What Then is a Nation?
Conceptualizing National Community
What then is a nation? What distinguishes this form of association that has risen to such prominence in modern life that we have felt compelled to coin the term nationalism to describe our relationship to it?
First of all, a nation is a community. In other words, a nation is a group of people who imagine themselves connected to each other as objects of special concern and loyalty by something that they share. As such, a nation is more than a set or species and less than an organization. The mere sharing of some characteristic or practice, such as skin color or a language, may make individuals members of a set; but until they affirm what they share as a source of mutual concern and loyalty these individuals do not form a community. And while the members of nations may aspire to organize their lives to achieve certain shared ends – for example, as states – nations can and have existed without organized means of coordinating their members’ activities toward common ends.
Second, and perhaps most important of all, a nation is an intergenerational community.50 The members of a nation share something that links them back in time to particular points of origin and forward into an indefinite future.51 They share predecessors and successors who are regularly invoked to deepen the ties that bind the living and extend their sense of obligation to past and future generations. Moreover, nations, like families, extend community through time rather than merely beyond the present.52
Third, the nation is a cultural heritage community. In other words, it is the affirmation of a shared inheritance of cultural artifacts, such as language, founding symbols, stories of origin, etc., that creates a nation’s intergenerational community. People inherit a vast array of cultural artifacts from previous generations, much of which they ignore or take for granted. But when they affirm as a source of mutual concern and loyalty some part of the cultural heritage that they share with each other, they create and reinforce the kind of intergenerational community characteristic of nations.
Let me emphasize that it is shared cultural inheritance, rather than shared cultural practice or expression, that defines a nation as I understand it. That is why I describe the nation as a cultural heritage community, rather than more simply as a cultural community. You do not need to speak, or even like, Gaelic to be a member of the Irish nation; you need merely to imagine yourself connected by ties of special concern and loyalty to those with whom you share a cultural heritage that includes somewhere in past and present the speaking of Gaelic.53 Similarly, you do not need to practice, or even like, Judaism in order to be a member of the Jewish nation (as opposed to a member of the Jewish religious community); you need merely imagine yourself connected by ties of social friendship to those who share the inheritance of cultural artifacts that reflect Jewish practice and history.
Fourth, a nation is a singular or irreproducible community, hence the proper name that it bears. In imagining a cultural inheritance as a source of social friendship, the members of nations affirm the slicing up of human experience into units that reflect the irreproducible contingencies of history – that x followed y in one case and something else in another – rather than either natural necessity or conscious design. Like individuals, each of these units is known by a proper name that marks the singularity of the combination of experiences that constitutes it. And like individuals, each of these units is unique, no matter many things that they may share with each other. National community thus helps situate individuals in time by associating them with contingently divided lines of cultural inheritance.
Fifth, the cultural heritage affirmed by nations is associated with particular territories, an association that gives these territories special value for their members. As we shall see, national attachments to particular territories become especially problematic when, in the wake of the spread of popular sovereignty theories, nations claim the right to have the final say over what goes on in their “own” lands.
Sixth, a nation is, to use Craig Calhoun’s expression, a “categorical” community: it links people directly and equally rather than by means of hierarchical sub-communities.54 With the crucial exception of children, who usually receive their nationality through their parents, nationality is not received indirectly through one’s relationship to a social superior. Accordingly, every adult member of a nation is as much a member as any other. That does not mean that nations cannot coexist with caste and other forms of status hierarchy. It merely means that nationality cuts across and competes with these status hierarchies. A deep attachment to caste and other status hierarchies is bound to make nationhood, something we share equally with slaves, untouchables, and outcasts, less attractive and significant. Conversely, the rejection of such hierarchies is bound, all other things being equal, to make nationhood look more important and attractive, which, we shall see, is one of the reasons why nation and individual have risen to prominence together in modern political life.
A nation, then, is a categorical community in which the sharing of a singular and contingent cultural heritage inspires individuals to imagine themselves connected to each other – and to certain territories – through time by ties of mutual concern and loyalty. The rest of the chapter develops and defends this definition of national community.
Here I shall merely point out that there is nothing new or distinctly “modern” about the nation conceived in this way. This way of imagining community has a long history, back to the ancient Greek world and beyond. It is nationalism, not national community, that is relatively new or temporally modern. In other words, it is our attitude toward national community, in particular, our political attitude, that has changed in the modern world, rather than nationhood itself. The failure to distinguish between national community and nationalism is a major limitation of many otherwise insightful “modernist” theories of nationalism. We need, I shall argue, to be able to speak about “nations before nationalism,” to use John Armstrong’s phrase,55 if we are to make sense of nationalism as a social phenomenon. For we need to able to ask how and why did an old and familiar form of community, the nation, comes to take on such striking political importance in the modern age. If, as many theorists insist, we insert the demand for sovereignty into our very definition of national community,56 then it becomes impossible to pose such questions.
The semantic history of the term nation is often depicted as a wild ride that careens from one new meaning to another.57 The story usually begins with something similar to the meaning I have just advanced. It shifts to the much narrower and more idiosyncratic conception of nationhood applied to Church and university associations in the Middle Ages, turns to the focus on communities that share a common government in the early modern period, and finally ends with the romantic ideal of a unique cultural community at the beginning of the 19th century.
The problem with such semantic histories, however, is that they focus so much attention on new ways of using terms that they tend to obscure continuities, even when older meanings continue to inform common usage. There is no doubt that the term nation has accumulated an unusually diverse set of meanings over the millennia. But that does not mean that the original meaning or the phenomenon it characterized ever disappeared. As Susan Reynolds and other students of mediaeval European history have made clear, “there is no foundation at all for the belief, common among students of modern nationalism, that the word natio was seldom used in the middle ages except to describe nationes into which university students were divided. It was used much more widely than that, often as a synonym for gens . . . and was thought of as a community of custom, descent, and government.”58
As for the common belief in an early modern or Enlightenment transformation of the term nation into a culturally neutral community merely sharing a common government, one telling example should suffice to bring it into question. Accounts of this transformation usually invoke the definition of term nation in that great monument of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie.59 That definition does indeed begin by describing the nation as a “collective word used to characterize a considerable number of people who inhabit a certain stretch of territory, bounded by certain limits, and obey the same government.” But it immediately goes on to suggest that “each nation has its own character,” as illustrated by the familiar proverb, “glib as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, naughty as an Englishman, proud as a Scot, and drunk as a German."60 Since three of his five examples, the Italians, Scots, and Germans, lacked a common government during the 18th century, the author of this entry clearly does not deem a shared government a necessary condition of nationhood – nor, for that matter, is he reluctant to associate nations with distinctive cultural traits.
It is certainly true that the term nation starts to be used in new ways in the 17th and 18th centuries, as a synonym for the people, the group from which states were increasingly seen as deriving their authority. Indeed, I shall argue that the key to understanding the rise of nationalism in modern political life lies in the effect of this new way of thinking about political authority on an old way of imagining community, i.e. the intergenerational ties of the nation. But in order to understand this effect we need first to distinguish clearly between the two ways of imagining groups that they represent, regardless of the terms used to express these images. To that end, the next chapter outlines the differences between these two images of group membership, which I describe as the people and the nation, and then shows how they support two very different images of the nation-state.
Nevertheless, while my definition of the nation reflects common usage for more than two thousand years, my primary aim in this chapter is to identify a social phenomenon, a form of association that has taken on unprecedented political importance in the last 300 years, rather than to clarify our use of terms. The semantic history of the term nation and its equivalents in other languages is quite complex. But it is the slipperiness of the phenomenon itself that has made the definition of national community so frustrating, not just the ambiguity of the words we use to describe it. For even after we have cleaned up our use of language, we still have to figure out what to make of a form of community that seems to draw on almost every source of distinctiveness, from language and territorial boundaries to religious belief and political organization.
At this point many scholars simply throw up their hands and conclude that a nation “is a group that thinks it is a nation.”61 In doing so, they fall back on the need for subjective affirmation that the nation shares with every other form of human community. It is not clear, however, that one learns anything of importance about the distinctive character of national community from emphasizing its subjective element in this way. If a nation is a group of people who think that they form a nation, to what kind of social group do they imagine that they belong? A nation, which, in turn, is a group that thinks of itself as a nation.62 If this kind of circularity were unavoidable, then we might have to grit our teeth and make the best of it. But it is not. For the fact that we must rely on subjective affirmation to confirm the existence of nations does not mean that a nation is whatever people say it is. It merely means that whatever shape nations take, we should look for it in the imagination rather than in any particular form of social organization.
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