Nation

• 1. Introduction

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  A nation, according to Benedict Anderson, is "an imagined political community." He called it imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, will never meet them, or even hear of them. Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. That single phrase reframes something most people treat as solid and ancient. How can millions of strangers feel bound into one body? Where did this feeling come from, and when? Scholars largely agree on a startling answer: nations are socially constructed, historically contingent, and a distinctly modern phenomenon. People have always loved their kin, their traditions, their homeland. But the belief that state and nation should align as a nation state did not become a prominent ideology until the end of the 18th century. The questions that follow run deeper still. Is a nation born of blood or of choice? Did England, Bulgaria, or ancient Israel get there first? And now, with the Internet and the United Nations reshaping power, will the nation itself fade?

• 2. Born Of A Word

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  Around the year 1300, Middle English speakers used the word nacioun to mean a race of people, a large group with common ancestry and language. It arrived from Old French nacion, carrying senses of birth, rank, descendants, relatives, and homeland. The deeper root is Latin natio, from the verb nasci, to be born. Literally, natio means that which has been born. The Latin trail leads further back to the Proto-Indo-European root gene-, give birth or beget, whose derivatives cluster around procreation and familial and tribal groups. In Latin itself, natio described the children of the same birth and a human group of the same origin. Cicero stretched the word, using natio simply for "people." The etymology hints at a quiet tension that runs through every later debate. The word is rooted in birth and blood, yet what scholars describe is something far more deliberate and constructed than mere descent.

• 3. Three Ways To Explain

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  Primordialism reflects how ordinary people often imagine nationalism, but it has largely fallen out of favour among academics. It proposes that there have always been nations and that nationalism is a natural phenomenon. A second view, ethnosymbolism, treats nationalism as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon and stresses the role of symbols, myths, and traditions. The third, modernization theory, has superseded primordialism as the dominant explanation. It adopts a constructivist approach, arguing nationalism emerged from processes like industrialization, urbanization, and mass education, which made national consciousness possible. Ernest Renan, in his lecture "What is a Nation?", offered an image that has outlived a century of theory. A nation, he said, is "a daily referendum." Nations, he added, rest as much on what a people jointly forget as on what they remember. Carl Darling Buck pushed the point in a 1916 study. "Nationality is essentially subjective," he wrote, "an active sentiment of unity, within a fairly extensive group." That sentiment, Buck argued, draws on real but diverse factors, no single one of which must be present in every case.

• 4. Blood Or Choice

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  By the late 20th century, many social scientists argued that there were two kinds of nations, and the dividing line ran between France and Germany. The ethnic nation, exemplified by the German peoples, was conceptualized as originating with early 19th-century philosophers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It referred to people sharing a common language, religion, culture, history, and ethnic origins that set them apart from others. The civic nation traced its lineage instead to the French Revolution and ideas from 18th-century French philosophers. It centred on a willingness to "live together," producing a nation that results from an act of affirmation. Ernest Renan held this civic vision among others. The same split appears in how nations bind themselves: some are constructed around ethnicity, a path known as ethnic nationalism, while others are held together by political constitutions, known as civic nationalism. Thomas Hylland Eriksen pointed to what truly separates a nation from a mere ethnic group. It is the relationship with the state. A nation, in this reading, is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group.

• 5. Searching For The First

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  Adrian Hastings argued that nations and nationalism are predominantly Christian phenomena, with the Jews as the sole exception. He viewed them as the "true proto-nation," the original model of nationhood, drawn from ancient Israel in the Hebrew Bible. Even after losing political sovereignty for nearly two millennia, Jews held their national identity together through collective memory, religion, and sacred texts. Anthony D. Smith wrote that the Jews of the late Second Temple period offered "a closer approximation to the ideal type of the nation" than perhaps anywhere else in the ancient world. Hastings turned next to England, claiming its Anglo-Saxon kings mobilized mass nationalism to repel Norse invaders. He singled out Alfred the Great, who drew on biblical language in his law code. During Alfred's reign, selected books of the Bible were translated into Old English to inspire Englishmen to fight. Hastings dated a strong renewal of English nationalism to the 1380s, when the Wycliffe circle translated the complete Bible into English. Susan Reynolds went further, arguing many European medieval kingdoms were nations in the modern sense, though political participation was limited to a prosperous and literate class. Florin Curta offered medieval Bulgaria as another candidate. Danubian Bulgaria was founded in 680-681 as a continuation of Great Bulgaria. After adopting Orthodox Christianity in 864 it became a cultural centre of Slavic Europe, a position consolidated by the invention of the Cyrillic script in its capital, Preslav, on the eve of the 10th century. Anthony Kaldellis asserted that what we call the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire transformed into a nation-state, while Azar Gat argued China, Korea, and Japan were nations by the European Middle Ages.

• 6. The Skeptics Reply

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  Patrick J. Geary rejects the conflation of early medieval and contemporary group identities as a myth. It is a mistake, he argues, to conclude continuity simply because names recur. Names were adapted to different circumstances by different powers, and could persuade people of continuity even when radical discontinuity was the lived reality. Historians, Geary warns, are "trapped in the very historical process we are attempting to study." John Breuilly aims a similar charge at Hastings, criticizing the assumption that continued usage of a term such as "English" means continuity in its meaning. Paul Lawrence challenges Hastings's reading of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People as proof of early English national identity. Those writing so-called national histories, Lawrence observes, may have worked with a rather different notion of "the nation" than modern writers do. Such documents, he adds, show how an elite defined itself, but "their significance in relation to what the majority thought and felt was likely to have been minor." Sami Zubaida widens the doubt. Many states and empires ruled over ethnically diverse populations, and "shared ethnicity between ruler and ruled did not always constitute grounds for favour or mutual support." Ethnicity, he argues, was never the primary basis of identification within these multinational empires.

• 7. Nations In The Lecture Hall

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  At the University of Paris, the term natio took on a strikingly concrete meaning. It described colleagues in a college or students who were born within a single pays, spoke the same language, and expected to be ruled by their own familiar law. In 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris, Jean Gerson was elected twice as a procurator for the French natio. The University of Prague borrowed the same scheme. From its opening in 1349, its studium generale was divided into Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish nations. The Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem applied a kindred logic at Rhodes, where they kept hostels that gave them their name. The Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur described the arrangement in 1436. There, he wrote, foreigners eat and have their places of meeting, each nation apart from the others, with a Knight in charge of each hostel, providing for the inmates according to their religion. The Serer people offer a different kind of claim to deep nationhood. Sources reaching back to the 1855 Bulletin de la Societe de geographie describe the Serer as a nation and one of the oldest inhabitants of the Senegambia region. The Serers of the north originated in the ancient kingdom of Takrur, and from the 11th century faced religious and ethnic persecution from Islamic forces. That pressure drove the Serer Exodus southward. Today they form the third largest ethnic group in Senegal.

• 8. The Fate Of Nations

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  Philip S. Gorski argued that the first modern nation-state was the Dutch Republic, built on a fully modern political nationalism rooted in biblical nationalism. Diana Muir Appelbaum extended the argument in 2013 to a series of new Protestant sixteenth-century nation states. Liah Greenfeld placed the origin elsewhere again. In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, she argued that nationalism was invented in England by 1600, calling England "the first nation in the world." If the nation has a beginning, it may also have an end. Postnationalism describes the trend by which nation states and national identities lose importance relative to supranational and global entities. Economic globalization, multinational corporations, the internationalization of financial markets, the United Nations, the European Union, and the Internet all push in that direction. Yet attachment to citizenship and national identities often remains important. Samuel P. Huntington pushed back hard against the cosmopolitan dream. In a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, then a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", he argued cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of post-Cold War conflict. He wrote it in response to Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man claimed the world had reached a Hegelian "end of history." Huntington expanded his thesis in a 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Jan Zielonka of the University of Oxford offered a third picture entirely. The future exercise of political power, he suggested, will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one, with overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities, and fuzzy borders.