people speak the same language as myself?’, as if
there was an actual point at which the ratio between the familiar and the unfamiliar became critical and the
speech pattern changed from one grammatical essence to another. This essentialism, by contrast, is insinuated
into the core of modern common sense about language. We would want to know whether the speech
of Montaillou should be categorized as a dialect of Occitan and whether the inhabitants of San Mateo really
spoke a variant of Catalan. We assume the reality of underlying different deep grammars. If the modern political
map, unlike its mediaeval equivalent, contains precise boundaries, so too does the modernly imagined
map of speech. The assumptions of this imagined mapping are easily projected on to other cultures and other
times. Clifford (1992) recounts how anthropologists typically assume that each village, or each tribe, which
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they study, has its own unique language.
The modern imagining of different languages is not a fantasy, but it reflects that the world of nations is also
a world of formally constituted languages. The disciplinary society of the nation-state needs the discipline of
a common grammar. The mediaeval peasant had no official forms to complete, inquiring whether the respondent
speaks Spanish or English. No acts of parliament decreed which language was to be used in compulsory
public education or in state broadcasting; nor would the mediaeval subject have dreamt of ever going to war
over such matters. The questions about language, which today seem so ‘natural’ and so vital, did not arise.
To put the matter crudely: the mediaeval peasant spoke, but the modern person cannot merely speak; we
have to speak something – a language.
Languages and Boundaries
A world of different languages requires the constitution of categorical distinctions. A problem confronts anyone
who attempts to make distinctions between one language and another. Not all the speakers of a language
speak in the same way. Thus, some differences of speaking have to be classified as being instances of different
languages and some will be classified as differences within the same language. The notion of ‘dialect’
becomes crucial to maintain the idea of separate languages: it seems to account for the fact that not all speakers
of a language speak the same way. The word ‘dialect’ did not gain its linguistic meaning until the early
modern period (Haugen, 1966a). Previously, the linguistic problems, which the word addresses and seems
to solve, did not arise. The inhabitants of fourteenth-century Montaillou did not worry whether their tongue
was a ‘dialect’ of a wider language, or whether it was a separate language: the shoemaker was interested in
knowing whether he shared a birthplace with the woman, not whether they spoke ‘the same language’.
The idea of a dialect had little use before nation-states started establishing official ways of speaking and
writing. Differences between languages and dialect, then, became hotly contested political issues, as well
as concerns for the discipline of linguistics. If it seems obvious to us that there are different languages, it is
by no means obvious how the distinctions between languages are to be made. Suppose one stipulated that
speakers of the same language understand each other; and that speakers of different languages do not. This
would imply that all the variants (or dialects) of a single language are mutually intelligible, and that different
languages are mutually unintelligible. Linguists have emphasized that there is no simple criterion for determining
mutual intelligibility. How much comprehension should count as intelligibility? Where on the continuum
of comprehensibility is the boundary between understanding and non-understanding to be drawn?
Even if such a criterion could be applied, it would lead to very different distinctions from those which are conventionally
accepted and which seem so solid to speakers and non-speakers alike (Comrie, 1990; Ruhlen,
1987). There are instances of ‘different’ languages, such as Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, which are mutually
intelligible. As Eriksen (1993) points out, the spoken language of Norwegian cities like Bergen and Oslo
is closer to standard Danish than it is to some of the rural dialects of Norwegian. As well as the problem of
different languages which are mutually comprehensible, there is the problem of languages which encompass
mutually incomprehensible dialects. Thus, speakers of both Gheg and Tosk dialects imagine themselves to
speak the common language Albanian, although the dialects are mutually incomprehensible (Ruhlen, 1987).
More is at stake in drawing the boundary of a language than linguistics. The battle for hegemony, which accompanies
the creation of states, is reflected in the power to define language, or in what Thompson has
called the power “to make meaning stick” (1984, p. 132). This power resides not merely in the imposition of
certain words or phrases, but also in the claim of languages to be languages. The middle class of the metropolitan
areas typically will make their meanings stick as the official language, relegating other patterns within
the national boundaries to ‘dialects’, a term which almost invariably carries a pejorative meaning. As Haugen
(1966a) suggested, a ‘dialect’ is frequently a language which did not succeed politically: for example, Piedmontese
was relegated to the status of dialect after Tuscan succeeded in becoming the language of Italy.
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Nationalists, in attempting to create a separate nation, often will create a language as a distinct language,
although they might claim to be creating the nation on the basis of the language, as if the latter were an ancient,
‘natural’ fact. When Herder was praising the German language as the soul of the German nation, he
was arguing to bring both – the language and the nation – into existence, whilst treating both as if age-old.
The speech of the territory that was to become Germany comprised several mutually unintelligible ways of
talking, none of which had succeeded yet in establishing its status as the ‘correct’ form of an overall German
language. At that time, Prussians spoke Low German and “learnt High German as a second language”
(Hawkins, 1990, p. 105). In the following century, with the rise of Prussia, ‘standard’ German was to emerge
as the north German pronunciation of southern High German.
Again and again, the boundaries between languages, and the classification of dialects, have followed the
politics of state-making. Where national boundaries are established, then, the differences in speech patterns
either side of the boundary are more likely to be seen as belonging to distinctly different languages by the
speakers themselves, their national centres and the world in general. When the Dutch went their way politically,
their form of lower Franconian was to become a separate language, in contrast to other forms which have
become known as dialects of German (Schmidt, 1993). Galician, spoken in Spain, and Portuguese, spoken
across the border, are now generally thought to be distinct languages. In linguistic terms, French and Italian
merge into each other, but the speech patterns on the French side of the border are likely to be seen as dialects
of French, and those on the Italian side as dialects of Italian (Ruhlen, 1987). Similarly, Friul in Northern
Italy is similar to Romanesch in Switzerland, but, again, national boundaries reinforce a sense of linguistic
separateness (White, 1991). The creation of Norwegian is instructive. The decolonization from Denmark was
marked by a struggle for language. First, the state of Norway was to declare its own language, creating a
spelling to match so-called Norwegian patterns of talking, rather than Danish ones. Then, there was the internal
battle between two rival patterns of speech, the Riksmål and Landsmål, both having claims to be considered
as the proper Norwegian (Haugen, 1966b). In all these cases, professional linguists have tended to fall
into line with accepted practices, accepting Norwegian and Danish as different languages, High and Low German
as variants of the same language etcetera (Comrie, 1990). As Ruhlen (1987) admits, because there are
no purely linguistic criteria for classifying languages, linguists follow common beliefs about identifying similar
and different languages.
The common practices of naming languages tend to emerge through struggles for hegemony. And what is
made into a common practice can, under certain circumstances, be unmade or become a locus of struggle.
For example, Italian law makes a distinction between koine (dialects) of Italian and full-blown minority languages.
Friulan and Sardinian activists campaigned for years to have their speech recognized in law as official
languages. Successive central governments, fearful of separatism and the cost of grants for minority
languages, resisted their demands. In the debate whether Friulan and Sard were dialects or languages, both
sides have their expert linguists, contesting the other side's characterization of what constitutes a language
and what is merely a dialect (Petrosino, 1992). More dramatically, the Turkish government officially denies
that its Kurdish citizens are Kurds and that there is a Kurdish language: the Kurds really are “mountain Turks”,
who have forgotten their native, Turkish tongue (Entessar, 1989).
One might suppose that nationalist movements, seeking to form separate states, will seek to convert dialect
into language. The power of writing down a way of speaking should not be underestimated: it provides material
evidence for the claim that a separate language exists. In order to highlight differences from the ‘official’
governing language, separate spellings might be adopted and these might highlight the area's distinctive way
of talking. These spellings, written on public notices and used in mythic poetry, will proclaim the uniqueness
of the speech and its status as a language. Sometimes different orthographies can divide mutually intelligible
ways of speaking, as in the case of Serbian and Croat, and also Urdu and Hindu. The status of the writing,
however, can be contested or officially branded as dialect. In 1994, for the first time since the 1872 Scottish
Education Act banned the use of lowland Scottish (or Lalland) in schools, Glasgow University accepted a dissertation
written in Lalland: topic of the ‘deisertation’ was ‘Scots spellin’. Significantly, the university senate
only agreed to accept the thesis on the understanding that its writing be classified as a dialect of English, not
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as a separate language (Guardian, 8 July 1994).
Writing down a ‘dialect’ is not a simple issue, because a particular way of speaking has to be selected.
Braudel (1988) writes of the problem faced by those who wished to translate the official French documents
of the post-Revolutionary state into local ‘patois’. Each village seemed to have its own way of speaking and
its own accent. The Director of the département of Corrèze spoke about the difficulty of finding acceptable
translations: “The translator, who happened to come from the canton of Juillac, did not speak with the same
accent as the other cantons which all vary slightly; the difference becomes marked at a distance of seven or
eight leagues” (quoted in Braudel, 1988, p. 92). Another official, according to Braudel, proposed translating
the Declaration of the Rights of Man into a devised patois, which would be “midway between all the different
jargons” of the peoples in the Bordeaux area. One might surmise what might have happened had the authorities
accepted the idea of such a compromise language, which did not represent the speaking patterns of any
existing person. Had this language been taught in schools, and were it used by later poets to extol the historic
romance of the area, then separatist groups today might be demanding its official recognition. The University
of Bordeaux might be faced with doctoral ‘deisertations’ written in this apparently ancient tongue.
The establishment of a distinct language involves its own internal struggles for hegemony, as one way of
speaking is to stand as the model for the whole language. Were the Kurdish movement in Turkey to champion
an official Kurdish language, then it must select from among its supporters’ various ways of talking. In the
1930s and 1940s the Sardinian nationalist movement avoided the language issue. To have promoted Sard
as a separate language, and to have held it as the symbol of Sardinian independence, would have invited
conflict. Sard contained a variety of different forms: even to refer to ‘Sard’, as such, implies a contestable
uniformity. One form of Sardinian speaking would have to have been selected as the official form, with other
variations transformed into mere dialects, or poor relations to ‘metropolitan Sard’. In order not to alienate
speakers of any variety of Sardinian speech, the leaders of the pre-war Sardinian nationalist movement downplayed
the importance of language (White, 1991).
The case of the separatist Lombard League is interesting. In the early 1980s, the League declared Lombardian
to be a separate language from Italian (Ruzza, 1993). Activists daubed out the final vowels on street
signs in Lombardy. In response, opponents mocked the idea that Lombardian was a proper language. There
is little point in turning to the linguistic textbooks to settle the issue: some classify Lombardian as a separate
language (Grimes, 1988), whilst others do not (Vincent, 1987). Had the League's programme been successful
during the early 1980s, and had Lombardy seceded from Italy, establishing its own state boundaries, a prediction
might be made: increasingly Lombardian would have come to be recognized as different from Italian, as
Norwegian is from Danish and Swedish. After a while, linguistic textbooks would agree on the matter. However,
in the late 1980s the League dropped the language issue, and, indeed, it changed its name from Lombard
to Northern League (Ruzza, 1993). The issue of language was alienating potential supporters, who considered
themselves Lombardian but did not speak the language. Also, a ‘correct’ form of Lombardian would have
to have been created and few supporters were prepared to volunteer their area of Lombardy as the home of
incorrectly spoken Lombardian.
Conflicts over language are commonplace in the contemporary world. They are comprehensible to ‘our’ common
sense: reports about French and Flemish speakers in Belgium, or Urdu and Hindu speakers in India, do
not occasion puzzlement. Such conflicts are not just struggles about language, but importantly they are conducted
through language (as well as through violence). In this respect, the universal, or international, aspects
of nationalism are crucial. Without common notions, which can be translated across particular languages and
dialects, the conflicts would not be pursued in their nationalist forms. Foremost amongst such notions are the
ideas of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ themselves. These terms must be reproduced in every language which is
used by its speakers to claim that they possess a separate language, and that, in consequence, they are a
separate nation, whose internal differences of speech are merely differences of ‘dialect’.
Notions of language and dialect are not the exclusive property of ‘extremists’, who pursue narrow national
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dreams. They are part of ‘our’ common sense. This has methodological and political implications. Nations
may be ‘imagined communities’, but the pattern of the imaginings cannot be explained in terms of differences
of language, for languages themselves have to be imagined as distinct entities. If nationalism is to be studied
as a widespread ideology, and if nationalist assumptions are to be found in common-sense notions about
what a language is, then nationalism should not be projected on to others, as if ‘we’ are free from all its effects.
In addition, the assumptions, beliefs and shared representations, which depict the world of nations as
our natural world, are historical creations: they are not the ‘natural’ common sense of all humans.
At other times people did not hold the notions of language and dialect, let alone those of territory and sovereignty,
which are so commonplace today and which seem so materially real to ‘us’. So strongly are such
notions embedded in contemporary common sense that it is easy to forget that they are invented permanencies.
The mediaeval cobblers in the workshops of Montaillou or San Mateo might, with the distance of 700
years, now appear to us narrow, superstition-bound figures. But they would have found our ideas on language
and nation strangely mystical; they would be puzzled why this mysticism could be a matter of life and death.
• nationalism
• nation and state
• dialects
• nation
• peoplehood
• patriotism
• language
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