The only society that fits at all well into Gellner’s model of an agrarian society is the feudal one. But this is not proof that the peasantry lacked a national identity, but rather that the aristocracy did. Indeed, Russia had a popular national identity. Every year throughout the Middle Ages and the early Modern Era, Russia had mobilised massive armies to defend its endless border against summer incursions.Its whole structure reflected this isolated Christian state’s need for survival. This moulded Russian culture and gave it a sense of its special role in history and its vocation for sacrifice, which to some extent was to be transferred in the twentieth century to what has been called a secular religion. It became a nation with an international mission.14
This brings us to challenge one of Gellner’s great assumptions: the idea that rural society was entirely static in preindustrial Europe. Apart from military duties, as occurred on a massive scale in Russia but also everywhere else to a greater or lesser extent, the roads of Europe were tramped by all manner of people: vagrants, merchants, tradesmen, Gypsies, and peasantry from the mountains in search of seasonal work.15
Even the peasant who never left his land had some idea of his national community, which was generally only one of many competing identities. His geography would also have been pretty vague. There is an interesting story of a man from St. Kilda who went travelling in the Hebrides in the nineteenth century. St. Kilda is a group of small islands far out into the Atlantic and the peasants lived an independent and egalitarian lifestyle that exercised a certain fascination on more “civilised” travellers from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Our St. Kildan reached the bottom of Skye where it nearly touches mainland Scotland, and looking across, said, “I suppose that must be England (Sasainn)”. This story tells us that a nineteenth-century peasant could have a sense of belonging to a nation whose exact entity he did not know. He knew that it was bordered by another country called England, and the story implies that he also realized that the other country was much more powerful. Coming from tiny St. Kilda, he could not have dreamt the real dimensions of these nations.
Ideas, including ideas of national identity, had always circulated, but it was difficult to maintain momentum when communications were so difficult. The great change, which in the opinion of many ushered in the modern age, was the invention of the printing press. Without the printing press, the Reformation would probably have been no different to the many other popular Christian movements that challenged the Church hierarchy from time to time. The circulation of broadsheets, particularly in Germany, was fundamental, and the Reformation was the first step towards nationalism because it created national religions in many parts of Europe.
A sense of nation therefore existed before the advent of modern nationalism. It may or may not have existed in prehistory, but for our purposes it is a reality of human society. What was it then that turned a sense of nation into nationalism? What triggered this obsession that Gellner correctly identifies as a congruence between state and nation? Surely it has to be the greater desire of the population of a given territory to get involved in political affairs, itself a product of the greater permanency of ideas following the invention of the printing press. After Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention, Europeans were initially more interested in the celestial republic and fought their wars of religion, but by the seventeenth century attention turned to the earthly one. It has to be admitted that much of the discourse was still couched in religious terminology, but the content had its feet firmly on the ground. In Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom in a Platform, a work that was already calling for universal suffrage, we find clear indicators of a national consciousness that could be called nationalism. According to this radical thinker, England had once been free and had come under a pernicious foreign domination in the form of the Norman Conquest. Since then, the English had always suffered and the task, a quintessentially political task, was to set the English free and put them back in control of their own state and land. The English had been made servile by these centuries of subjugation. Historians rightly ridicule this interpretation. It was clearly a myth, and we know the importance of myths in nation-building. Like all good myths, it may have had a tiny element of truth in it. Anglo-Saxon society was no utopia; it was slave-owning like the Germanic warrior societies that founded it, and the Church had encouraged the various forms of subjugation to be abandoned in favour of the emerging and increasingly ubiquitous “serf”. The Normans were to rationalise feudalism and strengthen the state. But a slave is always a slave, whatever name is used, and “serf” derives from servus, the classical Latin for slave. Norman society may have been marginally more repressive than the Anglo-Saxon one, but by the time Winstanley was writing, Norman French had long since disappeared from the country, following the premature demise of the feudal system which in turn was caused by the catastrophic effect of the Black Death in England. The historical veracity of Winstanley’s ideas is irrelevant: what matters is that he perceived England as dominated by an alien group from which it had to be liberated, one of the typical phenomena of nationalism, as Gellner confirms. This is nationalism that is in no way concerned with military conquest (some of the army refused to go to Ireland on moral grounds; Fairfax refused to lead the army against its old ally, Scotland), and is one entirely interested in the political culture of the current state. The French Revolution was another great national event, and this time the nationalist nature is very clear. Europe looks to it as an example and a precursor to the new Europe that gradually evolves in the nineteenth century. The 1793 constitution may never have been enacted, but it makes clear that the Revolution was all about a democratic political settlement for the French nation. Again history was used to justify the nation and the revolution. Gaul/France was dominated by the Romans/Franks and Vercingetorix/ contemporary revolutionaries fought bravely against the oppressor. Like Winstanley, these revolutionaries used history to combine class and national identity. When Napoleon seized power, ancient Rome became the ideal model rather than the model oppressor. Modern historians can be a little precious about these obvious anachronisms, but they are simply arguments by analogy – the natural language of nationalism. According to Croce, “All history is contemporary history.” An idealist position at the other extreme, but not without its element of truth.
Because history is a muddled and complex affair, the Revolution also led to Bonaparte and French expansionism, and as new tricolours were raised around Europe, a new political force had appeared and its name was nationalism. What may or may not have existed in the past as an isolated and partial reality, now became almost universal. It was a potent force, and one that was easily manipulated. It can undoubtedly produce intolerance and arrogance, as can all other ideologies. Johnson famously referred to patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”.16 Petty nationalism most certainly is. But nationalism is also the demand for a rightful political voice, a recognition of one’s own culture and a place at the ruler’s table. It should also be remembered that states were brutal and expansionist even before the advent of nationalism.
Nation is everywhere a reality and nowhere clearly defined. It is generated by various mixtures of language, geography, culture, religion and ethnicity or what I would call perceived ethnicity. Ethnicity is always pernicious myth. It may however be none of these. It may exist simply because a state has existed for so long that it has built up a culture of law and political activity that transcends any of the other identities that divide the nation. Switzerland is a good example of this. It has four languages (at least). It was the cradle of the Reformation and the ensuing fragmentation of western Christianity, but that fragmentation, which also occurred within its borders, did not break up the nation. Geography was undoubtedly essential in its formation, but only as far as the original mountain cantons were concerned. It developed a common culture, one that has become increasingly insular with the passing centuries, so that now it has something of a reputation for being a smug and slightly philistine nation, whi
ch belies its interesting history. On the other hand it is a well-functioning polity and its linguistic diversity means that it is inevitably tuned into the larger language communities beyond its borders. This diverse nation was perhaps the starting point for modern nationalism and democracy, although some might point to the Italian republics. The fact remains that Switzerland survived and the Italian republics did not,17 an outcome that would have greatly comforted Machiavelli who always believed a virtuous republic had to be founded amongst a rustic people on a hostile and infertile terrain – and the Germans were his preferred choice, based bizarrely on his short sojourn in Bolzen, now Bolzano in northern Italy.
The only general definition for a nation is as unsatisfactory as it is tautological. A nation exists because it is a nation, and is widely accepted as such by a substantial number of people.18 Others may deny its existence, but if it has meaning to some, it has a certain reality. It is after all a purely social reality, an entirely artificial construct. Most nations were formed through a degree of military conquest, but their ability to integrate new areas, gain legitimacy and effectively create a new and greater nation did depend on cultural factors. The conquest of minor Anglo-Saxon nations by Wessex to create England was not paralleled by similar success when it came to the annexation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The borders of France eventually settled along a linguistic divide. Not exactly, of course: Flemish is spoken in northeast France and a German dialect in Alsace, not to speak of the internal languages of Breton and Basque. Nations irreversibly assimilate small cultures. Cornish has disappeared in England, and Cumric has disappeared in Scotland (the classic Welsh epic Gwˆyr a Gogledd or “Men of the North” is an account of the travails of their northern cousins). Gascony was originally Wasconia (Basque-land), gaining the initial “g” from the dislike of neo-Latin and Celtic speakers for starting a word with the semi-consonant. It therefore follows that the Basque territories were once much larger. The process of cultural assimilation is as old as man himself. Languages and cultures influence but do not determine borders and borders influence but do not determine languages. States influence the creation of national identities, and in recent history national identities have influenced the creation of states. Political structures enhance or suppress national identities. Necessarily then national identities, although historically determined, are constantly shifting. They shift territorially, they shift linguistically and most interestingly they shift culturally.
We have now come to the difficult part. So far I have reduced nationalism to a shapeless confusion, and I have heaped some, perhaps too many, unkind words on Gellner’s fundamental work on the subject, Nations and Nationalism. It is time to put a little order back into nationalism by examining the possible kinds of nationalism. Gellner and many other social scientists and historians are most interested in the subjective and objective causes of nationalism, while the last two of my three distinctions concerns nationalisms themselves as they actually appear and influence events.
The first distinction is between the nationalism of great nations and the nationalism of small or subject nations. Gellner acknowledges this distinction and creates the categories of “Megalomanians” and “Ruritanians”.19 He then writes a witty but more than a little simplistic parody, which mainly concerns the reality of eastern European nationalism. His Ruritania is an absurd and ignorant little peasant country, which may or may not build the protective shell of a state. Either way, it remains absurd and ignorant. Like Marx, Gellner has a deep-rooted contempt for small-nation or Ruritanian nationalism. Like Marx, he believes that there are historic great nations that can instigate change, and in his opinion, nineteenth-century ethnographers have a lot to answer for. His peasant world (forever inhabited solely by peasants) appears to be one completely lacking any form of consciousness of itself or anyone else. It communicated in “context-bound grunts and nods”.20 This is my alternative version to Gellner’s tale of passive Ruritanians: During the sixteenth century, most Ruritanians converted to Lutheranism. The Bible was translated into Ruritanian and broadsheets circulated amongst the peasantry with unheard-of radical ideas. The Ruritanians participated in the Thirty Years War, and were eventually re-Catholicised at the point of a sword. Although they never returned to Protestantism in significant numbers, the national poet and translator of the Bible, T., continued to be read and revered. In the nineteenth century, the Ruritanians rebelled against their Megalomanian rulers and were brutally suppressed. Following this traumatic event, there was a great flowering of Ruritanian literature and exiles in America sent money home to set up schools. At the same time unfortunately, Ruritanians were being cleared from the land to make way for Megalomanian farmers who introduced modern agrarian techniques (unfortunately it was discovered later that these techniques caused irreversible environmental damage and much of Ruritania became infertile, further reducing the population). Ruritanians were forcibly recruited for the wars against the other great power in the region, Domineeria, and for many Ruritanian men the stark choice was between emigration and the army. This meant that peasant families were robbed of young men at their most productive age and the rural economy was unable to sustain many landless peasant families, particularly after cheap agricultural imports came in from the New World. The two World Wars further decimated the Ruritanian population. After the War, the Socialist Republic of Megalomania questioned the loyalty of the backward Ruritanians and many were rounded up and put into labour camps. Now there are only 15,000 Ruritanian native speakers left (in the nineteenth century there were about one million), but we should not give up hope, because Megalomania, which has reinvented itself as a “free-market democracy”, wants to become a member of the European Union and has signed the European Charter on Lesser-Used Languages along with a wad of other charters. It will do all it can to keep this historic language alive, within the limitations imposed by prudent budgetary policy. There is the problem of the collapse of the Megalomanian economy and the scourge of organized crime, which means that all the young Ruritanians have emigrated to Germany. … You could do any number of these invented cases to back up your arguments, but I don’t believe that mine is any less typical than Gellner’s. The story of small nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a tragic one, and those cultures should not be despised simply because they lost out to more powerful forces. The Ruritanians suffered along with all Europeans, but they suffered more.21
Megalomanians say that in the interests of rationalisation you should conform to the national type. You may speak Catalan, but that is really just an affectation. Your real language is Spanish, which has international importance and a great literature. Or you peoples of highland India don’t really have a proper religion; what you are actually practising is a kind of primitive Hinduism and you should start respecting the real thing by dressing properly and accepting the caste system. Or to use the arguments of Ernest Gellner, who is a Megalomanian of the first water, you really have to conform to the national culture because the modern industrialised nation with its division of labour, of which nationalism is simply an unconscious expression, requires a high degree of homogenisation in the interests of productivity and efficiency, otherwise we are all going to starve.22 The Ruritanian replies that he or she doesn’t really care what the Megalomanians are doing, but would just like to carry on as before. Ruritanians are often considered reactionaries because they stand in the way of progress. In a way they are, but theirs is not the reaction of the powerful to a reduction in their power (the usual meaning of reaction), but the reaction of the powerless when faced with annihilation of their culture and identity.
All the colonial wars of independence were wars of Ruritanians against Megalomanians. All the battles and campaigns in aid of minority cultures, either aimed at independence or some form of autonomy, are between Ruritanians and Megalomanians. Gellner is his usual dismissive self: “To put it in the simplest possible terms: there is [sic] a very large number of potential nations on earth. Our planet also c
ontains room for a certain number of independent or autonomous political units. On any reasonable calculation, the former number (of potential nations) is probably much, much larger than that of possible viable states.”23 States can come together or split apart, as their populations desire. Of course, we can all have views on individual cases. It could be argued, for instance, that the unification of Germany was unfair on other eastern countries like the Czech Republic and Hungary, which have had to wait for membership of the European Union. It could be argued that the break-up of Yugoslavia was absurd, because the republics already enjoyed considerable autonomy (their own police, their own army, their own parliament and laws, their own foreign debt, etc.). All they gained was the right to rid themselves of one of their flags and to take control of international borders – hardly worth the suffering of a brutal and senseless war. Nevertheless self-determination remains a valid principle as long as the rules of the democratic game are observed.24
But I cannot agree that the number of potential nations is in some way a problem. If the Karen of Burma gain autonomy or independence, is that to be regretted, while their annihilation to make way for a more viable national structure is to be seen as the onward march of progress? If democracy is our aim, then all national aspirations should be taken into account, which does not mean they can always be fully satisfied because, here I agree with Gellner, nationalisms are often competing and compromise is then the only way out.
Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 11
