Eric Hobsbawm

Nations and Nationalism Since 1780

 Intro
• Intergalactic Historian consulting the libraries
• human history is incomprehensible with out some
understanding of nation and nationalism
• What do these terms signify?
• Walter Bagehot, 19th century history as nation
building
• Last 15 years, works have been done on
nationalism and Smith’s nationalism: a trend
report and bibliography. For references
• Not from 19th century liberalism: Stuart Mill’s
Considerations on Representative Government
• Ernest Renan’s lecture “What is a nation?”
• Debates among Marxists of the second • P3
international on what they called the national • Marxist “
question
• Colonial/Third
• Stalin’s Marxism and the national and colonial
World
question (not for intellectual merit, but for its
political influence • European political
• Not much from the “twin founding father of the
academic study of nationalism after WW1:
Carlton Hayes and Hans Kohn—nothing special
as the map of Europe was drawn and redrawn
for the first time at that time
• Why are these sources obsolete? Chiefly • P3
because the academic study of nationalism at
that time did was anticipated by Marxists a
commonplace.
• They did not do anything innovative
• The discourse on nationalism entered a fruitful
phase 20 years ago
• Why? Final chapter
• What nation and nationalism are and what role in • p4
the historical development they played from
1968-88
• Provides a list of works that he thinks helped him
• All these works asked one question in particular
“what is a/the nation?”
• Way of classifying people with claims
• It is in some ways primary or fundamental for their
social existence or individual existence
• But, no satisfactory criterion can be discovered to
decide which of the many human collectivities
should be labelled in this way
• Nation is a very recent category in human history • p4
• Developed in specific places, not universally
• How to distinguish nation from other entities ?
No way to answer the question
• Attempts to establish objective criterion for
nationhood or to explain why some groups
became nations and others not, is often made
based on single criterion like language or
ethnicity
• Stalin’s definition is the best known in this
regard:
• These objective definitions have failed: because • p6
there was always exceptions
• Criteria like language and ethnicity among
others are themselves “fuzzy” shifting and
ambiguous and hence useless to define nation
• These are used by propagandists
• Example are widely found in recent Asian
politics:
• The Tamil speaking people in Ceylon constitute
a nation distinct from Singalese
• Separate historical past, language, and place of
origin
 • The Tamils demanded autonomy or independence on • P6
grounds of Tamil Nationalsm
• But, they have two different origins
• Sri Lankan
• Indian (immigants)
• 41% of tem refused to be identidfied as Tamils. They
preferred “Muslims/Moors
• Tamil nationalists demanded (1987 negotiations
which ended the civil war) language to be
considwered as the unifying factor
• But it conceals many other
• As for separate historical past, it is vague or
meaningless:
• What could be the altermative grounds from • P7
which to define Nation?
• Subjective, rather than objective: individual can
claim it wherever and whenever they want it
• But, this is an attempt to escape the previous
escapism in definig nationalism
• People with different linguistic and other
objective criterion coexist in France or many
other places.
• This approach has been seen as a legitimate one • P8
by Otto Bauer and Renan, because nations had
objective elements in common.
• Identifying choice as the criterion of nationhood
subordinates the multiple and complex ways in
which human beings define themselves
• One can live in Bankok and think himself as an
British citizen, as an Indian or as a Gujrati or as
a Jain or as a member of a particular caste.
• It is impossible to reduce nation to a single
dimension, whether linguistic, cultural, or
historical.
• Neither objective nor subjective definition is • p8
satisfactory, both are misleading
• Agnosticism is the best initial posture of a
student in the field, so this book assumes no a
priori definition of what constitute a nation
• Initial working assumption is any sufficiently
large body of a people whose members regard
themselves as a member of a “nation” will be
treated as such
• “national question” to approach it, its better to • p9
begin with the concept of nation rather than with
the reality it represents
• Nation is conceived as nationalism: the real
nation can be recognized as a posteriori
• This is the approach of this book
• It charts the changes and transformations of the
concept, particularly towards the of the 19th
century
• Concepts are socially, historically, and locally
rooted. They are not parts of free-floating
philosophical discourse
• Position of the writer • p9
1. Use Gellner’s definition of nationalism (that political and
national units should be congruent
2. Not primary nor unchanging social entity. It is historically
particular and recent. It is pointless to discuss nation and
nationality in isolation
3. Like Gellner, will argue that the element of artefact,
invention, and social engineering make nations
4. God-given way, inherent political destiny … are just myths
5. “Natioanlism sometimes takes preeisting cultures and turns
them into nations, sometimes invents them and often
obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality.”
6. For the purpose of analysis, nationalism comes before
nations. Nations do not make state and nationalisms but the
other way round.
• National question is situated at the intersection • p10
of politics, technology and transformation
• Nations exists only as functios of a particular
kind of territorial state or the aspiration to
establish one
• Nation must be discussed in terms of political,
technical administrative economic and other
conditions
• Dual phenomena: must be analysed from below,
that is in terms of hope, assumptions, needs,
longing, interests, of ordinary people, which are
not national and still less nationalist
• Major criticism of Gellner: • P11
• His preferred perspecstive of modernization
from above makes it difficult to pay adequate
attention to the view below
• View from the below:
• Nation as seen not by government or
movements, but by ordinary people who are the
actions of the propaganda by thoe above. It is
exceedingly difficult to discover 3
• Social historians have discovered hoe to
investigate the history of ideas, opinions and
feelings at the sub-literary level
• Three things are clear: • P11
• Official state ideologies and movements are not
guides to what it is in the minds of even most
loyal citizens or supporters
• We cannot assume that for most people national
identification excludes or is always superior to
everything else that constitute the social being.
• National identification and what it is believed to
imply can change and shift in time
• The development nation and nationalism in old
established states like England and France has
not been studied intensely , though it is now
attracting attention
• Scots, Welsh, or Irish nationalism
 • National consciousness develops unevenly among social • p12
groups and regions of a country
• This regional diversity and its reasons have been neglected
in the past.
• Histoery of natonal movemetns by Gellner is followed:
• One: 19th C Europe, cultural, literary, and folkloric. With no
political or national implications
• Two: pioneers of national idea and the beginning of political
campaigning
• Three: (this book concerns this phase) nationalism occurs
before the creation of nationstate (Ireland)
• Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently
no so. Renan “Getting its history wrong is part of being a
nation”.
Chapter 1: The Nation as novelty: from revolution to liberalism
• Basic feature of modern nation: its modernity. • P14/15
• Contradicts widely held ideas of nations as natural,
primary, and as something that precedes history
• Spanish Academy did not use the term in its dictionary
before 1884.
• Langua nacional: the first entry comes under
dialect/language
• Before 1884, nacion simply meant people living in a
province.
• Now, a state or political body that recognizes a supreme
center of common government
• In 1925, the dictionary describes nation as “the collectivity
of persons who have the same ethnic origin and, in general,
speak the same language and possess a common tradition”
• Nation first indicates: Origin/Descent, which is • p15
• attached to the body of men. Those men not
necessarily formed the state.
• Attached to territory
• Birthplace came to be identified with state only
after 1925 [(patria: birthplace), (tierra:
homeland) we come to know about modern
patriotism
• Were 18th C England and France nation-states?
Can be doubted
• In Romance languages the word nation is • p16
indigenous
• Traces the root of the word:
• It is historically very young (p18)
• Old meaning indicated ethnic unity, the new one
stressed on political unity and independence
• To better understand it, one needs to follow those
who began systematically operate with this concept
in their political discourse during the age of
revolution from about the 1830s.
• The primary meaning of the word is/was political
• It equated the people and the state in the manner of
the revolutions in France and America
• The nation, thus, was the body of citizens with collective • P19/20
sovereignty.
• Stuart Mill: defined the nation by its possession of national
sentiment
• Mill discusses the idea of nationality under government or
democracy
• The equation nation = state = people linked nation to territory,
since state is territorial
• But, what constituted people? The French revolution was
completely alien to the principle or feeling of nationality, it was
even hostile to it.
• From the popular revolutionary point of view, the nation had
only one thing in common
• Collective interest against privilege
•
 o
• The German philologist Richard Bockh in the • P21
1860s argued that language was the only adequate
(page 22) indicator of nationality
• This was the time when two different concepts of
nationalism meet:
• 1. the revolutionary
• 2. the nationalist
• The equation state = nation = people applied to both
• For the nationalists the prior communities helped to
create political entities: difference from foreigners
• The revolutionaries perceived sovereignty in relation
to the entire human race
• For governments,the central item in the equation • P23/24
state = nation = people was plainly the state
• What was the locus of nation from 1830 to 1880
drawn by the liberal bourgeoisies and their
intellectuals?
• This was the time in Europe when nation
making as walter Bagehot states became
essential content of 19th century evolution
• Mill’s observation that the establishment of a
national state had to be (1) feasible and (b)
desired by the nationality itself, raised a set of
analytical issues
• We encounter a surprising degree of intellectual • P24
vagueness in the 19th c liberal discourse
• Much of the liberal theory of nations emerges
on the margins of the discourse of liberal writers
• One central area in that discourse made it
difficult to consider the nation intellectually at
all.
• Liberal bourgeois theory of the nation and its
reconstruction is the task of the chapter
 • Adam Smith uses the word in the title of his • P24/25
great work
• For him, it plainly means no more than a
territorial state
• His thought was relevant to the liberal middle-
class thinkers
• The question that we neeed to ask is “Did the
nation-state have a specific function as such in
the process of a capitalist development?
• World system theorists have tried to show that • p25
capitalism was bred as a global system in one continent
and not elsewhere, precisely because of the political
pluralism of Europe, which neither constituted nor
formed part of a single “world empire”.
• Economic development in the 16th-18th centuries
proceeded on the basis of territorial states, each of
which tended to pursue mercantilist policies as a
unified whole
• Even now we think of world capitalism in terms of
national units in the developed world
• Other parts which played important role in the genesis
of the capitalist world had no space
• Classical political economy, notably of Adam • p26
Smith’s, is a critique of the mercantile system, a
system developed by state effort and policy
• Free market and trade were directed against this
concept of national economic development which
Smith demonstrated to be counter-productive
• Economic theories elaborated on the basis of
individual units (persons or firms) –maximizing
their gains and minimizing their losses
• This is where the functions of the government
became relevant to the economy, but the
economy still had no place for the nation
• Trade between states became a reality
• Interests of individuals soon became the interests
of state (27)
• And, with that the concept of national economy
became a reality with fiscal policies, public
finances and activities
• “Division of humanity into autonomous nations is
essentially economic” (p. 28)
• Nation-states guaranteed the security of contracts
and property: government function is rationalized
by liberal economics in terms of free competition
 • With national economy the issue of economic • p30
development of the nation became usual
• This development took the form of capitalist-
industrialization, pressed forward by the elites
• These actually formulated the liberal concept of
the nation
• It had to have a sufficient size to form a viable unit
of development:
• New definition of Nation by New English
Dictionary:
• Large population, extensive territory, manifold
national resources,
 • Extensive territory: The Germans followed this • p33
principle
• The building of nations was seen inevitably as a
process of expansion
• Anomalies had been there as the Irish case
• Nationalism is thus understood and practiced as
movements for unifications or expansions
• In liberal nationalism, the criteria of language,
ethnicity, common history did not have any
legitimate values
• The nation state was thus heterogeneous, mixed up,
based more on territory than on people
 • Nation and nationalism represented a stage in
the development of human society
• It fitted in progress: enlarged the scale in human
economies, societies, and culture
• Small people, language, culture fitted into the
progress so far it accepted subordinate status to
larger units
• But, this nation-building applied to only some
nations, as the liberal nationalism took ethnicity
as the only criterion for nationhood and ignored
race, language
• Questions like “what constitutes nationhood?”
had been regarded as marginal by Marx and
Engels like Mill and Renan
• In the second international such questions had
been debated

• Massimo d’Azeglio: “We have made Italy, now

we have to make Italians”.
 Chapter 6: Nationalism in the Late Twentieth
Century
• Collapse of USSR marks a permanent historical
change
• It introduced new elements in the history of
nationalism
• But, there is no apparent sign of separatism in
the US
• Separatist agitations (largely terrorist) are
clearly shaking corners of the South-Asian sub-
continent, but so far (except for the secession of
Bangladesh) the successor states have held
together.
 Chapter 6
• Post-colonial national regimes still • 164
overwhelmingly accept the 19th century
traditions of nationalism, both liberal and
revolutionary-democratic. Gandhi and Nehru,
Mandela and Mugabe, Zulfikhar Bhutto and Ms
Aung-San Su Xi were or are nationalists. They
are nation-builders not nation-splitters.
• Many of the post-colonial African states may
collapse into chaos and disorder
• Ethnic violence is older than nationalism itself
 • 1988-92 Outburst of separatist nationalism in
Europe is undeniably connected with the
creation of nation states during the 1918-21.
• Unfinished business of 1918-21
• Communist states disintegrated much like the
colonial frontiers during the 1880-1950 which
resulted in post-colonial states.
• Most their inhabitant did not know what
frontiers were or took no notice of them
• Soviet Union set out to create enthno-linguistic
territorial ‘national administrative units’ i.e. ‘nations’ in
the modern sense,
• Soveit nation states were theoretical constructs of soviet
intellectuals rather than a primordial aspiration of any of
those central-Asian peoples
• The changes in and after 1989 were thus essentially not
due to national tensions
• German unifications of 1870 and 1990 was the
byproduct of unexpected events outside Germany
• USSR collapsed for economic difficulties
• Growing deterioration of living conditions that were
undermined by the government was the reason
• What kept it together, then?
• Peaceful separation is virtually unknown. • 169
• Nationalism is no longer the historical force it
was from 1800 to 1950
• It developed the world of the 19th century through
building nation states and national economies
• It created the “dependent” world during the first
half of the 20th century and resulted in
movements for national liberation and
independence
• Why were these movements inconceivable half a
century ago?
• These mevoments in the third world were in • 169/170
theory modeled on the nationalism of the west
• But, in practice the states they were attempted to
construct were generally the opposite of the
ethnically and linguistically homogeneous
entities which came to be seen as the standard
form of nation state in the west
• Much liike western nationalism of the liberal era
• Both were typically unifactory as well as
emancipatory
 • The current phase of separatist and divisive ethnic • 170
assertion has no positive prospect
• It just attempts to recreate the original Mazzinian model
of the ethnically and linguistically homogeneous
territorial nation-state
• This is unresalistic (160—2) and out of line with late
twentieth century linguistic and cultural development
• The force behind the sentiment that leads groups of ‘us’
to give themselves an ‘ethnic/linguistic identity against
the foreign and threatening “them” cannot be denied
• Xenophobia becomes the widespred ideology
• Becomes racism in Europe and US in the 1990s, worse
than it was in the days of fascism
• We live in urbanized societies • P.174
• Our social disorientation is checked by
nationalism
• nationalism or ethnicity is a substitute for factors
of integration in a disintegrating society. When
society fails, the nation appears as the ultimate
guarantee
• But, it also creates “otherness” : they can be
blamed for all the grivences, uncertainties and
disorientations
• Who are they?
• Not US. Aliens. Enemies. Past and Present.
• If necessary, they are invented
• People who cannot adjust with such • 175
fundamentalism often converge on those who
offer inclusive and complete worldviews.
• Nationalism has one advantage over
fundamentalism :
• Its vagueness and lack of programmatic content
gives it a universal support within its community
• Fundamentalism is a minority phenomenon
• May be imposed by a regime (Iran)
• Or by the fundamentalist community (Israel)
• Separatist movements are often the expression • 177
of sectional or minority interests, politically
fluctuating and not stable
• These fluctuations and instabilities that define
many nationalist parties who
 Ch 6. PART III
• The anguish and disorientation to belong is just • 177/178
a hunger for law and order, less about national
identity
• This creates the illusion of nations and
nationalism as a rising force in the third
millennium
•
• Decolonization meant that independent states • 178
were created out of existing areas of colonial
administrations
• Without any reference to, or sometimes without
the knowledge of, their inhabitants
• These had no national significance for their
populations, except for colonial-educated and
westernized native minorities
• The internationalism of the third-world leaders of
national liberation movements is more obvious
• In India the unity of the movement cracked even
before the independence
• Soon after independence tensions develop • 179
between component parts of independence
• The partition of India in 1947, splitting of
Pakistan, Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka—these
are special cases in a world where multi-ethnic
and multi-communal states are new the new
norm.
• Nation today is in the process of losing an • 181
important part of its old functions, namely that of
constituting a territorially bounded ‘national
economy’
• Since WWII, role of national economies have
undermined the international division of labor,
whose basic units are transnational or
multinational enterprises of all sizes, and these are
often outsidse the control of state governments
• NGOs
• Only functional national economy in late 20th
century is the Japanese.
• National economies have not been replaced with • 182
world-system institutions/organizations like
IMF
• Extraterritorial industrial zone (EPZ in BD)
multiply inside sovereign nations.
• Much like the trade in the Middle Ages
• So do off-shore tax-havens, islands whose only
function is to remove economic transactions
from the control of nation-states
• Nation and nationalism is just irrelevant to these
developments
 • Economic functions of the state has not • 182
diminished or likely to fade away.
• These have grown, even in neo-liberal
economies, due to huge revenue from public tax
and expenditure
• Agents of redistribution
• But, national economies undermined
transnational economy
• American economy is highly dependent on
Chinese one
• Ours on loans from WB/ADB or donation
• National economies are not really “autonomous”