:: Media Times Review Blog ::

Anthony D. Smith, Axess Magazine

The nation endures. Many have predicted that national identity will be replaced by global identity. But this is true only for a small global elite that most closely resembles a pre-national aristoricracy. For most of the world’s citizens national identity has maintained, and even strengthened its grip. But what do we now mean by terms such as “nation” and “state”?

The modern world in which we live is a global society. Ours is the first global epoch. Economic exchange, political interdependence and mass communications have made the whole world “one place.” This means that our sense of community and our identities, too, are global, at least in aspiration. At present, of course, we possess multiple identities—local, gender, class, ethnic and the like. But these are situational, and they are subsumed in and transcended by our approaching global identity. Politically, in a postmodern era, that will be the identity that matters.

In one form or another, this is the received wisdom that is so widely and insistently proclaimed. So insistently, that one begins to suspect it conceals an uncomfortable and undesirable truth, namely, that whatever the future may hold, we still remain firmly in the grip of our national identities in a national epoch. Over a century ago, Ernest Renan foresaw the rise of a European federation, and Marx and Engels awaited the coming supersession of “national narrow-mindedness.” Yet, when we look around us, we still see the same national landscape, the same jockeying for power and influence by national states, the same national identities and loyalties that helped to ignite two world wars and turn the globe into a series of territorial national states with their assertive nationalisms.

But are these national identities and loyalties so monolithic as in the past? Has not national identity become malleable and hybrid as a result of the massive influx of economic migrants and political asylum-seekers that we have witnessed in recent decades? Of course, this assumes that in the past national identity was a kind of fixed quantity, an essence, where today it has become fluid and fragmented. But it is doubtful if past national identities were ever so unified, let alone homogenous, as nationalists would have us believe; and it is equally unclear that they have become as fragmented as postmodernists like Homi Bhabha make out. It is equally possible to claim, with Michael Billig, that national beliefs are “engrained” in our societies, that the “unwaved flag” we take for granted remains the potent, if tacit, symbol of our bedrock sentiments and assumptions.

Can we go beyond opinion and argument and produce evidence for the persistence or decline of nations and national identities, at least in the West? The case of non-Western nations is, after all, rather different. They have often only recently emerged as a result of anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa, or gained a distinctive profile, as in Latin America. Even in Eastern Europe, the Nazi ethnic holocaust succeeded by forty years of communist suppression and followed by sudden rejuvenation, suggests a quite different set of questions and arguments.

Much of the argument about the supersession of nations in a global epoch revolves around the idea of the “myth” of the nation and its hold over people’s hearts and imaginations. By myth I mean a widely believed tale about an heroic past which meets present needs. For Benedict Anderson, the nation is an “imagined community”—and imagined as finite, sovereign and horizontal or cross-class. It is in this image that nations are created and persist, filling the void left by the decline of the great world religions and sacred monarchies. As a creation of the imagination, the myth of the nation is, claims Anderson, unlikely to fade away, for it answers to the human need for ultimate goodness and immortality.

Anderson’s analysis has surely captured the poignancy of the subjective feelings associated with nationhood. But it is too general, too abstractly couched, to allow us to assess the “health” and vigour of actual nations, or groups of nations or, for that matter, the robustness and tenacity or, conversely, the attenuation and decay of a sense of national identity. For that purpose, we need a more concrete and precise measure, one that can relate subjective sentiments and imaginings to more objective and concrete elements of nationhood.

That in turn requires us to propose an alternative definition and approach, one which separates the terms “nation” and “state,” while acknowledging their historical relationship, and which also distinguishes the concept of the nation (and national identity) from nationalism, the ideology and movement. Similarly, it helps to keep apart the term “national sentiment,” a sense of loyalty to the nation and a desire for its well-being, from both the nation and nationalism. In practice what this means is that the decline of the phenomenon referred to by one term need not entail the decline of phenomena referred to by the others: for example, the decline of nationalism need not be accompanied by the decline of nations or national identities.

SINCE IT IS the longevity of the myth of nations with which I am primarily concerned, let me start with the concept of the nation. Here I find it useful to define the nation as a named and self-defined human community of shared history and destiny, possessed of a homeland whose members cultivate shared myths, memories, symbols and traditions, and create a distinctive public culture and legal system. This is an ideal or pure type of the nation; few actual nations attain to this ideal. Most historical nations only approximate to this standard. The concept of national identity can also be defined ideal-typically, as the continual reproduction and reinterpretation of a pattern of symbols, values, myths and memories that compose the distinctive heritage of the nation, and the identification of individual members with that cultural heritage. As we shall see, this latter definition has built into it the probability of change, for the elements of national identities are always subject to conflict and negotiation. In fact, this is, paradoxically, one of the keys to the persistence of nations.

The same method can be used to analyse the ideological movement of nationalism. In ideal-typical terms, nationalism can be defined as an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a human population, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation. It is these common goals and this reference to the nation that marks off nationalism from other kinds of social and political movements. But in practice, nationalisms, as historical phenomena, take different forms according to the circumstances of the community in question and the material and ideal interests of their principal bearers. Again, like national identities, nationalisms are not monolithic: on the contrary, we may expect to find rival and competing nationalisms in a given community.

UNLIKE, SAY, economic or political interests, myths and symbols tend to outlive the conditions and processes that led to their emergence.Herein lies a second key to the potency of the myth of the nation. But, to grasp why the national myth has been and remains so powerful and tenacious, we need first to enquire into the processes that encouraged the formation of nations.

The first of these processes is a growing self-definition of the community. An important aspect of this is the acquisition of a collective proper name; not just a designation by outsiders, as the Greeks called the Canaanites of the Mediterranean littoral phoinikes (Phoenicians), but one that the members use to define themselves, both to themselves and to the outside world. This is all part of the process of self-differentiation and self-characterisation, in opposition to others who are felt to be dissimilar and alien.

A community of “history and destiny” is one that cultivates shared memories of one or more ethnic pasts and aspirations for its special path into the future. In other words, we are not dealing here with the past as seen by more or less dispassionate historians, nor the future as forecast by more or less unbiased prognosticians, but with the memories of the ethnic past or pasts as retold by the members of that community to each other down the generations, and with the distinctive communal future as envisioned by members of the community, the special fate marked out for a special people. The growth of personnel entrusted with such retelling and envisioning are vital elements in the formation of ethnic communities and nations.

Equally important is the cultivation and transmission of myths and symbols peculiar to the community, which mark out that community and explain it to the members. Here, myths and symbols of origin, like the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus, or the baptism of Clovis, are prominent elements of the fund of myths, symbols, memories, values and traditions that constitutes a repository of creative communal energy and understanding. Even more important, in the long run, are myths of ethnic election through which the community is assured of an exclusive God-given or history-endowed mission, whether by means of a special covenant, or more usually by being assigned a unique task in the moral economy of the world. Such myths become particularly important in times of crisis, for they help to ensure the persistence of the community through tribulations.

That nations are possessed of their own “homelands” is a truism, even if in fact some of them may be deprived of their ancestral lands. It follows that territorialisation represents a key process in the formation of nations, not just in the sense of physical acquisition of land, but of recognition by outsiders as belonging to the community, and by the members as their very own. This latter involves the rise of “ethnoscapes,” in which ethnic communities and specific terrains grow together, that is, the members of ethnic communities become primarily attached to a particular terrain and no other, and exalt it above all others. In a further development, the ethnoscape may become a sacred territory—sanctified by saints and heroes, or by the holiness of the people, or by the tombs of the ancestors.

A key process in the formation of nations is the forging of a distinctive public culture. Though its contents vary with the community and its ethno-history, it includes a set of political symbols (flag, emblem, anthem, coins, monuments and the like), public rituals (national days, saluting the flag, parades, oath-swearing, public funerals, etc.), distinctive codes (of mores, languages, etc.) and styles of public education. This too is a gradual process, and one that may for long be directed primarily to the elites or to selected strata of the community. But the important point is that these are national rites, symbols and codes held in common and displayed in public.

This development signals the growth of a single legal system, and the growing observance of shared laws and customs across the territory of the community. Lawcodes have been known from as far back as ancient Sumer and Babylon, but they have generally encompassed either city-states or empires rather than ethnic communities or nations. Again, while in themselves unable to differentiate and create a nation, their observance helps to reinforce a nation that is in-the-making as a result of the other processes of nation-formation. A standardised legal system covering the entire community and not just its localities, binds members more firmly to each other, creating new commonalities; and the same is true of shared customs and conventions.

Bringing all this together, we may now say that, when these processes develop and combine, we can expect to see communities approximating to the ideal-type of the nation. In practice, actual historical nations normally fall short of the ideal-type. Nevertheless, use of this type of analysis provides us with a touchstone for grasping the development and formation of nations. In the same way, this method can also help us to gauge the decline of nations, that is, the attenuation of national ties and the erosion of national identities. This will also help us to assess some of the current debates about the impact of globalisation on the resilience of nations and the persistence of nationalism and national identities.

Read the full article >>>