Zlatko Hadžidedić, Center for Nationalism Studies

Homogeneity as the Route to Modernity

There are not so many among contemporary social scientists who do not connect the phenomena of nationalism and Modernity. Actually, most of them tend to perceive these two as one: at least, in most of contemporary theories of nationalism, nationalism and Modernity are almost inconceivable one without another. The famous definition of nationalism by Elie Kedourie indirectly locates its emergence in the time of Europe’s industrialisation and modernisation: “Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century”.(l) Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm’s places the rise of the nation “in a century of revolution and démocratisation”, with the nation being “one of many traditions invented by political elites in order to legitimise their power”.(2)

Although most of scholars treat nationalism and Modernity as practically entwined, few of them have not been rather cautious about linking the emergence of nationalism with that of industrialisation. Among these few, probably the most famous is Ernest Gellner, who made modern society’s need for homogeneity, induced by its need for economic growth in the age of industrialisation, the key postulate in his theory of nationalism. “Essentially,” says Gellner, “nationalism is a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion”. For,

Industrialisation and modernisation notoriously proceed in an uneven manner. Just as notoriously, it is the early stages, the first few generations, of these processes which cause the greatest disruption, the greatest misery, and which provide the maximum opportunity for political revolution and for the re-thinking and re-drawing of loyalties. This ghastly tidal wave does not hit various parts of the world simultaneously: on the contrary, it hits them successively.(3)

Tom Nairn, adopting the core-periphery theory of capitalism, is even more explicit than Gellner connecting the notion of uneven industrialisation to that of nationalism as an expression of the imperative to industrialise. For Nairn, the real origins of nationalism are to be found “in the machinery of world political economy”. Just like Gellner, Nairn emphasised that the process of that economy’s development as such, that is, the process of mere industrialisation and urbanisation, was not the reason for the rise of nationalism: it was rather caused by the features of that process, which Naim also put under the common denominator of “uneven development”. Unlike Gellner, Nairn was more prone to perceive the negative aspects of the role that capitalism had played in the emergence of nationalism:

The unforseeable, antagonistic reality of capitalism’s growth into the world is what the general title “uneven development” refers to. (…) Modern capitalist development was launched by a number of West-European states which had accumulated the potential for doing so over a long period of history. (…) The impact of those leading countries was normally experienced as domination and invasion. (…) On the periphery itself, outside the core areas of the new industrial-capitalist world economy, people soon needed little persuasion of this. They learned quickly enough that Progress in the abstract meant domination in the concrete, by powers which they could not help apprehending as foreign or alien. (…) Huge expectations raced ahead of material progress itself. The peripheric elites had no option but to try and satisfy such demands by taking things into their own hands. Taking things into one’s own hands denotes a good deal of the substance of nationalism, of course. It meant that these classes … had to mobilize against progress at the same time as they sought to improve their position in accordance with the new canons. They had to contest the concrete form in which (so to speak) progress had taken them by the throat, even as they set out to progress themselves. Since they wanted factories, parliaments, schools and so on, they had to copy the leaders somehow; but in a way which rejected the mere implantation of these things by direct foreign intervention or control. This gave rise to a profound ambiguity, an ambivalence which marks most forms of nationalism.(4)

Both Gellner and Naim, together with a number of other authors, perceived nationalism as an essentially reactive phenomenon. According to Nairn, nationalism is a reaction displayed by peripheral industrialising societies to the spread of modernisation and industrialisation under the aegis of global capitalism. In Gellner’s case, nationalism is defined in a more ambiguous way: sometimes, it is perceived in a broader sense, as a response to modern industrial society’s requirements for homogeneity; sometimes, however, as in his famous model-nation of Ruritanians who attempt to secede from the empire of Megalomania(5), it is interpreted as a reaction of peripheral ethnic groups affected by unevenness of industrial development within a multi-ethnic state. Just like in Nairn’s description, this reaction arises due to the comparison of the levels of development between the periphery and the core: it is progress itself, if perceived as a permanent expectation rather than an achieved material fact, which creates resentment that characterises most of reactive nationalisms. However, unlike Nairn, Gellner brings the core-periphery concept from the international level to the internal one: it is depicted either in terms of the relationship between a core-nation and an ethnic-minority group, or in terms of the relationship between an imperial capital and an ethnic province.

Similarity between Gellner’s and Nairn’s views can hardly be a surprise: what they certainly both have in common is their radical historical materialism. This philosophy of history holds that the realm of ideas, or, in Marxist idiom, the superstructure, is by definition dependent on the material base: in other words, that the realm of ideas itself is but a reaction to the dictates, requirements or needs of the material base. In this sense, nationalism, while obviously taking place within the realm of ideas, can be no exception to this rule: the idea of nationalism, according to historical materialists, is but a consequence of material progress; more precisely, as both authors claim, it is a consequence of this progress’ uneven diffusion. This logically leads to the conception of reactive nationalism as the only form of nationalism.

Strangely enough, so different an author as Elie Kedourie, who analysed the doctrine of nationalism in the light of its conceptual development, tracing its origins back to the Kantian philosophy of self-determination, also conceived of reactive nationalism as the only existing form of nationalism. Thus in the afterword to the fourth edition of his most famous book(6), while criticising Gellner’s theory of nationalism as a phenomenon related to industrialisation, Kedourie maintains that “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands in which there was as yet hardly any industrialization”. The logic of such a statement obviously implies that the doctrine of nationalism, even if it really happened to be first articulated in German-speaking lands (what about the English, American and French Revolutions and their respective nationalisms?), could only be a reaction to the increasing domination of the already-industrialised nation-states of Western Europe; yet, Kedourie mistakes the consequence for the cause: ultimately, this brings him to the odd conclusion that “the areas where industrialism first appeared and made the greatest progress, i.e. Great Britain and the United States of America, are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.

Indeed, as a reactive and defensive phenomenon, nationalism is unknown in the areas mentioned above: there nationalism took its most active and aggressive form, that of expansionism and colonialism. In its most active form, promoted from the core areas of industrial development by means of economic, political and military expansion, nationalism appears so natural and built-in into those societies’ foundations as to become invisible, at least from Kedourie’s Germanophobic/Anglophilic perspective. This “natural” expansion of both Western ideas and Western power is probably best described in the introduction to Liah Greenfeld’s famous book “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity”:

When nationalism started to spread in the eighteenth century, the emergence of new national identities was no longer a result of original creation but rather of the importation of an already existing idea. The dominance of England in eighteenth-century Europe, and then the dominance of the West in the world, made nationality the canon. As the sphere of influence of the core Western societies (which defined themselves as nations) expanded, societies belonging or seeking entry to the supra-societal system of which the West was the center had in fact no choice but to become nations.(7)

This description, as one can see, is not too far from the picture presented by Tom Naim. However, while retaining the basic core-periphery concept, Greenfeld rejects the underlying logic of Naim’s or Gellner’s historical materialism: nationalism, or the concept of nation, is not seen as having been created by blind forces of historical development; it is rather that these forces had been set into motion by the newly-born idea of nationalism. For Liah Greenfeld, emergence of the first nation, and therefore birth of the idea of nationalism, is to be marked by a semantic shift in the meaning of the word “nation”: when the meaning of the word shifted towards the concept of “sovereign people”, the idea of nation was born, thus giving birth to the first nation. The first emergence of the concept of nation as a sovereign people, according to this author, took place in the sixteenth-century England. In its subsequent spread across the globe, the idea of nation shifted further, towards the concept of nation as a unique, sovereign people. Needless to say, in its first appearance, the concept of the English nation as a sovereign people inevitably implied this people’s uniqueness: thus, when spreading further, the concept of nation was properly understood in other societies as a concept implying both uniqueness and sovereignty. And, as Greenfeld correctly puts it, all these societies, except the first-born one, had no choice but to become unique and sovereign, that is, to become nations: the dominance of England in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the dominance of England over the world’s seas and trade routes was inevitably forcing them to become nations.

Not surprisingly, the first societies whose reaction was recorded were also those sea-trade oriented ones: the Netherlands and the North American colonies.(8) The next reaction took place in a country whose geopolitical position was rather ambivalent: France of the eighteenth century considered itself a continental power; at the same time, its orientation towards sea-trade was unquestionable. It was only later that the typical continental countries with geopolitical potential to establish their own domination on the Continent started to adopt the concept of nation, thus practically adopting nationalism as an attempt to apply this concept to their own societies. Compared with the sixteenth-century England, the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the eighteenth-century United States and France, Germany and Russia of the nineteenth-century were obviously late-comers. Eventually, the late-nineteenth century attempt by the governments of these two countries to promote a network of continental trade-routes demonstrated all the idleness of such efforts: the nations born first were so ideologically and militarily equipped as not to allow the late-comers to break their monopoly over the routes of the world’s trade. Thus the Anglo-French alliance (with the United States joining the alliance in 1917) triggered the 1914-1918 World War, so that eventually, as the strategically planned outcome of the war, the already-obsolete European empires were replaced by a number of new nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe.(9)

The rule of the nation-state has since become absolute, and the concept itself, as every student of nationalism knows, has been defined in absolutist terms. The most obvious manifestation of this absolutism is the doctrine of national self-determination, the doctrine of victorious Western nation-states which has, since 1919, been imposed onto the entire globe: the world as a geopolitical whole has, paradoxically, had to be subjected to self-determination. Or, in more practical terms, every country in the world aspiring to catch up with the already-developed Western nation-states has had to define itself as a nation-state, in order to trigger the process of modernisation and industrialisation, and become a part of the system of nation-states.

The history of the spread of nationalism and of the nation-state concept demonstrated that homogenisation of modern societies was not merely a consequence of their modernisation and industrialisation. Rather, it was the other way round: the process of modernisation and industrialisation was induced by the homogenisation of these societies. Historically, this homogenisation emerged due to the introduction of the concept of nation: the idea of the nation as a unique, sovereign people, when applied to a society already in possession of the state, produced this society’s mobilisation around the state which granted it an illusion of its uniqueness and sovereignty. Mobilisation around the state led further, towards this society’s homogenisation. Society homogenised around the state by the idea of its sovereignty and uniqueness became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the concept of nation induced the simultaneous emergence of the nation, nationalism and the nation-state as observable social phenomena. What is more important, the nation, as a society homogenised by nationalism, found its homogeneity the most favourable precondition for further, perpetual mobilisation around efforts to induce perpetual economic growth. These efforts took the form of industrialisation.

The history of the spread of both the concept of nation and modernisation/industrialisation shows that the need for perpetual economic growth did not emerge only due to the development of means of production; or, rather, not only due to the development of means of production. The idea of perpetual growth, and therefore the need to realise it, and therefore the development of means to realise it, emerged at the point of accumulation of potentials of a given society. It was this accumulation, that had previously been generated by the process of modern society’s mobilisation and homogenisation in the form of the nation, which created the need to realise such potentials: thus the concept of perpetual growth was born, as an expression of modern society’s need to realise its accumulated potentials. Modern societies homogenised as nations have been putting most of their efforts into development of those material pre-conditions which were to bring their potentials for perpetual growth closer to realisation. Needless to say, these efforts have only been magnifying such potentials at an ever-growing rate, thus bringing the concept of endlessly perpetual growth into being. Therefore, it is difficult to say that modern society’s need for growth produced homogeneity; nor is it more likely that modern society’s homogeneity produced nationalism and the nation-state. As can be seen successively – from England, the United States and France, to Germany – it was always the prior emergence of the nation-state and nationalism that triggered the homogenisation of these societies; this homogenisation, in turn, generated the idea of rapid economic growth, and then the need and the conditions for its actual realisation. In all these cases, the emergence of nationalism always preceded the emergence of industrialism and is rather to be associated with earlier stages of capitalism.

Notes

1. Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism (Blackwell: Oxford UK-Maiden USA 1993), p. 1.
2. Hobsbawm, Eric: Invented Traditions., in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism (Oxford University Press: Oxford-New York 1994), p.
3. Gellner, Ernest: Nationalism and Modernisation., in John Hutchinson/Anthony D. Smith (ed.): Nationalism (Oxford University Press: Oxford-New York 1994), p.
4. Nairn, Tom: The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (New Left Books: London 1977), p. 334-336
5. Gellner, Ernest: Nations and Nationalism. New Perspectives on the Past (Blackwell: Oxford 1983), ch. What is a Nation?
6. Kedourie, Elie: Nationalism (Blackwell: Oxford UK-Maiden USA 1993), p. 143.
7. Greefeld, Liah: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA-London 1993), p. 14.
8. , p. 14.
9. That “Wilsonian idealism” was in fact a consistent, long-term geopolitical strategy on the part of Anglo-American powers, can be seen from the text written at the beginning of the century by Wilson’s predecessor and opponent, Theodore Roosevelt: “Europe must be reconstructed on the basis of the principle of nationalities. (…) The Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish Empire must be broken up if we intend to make the world even moderately safe for democracy. (…) There must be a revived Poland, taking in all Poles of Austria, Prussia and Russia; a greater Bohemia, taking in Moravia and the Slovaks; a great Yugoslav community including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, while the Rumanians in Hungary should become part of Rumania and the Italians in Austria part of Italy. (…) Only in this way can we remove the menace of German aggression which has become the haunting nightmare for all civilizations, especially in the case of the small well-behaved liberty-loving peoples.” (In Hans Kohn, “The Age of Nationalism”; quoted from David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist,” The Review of Politics, vol. 23, July 1961, p. 356-377; The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition, New York ,1922, XXI, 409.)