Nation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Many studies exploring nations and nationalism have embraced constructivist or postmodern lenses, according to which belonging to a nation is seen as an erroneous belief in a myth that needs to be corrected. In the words of Aviel Roshwald (2006), “The stories peoples, communities, and movements tell about themselves are seen as masks that must be pulled away if their true faces are to be revealed.” Nations have been portrayed as constructs, as “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson’s term, 1983) serving elites interested in manipulating the masses to obtain power. Such perspectives tend to ignore the role of the people in choosing which images to accept and which discourses to follow. In addition, they make it difficult to assess the tenacity of deeply rooted, historical traditions.

The Primordialist Perspectives

Recently there was a comeback of the so-called primordia list perspectives on nations and nationalism. Followers of scholar Anthony D. Smith tend to see national identity as an empirical fact, a social reality. They emphasize the stability of ethnic and national communities. Smith (1996) defined the ethnie (a feeling of kinship) as the core around which nations are built. According to Smith, “National sentiment is no construct. It has a real, tangible base. At its root is a feeling of kinship, of the extended family, that distinguishes the nation from every other kind of sentiment.” Smith embraces a view of the nation as an enduring community of “history and culture, possessing a unified territory, economy, mass education system, and common legal rights.”

Although Smith and his followers would probably agree that the majority of modern nations emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, “in the modern world inaugurated by the French and American revolutions”—they are likely to argue that the existence of ethnic origin myths, the mobilization of communities based on language, and similar phenomena suggest that modern nations have premodern ancestors. This is a major insight of the primordialist school of thought. According to this perspective, in order to understand modern nations, the development of nationhood must be traced over long periods of time, not associated with one particular historical period.

According to the primordialist theory, nations will never disappear. The main reason for the eternal livelihood of nations is their ability to build on the preexisting memories and ethnic myths that form the basis of every community. In short, to use a famous phrase coined by Ernest Gellner, nations as seen by Smith’s school of thought have a “navel” or ethnie, which is unlikely to disappear any time soon. Globalization, the reemergence of regions, and the growth of international institutions, such as the European Union, are only going to strengthen the primordial sentiments that are at the core of modern nations.

Alternative Ways To Conceptualize Nations

An alternative way of conceptualizing nations is to explore them as the outcomes of modern social changes, as historically specific constructs, or as communities without “navels.” Nations are perceived as constructs of historical, industrial, and communicative developments (i.e., the invention of mass media, print, and the spread of ideas). The modernists (included in this school of thought are also constructivists, postmodern nists, and institutionalists) see pr imordialist approaches as “expressions of nationalism itself.” Primordialist approaches are declared to be fundamentally flawed. Nations should be studied as ever-changing dependent variables, as outcomes of numerous complex historical processes, and as historical contingencies.

Scholars working within these schools of thought are likely to challenge the idea of a “unitary nation” and try to deconstruct the concept of the “nation-state. «They are likely to point to the historical evidence showing that states have emerged without nations, and some nations certainly have emerged without the blessings of their own state. Nationalism strives to make culture and polity (i.e., nation and state) congruent by providing a political roof for a culture, and the mythical imaginations of “nations” created by nationalists need to be destroyed.

The constructivist approaches are supported by the case studies conducted by Yuri Slezkine and Rogers Brubaker. Yuri Slezkine’s 1994 path–breaking article “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism” argues that despite the russifying element in the Soviet nationalities policy, non–Russian Soviet nationalities managed both to gain some power and to develop their national cultures within the USSR. Slezkine suggests that the Soviet regime suffered from “ethno-philia”; it suppressed individual rights but consistently promoted group rights by supporting national cadres and allowing education in non– Russian languages. In his view, the USSR institutionalized “ethno-territorial federalism.” Slezkine expressed it this way: “If the USSR was a communal apartment, then every family that inhabited it was entitled to a room of its own.” His argument (that instead of destroying the nations, the USSR constructed them) is one of the most convincing case studies supporting the constructivist definition of a nation as the product of state policies.

Similarly, Rogers Brubaker’s Nationalism Reframed (1996) defines a nation as an “institutionalized form.” According to Brubaker, instead of asking, «What is a nation?” the students of nations should dwell on how nationhood is institutionalized within and among states. This way of thinking would help to separate categories of analysis from practical categories. Nations are practical categories, not categories of analysis, and, according to his argument, categories of analysis do not need to be invoked to understand the power of nations.

Is There A Solution?

Movement toward a middle position has become acceptable in the study of nations. Smith’s recent writings on ethno-symbolism are part of this trend. Ethno-symbolism acknowledges the insights of constructivism and differs from primordialism in that it highlights the role of historical memory and symbolism instead of dwelling on “biological,” unchanging characteristics of nations. John Hutchinson’s 2004 Nations as Zones of Conflict is a noteworthy contribution to this emerging paradigm. Hutchinson reconceptualizes the nation as “a field of conflicting interpretations,” thus drawing attention to the role of conflict and traumatic memory in the construction of nations. According to this view, competing loyalties have always been part of the processes of nation construction. Global processes, such as empire building, inspired the consolidation of populations into smaller groups (such as ethnic groups or nations). Later, the newly formed groups, such as nations, became the backbone of broader, more encompassing networks.

Hutchinson’s critics, such as Gerard Gelanty (Gelanty et al., 2008), point to the importance of civic conceptions of nations (which is reminiscent of Ernest Renan’s definition of the nation as a “daily plebiscite”) and the existence of multicultural nations.

Gelanty argues that supranational projects such as the European Union may change the quality of national identity by inspiring most nations in Europe to adopt a different (“European”) dimension, although these projects are not capable of “killing the nation” as a locus of identity. This observation suggests that scholars are likely to continue to debate the definition of the nation and its influence in the near future.

Bibliography:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Deutch, Karl. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1953.
Gelanty, Gerard, John Hutchinson, Eric Kaufmann, Umut Ozkirimli, and Andreas Wimmer. “Debate on John Hutchinson’s Nations as Zones of Conflict.” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (2008): 1–28.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Hutchinson, John. Nations as Zones of Conflict. Thousands Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004.
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Elley and Ronald Suny, 42–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1882.
Roshwald, Aviel. The Endurance of Nationalism and Modern Dilemmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Slezkine,Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–452.
Smith, Anthony D. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
“The Origins of Nations.” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Elley and Ronald Suny, 106–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

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