The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow's Ancestors

218 Pages·1998·0.82 MB·English

by  David McCrone

THE SOCIOLOGY OF NATIONALISM

Nationalism is fast becoming the social and political ideology of our time, in a
world where every continent, economic system or level of development has to
come to terms with its main concepts. This book analyses the many manifestations
of nationalism in the wider context of the social sciences, bringing together
sociology, social anthropology, politics and history in the course of its analysis.
Among the topics covered are:

• Classical and contemporary theories of nationalism
(cid:127) Nationalism and ethnicity
(cid:127) Nationalism and the construction of history
(cid:127) Nationalism and the nation-state
(cid:127) Colonial and post-colonial nationalisms
(cid:127) Neo-nationalism and post-communist nationalism.

It concludes with a look to the future and asks why nationalism is growing when
its goal, the ‘nation-state’, seems to be going out of business.
Clear and concise in its presentation of key concepts and theories as well as
in its arguments and analysis, The Sociology of Nationalism can be seen as a significant
new addition to the literature already available on the subject and will be essential
reading for students across a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, history,
politics and anthropology.
David McCrone is Professor of Sociology, and Convener of the Unit for the
Study of Government in Scotland, at Edinburgh University. His previous
publications include Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation, also
published by Routledge.
INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF
SOCIOLOGY
Founded by Karl Mannheim
Editor: John Urry
Lancaster University
THE SOCIOLOGY OF
NATIONALISM

Tomorrow’s ancestors

David McCrone

London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1998 David McCrone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McCrone, David.
The sociology of nationalism: tomorrow’s ancestors/
David McCrone.
(International library of sociology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Nationalism. 2. Political sociology. 3. Sociology.
4. Ethnicity. I. Title. II. Series.
JC311.M392 1998
320.54–dc21 98–9523

ISBN 0-203-42885-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-73709-1 (Glassbook Format)
ISBN 0-415-11459-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-11460-8 (pbk)
CONTENTS

Preface vii
1 The fall and rise of nationalism 1
2 Tribe, place and identity: ethnicity and nationalism 22
3 Inventing the past: history and nationalism 44
4 ‘Devils at his back’: nationalism and Ernest Gellner 64
5 Nation as state: nationalism and state-building 85
6 Dialectic with the other: liberation nationalism in the
twentieth century 102
7 In and out of the state: the rise and rise of neo-nationalism 125
8 The unforeseen revolution: post-communist nationalism 149
9 Nationalism and its futures 169
Bibliography 188
Index 199
v

PREFACE

What kind of book is this? Inevitably it is a book of its time and place. Fifty—
even thirty—years ago it would have been hard to imagine such a book being
written, indeed adding to a long list of books which have been published on
nationalism in the last decade. It joins a burgeoning literature which spreads across
the social sciences—sociology, social anthropology, politics, history—and into
cultural and literary studies. Nor is it simply part of an intellectual fad. We struggle
to keep up with, never mind to explain, the manifestations of nationalism wherever
we look. There is no continent, no economic system, no level of development
which does not have to come to terms with nationalism. If we had told our
predecessors in the middle of this century that studying nationalism was not
simply writing history but coping with its many modern manifestations, in all
probability they would not have believed us. But then, we inhabit a late twentieth-
century world in which many of the old nostrums and doctrines have withered.
Socialism has gone; fascism has gone. Nationalism has survived and prospers.
This book is a sociologist’s modest attempt to make sense of these different
manifestations. It is not a history book, still less a revelation of a new, bright theory
of nationalism. It reviews the literature on nationalism from a disciplinary
perspective. It does not seek to claim that only sociologists can make sense of it,
but, rather like the cobbler who thought there was nothing quite like leather, the
author starts from the viewpoint of his sociological trade. Nationalism is above
all a social and political movement. It manifests itself in rich and in poor countries;
it has left-wing as well as right-wing variants; it works with, as well as against,
movements of class and of gender.
This is a sociological book because it does not reduce nationalism merely to
politics. It seeks to look at the social and economic interests which mobilise
nationalism, without arguing that it is in any sense epiphenomenal. It is a cultural
form of politics which is not simply reducible to material interests. We live in an
age of nationalism, but one which spends a lot of its energies denying that
nationalism exists. The orthodoxy is that it is a virus left over from an older more
vicious age, which, as if mutating itself against all known antidotes, comes back
to wreak its havoc on hapless victims. Centres of power employ the common-
sense that they are patriotic while their enemies are nationalistic. If we look about
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PREFACE
us, we know that this simply cannot be true. The most powerful forms of
nationalism are those which operate its power while denying its existence.
The study of nationalism is barely forty years old. To be sure, Hans Kohn’s
entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1940s marked out its intellectual territory
for much of the following twenty years, but this standard source of universal
particularism was addressing a world which had disappeared (with fascism) rather
than one which was to come. What Kohn and others did not realise was that all
the modern states of the post-war era were locked into an era of competitive
nationalism ‘in the national interest’, while blaming it for the troubles of the 1930s
and 1940s.
How does this book handle the subject? It is an attempt to lay out the
arguments and debates around the key issues. The first chapter outlines the
fall and rise of nationalism, the efforts to wrestle with what a ‘nation’ is, with
the variants of nationalism, ethnic and civic, and with what we can cull from
the classical writers of sociology. In the second chapter, we review the complex
relationship between ethnicity and nationalism, arguing that one cannot reduce
the latter to the former. There is also something deeply personal and intimate
about nationalism; in Billig’s felicitous phrase, it is ‘banal’. This perspective is
important because it helps us to escape from the orthodoxy that nationalism is
a kind of political brainwashing, a sort of false consciousness. Nationalism is
above all about ‘history’ in the sense that it writes its own, that it constructs an
account of its origins and its past which legitimates the present and offers
signposts for the future. That is why nationalists are ‘tomorrow’s ancestors’.
This is the subject of chapter 3.
Standing at the heart of modern nationalism studies is Ernest Gellner, whose
sociology of nationalism is examined in chapter 4. Gellner wrote, as John Hall
put it, with ‘devils at his back’. He represented so well the deliberately ‘marginal
man’ whose positioning at the tangents of the great movements of our time gave
him the unique perspective on nationalism. Much of the writing on nationalism
in the last thirty years has been done with Gellner in mind. He has been an irritant
and an inspiration.
In chapter 5 we examine the central orthodoxy of nationalism, that it was the
handmaiden of state-building in the modern era. Its success is reflected in our
equation of ‘nation’ with ‘state’. The following chapter tackles what appeared at
the time to be its ‘last wave’ —liberation nationalism against colonial regimes.
Again, we were confounded as these post-colonial systems were themselves
attacked for not being truly nationalist.
Usually at this point in history, the narrative ends. With state-building and
the end of colonialism, nationalism seemed over. It wasn’t. In the final quarter
of the twentieth century a new variant emerged in the form of neo-nationalism
which its opponents sought to counter by denying its existence. They have largely
given up. In a world of limited and shared sovereignty, the self-styled nation-state
finds itself squeezed from above and below. The fall of communism, so long
predicted but ultimately unexpected, ushered in a new and more complex wave,
viii
PREFACE
and we are still struggling to make sense of this wave as the century draws to a
close. Thesemodern manifestations—neo-nationalism, and post-communist
nationalism—are the subjects of chapters 7 and 8.
In the final chapter, the central conundrum is reviewed: why nationalism, when
its goal the ‘nation-state’ seems to be going out of business? That is a good point
to end with, as we cannot afford to draw a line under nationalism in all its
mutations. Further variants will no doubt surface and demand our attention in
the new millennium, for it is the sheer versatility of the phenomenon which is
both its delight and exasperation.
Nationalism is a subject which attracts disciples and heretics. Much of what
is written comes from those who either support it, or condemn it. It is therefore
important for the current author to offer an insight into his own perspective.
It is significant that this book is written by a Scot. It is not, however, a book
about Scottish nationalism. To my generation, les événements of 1968 coincided
with the rise of modern political nationalism in Scotland. It did not have a place
in intellectual orthodoxy, which claimed to be cosmopolitan in its ideology,
but which was riddled with the parochialisms of the centre. Just as women have
to do, Scots learned to fillet out the in-built biases of conventional discourses,
and to combat the complacent assumptions that people are men, and Britain a
nation. Faced too with the particularistic accusation that the only way to explain
nationalism in Scotland was in terms of what was perceived to be its own
distorted and parochial history, it became important to study the many variants
of nationalism, and to discover that they all had something in common. To
the accusation that the author is a nationalist, one would have to reply that,
since the British general election of 1997 at which the self-defined Unionist
party in Scotland (and Wales) was wiped out, we are all nationalists now—to
some degree or another.
Readers of this book will find, then, a commentary on nationalism which is
informed by the fact that the author is both a sociologist and a Scot. Those are
the key dimensions to bear in mind. This book is not a political tract, and it has
no special axes to grind. It tries to be as dispassionate and analytical as possible.
Whether or not the author succeeds is for the reader to decide. I owe particular
thanks to fellow students of nationalism, and in particular to John Hall, Graeme
Morton, Lindsay Paterson and Gianfranco Poggi who made such perceptive
comments on earlier drafts. Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism (Verso, 1997) was
published after this manuscript was written, but the reader will see that his
influence has been profound. I have benefited greatly from sharing teaching with
him. This book is dedicated to all those who have taken a part in the debate about
a Scottish Parliament, but above all to Mary with whom I have had my own
domestic debates on these matters, and without whom this book would certainly
not have been written.
St Andrew’s Day, 1997
ix