THEORIES OF NATIONALISM

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Nationalism.html

FS DIP 112: Philippine Nationalism and CultureFS DIP 112: Philippine Nationalism and CultureA.M. SALVA

5 Nationalist theorists● Ernest Gellner, ● Miroslav Hroch, ● Eric Hobsbawm, ● Ernest Renan and ● Benedict Anderson.

These five theorists have contributed a tremendous amount to the study of the rise of nationalism. Gellner, Hroch and Hobsbawm propose general models for the rise of nations, while Renan and Anderson define nationality and examine the spirit behind it.

Ernest Gellner

the most influential theorist in the study of nationalism. five stages in the transition:

1. Baseline: "A world exists where ethnicity is still not yet self-evidently present, and where the idea of any link between it and political legitimacy is almost entirely absent."

Ernest Gellner

2. Nationalist Irredentism: "A world which has inherited and retained most of its political boundaries and structures from the previous stage, but within which ethnicity as a political principle—in other words, nationalism—is beginning to operate…The old borders and polities are under pressure from nationalist agitation."

Ernest Gellner

3. Emergence of Nationalist States: "National Irredentism triumphant and self-defeating. Plural empires collapse, and with them the entire dynastic-religious style of political legitimation, and it is replaced by nationalism as the main effective principle. A set of smaller states emerge, purporting to fulfill the national destiny of the ethnic group with which they are identified. This condition is self-defeating, in so far as these new units are just as minority-haunted as the larger ones which had preceded them. The new units are haunted by all the weaknesses of their precursors, plus some additional ones of their own. "

Ernest Gellner

4. Nacht and Nebel. "This is a term employed by the Nazis for some of their operations in the course of the Second World War. Under cover of wartime secrecy, or in the heat of conflict and passion, or during the period of retaliatory indignation, moral standards are suspended, and the principle of nationalism, demanding compact homogenous ethnic groups within given political-territorial units, is implemented with a new ruthlessness. It is no longer done by the older and benign method of assimilation, but by mass murder or forcible transplantation of populations."

Ernest Gellner

5. Cultural Convergence: "High level of satiation of the nationalist requirement, plus generalized affluence, plus cultural convergence, leads to a diminution, though not the disappearance, of the virulence of nationalist revindication."*Gellner grounds each stage historically. It is interesting to note that he considers the world on eve of the French Revolution in 1789 the "baseline" society, although it bears very little resemblance to either one of the two societies Gellner describes as "baseline." Prior to the French Revolution, dynastic monarchies invoked the Divine Right of Kings to apportion land and to govern the people.

Miroslav Hroch

● classifies a nation as "a large social group integrated not by one but by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships (economic, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical, historical) and their subjective reflection in collective consciousness."

Miroslav Hroch

three keys to creating a "nation:"

1. "a 'memory' of a common past, treated as a 'destiny' of the group;

2. a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group or beyond it;

3. a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society."

*three keys to creating a national identity generally occur in Phase A:

Miroslav Hroch

● Phase A: Activists strive to lay the foundation for a national identity. They research the cultural, linguistic, social and sometimes historical attributes of a non-dominant group in order to raise awareness of the common traits—but they do this "without pressing specifically national demands to remedy deficits."

Miroslav Hroch

● Phase B: "A new range of activists emerged, who sought to win over as many of their ethnic group as possible to the project of creating a future nation."

● Phase C: The majority of the population forms a mass movement. "In this phase, a full social movement comes into being and movement branches into conservative-clerical, liberal and democratic wings, each with its own program."

Eric Hobsbawm

● incorporates Hroch's three phases into his model for the development of nations and adds to them:

National Consciousness: Hobsbawm's first stage describes how "national consciousness" develops "unevenly among the social groupings and regions of a country…the popular masses—workers, servants, peasants—are the last to be affected by it" (Nations and Nationalism 12).

Eric HobsbawmPhase A: Hobsbawm adopts Hroch's terminology, describing Phase A as the emergence of cultural, literary and folkloric identity for a particular social group or region (12). Within this phase, Hobsbawm cites three criteria for making claims of nationality:

Eric Hobsbawm

Hobsbawm cites three criteria:

1."Its historic association with a current state or one with a fairly lengthy and recent past"

2."The existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative vernacular"

3."A proven capacity for conquest"

Eric HobsbawmPhase B/ Popular Proto-Nationalism: A body emerges, which consists of pioneers and militants of "the national idea." They begin to campaign for this idea of "nationality" (12). He gives four main criteria for the development of "popular proto-nationalism":

● 1. Language

● 2. Ethnicity

● 3. Religion

● 4. "The consciousness of belonging or having belonged to a lasting political entity—the most decisive criterion of proto-nationalism"

Eric Hobsbawm

Phase C: "Nationalist programmes acquire mass support, or at least some of the the mass support that nationalists always claim they represent"

Eric Hobsbawm

1. "The transformation of nationalism" (1870-1918): In this period, the world witnessed the completion of German and Italian unifications during the

"Mazzinian phase" (1870-1880), as well as the collapse of multinational empires

(the Hapsburg empire, the Ottoman empire, Russia) from 1880-1918 (101-130)

Eric Hobsbawm

2. "The apogee of nationalism" (1918-1950): he describes this period as the triumph of the nineteenth century "principle of nationality" .

3. Nationalism in the late twentieth century: the rise of "internationalism" .

Ernest Renan

"a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things constitute this soul or spiritual principle:

● One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories;

● the other is a present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form".

Ernest Renan

Sacrifices form the foundation of "nations"—"a nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future".

Ernest Renan

● disregards conventional proposals that race, religion and language generate nationalism. However, he does cite geography as a significant factor.

● also emphasized, most nations began as dynasties. According to Renan, dynastic territories progress to nations in one of three ways: dynastic unions, general popular consciousness and direct will of provinces

Benedict Anderson● proposed that nationalism filled the void left by

the decline of religious and dynastic territorial control. He writes, "Through the general principle of verticality, dynastic marriages brought together diverse populations under new apices" .

● The power of dynastic unions emerged most clearly through the Hapsburg family. Monarchs invoked the Divine Right of Kings to manipulate their subjects (as opposed to their citizens), and the Hapsburg family embodies that potent combination of religion and a monarchy.

Benedict Anderson● Monarchs invoked the Divine Right of Kings to

manipulate their subjects (as opposed to their citizens), and the Hapsburg family embodies that potent combination of religion and a monarchy. In 1452, the Archduke of Austria (a Hapsburg) was elected Holy Roman Emperor, marking the beginning of a dynastic superpower that would endure until the First World War. However, as the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment approached, such blind faith in the monarchy diminished, and people began to consider the concept of becoming a "nation."

Benedict Anderson● The First World War saw the demise of

many dynastic realms—"by 1922, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans were gone…From this time on, the legitimate international norm was the nation-state, so that in the League [of Nations] even the surviving imperial powers came dressed in national costume rather than imperial uniform" (Imagined Communities).

Timeline of the Major Events in the History of Nations

● 1450- Invention of the printing press (Gutenberg)

● 1452- The Archduke of Austria selected as Holy Roman Emperor, marking the beginning of the Hapsburg Dynasty (1452-1918)

● 1492- The Unification of Spain ● 1618-1648- The Thirty Years' War ● 1648- Peace of Westphalia ● 1702-1713- War of Spanish Succession

Timeline of the Major Events in the History of Nations

● 1713-1714- Treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt

● 1776-1783- The War for American Independence

● 1789- French Revolution ● 1792-1815- Revolutionary and Napoleonic

Wars ● 1815- Congress of Vienna

Timeline of the Major Events in the History of Nations

● 1848- Revolutions of 1848 ● 1859- The Italian War ● 1864- The Danish War ● 1866- The Austro-Prussian War ● 1870- The Franco-Prussian War ● 1871- Italian and German Unification

completed

Timeline of the Major Events in the History of Nations

● 1914-1918- World War I ● 1917- Russian Revolution ● 1919- Treaty of Versailles ● 1933-1945- Germany's Third Reich: Hitler

comes to power ● 1938- Munich crisis; Germany annexes

Austria ● 1939-1945- Second World War

Timeline of the Major Events in the History of Nations

● 1945- United Nations established (51 members); Cold War begins

● 1947- India and Pakistan independent

● 1948- Burma independent, Israel established

● 1949- People's Republic of China established; Dutch leave Indonesia

● 1950s- Japan regains sovereignty; various African independence movements

● 1960s- More African independence movements; Vietnam War begins