Nationalism

Social theory has approached nationalism most as a political ideology structuring relations of power and conflict. It has focused on nationalism's relationship to ethnic violence and war, on the production of beliefs that one's own country is the best, and on the invocation of national unity to override internal differences. It has seen nationalism first through bellicose international relations and second through projects by which elites attempt to mobilize mass support. This has been an influential view both among scholars of nationalism (such as Michael Hechter) and among general social theorists (such as Jürgen Habermas) who have tended to see nationalism largely as a problem to be overcome.

A second strain of social theory, associated with modernization theory and anticipated by both Weber and Durkheim, has seen nation building as a crucial component of developing an effective modern society, one capable of political stability and economic development. Nationalism, as the ideology associated with such nation building, is thus important to a phase on the process of becoming modern and also a normal reflection of industrialization and state formation. Ernst Gellner, Charles Tilly, and Michael Mann are key representatives. But however normal to a developmental phase nationalism may be, all see it as also deeply implicated in power relations and conflicts and prone to problematic manipulation by state elites.

These first two lines of theory both emphasize politics and the state and treat nationalism mainly as a feature of the modern era. A third strain of social theory recognizes the role of nationalism in politics and conflict but stresses also its more positive contributions to the production of culture, the preservation of historical memory, and the formation of group solidarity. Many of the most influential theorists in this group also place much greater stress on the sources of nationalism in ancient ethnicities that provide the basis for identities prior to any specific political mobilization. Anthony Smith is the foremost representative of this view. A related point is that nationalism ought not to be approached only through its most extreme manifestations, but also grasped in its more banal forms—in a variety of ceremonial events, for example, and the organization of athletic competitions. These contribute not only to specific group loyalties but to the reproduction of the general view that the world is organized in terms of nations and national identities.

Here the study of nationalism as a topic of social theory intersects with the more reflexive question of how nationalism has shaped a crucial unit of analysis in social theory, that of society. While “sociality” may be universal to human life, the idea of discrete, bounded, and integrally unitary “societies” is more historically specific. It appears in strong form as one of the characteristic, even definitive, features of the modern era.

This reflects political features—as, for example, both state control over borders and intensification of state administration internally help to produce the idea of bounded and unified societies, and as arguments for political legitimacy increasingly claim ascent from the people rather than descent from God or inherited office. It also reflects cultural features, although many of these are not ancient inheritances but modern inventions or reforms, such as linguistic standardization, common educational systems, museums as vehicles of representation, and the introduction of national media. In one of the most influential recent studies of nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1991) has described it as productive of “imagined communities.” By this he means that nations are produced centrally by cultural practices that encourage members to situate their own identities and self-understandings within a nation. Reading the same news, for example, not only provides people with common information, and common [Page 520]images of “us” and “them” but helps to reproduce a collective narrative in which the manifold different events and activities reported fit together like narrative threads in a novel and interweaves them all with the life of the reader. Practices and institutions of state administration are central to this production of nations as categories of understanding—imagining—but they are not exhaustive of it, and those who wield state power do not entirely control it.

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