Smith - Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era

Many people throughout the world have been astonished and saddened by the sudden eruption of ethnic conflict and nationalism across the globe. They had hoped for a world free of ethnic dissensions and national conflicts, in the belief that ethnicity and nationalism were being rapidly superseded. They forget that ethnic community has a long history and that nationalism, as an ideology and a movement, has been a powerful force in world politics since at least the French and American Revolutions. The recent resurgence of nationalism can only be understood as part of a long historical process, and analyses that commence with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even the Second World War, are apt to be shallow and misleading.

My aim in this book is to assess some of the ways in which the resurgence of nationalism today has been analysed, and to offer my own viewpoint on recent trends in the formation of nations and nationalisms, building on ideas briefly adumbrated in the last chapter of my National Identity and an earlier article.the Caucasus or South Africa, nor of the prospects for Sikh, Palestinian or any other nationalism.

Nor do I seek to engage with the wider debates about modernity or globalization and their consequences, except where they touch on issues of national identity and nationalism, since I believe that the key to an understanding of nations and nationalism as general phenomena of the modern world lies more with the persisting frameworks and legacies of historical cultures and ethnic ties than with the consequences of global interdependence. This is not to deny the magnitude of those consequences. Their main effect on modes of human association has been to undermine traditional structures of community and to diffuse the ideology of nationalism, disembedding it from its particular national contexts. But the disembedding of nationalism was already achieved in and through the French Revolution, and it is possible to see nationalism, paradoxically, as one of the main forces for global interdependence.

My argument is rather that nationalism derives its force from its historical embeddedness. As an ideology, nationalism can take root only if it strikes a popular chord, and is taken up by, and inspires, particular social groups and strata. But nationalism is much more than an ideology. Unlike other modern belief-systems, it depends for its power not just on the general idea of the nation, but on the presence and character of this or that specific nation which it turns into an absolute. Its success, therefore, depends on specific cultural and historical contexts, and this means that the nations it helps to create are in turn derived from pre-existing and highly particularized cultural heritages and ethnic formations. This, not some revolutionary but abstract formulation, is what stirs so many men and women in so many corners of the world today. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, nationalism is far more akin to religion and religious community than to, say, liberalism and socialism. This is the main reason why current modernist and post-modernist critiques of nationalism seem so often to miss their mark, and why it is necessary to look elsewhere for the continuing power and vitality of nations and nationalisms in an interdependent world.

I am very grateful to Anthony Giddens and Polity Press for enabling me to set down my views on what has, once again, become a pressing international, as well as social and cultural, issue. I should like to express my warm thanks to Professors Giovanni Aldobrandini and Maria Damiani Sticchi for inviting me to Rome to give some lectures to students at the Libera Universit Internationale degli Studi Soziali which formed the starting-point for these reflections; and to the members of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, and the Research Workshop on Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics, for stimulating conferences, seminars and discussions of recent contributions in the field. For the views contained herein and for any errors, however, the responsibility is mine alone.

Anthony D. Smith,

London School of Economics