Zlatko Hadžidedić Gellner and the Blind Forces of History
Gellner’s theory of nationalism, already well-developed in his earlier works[1], has become truly influential since the publication of “Nations and Nationalism”[2]. Originally conceived as a response to the theory of nationalism by his senior colleague Elie Kedourie[3], Gellner’s theory has easily overcome the popularity of its predecessor: Kedourie’s history of the philosophical foundations of nationalism, going back to the Kantian idea of self-determination, could not compete with Gellner’s radical historical materialism, which totally divorced the phenomenon of nationalism from the realm of ideas, presenting it as a simple but inevitable historical consequence of the development of the means of production. One of the very few concessions to the view of nationalism as an ideological construct can be found on the first page of “Nations and Nationalism”, where nationalism is referred to as a “political principle” and a “theory”:
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. (…) In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
In the rest of Gellner’s theory, one will be looking in vain for the explanation of who and why, actually, introduced, promoted or imposed such a principle: presented as an inevitable consequence of the process of industrialisation, the emergence, promotion and imposition of the principle easily find a plausible external cause; yet, this principle’s internal sources remain obscure.
It was industrial production as such, according to Gellner, that imposed the imperative that the homogenous mass of anonymous, mobile and replaceable individuals be extended so as to embrace the whole of modern society, thus destroying the stratified, inegalitarian structure of the preceding, agrarian one. The following paragraph roughly describes such a situation:
Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked with national movements. The economic basis of those movements is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed. (…) Unity of language and its unimpeded development are most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial intercourse on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate classes and, lastly, for the establishment of close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, seller and buyer.
These words may seem to have been written by Ernest Gellner. However, they were written in 1914 by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.[4] Unlike Gellner, Lenin acknowledged the existence of an agency (bourgeoisie) that had introduced the set of ideas (political and linguistic unity) about the structure of society (national state) designed so as to promote this agency’s economic interests. The bourgeoisie had promoted these interests through national movements (which are thus not to be regarded as an autonomous agency, not even one derived from the bourgeoisie itself, but rather as a medium for articulation of the bourgeoisie’s political interests), in the attempt to mobilise popular support as a precondition for the desired re-structuring of a society. However, Gellner’s historical materialism is much more radical than the Marxist one: there is simply no place for an acting human agency, nor for its super-structural production of ideas, not even as a response to the requirements imposed by the production of material goods. For, it is the need for economic growth (as the dominant principle of industrial society) that demands homogenous society; that, in turn, generates the need for society’s homogenisation, and this task is to be performed by nationalism. At this point, Gellner may well have emphasised that this imperative had also created the idea of egalitarianism, as an ideological justification for the imposition of homogeneity. However, there is a striking absence of ideological dimension in the entire Gellner’s theory: the historical emergence of nation/nationalism is seen as a mechanic, even automatic process, stemming from the changed conditions of material production in the age of industrialism. Therefore, the domination of egalitarian concepts in modern society is to be treated as a mere by-product of this society’s need for homogeneity, required by the nature of industrial production. For, “it is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa”.[5]
Of course, the required homogenisation in industrial society could have taken some other, non-nationalist forms, and it indeed did so, namely in the case of the communist modernisation/industrialisation attempts to homogenise society and generate growth on a non-nationalist ideological basis. However, the reason why the homogenisation in a modern society rather takes the form of nationalism is in Gellnerian theory explained by uneven diffusion of modernisation and industrialisation, not by modernisation and industrialisation itself. Thus the notion of uneven diffusion arises as pivotal in Gellner’s understanding of nationalism:
Nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact of this wave generates a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past societies, is a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which b) is not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities and incentives for revolution, and which c) is remediable, and is seen to be remediable, by “national” secession. Under these circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.[6]
Yet, it remains unclear a) why, among all the things in the world, it is “national” secession that is perceived as a remedy for the sharp social stratification, and b) by whom, among all the social strata, it is perceived as such. A logical answer to both questions would be that it best serves the interests of those who attempt to prevent social revolution. However, with the introduction of the category of “interests”, as well as the category of these interests’ protection, there is no remedy that naturally and inescapably flows from the general situation. In the situation described above, the interests can be protected and revolution can be prevented a) by use of brute force, or b) by introduction of ideology which erases stratification’s sharp lines and establishes those less visible ones, in other words, which ostensibly unites divided society. Neither of these options can be treated as natural; and either of them may seem inescapable only from the point of view of those social strata whose aim is to prevent social revolution.
The use of force may be an option for those who are actually in the possession of it; this does not seem to have been the case with the industrial society’s newly-born stratum, attempting to maximise its financial power on the individual basis, while being deprived of the state- or aristocracy-monopolised military one. On the other hand, the military power of the state, usually identified with the ruling stratum of the pre-industrial age, became increasingly dependent on the financial power of the former, so that both strata could coalesce, as it indeed was the case in the 17th/18th-century England or the 19th-century Prussia. But, even this kind of convergence of interests of the financial and military elites, articulated in the form of a liberal-conservative alliance, was not frequently leading to the use of brute force; it rather led to the introduction of the ideology that was to legitimise the existence of such an alliance.
In the countries and regions which were particularly affected by the uneven diffusion of industrialisation and modernisation, such an ideology, aimed at the legitimisation of a social order that might be called a dynamic status quo, seemed to be the only conceivable remedy against a revolutionary threat. And this is the point in which Gellner failed to make a distinction between the categories of “conceivable” and “natural”, thus almost joining the camp of primordialists, who tend to perceive nationalism as a natural rather than ideological principle. Yet, it was the discourse of nationalism (and nationalism is a discourse imposed by identifiable social forces rather than a phenomenon mechanically created by blind forces of historical development) that has logically, not naturally, flowed from the general situation. Moreover, nationalism does not have to, and frequently did not, take the form of secessionism: whenever there was a convergence between a threat of social revolution and potential, if not actual, secessionist claims within a state, the ideology itself would rather take a revolutionary form, emphasising its state-unifying role, thus creating what is usually called “the nation”. If Gellner’s description of the “general situation” preceding the appearance of nationalism were to be taken into account, most of Western nationalisms, being revolutionary, non-secessionist and unification-aimed, could not qualify; only those secessionist, Central and East European ones would fit the pattern.
The total absence of ideology as a category created an unsustainable gap in Gellner’s historical materialism: a theory of nationalism, seeking to establish purely materialist explanation for a phenomenon whose very existence cannot be placed out of the realm of ideas, would be unable to produce any logical one. “Like a Marxism without a theory of revolution, Gellner’s theory provides no coherent vision of how nationalism works its way into the realm of substantive human action.”[7] For, modern society’s need for economic growth can indeed produce more need for growth; the need for growth alone, however, no matter how strongly felt, can not produce nationalist sentiment: there is simply a missing link between the two. Regardless of how radical Gellner’s materialism was, there was still a need for a category that could be made correspondent with people’s minds within which the appearance of nationalism had to be located. To bridge this gap, Gellner therefore had to refer to the realm of ideas, at least indirectly. And he did exactly that, introducing the notion of “culture”, defined broadly as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”. Thus his introductory, provisional definition of the nation says that
- Two men are of the same nation if and only they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
- Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. [8]
However, the introductory definition of the term “culture” has later been narrowed so as to refer to a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”.[9] Not only has culture as a system of ideas and associations been reduced to that of “signs and ways of behaving and communicating”, which roughly equals a “distinctive style of conduct and communication”; it has also become closely linked to the notion of community. In other words, it is presupposed that culture can exist as a distinct style of conduct and communication if, and only if, there is a community whose distinctiveness it establishes or protects. This, again, presupposes that culture and community are, by definition, congruent units that may rightfully be perceived as inseparably intertwined, or, in practical terms, identical. Also, being divorced from the sphere of ideas and associations, culture, as a distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community, has itself become given. This is not to say that such a style cannot change; it certainly can and does, as Gellner himself liked to emphasise. But, the impetus for a change within a culture is to be found within the sphere of ideas and associations; without it, culture as “a style of conduct and communication of a given community” would automatically be perpetuating itself, always on the same scale. In other words, it would be given, once for all. And then, this view of culture as a forever-given unit (congruent or even identical with that of community) would be quite close to the nationalists’ and primordialists’ perception of a timeless and changeless unity of the two, the unity which they prefer to call “the nation”. Indeed, that Gellner’s “culture” is practically identical with what is usually called “the nation”, can be seen in his latest, posthumously published definition of nationalism:
Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. Whatever principles of authority may exist between people depend for their legitimacy on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture (or, in nationalist idiom, of the same “nation”). In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so.[10]
If “culture” and “nation” are really interchangeable notions, then “the nation” may well be understood either as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community” or as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”, according to the given definitions of “culture”. Yet, the idea of the nation as a distinctive style of conduct and communication, or, indeed, as a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating, would probably go well beyond the limitations of Gellner’s substantialism, as Rogers Brubaker labelled it:[11] it is much more likely that Gellner’s “nation” was referring to a given community, as a real and substantial collectivity, rather than to its distinctive style of conduct and communication. There are no clear indications in the entire Gellner’s opus on nationalism that he perceived “the nation” in a non-substantialist way, that means, not as a real community, entity or collectivity, but as a “style of conduct” or a “system of ideas”. Perhaps the most accurate interpretation of his understanding of both “culture” and “the nation” would be that he perceived the nation (as a community) as one with its culture (as its distinctive style of conduct and communication): it is this perception of oneness that enabled him to treat these two notions as interchangeable or identical.
However, bsides producing terminological confusion, this understanding of nation/culture in terms of oneness between a community and its distinctive style of conduct and communication creates additional difficulties: some communities with their distinctive styles of conduct and communication had preceded Gellner’s invention of nations by nationalism; therefore, they were to be treated as cultures but not as nations. That is why Gellner had to introduce a distinction between “low cultures” of the pre-nationalist, agrarian age and a “high” culture of the age of industrialism, the latter being understood in a rather paradoxical way: a) as identical with “the nation” and therefore invented or imposed by nationalism; b) as required by industrial society’s need for homogeneity and therefore being a generator of nationalism. This paradox is further complicated by Gellner’s use of the term “high culture” to refer to all literate cultures, both modern, nationalist and pre-modern, pre-nationalist. Also, besides being treated as an equivalent of “the nation”, modern high culture is sometimes loosely defined as being equivalent to education.[12] (Following the logic of this argument, “the nation” and “education” should therefore be treated as equivalents, too. Although this may well be accepted as a metaphorical explanation of Gellner’s basic approach to nationalism, the equalisation of the –otherwise totally disparate – notions of “the nation” and “education” has little epistemological validity.) However, while it is possible to accept the underlying claim that illiterate, folk-transmitted cultures do not differ significantly in the agrarian and industrial ages, and therefore can be commonly labelled as “low cultures”, it is far from clear whether literate cultures of both periods can both be put under the common label of “high cultures” or have to be treated as distinct.
Indeed, if we choose to ignore the primordialist view of the nation as an ever-existing racially/culturally-defined community, the central question in any interpretation of the phenomenon of nationalism is the question of continuity. This equally refers to human aggregations, as well as cultures and civilisations of the pre-modern, agrarian age: their relatedness to modern nations (regardless of how “the nation” is defined) is an object of permanent dispute among students of nationalism. In this respect, Gellner’s modernism is less radical than his historical materialism: while claiming that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist, it does not advocate the idea of absolute discontinuity between “high”, literate culture of the agrarian age and modern, “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of industrialism; nor does it claim such discontinuity between the modern high culture and the preceding low cultures. However, he maintains that “the hold of a shared literate culture (“nationality”) over modern man springs from the erosion of the old structures, which had once provided each man with his identity, dignity and material security, whereas now he depends on education for these things.”[13] Therefore, it is the period of transition between two ages that provides us with the key to understanding of the question of continuity:
The agrarian age of mankind is a period in which some can read and most cannot, and the industrial age is one in which all can and must read. In the agrarian age, literate high-cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. (…) The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny by criteria (“experience”, “the light of reason”) located beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. (…) That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story, (….) by which the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public, neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of appertaining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized. (…) An absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some, becomes an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some. [14]
It is worth noting that Gellner, in this analysis of the period of transition, while abandoning neither his favourite Manichean dichotomies (agrarian/industrial society, low/high culture, culture/state etc.), nor their paradoxical inversions (“an absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some / an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some”), makes a tactical reversal in his radical materialism and concedes that economic growth hinges on cognitive growth. This leads to the temporary introduction of “the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story”, in which Cartesian and empiricist philosophies play so significant a role as to “de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny” by criteria of “experience” and “the light of reason”. Thus the continuity of “high culture”, going from the agrarian age to the industrial one, depends on the rejection of its absolutism, that is, on its secularisation. In the entire Gellner’s theory, this is the only real concession to the “realm of ideas”: for his concept of culture to survive, it was necessary to admit that certain concepts did produce assumptions for the transformation of pre-modern, absolutist literate cultures into modern, secular, school-transmitted ones, if the latter were to serve as the “idioms of entire territorial nations”.
However, Gellner’s universal solution for a) the problem of continuity between pre-modern and modern ages, b) the question of relatedness between pre-modern communities and modern nations, c) the absence of an ideological dimension in a theory of nationalism, d) the question of relatedness between a cultural unit on one side, and ethnic, national and state units on the other side, relies upon the specific, Gellnerian use of the notion of culture. This use attempts to bridge all these gaps through the concept of oneness, which depicts culture, defined as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”, as one with any such community, be that an ethno-linguistic or racial group, a religious community, a nation aspiring to the state, or a nation contained within borders of the state. For that purpose, the notion of culture, being sometimes congruent, sometimes identical and interchangeable with every each of these categories, has had to be so widened as to embrace all of them:
This leads to the main generalisation concerning the role of culture in agrarian society: its main function is to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative, the hierarchical status system of that social order. (…) Note that, if this is the primary role of culture in such a society, it cannot at the same time perform a quite different role: namely, to mark the boundaries of the polity.
This is the basic reason why nationalism – the view that the legitimate political unit is made up of anonymous members of the same culture – cannot easily operate in agrarian society. It is deeply antithetical to its main organising principle, status expressed through culture. It is not mobile and anonymous, but hold its members in their “places”, and the places are highlighted by cultural nuance.[15]
Yet, if we take “culture” in a less substantialist meaning, as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”[16], as Gellner himself proposed, there can hardly be any identity between culture and ethno-linguistic units, at least not in agrarian society. The pattern which was predominant was one of stratified cultures, rather than of one culture performing the task of stratification. If there was any such stratification-performing culture that could be perceived as one, it was rather functioning on the pan-European level (and Gellner’s understanding of nationalism is consistently confined to the European context) than on the level of a particular ethnic group. And, among those distinct stratified cultures, it was the culture of the ruling strata (including clergy) that clearly tended to be unified into, and identified with, a common trans-ethnic, pan-European culture. In Gellner’s words quoted above, when the literate high cultures of the agrarian age “were carried by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be trans-ethnic and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wherever that court was emulated or that clerisy respected and employed”. The middle strata’s culture (in those times represented by the relatively small social groups of merchants, artisans, moneylenders) also tended to display a maximal flexibility in terms of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity. To be more precise, these specialised, urban, middle-class groups were often ethnically and religiously distinct from their environment (Jews, Greeks, Armenians); at the same time, they were widely dispersed across the boundaries of other ethnic groups linked to a particular territory. While being resistant towards religious and social assimilation, concerned with their privileged status which simultaneously meant a kind of semi-isolation from the rest of a society, they were rather indifferent towards the linguistic assimilation: not only were they readily adopting other groups’ languages in an every-day communication, they were also gradually abandoning a non-religious use of their own languages. Thus only the lowest strata’s culture (usually called “folk-culture”, or, in Gellnerian idiom, “low culture”) was left the possibility to be congruent with an ethno-linguistic unit. It was nationalism that has unified these stratified cultural units of pre-modern society into the “high” culture of the nation, while sometimes (at least in the Gellnerian East-Central European context) using the culture of the lowest strata as its basis: only by absorbing the lowest strata’s culture could the convergence between this “high”, synthetic culture and ethno-linguistic unit be hypothetically brought into being.
In this aspect, Gellner’s approach to nationalism, while pretending to be “modernist”, is no less primordialist than nationalists’ own approach to nationalism, and is, above all, mistaken in its basic premise: culture in the pre-modern society, which is said to have been the base for the future appearance of nations and nationalism, can not be treated as one, primordial, undivided entity, let alone exclusively identified with ethnicity or language. It was the above-mentioned rigid stratification in such a society that had created plurality of distinct, hierarchical, class-based cultures within a particular political unit, which eventually were to be unified into one, synthetic (or, in Gellner’s terms, “high”) culture of the nation. The plurality of such cultures is therefore to be described as class- rather than ethno-linguistically based.
Of course, it would be unfair to overlook the fact that in his best-known work, “Nations and Nationalism”, Gellner portrays agrarian society and what he there calls “sub-cultures” in very similar terms, thus contradicting his general concept of culture, as presented in the passage above:
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specialisations, its persisting regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distributed at random. Its sub-cultures underscore and fortify these structural differentiations, and they do not by setting up or accentuating cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from finding such cultural differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate.[17]
However, even if we put all the terminological confusion aside, and take for this purpose only Gellner’s pre-modern “low cultures” as correspondent to particular ethno-linguistic units within the boundaries of a pre-modern polity, then “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of nationalism should still be understood as entity merged out of the plurality of pre-existing, both literate and folk cultures, rather than as entity fully corresponding to any of them: while merging pre-existing “low” cultures, modern “high” culture inevitably erodes their ethnic boundaries and creates its own, national ones. Also, as was said above, a pre-modern “high” culture undergoes the process of secularisation in order to be transformed into a modern one. Perhaps the most conspicuous point in Gellner’s modernism, one saying that the cultures nationalism claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions[18], is in line with this argument:
Nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by themselves.[19]
However, Gellner’s last, posthumously published words offer a somewhat simplified but at least clear-cut explanation of what he had actually meant while ambiguously using the term “culture”. Repeating his basic claim that nationalism is a principle which maintains that political legitimacy depends “on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture”, Gellner went so far as to assert that what he called “the same culture” is “in nationalist idiom” called “the same nation”;[20] or, putting it inversely, that “the same nation” has, in Gellnerian idiom, been replaced by “the same culture”. Within such logic, “high” culture, shared by “a mobile anonymous mass of participants” and “relatively free of internal nuances” which characterise “low” cultures, has become “linked to the political boundaries of the unit with which it is identified”.[21] Being identified with the political unit and its boundaries, “high” culture has actually institutionalised its own boundaries, which preceding “low” cultures, as is said above, were not able to establish.
Perhaps culture contained within the boundaries of the state may be accepted as a plausible definition for the notion of the nation. Yet, Gellnerian “culture” seems to be synonymous with “the nation”: at the least, the content of the term is overlapping with his rather vague notion of the nation, defined only in terms of “high” culture’s congruence with the boundaries of the state, with the nation’s boundaries being the same as those of “high” culture’s. In that sense, the nation contained within the boundaries of the state may be a poor definition for the nation-state; but it says nothing about the nation itself. If this interpretation is correct, and if Gellner’s “culture” is only an alternative term to designate what other authors usually call “the nation”, then his basic claim that nationalism is a principle of congruence between culture and the state, offers little more than Mazzini’s 19th-century slogan “every nation a state”: a late 20th-century theory saying that nationalism is a principle of congruence between the nation and the state is to be seen as simply obsolete.
Indeed, Gellner’s assertion that “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication” clearly suggests that he treats the notions of nation and culture as practically, if not theoretically, identical and inter-changeable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that, within such a logic, two men sharing the same culture are not of the same nation. However, the real implications of such inter-changeability lead to a less benign, typically nationalist assertion that two men share the system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication if and only if they are of the same nation.
For Gellner, not only are “the sense of ethnicity, the identification with a nation, and the political expression of this passionate identification”, inseparably entwined: they have become one.[22] The use of “culture” to bridge the gap between the notions of ethnicity, nation and nationalism thus serves as a cover under which an identity between these three is bound to persist. This is quite close to the view of the nation as a “self-aware ethnic group” (Connor)[23]: in the Gellnerian idiom, the nation has become a self-aware culture, brought to the self-awareness by the application of the nationalist principle, one which holds that political and national, that is, cultural units should be congruent. Inconsistently, it is quite far from Gellner’s own rhetoric, one saying that nationalism is not the awakening of nations/cultures to self-consciousness, since it invents them where they do not exist.
[1] Gellner, Ernest: Thought and Change, Encounters with Nationalism.
[2] Gellner, Ernest: Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford UK-Cambridge US, 1983
[3] Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism, Oxford, 1993 (first published in 1960)
[4] Lenin: The Right of nations to Self-Determination, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999.
[5] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism and Modernisation, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 62
[6] Ibid., p. 61
[7] Beissinger, Mark: Nationalisms that bark and nationalisms that bite: Ernest Gellner and the substantiation of nations, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998, p. 170
[8] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[9] Ibid., p. 92
[10] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism, London, 1998, p. 3-4
[11] Brubaker, Rogers: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge, 1996, p. 15
[12] Nations and Nationalism, p. 89
[13] Ibid., p. 85
[14] Ibid., p. 77-78
[15] Gellner: Nationalism, p. 20-21
[16] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[17] Ibid., p. 63
[18] Ibid., p. 56
[19] Ibid., p. 57
[20] Nationalism, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 31
[22] Ibid., p. 90
[23] Connor, Walker: A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a…, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 45
Gellner’s theory of nationalism, already well-developed in his earlier works[1], has become truly influential since the publication of “Nations and Nationalism”[2]. Originally conceived as a response to the theory of nationalism by his senior colleague Elie Kedourie[3], Gellner’s theory has easily overcome the popularity of its predecessor: Kedourie’s history of the philosophical foundations of nationalism, going back to the Kantian idea of self-determination, could not compete with Gellner’s radical historical materialism, which totally divorced the phenomenon of nationalism from the realm of ideas, presenting it as a simple but inevitable historical consequence of the development of the means of production. One of the very few concessions to the view of nationalism as an ideological construct can be found on the first page of “Nations and Nationalism”, where nationalism is referred to as a “political principle” and a “theory”:
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. (…) In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
In the rest of Gellner’s theory, one will be looking in vain for the explanation of who and why, actually, introduced, promoted or imposed such a principle: presented as an inevitable consequence of the process of industrialisation, the emergence, promotion and imposition of the principle easily find a plausible external cause; yet, this principle’s internal sources remain obscure.
It was industrial production as such, according to Gellner, that imposed the imperative that the homogenous mass of anonymous, mobile and replaceable individuals be extended so as to embrace the whole of modern society, thus destroying the stratified, inegalitarian structure of the preceding, agrarian one. The following paragraph roughly describes such a situation:
Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked with national movements. The economic basis of those movements is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed. (…) Unity of language and its unimpeded development are most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial intercourse on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate classes and, lastly, for the establishment of close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, seller and buyer.
These words may seem to have been written by Ernest Gellner. However, they were written in 1914 by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.[4] Unlike Gellner, Lenin acknowledged the existence of an agency (bourgeoisie) that had introduced the set of ideas (political and linguistic unity) about the structure of society (national state) designed so as to promote this agency’s economic interests. The bourgeoisie had promoted these interests through national movements (which are thus not to be regarded as an autonomous agency, not even one derived from the bourgeoisie itself, but rather as a medium for articulation of the bourgeoisie’s political interests), in the attempt to mobilise popular support as a precondition for the desired re-structuring of a society. However, Gellner’s historical materialism is much more radical than the Marxist one: there is simply no place for an acting human agency, nor for its super-structural production of ideas, not even as a response to the requirements imposed by the production of material goods. For, it is the need for economic growth (as the dominant principle of industrial society) that demands homogenous society; that, in turn, generates the need for society’s homogenisation, and this task is to be performed by nationalism. At this point, Gellner may well have emphasised that this imperative had also created the idea of egalitarianism, as an ideological justification for the imposition of homogeneity. However, there is a striking absence of ideological dimension in the entire Gellner’s theory: the historical emergence of nation/nationalism is seen as a mechanic, even automatic process, stemming from the changed conditions of material production in the age of industrialism. Therefore, the domination of egalitarian concepts in modern society is to be treated as a mere by-product of this society’s need for homogeneity, required by the nature of industrial production. For, “it is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa”.[5]
Of course, the required homogenisation in industrial society could have taken some other, non-nationalist forms, and it indeed did so, namely in the case of the communist modernisation/industrialisation attempts to homogenise society and generate growth on a non-nationalist ideological basis. However, the reason why the homogenisation in a modern society rather takes the form of nationalism is in Gellnerian theory explained by uneven diffusion of modernisation and industrialisation, not by modernisation and industrialisation itself. Thus the notion of uneven diffusion arises as pivotal in Gellner’s understanding of nationalism:
Nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact of this wave generates a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past societies, is a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which b) is not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities and incentives for revolution, and which c) is remediable, and is seen to be remediable, by “national” secession. Under these circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.[6]
Yet, it remains unclear a) why, among all the things in the world, it is “national” secession that is perceived as a remedy for the sharp social stratification, and b) by whom, among all the social strata, it is perceived as such. A logical answer to both questions would be that it best serves the interests of those who attempt to prevent social revolution. However, with the introduction of the category of “interests”, as well as the category of these interests’ protection, there is no remedy that naturally and inescapably flows from the general situation. In the situation described above, the interests can be protected and revolution can be prevented a) by use of brute force, or b) by introduction of ideology which erases stratification’s sharp lines and establishes those less visible ones, in other words, which ostensibly unites divided society. Neither of these options can be treated as natural; and either of them may seem inescapable only from the point of view of those social strata whose aim is to prevent social revolution.
The use of force may be an option for those who are actually in the possession of it; this does not seem to have been the case with the industrial society’s newly-born stratum, attempting to maximise its financial power on the individual basis, while being deprived of the state- or aristocracy-monopolised military one. On the other hand, the military power of the state, usually identified with the ruling stratum of the pre-industrial age, became increasingly dependent on the financial power of the former, so that both strata could coalesce, as it indeed was the case in the 17th/18th-century England or the 19th-century Prussia. But, even this kind of convergence of interests of the financial and military elites, articulated in the form of a liberal-conservative alliance, was not frequently leading to the use of brute force; it rather led to the introduction of the ideology that was to legitimise the existence of such an alliance.
In the countries and regions which were particularly affected by the uneven diffusion of industrialisation and modernisation, such an ideology, aimed at the legitimisation of a social order that might be called a dynamic status quo, seemed to be the only conceivable remedy against a revolutionary threat. And this is the point in which Gellner failed to make a distinction between the categories of “conceivable” and “natural”, thus almost joining the camp of primordialists, who tend to perceive nationalism as a natural rather than ideological principle. Yet, it was the discourse of nationalism (and nationalism is a discourse imposed by identifiable social forces rather than a phenomenon mechanically created by blind forces of historical development) that has logically, not naturally, flowed from the general situation. Moreover, nationalism does not have to, and frequently did not, take the form of secessionism: whenever there was a convergence between a threat of social revolution and potential, if not actual, secessionist claims within a state, the ideology itself would rather take a revolutionary form, emphasising its state-unifying role, thus creating what is usually called “the nation”. If Gellner’s description of the “general situation” preceding the appearance of nationalism were to be taken into account, most of Western nationalisms, being revolutionary, non-secessionist and unification-aimed, could not qualify; only those secessionist, Central and East European ones would fit the pattern.
The total absence of ideology as a category created an unsustainable gap in Gellner’s historical materialism: a theory of nationalism, seeking to establish purely materialist explanation for a phenomenon whose very existence cannot be placed out of the realm of ideas, would be unable to produce any logical one. “Like a Marxism without a theory of revolution, Gellner’s theory provides no coherent vision of how nationalism works its way into the realm of substantive human action.”[7] For, modern society’s need for economic growth can indeed produce more need for growth; the need for growth alone, however, no matter how strongly felt, can not produce nationalist sentiment: there is simply a missing link between the two. Regardless of how radical Gellner’s materialism was, there was still a need for a category that could be made correspondent with people’s minds within which the appearance of nationalism had to be located. To bridge this gap, Gellner therefore had to refer to the realm of ideas, at least indirectly. And he did exactly that, introducing the notion of “culture”, defined broadly as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”. Thus his introductory, provisional definition of the nation says that
- Two men are of the same nation if and only they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
- Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. [8]
However, the introductory definition of the term “culture” has later been narrowed so as to refer to a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”.[9] Not only has culture as a system of ideas and associations been reduced to that of “signs and ways of behaving and communicating”, which roughly equals a “distinctive style of conduct and communication”; it has also become closely linked to the notion of community. In other words, it is presupposed that culture can exist as a distinct style of conduct and communication if, and only if, there is a community whose distinctiveness it establishes or protects. This, again, presupposes that culture and community are, by definition, congruent units that may rightfully be perceived as inseparably intertwined, or, in practical terms, identical. Also, being divorced from the sphere of ideas and associations, culture, as a distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community, has itself become given. This is not to say that such a style cannot change; it certainly can and does, as Gellner himself liked to emphasise. But, the impetus for a change within a culture is to be found within the sphere of ideas and associations; without it, culture as “a style of conduct and communication of a given community” would automatically be perpetuating itself, always on the same scale. In other words, it would be given, once for all. And then, this view of culture as a forever-given unit (congruent or even identical with that of community) would be quite close to the nationalists’ and primordialists’ perception of a timeless and changeless unity of the two, the unity which they prefer to call “the nation”. Indeed, that Gellner’s “culture” is practically identical with what is usually called “the nation”, can be seen in his latest, posthumously published definition of nationalism:
Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. Whatever principles of authority may exist between people depend for their legitimacy on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture (or, in nationalist idiom, of the same “nation”). In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so.[10]
If “culture” and “nation” are really interchangeable notions, then “the nation” may well be understood either as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community” or as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”, according to the given definitions of “culture”. Yet, the idea of the nation as a distinctive style of conduct and communication, or, indeed, as a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating, would probably go well beyond the limitations of Gellner’s substantialism, as Rogers Brubaker labelled it:[11] it is much more likely that Gellner’s “nation” was referring to a given community, as a real and substantial collectivity, rather than to its distinctive style of conduct and communication. There are no clear indications in the entire Gellner’s opus on nationalism that he perceived “the nation” in a non-substantialist way, that means, not as a real community, entity or collectivity, but as a “style of conduct” or a “system of ideas”. Perhaps the most accurate interpretation of his understanding of both “culture” and “the nation” would be that he perceived the nation (as a community) as one with its culture (as its distinctive style of conduct and communication): it is this perception of oneness that enabled him to treat these two notions as interchangeable or identical.
However, bsides producing terminological confusion, this understanding of nation/culture in terms of oneness between a community and its distinctive style of conduct and communication creates additional difficulties: some communities with their distinctive styles of conduct and communication had preceded Gellner’s invention of nations by nationalism; therefore, they were to be treated as cultures but not as nations. That is why Gellner had to introduce a distinction between “low cultures” of the pre-nationalist, agrarian age and a “high” culture of the age of industrialism, the latter being understood in a rather paradoxical way: a) as identical with “the nation” and therefore invented or imposed by nationalism; b) as required by industrial society’s need for homogeneity and therefore being a generator of nationalism. This paradox is further complicated by Gellner’s use of the term “high culture” to refer to all literate cultures, both modern, nationalist and pre-modern, pre-nationalist. Also, besides being treated as an equivalent of “the nation”, modern high culture is sometimes loosely defined as being equivalent to education.[12] (Following the logic of this argument, “the nation” and “education” should therefore be treated as equivalents, too. Although this may well be accepted as a metaphorical explanation of Gellner’s basic approach to nationalism, the equalisation of the –otherwise totally disparate – notions of “the nation” and “education” has little epistemological validity.) However, while it is possible to accept the underlying claim that illiterate, folk-transmitted cultures do not differ significantly in the agrarian and industrial ages, and therefore can be commonly labelled as “low cultures”, it is far from clear whether literate cultures of both periods can both be put under the common label of “high cultures” or have to be treated as distinct.
Indeed, if we choose to ignore the primordialist view of the nation as an ever-existing racially/culturally-defined community, the central question in any interpretation of the phenomenon of nationalism is the question of continuity. This equally refers to human aggregations, as well as cultures and civilisations of the pre-modern, agrarian age: their relatedness to modern nations (regardless of how “the nation” is defined) is an object of permanent dispute among students of nationalism. In this respect, Gellner’s modernism is less radical than his historical materialism: while claiming that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist, it does not advocate the idea of absolute discontinuity between “high”, literate culture of the agrarian age and modern, “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of industrialism; nor does it claim such discontinuity between the modern high culture and the preceding low cultures. However, he maintains that “the hold of a shared literate culture (“nationality”) over modern man springs from the erosion of the old structures, which had once provided each man with his identity, dignity and material security, whereas now he depends on education for these things.”[13] Therefore, it is the period of transition between two ages that provides us with the key to understanding of the question of continuity:
The agrarian age of mankind is a period in which some can read and most cannot, and the industrial age is one in which all can and must read. In the agrarian age, literate high-cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. (…) The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny by criteria (“experience”, “the light of reason”) located beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. (…) That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story, (….) by which the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public, neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of appertaining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized. (…) An absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some, becomes an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some. [14]
It is worth noting that Gellner, in this analysis of the period of transition, while abandoning neither his favourite Manichean dichotomies (agrarian/industrial society, low/high culture, culture/state etc.), nor their paradoxical inversions (“an absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some / an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some”), makes a tactical reversal in his radical materialism and concedes that economic growth hinges on cognitive growth. This leads to the temporary introduction of “the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story”, in which Cartesian and empiricist philosophies play so significant a role as to “de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny” by criteria of “experience” and “the light of reason”. Thus the continuity of “high culture”, going from the agrarian age to the industrial one, depends on the rejection of its absolutism, that is, on its secularisation. In the entire Gellner’s theory, this is the only real concession to the “realm of ideas”: for his concept of culture to survive, it was necessary to admit that certain concepts did produce assumptions for the transformation of pre-modern, absolutist literate cultures into modern, secular, school-transmitted ones, if the latter were to serve as the “idioms of entire territorial nations”.
However, Gellner’s universal solution for a) the problem of continuity between pre-modern and modern ages, b) the question of relatedness between pre-modern communities and modern nations, c) the absence of an ideological dimension in a theory of nationalism, d) the question of relatedness between a cultural unit on one side, and ethnic, national and state units on the other side, relies upon the specific, Gellnerian use of the notion of culture. This use attempts to bridge all these gaps through the concept of oneness, which depicts culture, defined as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”, as one with any such community, be that an ethno-linguistic or racial group, a religious community, a nation aspiring to the state, or a nation contained within borders of the state. For that purpose, the notion of culture, being sometimes congruent, sometimes identical and interchangeable with every each of these categories, has had to be so widened as to embrace all of them:
This leads to the main generalisation concerning the role of culture in agrarian society: its main function is to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative, the hierarchical status system of that social order. (…) Note that, if this is the primary role of culture in such a society, it cannot at the same time perform a quite different role: namely, to mark the boundaries of the polity.
This is the basic reason why nationalism – the view that the legitimate political unit is made up of anonymous members of the same culture – cannot easily operate in agrarian society. It is deeply antithetical to its main organising principle, status expressed through culture. It is not mobile and anonymous, but hold its members in their “places”, and the places are highlighted by cultural nuance.[15]
Yet, if we take “culture” in a less substantialist meaning, as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”[16], as Gellner himself proposed, there can hardly be any identity between culture and ethno-linguistic units, at least not in agrarian society. The pattern which was predominant was one of stratified cultures, rather than of one culture performing the task of stratification. If there was any such stratification-performing culture that could be perceived as one, it was rather functioning on the pan-European level (and Gellner’s understanding of nationalism is consistently confined to the European context) than on the level of a particular ethnic group. And, among those distinct stratified cultures, it was the culture of the ruling strata (including clergy) that clearly tended to be unified into, and identified with, a common trans-ethnic, pan-European culture. In Gellner’s words quoted above, when the literate high cultures of the agrarian age “were carried by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be trans-ethnic and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wherever that court was emulated or that clerisy respected and employed”. The middle strata’s culture (in those times represented by the relatively small social groups of merchants, artisans, moneylenders) also tended to display a maximal flexibility in terms of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity. To be more precise, these specialised, urban, middle-class groups were often ethnically and religiously distinct from their environment (Jews, Greeks, Armenians); at the same time, they were widely dispersed across the boundaries of other ethnic groups linked to a particular territory. While being resistant towards religious and social assimilation, concerned with their privileged status which simultaneously meant a kind of semi-isolation from the rest of a society, they were rather indifferent towards the linguistic assimilation: not only were they readily adopting other groups’ languages in an every-day communication, they were also gradually abandoning a non-religious use of their own languages. Thus only the lowest strata’s culture (usually called “folk-culture”, or, in Gellnerian idiom, “low culture”) was left the possibility to be congruent with an ethno-linguistic unit. It was nationalism that has unified these stratified cultural units of pre-modern society into the “high” culture of the nation, while sometimes (at least in the Gellnerian East-Central European context) using the culture of the lowest strata as its basis: only by absorbing the lowest strata’s culture could the convergence between this “high”, synthetic culture and ethno-linguistic unit be hypothetically brought into being.
In this aspect, Gellner’s approach to nationalism, while pretending to be “modernist”, is no less primordialist than nationalists’ own approach to nationalism, and is, above all, mistaken in its basic premise: culture in the pre-modern society, which is said to have been the base for the future appearance of nations and nationalism, can not be treated as one, primordial, undivided entity, let alone exclusively identified with ethnicity or language. It was the above-mentioned rigid stratification in such a society that had created plurality of distinct, hierarchical, class-based cultures within a particular political unit, which eventually were to be unified into one, synthetic (or, in Gellner’s terms, “high”) culture of the nation. The plurality of such cultures is therefore to be described as class- rather than ethno-linguistically based.
Of course, it would be unfair to overlook the fact that in his best-known work, “Nations and Nationalism”, Gellner portrays agrarian society and what he there calls “sub-cultures” in very similar terms, thus contradicting his general concept of culture, as presented in the passage above:
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specialisations, its persisting regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distributed at random. Its sub-cultures underscore and fortify these structural differentiations, and they do not by setting up or accentuating cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from finding such cultural differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate.[17]
However, even if we put all the terminological confusion aside, and take for this purpose only Gellner’s pre-modern “low cultures” as correspondent to particular ethno-linguistic units within the boundaries of a pre-modern polity, then “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of nationalism should still be understood as entity merged out of the plurality of pre-existing, both literate and folk cultures, rather than as entity fully corresponding to any of them: while merging pre-existing “low” cultures, modern “high” culture inevitably erodes their ethnic boundaries and creates its own, national ones. Also, as was said above, a pre-modern “high” culture undergoes the process of secularisation in order to be transformed into a modern one. Perhaps the most conspicuous point in Gellner’s modernism, one saying that the cultures nationalism claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions[18], is in line with this argument:
Nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by themselves.[19]
However, Gellner’s last, posthumously published words offer a somewhat simplified but at least clear-cut explanation of what he had actually meant while ambiguously using the term “culture”. Repeating his basic claim that nationalism is a principle which maintains that political legitimacy depends “on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture”, Gellner went so far as to assert that what he called “the same culture” is “in nationalist idiom” called “the same nation”;[20] or, putting it inversely, that “the same nation” has, in Gellnerian idiom, been replaced by “the same culture”. Within such logic, “high” culture, shared by “a mobile anonymous mass of participants” and “relatively free of internal nuances” which characterise “low” cultures, has become “linked to the political boundaries of the unit with which it is identified”.[21] Being identified with the political unit and its boundaries, “high” culture has actually institutionalised its own boundaries, which preceding “low” cultures, as is said above, were not able to establish.
Perhaps culture contained within the boundaries of the state may be accepted as a plausible definition for the notion of the nation. Yet, Gellnerian “culture” seems to be synonymous with “the nation”: at the least, the content of the term is overlapping with his rather vague notion of the nation, defined only in terms of “high” culture’s congruence with the boundaries of the state, with the nation’s boundaries being the same as those of “high” culture’s. In that sense, the nation contained within the boundaries of the state may be a poor definition for the nation-state; but it says nothing about the nation itself. If this interpretation is correct, and if Gellner’s “culture” is only an alternative term to designate what other authors usually call “the nation”, then his basic claim that nationalism is a principle of congruence between culture and the state, offers little more than Mazzini’s 19th-century slogan “every nation a state”: a late 20th-century theory saying that nationalism is a principle of congruence between the nation and the state is to be seen as simply obsolete.
Indeed, Gellner’s assertion that “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication” clearly suggests that he treats the notions of nation and culture as practically, if not theoretically, identical and inter-changeable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that, within such a logic, two men sharing the same culture are not of the same nation. However, the real implications of such inter-changeability lead to a less benign, typically nationalist assertion that two men share the system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication if and only if they are of the same nation.
For Gellner, not only are “the sense of ethnicity, the identification with a nation, and the political expression of this passionate identification”, inseparably entwined: they have become one.[22] The use of “culture” to bridge the gap between the notions of ethnicity, nation and nationalism thus serves as a cover under which an identity between these three is bound to persist. This is quite close to the view of the nation as a “self-aware ethnic group” (Connor)[23]: in the Gellnerian idiom, the nation has become a self-aware culture, brought to the self-awareness by the application of the nationalist principle, one which holds that political and national, that is, cultural units should be congruent. Inconsistently, it is quite far from Gellner’s own rhetoric, one saying that nationalism is not the awakening of nations/cultures to self-consciousness, since it invents them where they do not exist.
[1] Gellner, Ernest: Thought and Change, Encounters with Nationalism.
[2] Gellner, Ernest: Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford UK-Cambridge US, 1983
[3] Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism, Oxford, 1993 (first published in 1960)
[4] Lenin: The Right of nations to Self-Determination, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999.
[5] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism and Modernisation, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 62
[6] Ibid., p. 61
[7] Beissinger, Mark: Nationalisms that bark and nationalisms that bite: Ernest Gellner and the substantiation of nations, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998, p. 170
[8] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[9] Ibid., p. 92
[10] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism, London, 1998, p. 3-4
[11] Brubaker, Rogers: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge, 1996, p. 15
[12] Nations and Nationalism, p. 89
[13] Ibid., p. 85
[14] Ibid., p. 77-78
[15] Gellner: Nationalism, p. 20-21
[16] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[17] Ibid., p. 63
[18] Ibid., p. 56
[19] Ibid., p. 57
[20] Nationalism, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 31
[22] Ibid., p. 90
[23] Connor, Walker: A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a…, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 45
Gellner’s theory of nationalism, already well-developed in his earlier works[1], has become truly influential since the publication of “Nations and Nationalism”[2]. Originally conceived as a response to the theory of nationalism by his senior colleague Elie Kedourie[3], Gellner’s theory has easily overcome the popularity of its predecessor: Kedourie’s history of the philosophical foundations of nationalism, going back to the Kantian idea of self-determination, could not compete with Gellner’s radical historical materialism, which totally divorced the phenomenon of nationalism from the realm of ideas, presenting it as a simple but inevitable historical consequence of the development of the means of production. One of the very few concessions to the view of nationalism as an ideological construct can be found on the first page of “Nations and Nationalism”, where nationalism is referred to as a “political principle” and a “theory”:
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. (…) In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
In the rest of Gellner’s theory, one will be looking in vain for the explanation of who and why, actually, introduced, promoted or imposed such a principle: presented as an inevitable consequence of the process of industrialisation, the emergence, promotion and imposition of the principle easily find a plausible external cause; yet, this principle’s internal sources remain obscure.
It was industrial production as such, according to Gellner, that imposed the imperative that the homogenous mass of anonymous, mobile and replaceable individuals be extended so as to embrace the whole of modern society, thus destroying the stratified, inegalitarian structure of the preceding, agrarian one. The following paragraph roughly describes such a situation:
Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked with national movements. The economic basis of those movements is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed. (…) Unity of language and its unimpeded development are most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial intercourse on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate classes and, lastly, for the establishment of close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, seller and buyer.
These words may seem to have been written by Ernest Gellner. However, they were written in 1914 by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.[4] Unlike Gellner, Lenin acknowledged the existence of an agency (bourgeoisie) that had introduced the set of ideas (political and linguistic unity) about the structure of society (national state) designed so as to promote this agency’s economic interests. The bourgeoisie had promoted these interests through national movements (which are thus not to be regarded as an autonomous agency, not even one derived from the bourgeoisie itself, but rather as a medium for articulation of the bourgeoisie’s political interests), in the attempt to mobilise popular support as a precondition for the desired re-structuring of a society. However, Gellner’s historical materialism is much more radical than the Marxist one: there is simply no place for an acting human agency, nor for its super-structural production of ideas, not even as a response to the requirements imposed by the production of material goods. For, it is the need for economic growth (as the dominant principle of industrial society) that demands homogenous society; that, in turn, generates the need for society’s homogenisation, and this task is to be performed by nationalism. At this point, Gellner may well have emphasised that this imperative had also created the idea of egalitarianism, as an ideological justification for the imposition of homogeneity. However, there is a striking absence of ideological dimension in the entire Gellner’s theory: the historical emergence of nation/nationalism is seen as a mechanic, even automatic process, stemming from the changed conditions of material production in the age of industrialism. Therefore, the domination of egalitarian concepts in modern society is to be treated as a mere by-product of this society’s need for homogeneity, required by the nature of industrial production. For, “it is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa”.[5]
Of course, the required homogenisation in industrial society could have taken some other, non-nationalist forms, and it indeed did so, namely in the case of the communist modernisation/industrialisation attempts to homogenise society and generate growth on a non-nationalist ideological basis. However, the reason why the homogenisation in a modern society rather takes the form of nationalism is in Gellnerian theory explained by uneven diffusion of modernisation and industrialisation, not by modernisation and industrialisation itself. Thus the notion of uneven diffusion arises as pivotal in Gellner’s understanding of nationalism:
Nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact of this wave generates a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past societies, is a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which b) is not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities and incentives for revolution, and which c) is remediable, and is seen to be remediable, by “national” secession. Under these circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.[6]
Yet, it remains unclear a) why, among all the things in the world, it is “national” secession that is perceived as a remedy for the sharp social stratification, and b) by whom, among all the social strata, it is perceived as such. A logical answer to both questions would be that it best serves the interests of those who attempt to prevent social revolution. However, with the introduction of the category of “interests”, as well as the category of these interests’ protection, there is no remedy that naturally and inescapably flows from the general situation. In the situation described above, the interests can be protected and revolution can be prevented a) by use of brute force, or b) by introduction of ideology which erases stratification’s sharp lines and establishes those less visible ones, in other words, which ostensibly unites divided society. Neither of these options can be treated as natural; and either of them may seem inescapable only from the point of view of those social strata whose aim is to prevent social revolution.
The use of force may be an option for those who are actually in the possession of it; this does not seem to have been the case with the industrial society’s newly-born stratum, attempting to maximise its financial power on the individual basis, while being deprived of the state- or aristocracy-monopolised military one. On the other hand, the military power of the state, usually identified with the ruling stratum of the pre-industrial age, became increasingly dependent on the financial power of the former, so that both strata could coalesce, as it indeed was the case in the 17th/18th-century England or the 19th-century Prussia. But, even this kind of convergence of interests of the financial and military elites, articulated in the form of a liberal-conservative alliance, was not frequently leading to the use of brute force; it rather led to the introduction of the ideology that was to legitimise the existence of such an alliance.
In the countries and regions which were particularly affected by the uneven diffusion of industrialisation and modernisation, such an ideology, aimed at the legitimisation of a social order that might be called a dynamic status quo, seemed to be the only conceivable remedy against a revolutionary threat. And this is the point in which Gellner failed to make a distinction between the categories of “conceivable” and “natural”, thus almost joining the camp of primordialists, who tend to perceive nationalism as a natural rather than ideological principle. Yet, it was the discourse of nationalism (and nationalism is a discourse imposed by identifiable social forces rather than a phenomenon mechanically created by blind forces of historical development) that has logically, not naturally, flowed from the general situation. Moreover, nationalism does not have to, and frequently did not, take the form of secessionism: whenever there was a convergence between a threat of social revolution and potential, if not actual, secessionist claims within a state, the ideology itself would rather take a revolutionary form, emphasising its state-unifying role, thus creating what is usually called “the nation”. If Gellner’s description of the “general situation” preceding the appearance of nationalism were to be taken into account, most of Western nationalisms, being revolutionary, non-secessionist and unification-aimed, could not qualify; only those secessionist, Central and East European ones would fit the pattern.
The total absence of ideology as a category created an unsustainable gap in Gellner’s historical materialism: a theory of nationalism, seeking to establish purely materialist explanation for a phenomenon whose very existence cannot be placed out of the realm of ideas, would be unable to produce any logical one. “Like a Marxism without a theory of revolution, Gellner’s theory provides no coherent vision of how nationalism works its way into the realm of substantive human action.”[7] For, modern society’s need for economic growth can indeed produce more need for growth; the need for growth alone, however, no matter how strongly felt, can not produce nationalist sentiment: there is simply a missing link between the two. Regardless of how radical Gellner’s materialism was, there was still a need for a category that could be made correspondent with people’s minds within which the appearance of nationalism had to be located. To bridge this gap, Gellner therefore had to refer to the realm of ideas, at least indirectly. And he did exactly that, introducing the notion of “culture”, defined broadly as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”. Thus his introductory, provisional definition of the nation says that
- Two men are of the same nation if and only they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
- Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. [8]
However, the introductory definition of the term “culture” has later been narrowed so as to refer to a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”.[9] Not only has culture as a system of ideas and associations been reduced to that of “signs and ways of behaving and communicating”, which roughly equals a “distinctive style of conduct and communication”; it has also become closely linked to the notion of community. In other words, it is presupposed that culture can exist as a distinct style of conduct and communication if, and only if, there is a community whose distinctiveness it establishes or protects. This, again, presupposes that culture and community are, by definition, congruent units that may rightfully be perceived as inseparably intertwined, or, in practical terms, identical. Also, being divorced from the sphere of ideas and associations, culture, as a distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community, has itself become given. This is not to say that such a style cannot change; it certainly can and does, as Gellner himself liked to emphasise. But, the impetus for a change within a culture is to be found within the sphere of ideas and associations; without it, culture as “a style of conduct and communication of a given community” would automatically be perpetuating itself, always on the same scale. In other words, it would be given, once for all. And then, this view of culture as a forever-given unit (congruent or even identical with that of community) would be quite close to the nationalists’ and primordialists’ perception of a timeless and changeless unity of the two, the unity which they prefer to call “the nation”. Indeed, that Gellner’s “culture” is practically identical with what is usually called “the nation”, can be seen in his latest, posthumously published definition of nationalism:
Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. Whatever principles of authority may exist between people depend for their legitimacy on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture (or, in nationalist idiom, of the same “nation”). In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so.[10]
If “culture” and “nation” are really interchangeable notions, then “the nation” may well be understood either as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community” or as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”, according to the given definitions of “culture”. Yet, the idea of the nation as a distinctive style of conduct and communication, or, indeed, as a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating, would probably go well beyond the limitations of Gellner’s substantialism, as Rogers Brubaker labelled it:[11] it is much more likely that Gellner’s “nation” was referring to a given community, as a real and substantial collectivity, rather than to its distinctive style of conduct and communication. There are no clear indications in the entire Gellner’s opus on nationalism that he perceived “the nation” in a non-substantialist way, that means, not as a real community, entity or collectivity, but as a “style of conduct” or a “system of ideas”. Perhaps the most accurate interpretation of his understanding of both “culture” and “the nation” would be that he perceived the nation (as a community) as one with its culture (as its distinctive style of conduct and communication): it is this perception of oneness that enabled him to treat these two notions as interchangeable or identical.
However, bsides producing terminological confusion, this understanding of nation/culture in terms of oneness between a community and its distinctive style of conduct and communication creates additional difficulties: some communities with their distinctive styles of conduct and communication had preceded Gellner’s invention of nations by nationalism; therefore, they were to be treated as cultures but not as nations. That is why Gellner had to introduce a distinction between “low cultures” of the pre-nationalist, agrarian age and a “high” culture of the age of industrialism, the latter being understood in a rather paradoxical way: a) as identical with “the nation” and therefore invented or imposed by nationalism; b) as required by industrial society’s need for homogeneity and therefore being a generator of nationalism. This paradox is further complicated by Gellner’s use of the term “high culture” to refer to all literate cultures, both modern, nationalist and pre-modern, pre-nationalist. Also, besides being treated as an equivalent of “the nation”, modern high culture is sometimes loosely defined as being equivalent to education.[12] (Following the logic of this argument, “the nation” and “education” should therefore be treated as equivalents, too. Although this may well be accepted as a metaphorical explanation of Gellner’s basic approach to nationalism, the equalisation of the –otherwise totally disparate – notions of “the nation” and “education” has little epistemological validity.) However, while it is possible to accept the underlying claim that illiterate, folk-transmitted cultures do not differ significantly in the agrarian and industrial ages, and therefore can be commonly labelled as “low cultures”, it is far from clear whether literate cultures of both periods can both be put under the common label of “high cultures” or have to be treated as distinct.
Indeed, if we choose to ignore the primordialist view of the nation as an ever-existing racially/culturally-defined community, the central question in any interpretation of the phenomenon of nationalism is the question of continuity. This equally refers to human aggregations, as well as cultures and civilisations of the pre-modern, agrarian age: their relatedness to modern nations (regardless of how “the nation” is defined) is an object of permanent dispute among students of nationalism. In this respect, Gellner’s modernism is less radical than his historical materialism: while claiming that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist, it does not advocate the idea of absolute discontinuity between “high”, literate culture of the agrarian age and modern, “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of industrialism; nor does it claim such discontinuity between the modern high culture and the preceding low cultures. However, he maintains that “the hold of a shared literate culture (“nationality”) over modern man springs from the erosion of the old structures, which had once provided each man with his identity, dignity and material security, whereas now he depends on education for these things.”[13] Therefore, it is the period of transition between two ages that provides us with the key to understanding of the question of continuity:
The agrarian age of mankind is a period in which some can read and most cannot, and the industrial age is one in which all can and must read. In the agrarian age, literate high-cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. (…) The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny by criteria (“experience”, “the light of reason”) located beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. (…) That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story, (….) by which the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public, neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of appertaining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized. (…) An absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some, becomes an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some. [14]
It is worth noting that Gellner, in this analysis of the period of transition, while abandoning neither his favourite Manichean dichotomies (agrarian/industrial society, low/high culture, culture/state etc.), nor their paradoxical inversions (“an absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some / an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some”), makes a tactical reversal in his radical materialism and concedes that economic growth hinges on cognitive growth. This leads to the temporary introduction of “the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story”, in which Cartesian and empiricist philosophies play so significant a role as to “de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny” by criteria of “experience” and “the light of reason”. Thus the continuity of “high culture”, going from the agrarian age to the industrial one, depends on the rejection of its absolutism, that is, on its secularisation. In the entire Gellner’s theory, this is the only real concession to the “realm of ideas”: for his concept of culture to survive, it was necessary to admit that certain concepts did produce assumptions for the transformation of pre-modern, absolutist literate cultures into modern, secular, school-transmitted ones, if the latter were to serve as the “idioms of entire territorial nations”.
However, Gellner’s universal solution for a) the problem of continuity between pre-modern and modern ages, b) the question of relatedness between pre-modern communities and modern nations, c) the absence of an ideological dimension in a theory of nationalism, d) the question of relatedness between a cultural unit on one side, and ethnic, national and state units on the other side, relies upon the specific, Gellnerian use of the notion of culture. This use attempts to bridge all these gaps through the concept of oneness, which depicts culture, defined as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”, as one with any such community, be that an ethno-linguistic or racial group, a religious community, a nation aspiring to the state, or a nation contained within borders of the state. For that purpose, the notion of culture, being sometimes congruent, sometimes identical and interchangeable with every each of these categories, has had to be so widened as to embrace all of them:
This leads to the main generalisation concerning the role of culture in agrarian society: its main function is to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative, the hierarchical status system of that social order. (…) Note that, if this is the primary role of culture in such a society, it cannot at the same time perform a quite different role: namely, to mark the boundaries of the polity.
This is the basic reason why nationalism – the view that the legitimate political unit is made up of anonymous members of the same culture – cannot easily operate in agrarian society. It is deeply antithetical to its main organising principle, status expressed through culture. It is not mobile and anonymous, but hold its members in their “places”, and the places are highlighted by cultural nuance.[15]
Yet, if we take “culture” in a less substantialist meaning, as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”[16], as Gellner himself proposed, there can hardly be any identity between culture and ethno-linguistic units, at least not in agrarian society. The pattern which was predominant was one of stratified cultures, rather than of one culture performing the task of stratification. If there was any such stratification-performing culture that could be perceived as one, it was rather functioning on the pan-European level (and Gellner’s understanding of nationalism is consistently confined to the European context) than on the level of a particular ethnic group. And, among those distinct stratified cultures, it was the culture of the ruling strata (including clergy) that clearly tended to be unified into, and identified with, a common trans-ethnic, pan-European culture. In Gellner’s words quoted above, when the literate high cultures of the agrarian age “were carried by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be trans-ethnic and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wherever that court was emulated or that clerisy respected and employed”. The middle strata’s culture (in those times represented by the relatively small social groups of merchants, artisans, moneylenders) also tended to display a maximal flexibility in terms of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity. To be more precise, these specialised, urban, middle-class groups were often ethnically and religiously distinct from their environment (Jews, Greeks, Armenians); at the same time, they were widely dispersed across the boundaries of other ethnic groups linked to a particular territory. While being resistant towards religious and social assimilation, concerned with their privileged status which simultaneously meant a kind of semi-isolation from the rest of a society, they were rather indifferent towards the linguistic assimilation: not only were they readily adopting other groups’ languages in an every-day communication, they were also gradually abandoning a non-religious use of their own languages. Thus only the lowest strata’s culture (usually called “folk-culture”, or, in Gellnerian idiom, “low culture”) was left the possibility to be congruent with an ethno-linguistic unit. It was nationalism that has unified these stratified cultural units of pre-modern society into the “high” culture of the nation, while sometimes (at least in the Gellnerian East-Central European context) using the culture of the lowest strata as its basis: only by absorbing the lowest strata’s culture could the convergence between this “high”, synthetic culture and ethno-linguistic unit be hypothetically brought into being.
In this aspect, Gellner’s approach to nationalism, while pretending to be “modernist”, is no less primordialist than nationalists’ own approach to nationalism, and is, above all, mistaken in its basic premise: culture in the pre-modern society, which is said to have been the base for the future appearance of nations and nationalism, can not be treated as one, primordial, undivided entity, let alone exclusively identified with ethnicity or language. It was the above-mentioned rigid stratification in such a society that had created plurality of distinct, hierarchical, class-based cultures within a particular political unit, which eventually were to be unified into one, synthetic (or, in Gellner’s terms, “high”) culture of the nation. The plurality of such cultures is therefore to be described as class- rather than ethno-linguistically based.
Of course, it would be unfair to overlook the fact that in his best-known work, “Nations and Nationalism”, Gellner portrays agrarian society and what he there calls “sub-cultures” in very similar terms, thus contradicting his general concept of culture, as presented in the passage above:
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specialisations, its persisting regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distributed at random. Its sub-cultures underscore and fortify these structural differentiations, and they do not by setting up or accentuating cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from finding such cultural differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate.[17]
However, even if we put all the terminological confusion aside, and take for this purpose only Gellner’s pre-modern “low cultures” as correspondent to particular ethno-linguistic units within the boundaries of a pre-modern polity, then “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of nationalism should still be understood as entity merged out of the plurality of pre-existing, both literate and folk cultures, rather than as entity fully corresponding to any of them: while merging pre-existing “low” cultures, modern “high” culture inevitably erodes their ethnic boundaries and creates its own, national ones. Also, as was said above, a pre-modern “high” culture undergoes the process of secularisation in order to be transformed into a modern one. Perhaps the most conspicuous point in Gellner’s modernism, one saying that the cultures nationalism claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions[18], is in line with this argument:
Nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by themselves.[19]
However, Gellner’s last, posthumously published words offer a somewhat simplified but at least clear-cut explanation of what he had actually meant while ambiguously using the term “culture”. Repeating his basic claim that nationalism is a principle which maintains that political legitimacy depends “on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture”, Gellner went so far as to assert that what he called “the same culture” is “in nationalist idiom” called “the same nation”;[20] or, putting it inversely, that “the same nation” has, in Gellnerian idiom, been replaced by “the same culture”. Within such logic, “high” culture, shared by “a mobile anonymous mass of participants” and “relatively free of internal nuances” which characterise “low” cultures, has become “linked to the political boundaries of the unit with which it is identified”.[21] Being identified with the political unit and its boundaries, “high” culture has actually institutionalised its own boundaries, which preceding “low” cultures, as is said above, were not able to establish.
Perhaps culture contained within the boundaries of the state may be accepted as a plausible definition for the notion of the nation. Yet, Gellnerian “culture” seems to be synonymous with “the nation”: at the least, the content of the term is overlapping with his rather vague notion of the nation, defined only in terms of “high” culture’s congruence with the boundaries of the state, with the nation’s boundaries being the same as those of “high” culture’s. In that sense, the nation contained within the boundaries of the state may be a poor definition for the nation-state; but it says nothing about the nation itself. If this interpretation is correct, and if Gellner’s “culture” is only an alternative term to designate what other authors usually call “the nation”, then his basic claim that nationalism is a principle of congruence between culture and the state, offers little more than Mazzini’s 19th-century slogan “every nation a state”: a late 20th-century theory saying that nationalism is a principle of congruence between the nation and the state is to be seen as simply obsolete.
Indeed, Gellner’s assertion that “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication” clearly suggests that he treats the notions of nation and culture as practically, if not theoretically, identical and inter-changeable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that, within such a logic, two men sharing the same culture are not of the same nation. However, the real implications of such inter-changeability lead to a less benign, typically nationalist assertion that two men share the system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication if and only if they are of the same nation.
For Gellner, not only are “the sense of ethnicity, the identification with a nation, and the political expression of this passionate identification”, inseparably entwined: they have become one.[22] The use of “culture” to bridge the gap between the notions of ethnicity, nation and nationalism thus serves as a cover under which an identity between these three is bound to persist. This is quite close to the view of the nation as a “self-aware ethnic group” (Connor)[23]: in the Gellnerian idiom, the nation has become a self-aware culture, brought to the self-awareness by the application of the nationalist principle, one which holds that political and national, that is, cultural units should be congruent. Inconsistently, it is quite far from Gellner’s own rhetoric, one saying that nationalism is not the awakening of nations/cultures to self-consciousness, since it invents them where they do not exist.
[1] Gellner, Ernest: Thought and Change, Encounters with Nationalism.
[2] Gellner, Ernest: Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford UK-Cambridge US, 1983
[3] Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism, Oxford, 1993 (first published in 1960)
[4] Lenin: The Right of nations to Self-Determination, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999.
[5] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism and Modernisation, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 62
[6] Ibid., p. 61
[7] Beissinger, Mark: Nationalisms that bark and nationalisms that bite: Ernest Gellner and the substantiation of nations, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998, p. 170
[8] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[9] Ibid., p. 92
[10] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism, London, 1998, p. 3-4
[11] Brubaker, Rogers: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge, 1996, p. 15
[12] Nations and Nationalism, p. 89
[13] Ibid., p. 85
[14] Ibid., p. 77-78
[15] Gellner: Nationalism, p. 20-21
[16] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[17] Ibid., p. 63
[18] Ibid., p. 56
[19] Ibid., p. 57
[20] Nationalism, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 31
[22] Ibid., p. 90
[23] Connor, Walker: A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a…, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 45
Gellner’s theory of nationalism, already well-developed in his earlier works[1], has become truly influential since the publication of “Nations and Nationalism”[2]. Originally conceived as a response to the theory of nationalism by his senior colleague Elie Kedourie[3], Gellner’s theory has easily overcome the popularity of its predecessor: Kedourie’s history of the philosophical foundations of nationalism, going back to the Kantian idea of self-determination, could not compete with Gellner’s radical historical materialism, which totally divorced the phenomenon of nationalism from the realm of ideas, presenting it as a simple but inevitable historical consequence of the development of the means of production. One of the very few concessions to the view of nationalism as an ideological construct can be found on the first page of “Nations and Nationalism”, where nationalism is referred to as a “political principle” and a “theory”:
Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. (…) In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power-holders from the rest.
In the rest of Gellner’s theory, one will be looking in vain for the explanation of who and why, actually, introduced, promoted or imposed such a principle: presented as an inevitable consequence of the process of industrialisation, the emergence, promotion and imposition of the principle easily find a plausible external cause; yet, this principle’s internal sources remain obscure.
It was industrial production as such, according to Gellner, that imposed the imperative that the homogenous mass of anonymous, mobile and replaceable individuals be extended so as to embrace the whole of modern society, thus destroying the stratified, inegalitarian structure of the preceding, agrarian one. The following paragraph roughly describes such a situation:
Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked with national movements. The economic basis of those movements is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed. (…) Unity of language and its unimpeded development are most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial intercourse on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate classes and, lastly, for the establishment of close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, seller and buyer.
These words may seem to have been written by Ernest Gellner. However, they were written in 1914 by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.[4] Unlike Gellner, Lenin acknowledged the existence of an agency (bourgeoisie) that had introduced the set of ideas (political and linguistic unity) about the structure of society (national state) designed so as to promote this agency’s economic interests. The bourgeoisie had promoted these interests through national movements (which are thus not to be regarded as an autonomous agency, not even one derived from the bourgeoisie itself, but rather as a medium for articulation of the bourgeoisie’s political interests), in the attempt to mobilise popular support as a precondition for the desired re-structuring of a society. However, Gellner’s historical materialism is much more radical than the Marxist one: there is simply no place for an acting human agency, nor for its super-structural production of ideas, not even as a response to the requirements imposed by the production of material goods. For, it is the need for economic growth (as the dominant principle of industrial society) that demands homogenous society; that, in turn, generates the need for society’s homogenisation, and this task is to be performed by nationalism. At this point, Gellner may well have emphasised that this imperative had also created the idea of egalitarianism, as an ideological justification for the imposition of homogeneity. However, there is a striking absence of ideological dimension in the entire Gellner’s theory: the historical emergence of nation/nationalism is seen as a mechanic, even automatic process, stemming from the changed conditions of material production in the age of industrialism. Therefore, the domination of egalitarian concepts in modern society is to be treated as a mere by-product of this society’s need for homogeneity, required by the nature of industrial production. For, “it is the need for growth which generates nationalism, not vice versa”.[5]
Of course, the required homogenisation in industrial society could have taken some other, non-nationalist forms, and it indeed did so, namely in the case of the communist modernisation/industrialisation attempts to homogenise society and generate growth on a non-nationalist ideological basis. However, the reason why the homogenisation in a modern society rather takes the form of nationalism is in Gellnerian theory explained by uneven diffusion of modernisation and industrialisation, not by modernisation and industrialisation itself. Thus the notion of uneven diffusion arises as pivotal in Gellner’s understanding of nationalism:
Nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact of this wave generates a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past societies, is a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which b) is not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities and incentives for revolution, and which c) is remediable, and is seen to be remediable, by “national” secession. Under these circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.[6]
Yet, it remains unclear a) why, among all the things in the world, it is “national” secession that is perceived as a remedy for the sharp social stratification, and b) by whom, among all the social strata, it is perceived as such. A logical answer to both questions would be that it best serves the interests of those who attempt to prevent social revolution. However, with the introduction of the category of “interests”, as well as the category of these interests’ protection, there is no remedy that naturally and inescapably flows from the general situation. In the situation described above, the interests can be protected and revolution can be prevented a) by use of brute force, or b) by introduction of ideology which erases stratification’s sharp lines and establishes those less visible ones, in other words, which ostensibly unites divided society. Neither of these options can be treated as natural; and either of them may seem inescapable only from the point of view of those social strata whose aim is to prevent social revolution.
The use of force may be an option for those who are actually in the possession of it; this does not seem to have been the case with the industrial society’s newly-born stratum, attempting to maximise its financial power on the individual basis, while being deprived of the state- or aristocracy-monopolised military one. On the other hand, the military power of the state, usually identified with the ruling stratum of the pre-industrial age, became increasingly dependent on the financial power of the former, so that both strata could coalesce, as it indeed was the case in the 17th/18th-century England or the 19th-century Prussia. But, even this kind of convergence of interests of the financial and military elites, articulated in the form of a liberal-conservative alliance, was not frequently leading to the use of brute force; it rather led to the introduction of the ideology that was to legitimise the existence of such an alliance.
In the countries and regions which were particularly affected by the uneven diffusion of industrialisation and modernisation, such an ideology, aimed at the legitimisation of a social order that might be called a dynamic status quo, seemed to be the only conceivable remedy against a revolutionary threat. And this is the point in which Gellner failed to make a distinction between the categories of “conceivable” and “natural”, thus almost joining the camp of primordialists, who tend to perceive nationalism as a natural rather than ideological principle. Yet, it was the discourse of nationalism (and nationalism is a discourse imposed by identifiable social forces rather than a phenomenon mechanically created by blind forces of historical development) that has logically, not naturally, flowed from the general situation. Moreover, nationalism does not have to, and frequently did not, take the form of secessionism: whenever there was a convergence between a threat of social revolution and potential, if not actual, secessionist claims within a state, the ideology itself would rather take a revolutionary form, emphasising its state-unifying role, thus creating what is usually called “the nation”. If Gellner’s description of the “general situation” preceding the appearance of nationalism were to be taken into account, most of Western nationalisms, being revolutionary, non-secessionist and unification-aimed, could not qualify; only those secessionist, Central and East European ones would fit the pattern.
The total absence of ideology as a category created an unsustainable gap in Gellner’s historical materialism: a theory of nationalism, seeking to establish purely materialist explanation for a phenomenon whose very existence cannot be placed out of the realm of ideas, would be unable to produce any logical one. “Like a Marxism without a theory of revolution, Gellner’s theory provides no coherent vision of how nationalism works its way into the realm of substantive human action.”[7] For, modern society’s need for economic growth can indeed produce more need for growth; the need for growth alone, however, no matter how strongly felt, can not produce nationalist sentiment: there is simply a missing link between the two. Regardless of how radical Gellner’s materialism was, there was still a need for a category that could be made correspondent with people’s minds within which the appearance of nationalism had to be located. To bridge this gap, Gellner therefore had to refer to the realm of ideas, at least indirectly. And he did exactly that, introducing the notion of “culture”, defined broadly as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”. Thus his introductory, provisional definition of the nation says that
- Two men are of the same nation if and only they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
- Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. [8]
However, the introductory definition of the term “culture” has later been narrowed so as to refer to a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”.[9] Not only has culture as a system of ideas and associations been reduced to that of “signs and ways of behaving and communicating”, which roughly equals a “distinctive style of conduct and communication”; it has also become closely linked to the notion of community. In other words, it is presupposed that culture can exist as a distinct style of conduct and communication if, and only if, there is a community whose distinctiveness it establishes or protects. This, again, presupposes that culture and community are, by definition, congruent units that may rightfully be perceived as inseparably intertwined, or, in practical terms, identical. Also, being divorced from the sphere of ideas and associations, culture, as a distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community, has itself become given. This is not to say that such a style cannot change; it certainly can and does, as Gellner himself liked to emphasise. But, the impetus for a change within a culture is to be found within the sphere of ideas and associations; without it, culture as “a style of conduct and communication of a given community” would automatically be perpetuating itself, always on the same scale. In other words, it would be given, once for all. And then, this view of culture as a forever-given unit (congruent or even identical with that of community) would be quite close to the nationalists’ and primordialists’ perception of a timeless and changeless unity of the two, the unity which they prefer to call “the nation”. Indeed, that Gellner’s “culture” is practically identical with what is usually called “the nation”, can be seen in his latest, posthumously published definition of nationalism:
Nationalism is a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. Whatever principles of authority may exist between people depend for their legitimacy on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture (or, in nationalist idiom, of the same “nation”). In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so.[10]
If “culture” and “nation” are really interchangeable notions, then “the nation” may well be understood either as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community” or as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”, according to the given definitions of “culture”. Yet, the idea of the nation as a distinctive style of conduct and communication, or, indeed, as a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating, would probably go well beyond the limitations of Gellner’s substantialism, as Rogers Brubaker labelled it:[11] it is much more likely that Gellner’s “nation” was referring to a given community, as a real and substantial collectivity, rather than to its distinctive style of conduct and communication. There are no clear indications in the entire Gellner’s opus on nationalism that he perceived “the nation” in a non-substantialist way, that means, not as a real community, entity or collectivity, but as a “style of conduct” or a “system of ideas”. Perhaps the most accurate interpretation of his understanding of both “culture” and “the nation” would be that he perceived the nation (as a community) as one with its culture (as its distinctive style of conduct and communication): it is this perception of oneness that enabled him to treat these two notions as interchangeable or identical.
However, bsides producing terminological confusion, this understanding of nation/culture in terms of oneness between a community and its distinctive style of conduct and communication creates additional difficulties: some communities with their distinctive styles of conduct and communication had preceded Gellner’s invention of nations by nationalism; therefore, they were to be treated as cultures but not as nations. That is why Gellner had to introduce a distinction between “low cultures” of the pre-nationalist, agrarian age and a “high” culture of the age of industrialism, the latter being understood in a rather paradoxical way: a) as identical with “the nation” and therefore invented or imposed by nationalism; b) as required by industrial society’s need for homogeneity and therefore being a generator of nationalism. This paradox is further complicated by Gellner’s use of the term “high culture” to refer to all literate cultures, both modern, nationalist and pre-modern, pre-nationalist. Also, besides being treated as an equivalent of “the nation”, modern high culture is sometimes loosely defined as being equivalent to education.[12] (Following the logic of this argument, “the nation” and “education” should therefore be treated as equivalents, too. Although this may well be accepted as a metaphorical explanation of Gellner’s basic approach to nationalism, the equalisation of the –otherwise totally disparate – notions of “the nation” and “education” has little epistemological validity.) However, while it is possible to accept the underlying claim that illiterate, folk-transmitted cultures do not differ significantly in the agrarian and industrial ages, and therefore can be commonly labelled as “low cultures”, it is far from clear whether literate cultures of both periods can both be put under the common label of “high cultures” or have to be treated as distinct.
Indeed, if we choose to ignore the primordialist view of the nation as an ever-existing racially/culturally-defined community, the central question in any interpretation of the phenomenon of nationalism is the question of continuity. This equally refers to human aggregations, as well as cultures and civilisations of the pre-modern, agrarian age: their relatedness to modern nations (regardless of how “the nation” is defined) is an object of permanent dispute among students of nationalism. In this respect, Gellner’s modernism is less radical than his historical materialism: while claiming that nationalism invents nations where they do not exist, it does not advocate the idea of absolute discontinuity between “high”, literate culture of the agrarian age and modern, “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of industrialism; nor does it claim such discontinuity between the modern high culture and the preceding low cultures. However, he maintains that “the hold of a shared literate culture (“nationality”) over modern man springs from the erosion of the old structures, which had once provided each man with his identity, dignity and material security, whereas now he depends on education for these things.”[13] Therefore, it is the period of transition between two ages that provides us with the key to understanding of the question of continuity:
The agrarian age of mankind is a period in which some can read and most cannot, and the industrial age is one in which all can and must read. In the agrarian age, literate high-cultures co-exist with illiterate low or folk cultures. (…) The industrial age is based on economic growth. This in turn hinges on cognitive growth, which was ratified (and perhaps even significantly aided) by Cartesian and empiricist philosophies. Their essence was to de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny by criteria (“experience”, “the light of reason”) located beyond the bounds and the ramparts of any one belief system. (…) That, at any rate, is the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story, (….) by which the absolutist high cultures of the agrarian age are obliged to shed their absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public, neutral control. In brief, the price these high cultures pay for becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations, instead of appertaining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized. (…) An absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some, becomes an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some. [14]
It is worth noting that Gellner, in this analysis of the period of transition, while abandoning neither his favourite Manichean dichotomies (agrarian/industrial society, low/high culture, culture/state etc.), nor their paradoxical inversions (“an absolute doctrine for all and high culture for some / an absolute culture for all, and a doctrine for some”), makes a tactical reversal in his radical materialism and concedes that economic growth hinges on cognitive growth. This leads to the temporary introduction of “the purely intellectual, doctrinal aspect of a complex story”, in which Cartesian and empiricist philosophies play so significant a role as to “de-absolutize all substantive conviction about the world, and to subject all assertion, without exception, to neutral scrutiny” by criteria of “experience” and “the light of reason”. Thus the continuity of “high culture”, going from the agrarian age to the industrial one, depends on the rejection of its absolutism, that is, on its secularisation. In the entire Gellner’s theory, this is the only real concession to the “realm of ideas”: for his concept of culture to survive, it was necessary to admit that certain concepts did produce assumptions for the transformation of pre-modern, absolutist literate cultures into modern, secular, school-transmitted ones, if the latter were to serve as the “idioms of entire territorial nations”.
However, Gellner’s universal solution for a) the problem of continuity between pre-modern and modern ages, b) the question of relatedness between pre-modern communities and modern nations, c) the absence of an ideological dimension in a theory of nationalism, d) the question of relatedness between a cultural unit on one side, and ethnic, national and state units on the other side, relies upon the specific, Gellnerian use of the notion of culture. This use attempts to bridge all these gaps through the concept of oneness, which depicts culture, defined as a “distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community”, as one with any such community, be that an ethno-linguistic or racial group, a religious community, a nation aspiring to the state, or a nation contained within borders of the state. For that purpose, the notion of culture, being sometimes congruent, sometimes identical and interchangeable with every each of these categories, has had to be so widened as to embrace all of them:
This leads to the main generalisation concerning the role of culture in agrarian society: its main function is to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative, the hierarchical status system of that social order. (…) Note that, if this is the primary role of culture in such a society, it cannot at the same time perform a quite different role: namely, to mark the boundaries of the polity.
This is the basic reason why nationalism – the view that the legitimate political unit is made up of anonymous members of the same culture – cannot easily operate in agrarian society. It is deeply antithetical to its main organising principle, status expressed through culture. It is not mobile and anonymous, but hold its members in their “places”, and the places are highlighted by cultural nuance.[15]
Yet, if we take “culture” in a less substantialist meaning, as “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”[16], as Gellner himself proposed, there can hardly be any identity between culture and ethno-linguistic units, at least not in agrarian society. The pattern which was predominant was one of stratified cultures, rather than of one culture performing the task of stratification. If there was any such stratification-performing culture that could be perceived as one, it was rather functioning on the pan-European level (and Gellner’s understanding of nationalism is consistently confined to the European context) than on the level of a particular ethnic group. And, among those distinct stratified cultures, it was the culture of the ruling strata (including clergy) that clearly tended to be unified into, and identified with, a common trans-ethnic, pan-European culture. In Gellner’s words quoted above, when the literate high cultures of the agrarian age “were carried by a court or courtly stratum or a clerisy, they tended to be trans-ethnic and even trans-political, and were easily exportable to wherever that court was emulated or that clerisy respected and employed”. The middle strata’s culture (in those times represented by the relatively small social groups of merchants, artisans, moneylenders) also tended to display a maximal flexibility in terms of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity. To be more precise, these specialised, urban, middle-class groups were often ethnically and religiously distinct from their environment (Jews, Greeks, Armenians); at the same time, they were widely dispersed across the boundaries of other ethnic groups linked to a particular territory. While being resistant towards religious and social assimilation, concerned with their privileged status which simultaneously meant a kind of semi-isolation from the rest of a society, they were rather indifferent towards the linguistic assimilation: not only were they readily adopting other groups’ languages in an every-day communication, they were also gradually abandoning a non-religious use of their own languages. Thus only the lowest strata’s culture (usually called “folk-culture”, or, in Gellnerian idiom, “low culture”) was left the possibility to be congruent with an ethno-linguistic unit. It was nationalism that has unified these stratified cultural units of pre-modern society into the “high” culture of the nation, while sometimes (at least in the Gellnerian East-Central European context) using the culture of the lowest strata as its basis: only by absorbing the lowest strata’s culture could the convergence between this “high”, synthetic culture and ethno-linguistic unit be hypothetically brought into being.
In this aspect, Gellner’s approach to nationalism, while pretending to be “modernist”, is no less primordialist than nationalists’ own approach to nationalism, and is, above all, mistaken in its basic premise: culture in the pre-modern society, which is said to have been the base for the future appearance of nations and nationalism, can not be treated as one, primordial, undivided entity, let alone exclusively identified with ethnicity or language. It was the above-mentioned rigid stratification in such a society that had created plurality of distinct, hierarchical, class-based cultures within a particular political unit, which eventually were to be unified into one, synthetic (or, in Gellner’s terms, “high”) culture of the nation. The plurality of such cultures is therefore to be described as class- rather than ethno-linguistically based.
Of course, it would be unfair to overlook the fact that in his best-known work, “Nations and Nationalism”, Gellner portrays agrarian society and what he there calls “sub-cultures” in very similar terms, thus contradicting his general concept of culture, as presented in the passage above:
Agrarian society, with its relatively stable specialisations, its persisting regional, kin, professional and rank groupings, has a clearly marked social structure. Its elements are ordered, and not distributed at random. Its sub-cultures underscore and fortify these structural differentiations, and they do not by setting up or accentuating cultural difference within it in any way hamper the functioning of the society at large. Quite the contrary. Far from finding such cultural differentiations offensive, the society holds their expression and recognition to be most fitting and appropriate.[17]
However, even if we put all the terminological confusion aside, and take for this purpose only Gellner’s pre-modern “low cultures” as correspondent to particular ethno-linguistic units within the boundaries of a pre-modern polity, then “high”, school-transmitted culture of the age of nationalism should still be understood as entity merged out of the plurality of pre-existing, both literate and folk cultures, rather than as entity fully corresponding to any of them: while merging pre-existing “low” cultures, modern “high” culture inevitably erodes their ethnic boundaries and creates its own, national ones. Also, as was said above, a pre-modern “high” culture undergoes the process of secularisation in order to be transformed into a modern one. Perhaps the most conspicuous point in Gellner’s modernism, one saying that the cultures nationalism claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions[18], is in line with this argument:
Nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by themselves.[19]
However, Gellner’s last, posthumously published words offer a somewhat simplified but at least clear-cut explanation of what he had actually meant while ambiguously using the term “culture”. Repeating his basic claim that nationalism is a principle which maintains that political legitimacy depends “on the fact that the members of the group concerned are of the same culture”, Gellner went so far as to assert that what he called “the same culture” is “in nationalist idiom” called “the same nation”;[20] or, putting it inversely, that “the same nation” has, in Gellnerian idiom, been replaced by “the same culture”. Within such logic, “high” culture, shared by “a mobile anonymous mass of participants” and “relatively free of internal nuances” which characterise “low” cultures, has become “linked to the political boundaries of the unit with which it is identified”.[21] Being identified with the political unit and its boundaries, “high” culture has actually institutionalised its own boundaries, which preceding “low” cultures, as is said above, were not able to establish.
Perhaps culture contained within the boundaries of the state may be accepted as a plausible definition for the notion of the nation. Yet, Gellnerian “culture” seems to be synonymous with “the nation”: at the least, the content of the term is overlapping with his rather vague notion of the nation, defined only in terms of “high” culture’s congruence with the boundaries of the state, with the nation’s boundaries being the same as those of “high” culture’s. In that sense, the nation contained within the boundaries of the state may be a poor definition for the nation-state; but it says nothing about the nation itself. If this interpretation is correct, and if Gellner’s “culture” is only an alternative term to designate what other authors usually call “the nation”, then his basic claim that nationalism is a principle of congruence between culture and the state, offers little more than Mazzini’s 19th-century slogan “every nation a state”: a late 20th-century theory saying that nationalism is a principle of congruence between the nation and the state is to be seen as simply obsolete.
Indeed, Gellner’s assertion that “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication” clearly suggests that he treats the notions of nation and culture as practically, if not theoretically, identical and inter-changeable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that, within such a logic, two men sharing the same culture are not of the same nation. However, the real implications of such inter-changeability lead to a less benign, typically nationalist assertion that two men share the system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communication if and only if they are of the same nation.
For Gellner, not only are “the sense of ethnicity, the identification with a nation, and the political expression of this passionate identification”, inseparably entwined: they have become one.[22] The use of “culture” to bridge the gap between the notions of ethnicity, nation and nationalism thus serves as a cover under which an identity between these three is bound to persist. This is quite close to the view of the nation as a “self-aware ethnic group” (Connor)[23]: in the Gellnerian idiom, the nation has become a self-aware culture, brought to the self-awareness by the application of the nationalist principle, one which holds that political and national, that is, cultural units should be congruent. Inconsistently, it is quite far from Gellner’s own rhetoric, one saying that nationalism is not the awakening of nations/cultures to self-consciousness, since it invents them where they do not exist.
[1] Gellner, Ernest: Thought and Change, Encounters with Nationalism.
[2] Gellner, Ernest: Nations and Nationalism: New Perspectives on the Past, Oxford UK-Cambridge US, 1983
[3] Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism, Oxford, 1993 (first published in 1960)
[4] Lenin: The Right of nations to Self-Determination, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (ed.), The Nationalism Reader, New York 1999.
[5] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism and Modernisation, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 62
[6] Ibid., p. 61
[7] Beissinger, Mark: Nationalisms that bark and nationalisms that bite: Ernest Gellner and the substantiation of nations, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998, p. 170
[8] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[9] Ibid., p. 92
[10] Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism, London, 1998, p. 3-4
[11] Brubaker, Rogers: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge, 1996, p. 15
[12] Nations and Nationalism, p. 89
[13] Ibid., p. 85
[14] Ibid., p. 77-78
[15] Gellner: Nationalism, p. 20-21
[16] Nations and Nationalism, p. 7
[17] Ibid., p. 63
[18] Ibid., p. 56
[19] Ibid., p. 57
[20] Nationalism, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 31
[22] Ibid., p. 90
[23] Connor, Walker: A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a…, in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism, Oxford-New York, 1994, p. 45