On the nations - Krishan Kumar in TLS:

‘Studying nationalism is messy. Vagueness and confusion abound in the scholarly literature, as much as they do in popular usage. A prominent example is the persistent ambiguity as to whether one is talking about “nations” or “nation-states”. What, for instance, is the “United Nations”? Not a union of nations, surely, rather one of nation-states, since many solidly defined nations – Scottish, Catalan, Kurdish – are denied admission because they are not independent nation-states. So it seems there can be nations without nation-states, and not all these stateless nations either want or will be permitted to become nation-states. If, as most hold, nationalism is a political demand, the call for the formation of a nation-state, what is the nationalism of stateless nations?’

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‘Eric Storm, in the book under review, firmly and repeatedly commits himself to this position, saying that “the nation is formed by the community of citizens – the demos”. He rejects the main alternative concept of nationhood, which is that the nation is primarily an ethnic or cultural body. Such was the view of the LSE sociologist Anthony Smith, who, in a series of influential books (egThe Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986), argued that while modern nations might have some additional features – a common legal or educational system, for instance – they must, in order to have any substance or duration, be based on what he called “ethnies”, ethnic communities cemented by common memories, common myths, a common history.’

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‘Smith here contested the even more influential view of his erstwhile LSE teacher Ernest Gellner, as expressed in such works as Nations and Nationalism (1983). Nations were for Gellner fundamentally modern phenomena, dating no further back than the eighteenth-century Industrial and French Revolutions, when the whole ideology of nationalism was dreamt up, mainly in response to the requirements of industrialism. It is not, claimed Gellner, nations that give rise to nationalism – as the nationalists and some such as Smith would argue – but nationalism that summons up nations, inventing them when they may never have existed before.’

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‘There are also some jarring elements in Storm’s discussion. He says repeatedly, for instance, that by the second half of the nineteenth century, “most countries in Western Europe were nation-states”. This oddly ignores the fact that it was in this very period that the British and the French were actively in the process of constructing the largest empires in world history, while the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal still had substantial colonies and Austria was still at the centre of the far-flung Habsburg Empire. And what kind of “nation-state” was the newly united Germany – pointedly named the “German Empire (Deutsches Reich)” – a large section of whose population was Polish, and which had recently annexed the French province of Alsace-Lorraine? Nationalism may have become the dominant ideology – certainly surpassing socialism – in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. But its fulfilment, in the form of nation-states, mostly had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century, and even then there was the looming presence of the empires that “dare not speak their names”, the Soviet and American empires. One can indeed ask if nationalism has actually ever triumphed, in real terms, given the vast inequalities in a world of 193 theoretically equal nation-states, and the global dominance of a handful of super-states, clearly expressed in their individual veto power in the Security Council of the United Nations.’

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‘From these and other such sources we will be able to get a very good idea of a force – seemingly resurgent at the moment – that some see as the salvation of the world and others as a many-headed hydra.’

Read the article here.

Nationalism is the midwife of the nation, but a midwife that often couldn’t succeed.

And remember, people in search of a common myth. What else is there to say about nationalism?

Salvation or monster, it’s mainly a never-ending quest and the common myth mainly consists of a perceived enemy.