There is no political or social force stronger than national – or group – identity. The idea of liberal individualism might, sometimes, be more dominant, but its antithesis – that which balances it – is nationalism, tribalism, group identity.
National identity is, for most people, one of the first and fundamental ways they are defined.
But what drives this? Is it a natural allegiance to those geographically or culturally closest? Or has it developed through the arguments of elites as a political motivator? What utility does national identity have?
One of the first groups of theories is primordialism.
Primordialism is a term first used by Edward Shils, who, in an influential article written in 1975, argued that national identities were natural, ineffable, and ‘attributed to the tie of blood’.
For theorists of primordialism, national identity is explained through contiguity, custom, blood relations, language, but is something that one is born into, naturally, a priori – that is, it is not a conscious social construction, but an inevitable mode of being.
These ties are ineffable and strongly tied to a deep emotion that is uncontrollable, rather than rational.
Clifford Geertz, another primordial theorist, writes that they have ‘overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves’.
Primordialism has come under a lot of criticism.
In an oft-quoted article, The Poverty of Primordialism, Jack Eller and Reed Coughlan argue that recent evidence disputes the idea that there is anything ‘natural’ about these ties, and that there is stronger evidence that they are socially constructed.
The authors argue that the language of primordialism implies that national identity is a spiritual, mystical, unchangeable phenomenon that has been there since the beginning – whatever beginning means.
National identity is something that affects you – that you don’t have any control over.
Modernist theories of national identity generally critique primordialism.
Modernists argue that national identity is a concept that developed roughly over the last two centuries simultaneously to modern phenomena like capitalism, democracy, urbanisation and industrialisation.
In other words, national identity is not a natural or biological inclination; it’s a construction that has a modern cause.
The most prominent modernists include Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson.
Gellner is by far the most influential theorist of nationalism.
For Gellner, modern nationalism is a distinct and clear result of western industrialisation in the 19th century.
The difference between the modern world and the premodern one is that, ‘Physical work in any pure form has all but disappeared. What is still called manual labour does not involve swinging a pick-axe or heaving soil with a spade… it generally involves controlling, managing and maintaining a machine with a fairly sophisticated control mechanism’.
Technical, industrial production requires a certain proficiency, and so a meritocracy developed that essentially meant that machines and tools were best utilised by those with the talents to make use of them.
But, the difference between jobs isn’t that large – understanding the world requires a basic framework that is transferable, a framework largely based around the scientific method that was understood during the enlightenment and the beginning of the modern world.
A machine to make a table isn’t that different from a machine to make a car.
Instead of being born into a family role – a family of butchers or carpenters – a citizen would now be better off learning the basic education required to transfer their talents between simplistic jobs.
Gellner writes that, ‘A modern society is, in this respect, like a modern army, only more so. It provides a very prolonged and fairly thorough training for all its recruits, insisting on certain shared qualifications: literacy, numeracy, basic work habits and social skills… The assumption is that anyone who has completed the generic training common to the entire population can be re-trained for most other jobs without too much difficulty’.
In other words, a shared national culture is necessary for citizens to be mobile within that culture. Education – especially universal literacy – is key, and national identity is essential to modern, industrial societies.
If I’m from London and I move to Manchester, I can be sure that things work in roughly the same way.
Gellner’s theory is laid out in Nations and Nationalism, published in 1983, and in the same year another influential book on nationalism – Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities – was published.
For Anderson, national identity is ‘imagined’ – but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Anderson reminds us that, ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.
Anderson attributes national identity to a number of key phenomena.
First, the idea of a continuous, stable national identity was perfect to replace a religious worldview that had been dominant in Europe through the medieval period.
Helped by the printing press, Anderson argues that the newspaper began to present the nation as a continuous story with characters entering and exiting the stage at different times. On top of this, you assume that imagined others in the community have read the same story – a shared cultural code.
Next, he argues that capitalism encouraged printers to print first in Latin, but then in local vernaculars to find new markets.
Anderson’s study looks to Southeast Asia and Latin America as case studies, asking why in the former, nationalism in Vietnam, Cambodia and China were at odds with each other when they were all communist countries, and in the latter, why nationalisms developed on a continent with a roughly shared language.
The combination of capitalism and print media created these imagined geographical networks, Anderson argues, so that in South America, for example, trade routes or the travels of administrators took on a certain bureaucratic shape where people on the same routes would meet, read the same newspapers, know the same political stories, creating an ‘imagined’ community.
Bolivia, for example, would develop a separate print story to Paraguay.
Professor of nationalism John Breuilly, though, is sceptical of these sorts of ‘grand theories’ that claim to explain every particular case.
For Breuilly, there are different types of nationalism.
A framework to analyse nationalism can produce different results.
For Bruilley, nationalisms are ‘political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such action with nationalist arguments’.
This is primarily about power, and so arguments about class, culture, language or myth that are created to justify or galvanise people are secondary to the principle of political leaders and peoples coming together out of a need for strength.
In this sense, nationalism is no different to a club, a guild, a church or any other group.
Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State is a comprehensive historical analysis of different nationalisms and their relationship to the idea of what the state is.
Finally, the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxist reading of nationalism as the ‘invention of tradition’ argues that national myths are perpetuated by elites through a repetition and continuity of the past which justifies itself through a sort of ‘its worked before’ mentality. We trust that the sun is bright and warm because of the consistence with which it has been and is.
And so nationalism helps to legitimise the status quo.
In the same way, the British parliament was designed in a gothic style even though it was built in the 19th century to imply it was a longstanding, strong and trusted institution.
These sorts of authoritative myths are embodied in statues, education, and public holidays to give the impression of long-standing continuity.
Of course, those with power are usually the ones to decide on what passes as long-standing or successful, and so what might count as that for them might not for the disenfranchised.
For a Marxist like Hobsbawm, nationalism is inherently linked to class.
Nationalism and national identity are, of course, powerful phenomena: sometimes encouragingly so and sometimes dangerously so. Understanding how and why they function may help us learn both how to pacify some of their most dangerous effects and expand on some of their most useful.
Sources:
Jack David Eller and Reed M. Coughlan, The Poverty of Primordialism: The Demystification of Ethnic Attachments
Edward Shils, Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties: Some Particular Observations on the Relationships of Sociological Research and Theory
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
Brendan O’Leary, On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner’s Writings on Nationalism
Umut Özkiriml, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition
