Folk Beliefs of the Upper Normie II: “Nations are Modern Creations”
How the modernist approach to nationalism of Gellner, Hobsbawm etc. became conventional wisdom.
This article is the second in a series on modern folk beliefs. In the series so far:
“Nations are Modern Creations”
See the introduction to the first article for the full idea of the upper normie and their folk beliefs: below is an abridged version.
I have always liked the concept of the upper normie. An upper normie is someone who holds conventional mainstream opinions but is a bit more intelligent than the average and thus considers themselves to be more sophisticated than the normal normies. Common examples of the upper-normie worldview in Britain are the #FBPE movement, James O’Brien and the Rest is Politics.
Every society has its folk beliefs: sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact, and I have come to think of much of the upper-normie worldview as a collection of these folk beliefs. These are not the old sayings about health and wealth that might be passed down via your grandmother, but somewhat muddled and simplistic ideas about history, nationhood, economics, colonialism, race etc. that originated from academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs.
“Nations are modern creations”
In my previous article in this series I discussed the belief that national identity is merely a matter of citizenship. This article is about a related belief - that nations are modern creations. Readers familiar with the upper-normie worldview will surely have encountered this belief before; one example I saw recently was from journalist Mike Stuchbery, who asserted that “Germany didn't exist until 1871”.
Holders of this belief generally claim that nations are recent creations, combined with a vulgar Marxist explanation that they were created to persuade people to do things like fight in wars instead of engaging in revolution. Other examples I have come across are that English identity did not really exist until the Elizabethan era, or that Frenchness was created only with the mass education of peasants in the 19th century. The holders will also try to prove their artificiality, that traditional national symbols are invented traditions or that they are not ‘really national’, e.g. ‘St George was Turkish’ or ‘the Windsors are German’.
These arguments are not applied with much intellectual honesty, nor do they draw on any deep historical knowledge. They are of course never applied to the histories of non-Western nations or peoples (Palestine for example). Their purpose is generally to bolster the idea that Western nations were artificially ‘made’ and therefore that it is not an issue if they are remade or unmade too.
Insofar as they are intellectually grounded though, they derive from what has come to be known as the modernist approach to the study of nations and nationalism, and the ‘nationalism studies’ field it spawned, which have been especially prominent since the 1980s.
The modernist school’s approach to nations and nationalism
The modernist school holds that both nationalism and the nation itself are phenomena that only came into existence with modernity from the late 18th century onwards, often symbolised as beginning with the French revolution. The approach originated in the early and mid 20th century with works such as Carlton Hayes’s Essays on Nationalism (1926) and Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism (1944), but its most well-known ones today, and the idea of nationalism studies as a discipline, date from the 1980s and 90s. Particularly well-known examples from this era include Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990).
The modernist approach holds that the attributes enabling nations were absent before modernity. These include mass culture (facilitated by literacy in the vernacular language, or print capitalism as Benedict Anderson terms it), mass education, the direct relationship and identification between citizen and state, and indeed the modern state itself. Previously, identity was more likely to be tied to things like locality, feudal lord or church, while elite culture was communicated via trans-national script languages like Latin or Persian. The nation was therefore impossible.
The approach also emphasises how the principle of national self-determination - the idea that the nation-state was the right and proper political form for people to aspire to - was absent or at least far weaker in earlier periods. In previous eras, other principles took precedence in deciding what sort of rule there should be, like dynastic succession, the divine right of kings, or the ideal of universal empire (such as Dante offers in his early 14th-century work De Monarchia). The ideal of national self-determination came to supplant these earlier ideals over the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, redrew its map after WW1, and then spread worldwide after 1945.
Finally, the modernist school focuses on the role of invention and political construction in the development of nations. As Gellner claims in Nations and Nationalism: "It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round”.1 This engendering is done by inventing traditions such as Scottish Tartanry, as analysed in Hobsbawm’s co-produced volume The Invention of Tradition, also dating from the nationalism studies annus mirabilis of 1983.
Nations and peoples in premodern history
However, in any reading of history you will find contemporary sources talking about nations or peoples as fundamental divisions of humanity, which strike the reader as expressions of substantially the same sentiments as modern nationalism. In the next section I will describe how the modernist approach deals with this fact and why overall it is an insufficient way of studying nations, peoples, and nationalism. But first I’ll give a few examples; for a fuller account, the best overview of this I have read is Azar Gat’s 2012 book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, which also deals more fully with the problems of the modernist approach.
Looking to the ancient world, the native Egyptian king Kamose (ruled c. 1555–1550 BC), offers an early example. Kamose fought against the Hyksos, the first foreign (Semitic) rulers of a large part of Egypt. An inscription from the time, recorded on the original stelae and later on the Carnarvon tablet, describes his victory over the Hyskos thus:
“I should like to know what serves this strength of mine, when a chieftain in Avaris, and another in Kush, and I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis... No man can settle down, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics. I will grapple with him, that I may rip open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and to smite the Asiatic!"
You can see similar sentiments in the Babylonian chronicles and in the Torah. In the ancient world you can also see how even when politically divided, there is often a sense of shared political identity among related peoples, as in Herodotus’s Histories, in which the Athenians speak of “the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech” as to why they will not ally with the Persians. This is especially relevant to the common false belief that political disunity precludes a coming-together and shared political identity in times of crisis.
This sense of shared identity despite political divisions can also be seen in the writings of Bede, Gildas and others during the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, as I wrote about in a previous article. A few centuries later, after the Norman conquest, William of Malmesbury wrote in his 12th-century Gesta Regum Anglorum that:
“England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbott, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England.”2
The desire to avoid foreign rule is also clear in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, a letter from Scottish nobles to the Pope justifying Scotland’s existence as an independent kingdom:
“But if he [Robert the Bruce] should cease from these beginnings, wishing to give us or our kingdom to the English or the king of the English, we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours, and install another King who would make good our defence. Because, while a hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit in the slightest measure, to the domination of the English. We do not fight for honour, riches, or glory, but solely for freedom which no true man gives up but with his life.”
In imperial China, often seen solely in terms of the universalist Middle Kingdom, we can see in native Han Chinese ruler Zhu Yuanzhang’s overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368 a sense of the restoration of Chinese rule and customs over those of the northern barbarians. He issued this proclamation:
“Since ancient times rulers have governed the empire. China resided in the centre and brought order to the barbarians. The barbarians resided outside and submitted to China. It was never the case that barbarians resided in China and governed the empire. After the Song throne was overthrown the Yuan northern barbarians entered and ruled China.”3
The Ming legal code, created at his direction, specified policies of forced assimilation for the Mongol and Semu people who had previously ruled China:
“Mongols and Semu shall marry with Chinese persons. (It is essential that both parties be willing.) They are not permitted to marry within their own kind. Violators shall be punished by eighty blows of the heavy stick and both men and women shall be enslaved by the state.”4
In early modern Europe states were starting to coalesce, but modern nationalist movements were not yet present. Here Machiavelli wrote The Prince (published 1532), commonly thought to be a dispassionate manual for taking and wielding power. But his final chapter, Exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians reveals the real reason he wrote it. Machiavelli was writing amidst the Italian wars of the early 16th century which saw the increasing involvement, and later domination, of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in the military and political affairs of the northern Italian city states. As he wrote:
“It is therefore necessary to prepare such forces in order to be able with Italian prowess to defend the country from foreigners […] This opportunity must not, therefore, be allowed to pass, for letting Italy at length see her liberator. I cannot express the love with which he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered under these foreign invasions, with what thirst for vengeance, with what steadfast faith, with what love, with what grateful tears. What doors would be closed against him? What people would refuse him obedience? What envy could oppose him? What Italian would rebel against him? This barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of every one.”
And finally, on the aforementioned claim that Germany didn’t exist until 1871 as it was merely a collection of duchies and cities within the Holy Roman Empire. The identity of the Kingdom of Germany within the empire was established by the 11th century, and by the time of Martin Luther the empire itself was often referred to as the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Luther wrote the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation) in 1520, in which the existence of this German nation is treated as an established and meaningful fact:
“Now, although the Pope has violently and unjustly robbed the true emperor of the Roman empire, or its name, and has given it to us Germans, yet it is certain that God has used the Pope's wickedness to give the German nation this empire and to raise up a new Roman empire”.
The concept of a nation in Luther’s time was doubtless not identical with that of the Germany of 1871, but the sense of identification between a people and their country is clearly substantially the same.
How modernists define nations and nationalism
In contemporary common usage, examples like the above would often be called nationalism or at least be recognised as substantially the same phenomenon, but modernist authors prefer terms like ‘national sentiment’ or ‘proto-nationalism’. As modernist John Breuilly writes in Nationalism and the State:
“I do not quarrel with historians who claim that national consciousness existed in medieval Europe or that there were patriots active in the sixteenth century. I would simply argue that such phenomena should not be labelled as nationalism.”5
Nationalism according to the modernist approach is conceived of solely in the 19th-century ideological sense: in Gellner’s formulation “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”.6 This principle, which indeed did not become dominant before the 19th century, was that the proper form of political unit was the nation-state and that older forms were illegitimate. In the modernist approach nationalism is therefore seen as another -ism, like socialism, as an intellectually defined political programme.
Given that the word ‘nationalism’ does indeed only date from the late 18th century, this is a relatively easy argument for the modernists to make. The word ‘nation’ is much older, originating with the Latin natio, which the Romans used along with others like gens to mean ‘a people’, and making its way, with the same meaning, to English via old French in the middle ages. The modernists however argue that the idea of what a nation was, before modernity, so different from what it later became that it is an entirely different thing. As Hobsbawm writes in his chapter ‘The nation as novelty’:
“Whatever the ‘proper and original' or any other meaning of ‘nation', the term is clearly still quite different from its modern meaning. We may thus, without entering further into the matter, accept that in its modern and basically political sense the concept nation is historically very young […] Given the historical novelty of the modern concept of ‘the nation', the best way to understand its nature, I suggest, is to follow those who began systematically to operate with this concept in their political and social discourse during the Age of Revolution, and especially, under the name of ‘the principle of nationality' from about 1830 onwards.”7
Given that this older concept of a nation, of ‘a people’, is, allowing for the different modern political context, pretty close to the modern concept of a nation (even if in some cases more as ideal than reality), we can see that the modernist approach at its base depends on how we choose to define words.
How the modernist approach is misleading
Modernist arguments are valid when using their own own definitions of nations and nationalism. However these definitions, with their sharp distinctions between modern nations and those that came before, are not ones that seem to make much sense when reading historical primary sources, even from the age of modern nationalism itself. As Hobsbawm writes:
“[W]e encounter, in nineteenth-century liberal discourse, a surprising degree of intellectual vagueness. This is due not so much to a failure to think the problem of the nation through, as to the assumption that it did not require to be spelled out, since it was already obvious.”8
I would argue that the 19th-century liberals were more correct than the modernists, that the idea of the nation, though transformed from its premodern form, was obvious to them because it was so fundamental to how they thought about the world. The passions and loyalties it engendered were substantially the same as in any older idea of nation or people. The modernist focus on invented traditions also misses the point. Inventing traditions is just what human groups do; clearly the identity of the ancient city of Rome was not made false just because the Romans did not really descend from the Trojans.
The idea that we should take the approach of ‘the nation as novelty’ therefore, is the wrong way to study the subject academically and even more so as a way to educate the public. Better is an approach like Azar Gat’s which instead focuses on the broader concept of what he terms ‘political ethnicity, of which nations and nationalism are one expression. In this approach, the new idea in the modern era was not that of the nation itself but of popular sovereignty, which “released, transformed, and enhanced” nationalism rather than creating it, in particular in the way it “substituted the people for the monarch as the nation’s sovereign, and by that act it also charged the nation with popular energies and allegiance."9
So why the determination from the modernists to prove the recency and artificiality of nations, and why has their approach become so dominant? Many of the most prominent modernists were Marxists (Anderson and Hobsbawm), and/or Jewish refugees from mid-century central Europe (Kohn, Gellner and Hobsbawm), for whom nationalism had clearly proved to be a hostile force. More broadly, they embodied the intellectual reaction to the more ahistorical nationalist rhetoric of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But what has happened over the last few decades is that this rather particular approach to the subject has percolated through the more educated part of the public, i.e. the upper normie, and crowded out all others. Imagined Communities in particular was, as of 2016, the fifth most cited book in all of social science, mostly for its title alone. In reality though, Anderson’s argument is more nuanced; he emphasises that ‘imagined’ does not mean ‘false’, and that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined."10
Most people do not use the words ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in their strict academic modernist sense, but in a looser way to talk about national consciousness and identity in general. Once they have learnt modernist arguments like ‘the nation is fundamentally modern’ or ‘nationalism creates nations, not the other way round’, they start to take these arguments out of their academic context and make claims far more extreme than even the modernist approach could support. Thus, upper-normie discourse comes to confidently assert that nations can simply be made and unmade by political processes regardless of the underlying ethnic reality, a belief that is both false, and dangerous.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Blackwell 1998), p. 55.
Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford 2003) p. 56.
Edward L. Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule, (E. J. Brill 1995), p. 1.
Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang, p. 82.
John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester 1993) p. 3.
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 1.
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge 1992), p. 17-18.
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 24.
Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge 2012), p. 248-249.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso 2006), p. 6.
Good piece. I've bothered to read Anderson's book (which is actually quite eccentric in many ways). As you've noted, for Anderson a national consciousness, that presupposes nationalism, is enabled by a cultural flattening of time/identity. When he first published Imagined Communities in 1983, there would've only been a handful of widely consumed broadcast channels. This would appear to be a vindication of his thesis about mass media no doubt. I dont think there had been radical change by the final edition (2006) either - facebook only started to take off in that year.
I've often wondered where his thesis sits now national communities have splintered into a gazillion different information ecosystems. It most certainly suggests there is something more fundamental about national identity than mass media.
The arguments often change when it comes to Ukraine. Then it suddenly becomes imperative to recognize the inherently distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, and stand up against the Russian mudding of waters.
I don't want to focus on whether Ukraine "deserves" to be it's own nation and where we draw the line, are Croats just Catholic Serbs who belonged to the Habsburg empire, whether Slovaks are just Czechs who belonged to Hungary instead of Bohemia etc. I don't care about this here. I just want to note that suddenly in the case of Ukraine, the upper normie is suspiciously nationalistic all of a sudden.