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With which definition you agree the most?

Benedict Anderson's

NOTE: Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism first appeared in 1983. Since that time it has become one of the standard texts on the topic of nations and nationalism. The following definition is one of the most commonly used by scholars in the field.



"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien régime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To the question 'Who is the ‘Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been, not 'a member of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X, 'the uncle of the Baronne de Y,'or 'a client of the Duc de Z.'

"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.

"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destorying the legitamcy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.

"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

"These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism."

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 5-7.

Richand Handler's

NOTE: Richard Handler is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is an expert on nationalism and politics in Quebec. His book, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, is an excellent study of the interplay between politics, culture, and nationalism.



"Nationalism is an ideology about individuated being. It is an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity encompassing diversity. It is an ideology in which social reality, conceived in terms of nationhood, is endowed with the reality of natural things.

"In principle the individuated being of a nation—its life, its reality—is defined by boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity encompassing diversity. In principle a nation is bounded—that is, precisely delimited—in space and time: in space, by the inviolability of its borders and the exclusive allegiance of its members; in time, by its birth or beginning in history. In principle the national entity is continuous: in time, by virtue of the uninterruptedness of its history; in space, by the integrity of the national territory. In principle national being is defined by a homogeneity which encompasses diversity: however individual members of the nation may differ, they share essential attributes that constitute their national identity; sameness overrides difference.

"In principle an individuated actor manifests his life through the exercise of choice, and through the consistent action that follows therefrom. Consistent action is both characteristic and rational: the nation acts in accord with its essence, and according to its needs.

"In principle the life of an individuated actor is celebrated through creativity, which is the imposition of one's choices on the physical and social world, and in proprietorship, which is the establishment of permanent bonds between self and the products resulting from creative activity. Nationalism is an ideology of what C. B. Macpherson (1962) called possessive individualism.

"It is customary in the literature on nations and ethnic nationalism to distinguish between "nation" and "state." A nation, it is said, is a human group that may or may not control its own state; while a state is a political organization that may or may not correspond to all of one, and only one, nation. It is customary to point out that there are many more nations or potential nations than states; that most nations aspire to statehood yet many have not and will not attain it; and that many states, federal or unitary, encompass more than one nation. It is only slightly less customary to point out that states have created nations perhaps more frequently that nations states; in the classic nation-states of Western Europe state-building bred national identity rather than simply following from it.

"It is much less customary to observe that our notions of "nation" and "state" imply similar senses of boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity encompassing diversity. The state is viewed as a rational, instrumental, power-concentrating organization. The nation is imagined to represent less calculating, more sentimental aspects of collective reality. Yet both are, in principle, integrated: well-organized and precisely delimited social organisms. And, in principle, the two coincide.

"The nationalist desire for an integrated nation-state can be compared to the overriding concern of social scientists to speak about and privilege integrated social units of whatever level of complexity. Here I intentionally correlate actors'desires and observers' epistemology. The presuppositions concerning boundedness that dominate nationalist discourse equally dominate our social-scientific discourse, which takes discrete social entities, such as "societies" and "cultures," as the normal units of analysis, and the "integration" of such units as the normal and healthy state of social life.

"Of course, everyone knows that social life is not neatly integrated: the boundaries of nations, states, societies, and cultures are permeable and even vague. Yet to recognize (and then rationalize) "fuzzy boundaries" does not fundamentally question the epistemology of "entitivity" (Cohen 1978) upon which the notion of boundedness depends. In the study of nationalism and ethnicity the characteristic ploy used to get round the fuzzy-boundaries problem is to posit a distinction between objective and subjective groups. A human group, it is argued, can be bounded by attributes or characteristics that each of its members "possesses." This is objective boundedness, though what is objectively shared may be subjective states of mind of the group members -characteristic modes of thought and affect that lead to characteristic actions and social organizations. Objective boundedness means that the group actually exists as a group, and can be shown to exist by an external observer. Subjective boundedness is the sense that group members themselves have of forming a group; that is, national or ethnic self-consciousness. It is customary to point out that an objectively existent group may not be subjectively self-conscious, and that nations and nationalisms become possible only after the emergence of group self-consousness. It is only slightly less customary to point out that the actors' sense of group integration may be grounded in an illusion and that their perception of sameness may obscure important objective differences among group members. In the face of the continued emergence of evidence of such differences-and of mal- or dis-integration, permeableness, and vagueness of boundaries—many scholars of nationalism and ethnicity have de-emphasized the objective reality of groups and insisted instead on subjective boundedness as the sine qua non of collective existence. Proponents of this position argue that whatever the degree of objective boundedness, it is only the subjective perception (or delusion) of identity that launches a group on its career of collective action. The perception of group identity may even be sufficient to overcome large objective differences and bring a national entity into historical existence.

"This appeal to the subjective basis of group unity respects the entitivity assumptions-boundedness, continuity, homogeneity that both nationalists and social scientists presuppose in their discussions of the reality of nations. The reality that may be denied by a lack of shared objective traits is reestablished by the subjective sharing of a sense of identity, and the nation or ethnic group can again be proclaimed to exist. Once again we find a close congruence between actors' ideologies and observers' theories: the "common will to live together" that nationalists see as the necessary capstone to the list of objective traits which form a national entity becomes "group identity" in the jargon of social scientists."

Handler, Richard. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. New Directions in Antropoligical Writing: History, Poetics, Cultural Criticism, ed. George E.; Clifford Marcus, James. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 6-8.

Ernest Gellner's

NOTE: Ernest Gellner was one of the most important scholars of nationalism. His book, Nations and Nationalism (1983) remains one of the most important books in the field.



"In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior existence of the state.

"What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal and normative, idea of the nation? Discussion of two very makeshift, temporary definitions will help to pinpoint this elusive concept.

1. "Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.
2. "Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities. A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that category from non- members.

"Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the voluntaristic, has some merit. Each of them singles out an element which is of real importance in the understanding of nationalism. But neither is adequate. Definitions of culture, presupposed by the first definition, in the anthropological rather than the normative sense, are notoriously difficult and unsatisfactory. It is probably best to approach this problem by using this term without attempting too much in the way of formal definition, and looking at what culture does."

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 6-7.

John Breuilly's

NOTE: John Breuilly's book Nationalism and the State is a classic discussion of the politics of nationalism in a comparative and historical perspective.



"The term 'nationalism' is used to refer to political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments.

"A nationalist argument is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions:

1. There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.
2. The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values.
3. The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignity." (p.3).

"So the definition employed here can avoid the danger of being too vague and all-embracing and, among other things, draws attention to the modernity of nationalism.

"The definition also excludes from consideration political movements which demand independence on the basis of universal principles. The term 'nationhood' is often used to describe the achievement of such independence, as, for example, the creation of the United States of America. But the leaders of the independence movement did not refer to a cultural identity to justify their claims. They demanded equality and, failing that, independence, and justified the demand by an appeal to universal human rights. Parts of North America were simply the areas in which these rights were being asserted. Admittedly a sense of national identity developed after the achievement of independence but by then nationalism had a rather different and less distinctive function." (pp. 6-7).

"These general remarks have served to define and narrow down the area of investigation. I am concerned with significant political movements, principally of opposition, which seek to gain or exercise state power and justify their objectives in terms of nationalist doctrine. This still covers a large number of political movements and it is necessary to subdivide them. To do so one requires some principle of classification.

"Classifications are simply sets of interrelated definitions. Utility is their justification. There are numerous ways of classifying nationalism....

"The concern here is with nationalism as a form of politics, primarily opposition politics. This suggests that the principle of classification should be based on the relationship between the nationalist movement and the existing state. Very broadly, a nationalist opposition can stand in one of three relationships to the existing state. It can seek to break away from it, to take it over and reform it, or to unite it with other states. I call these objectives separation, reform and unification.

"In addition the state to which such a nationalist movement is opposed may or may not define itself as a nation-state. If it does, conflict may arise between governmental and opposition nationalisms, conflict which cannot occur when the state does not define itself as a nation-state. The position of a nationalist opposition having to counter governmental nationalism is fundamentally different from that of one which does not.

"These distinctions yield six classes, which are set out here with examples for each class:

.	(Opposed to) Non-nation states a	(Opposed to) Nation states 1
Separation	Magyar, Greek, Nigerian	Basque, lbo
Reform	Turkish, Japanese	Fascism, National Socialism
Unification	German, Italian	Arab, Pan-African

"(a) A rather clumsy term but I can think of nothing better" (pp. 11-12).

1) EDITOR'S NOTE: The bracketed text was added in the Second Edition of Breuilly's text (1992). I have included it here in the hope that it will make the author's distinctions a little more clear. The remainder of the text quoted here is drawn from the 1985 edition.

Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Miroslav Hroch's

NOTE: Miroslav Hroch is a important Czech political theorist. The essay cited from here offers an important definition of "nation."


"Now the 'nation is not, of course, an eternal category, but was the product of a long and complicated process of historical development in Europe. For our purposes, let us define it at the outset as a large social group integrated not by one but by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships (economic, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical, historical), and their subjective reflection in collective consciousness. Many of these ties could be mutually substituable - some playing a particularly important role in one nation-building process, and no more than a subidiary part in others. But among them, three stand out as irreplaceable: (1) a 'memory' of some common past, treated as a 'destiny' of the group - or at least of its core constituents; (2) a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it; (3) a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society."

Hroch, Miroslav. "From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation: The Nation-building Process in Europe," in Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed. Mapping the Nation. New York and London: Verso, 1996: pp. 78-97. See especially p. 79.

Ernest Renan's

NOTE: Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was an important French theorist who wrote about a variety of topics. His famous essay "What is a Nation?" (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?) was first delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882. It continues to be an important influence on scholars. One can see Renan's influence in the scholarship of people like Benedict Anderson.


A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more-these are the essential conditions for being a people. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consented, and in proportion to the ills that one has suffered. One loves the house that one has built and that one has handed down. The Spartan song-"We are what you were; we will be what you are" -- is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie.

More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together. These are the kinds of things that can be understood in spite of differences of race and language. I spoke just now of "having suffered together" and, indeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.

A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. That, I know full well, is less metaphysical than divine right and less brutal than so called historical right. According to the ideas that I am outlining to you, a nation has no more right than a king does to say to a province: "You belong to me, I am seizing you." A province, as far as I am concerned, is its inhabitants; if anyone has the right to be consulted in such an affair, it is the inbabitant. A nation never has any real interest in annexing or holding on to a country against its will. The wish of nations is, all in all, the sole legitimate criterion, the one to which one must always return.

We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of politics. What then remains? Man, with his desires and his needs. The secession, you will say to me, and, in the long term, the disintegration of nations will be the outcome of a system which places these old organisms at the mercy of wills which are often none too enlightened. It is clear that, in such matters, no principle must be pushed too far. Truths of this order are only applicable as a whole in a very general fashion. Human wills change, but what is there here below that does not change? The nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and only one master.

Through their various and often opposed powers, nations participate in the common work of civilization; each sounds a note in the great concert of humanity, which, after all, is the highest ideal reality that we are capable of attaining. Isolated, each has its weak point. I often tell myself that an individual who had those faults which in nations are taken for good qualities, who fed off vainglory, who was to that degree jealous, egotistical, and quarrelsome, and who would draw his sword on the smallest pretext, would be the most intolerable of men. Yet all these discordant details disappear in the overall context. Poor humanity, how you have suffered! How many trials still await you! May the spirit of wisdom guide you, in order to preserve you from the countless dangers with which your path is strewn!

Let me sum up, Gentlemen. Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its strength by the sacrifices which demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the right to exist. If doubts arise regarding its frontiers, consult the populations in the areas under dispute. They undoubtedly have the right to a say in the matter. This recommendation will bring a smile to the lips of the transcendants of politics, these infallible beings who spend their lives deceiving themselves and who, from the height of their superior principles, take pity upon our mundane concerns. "Consult the populations, for heaven's sake! How naive! A fine example of those wretched French ideas which claim to replace diplomacy and war by childishly simple methods." Wait a while, Gentlemen; let the reign of the transcendants pass; bear the scorn of the powerful with patience. It may be that, after many fruitless gropings, people will revert to our more modest empirical solutions. The best way of being right in the future is, in certain periods, to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion.

Renan, Ernest. "What is a Nation?" in Eley, Geoff and Suny, Ronald Grigor, ed. 1996. Becoming National: A Reader. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: pp. 41-55. See especially pp. 52-54.

NOTE: This essay is available online in the original French.

Michael Billig's

NOTE: Michael Billig suggests that nationalism is more than just a set of ideas expressed of separatists. Instead, Billig argues that nationalism is omnipresent - often unexpressed, but always ready to be mobilized in the wake of catalytic events.



"... there is something misleading about this accepted use of the word ‘nationalism’. It always seems to locate nationalism on the periphery. Separatists are often to be found in the outer regions of states; the extremists lurk on the margins of political life in established democracies, usually shunned by the sensible politicians of the centre. The guerrilla figures, seeking to establish their new homelands, operate in conditions where existing structures of state have collapsed, typically at a distance from the established centres of the West. From the perspective of Paris, peripherally placed on the edge of Europe. All these factors combine to make nationalism not merely an exotic force, but a peripheral one. In consequence, those in established nations – at the centre of things – are led to see nationalism as the property of others, not of ‘us’.

"This is where the accepted view becomes misleading: it overlooks the nationalism of the West’s nation-states. In a world of nation-states, nationalism cannot be confined to the peripheries. That might be conceded, but still it might be objected that nationalism only strikes the established nation-states on special occasions. Crises, such as the Falklands or Gulf Wars, infect a sore spot, causing bodily fevers: the symptoms are an inflamed rhetoric and an outbreak of ensigns. But the irruption soon dies down; the temperature passes; the flags are rolled up; and, then, it is business as usual." (p. 5)



"... the term banal nationalism is introduced to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition." (p.6)



"The central thesis of the present book is that, in the established nations, there is a continual ‘flagging’, or reminding, of nationhood. The established nations are those states that have confidence in their own continuity, and that, particularly, are part of what is conventionally described as ‘the West’. The political leaders of such nations – whether France, the USA, the United Kingdom or New Zealand – are not typically termed ‘nationalists’. However, as will be suggested, nationhood provides a continual background for their political discourses, for cultural products, and even for the structuring of newspapers. In so many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building.

"National identity embraces all these forgotten reminders. Consequently, an identity is to be found in the embodied habits of social life. Such habits include those of thinking and using language. To have a national identity is to possess ways of talking about nationhood. As a number of critical social psychologists have been emphasizing, the social psychological study of identity should involve the detailed study of discourse…. Having a national identity also involves being situated physically, legally, socially, as well as emotionally: typically, it means being situated within a homeland, which itself is situated within the world of nations. And, only if people believe that they have national identities, will such homelands, and the world of national homelands, be reproduced.

"In many ways, this book itself aims to be a reminder. Because the concept of nationalism has been restricted to exotic and passionate exemplars, the routine and familiar forms of nationalism have been overlooked. In this case, ‘our’ daily nationalism slips from attention. There is a growing body of opinion that nation-states are declining. Nationalism, or so it is said, is no longer a major force: globalization is the order of the day. But a reminder is necessary. Nationhood is still being reproduced: it can still call for ultimate sacrifices; and, daily, its symbols and assumptions are flagged." (pp.8-9)

Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications, 1995.

Rogers Brubaker's

NOTE: Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a member of The Nationalism Project's advisory committee. In addition to several other works on nationalism, Nationalism Reframed has established Brubaker as an important voice in the study of nationalism. In the passage included here Brubaker offers not a definition of nationalism but a characterization of the forms taken by nationalism in the aftermath of the transformation of multinational empires into would-be nation-states.

Nationalism has been both cause and effect of the great reorganizations of political space that framed the 'short twentieth century' in Central and Eastern Europe. But the forms of nationalism that have resulted from the nationalization of political space are different from - and less familiar than - those that helped engender it. The nationalist movements that preceded and (in conjunction with a variety of other factors) produced the redrawing of political boundaries have been intensively studied. By contrast, the nationalisms that (again in conjunction with a variety of other factors) were produced by this redrawing of political boundaries have received much less attention. This book addresses the distinctive forms and dynamics of these latter nationalisms, those that have emerged in the wake of the nationalization of political space.

These nationalisms are interlocking and interactive, bound together in a single relational nexus. This can be characterized on first approximation as a triad linking national minorities, the newly nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national 'homelands' to which they belong, or can be construed as belonging, by ethnocultural affinity though not by legal citizenship.

This triadic nexus involves three distinct and mutually antagonistic nationalisms. The first are the 'nationalizing' nationalisms of newly independent (or newly reconfigured) states. Nationalizing nationalisms involve claims made in the name of a 'core nation' or nationality, defined in ethnocultural terms, and sharply distinguished from the citizenry as a whole. The core nation is understood as the legitimate 'owner' of the state, which is conceived as the state of and for the core nation. Despite having 'its own' state, however, the core nation is conceived as being in a weak cultural, economic, or demographic position within the state. This weak position - seen as a legacy of discrimination against the nation before it attained independence - is held to justify the 'remedial' or 'compensatory' project of using state power to promote the specific (and previously inadequately served) interests of the core nation.

Directly challenging these 'nationalizing' nationalisms are, the transborder nationalisms of what I call 'external national homelands.' Homeland nationalisms assert states' right - indeed their obligation - to monitor the condition, promote the welfare, support the activities and institutions, assert the rights, and protect the interests of 'their ' ethnonational kin in other states. Such claims are typically made when the ethnonational kin in question are seen as threatened by the nationalizing (and thereby, from the point of view of the ethnonational kin, de-nationalizing) policies and practices of the state in which they live. Homeland nationalisms thus arise in direct opposition to and in dynamic interaction with nationalizing nationalisms. Against nationalizing states' characteristic assertion that the status of minorities is a strictly internal matter, 'homeland' states claim that their rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis ethnonational kin transcend the boundaries of territory and citizenship. 'Homeland,' in this sense, is a political, not an ethnographic category. A state becomes an external national 'homeland' when cultural or political elites construe certain residents and citizens of other States as co-nationals, as fellow members of a single transborder nation, and when they assert that this shared nationhood makes the state responsible, in some sense, not only for its own citizens but also for ethnic co-nationals who live in other states and possess other citizenships.

Caught between two mutually antagonistic nationalisms - those of the nationalizing states in which they live and those of the external national homelands to which they belong by ethnonational affinity though not by legal citizenship - are the national minorities. They have their own nationalism: they too make claims on the grounds of their nationality. 'Indeed it is such claims that make them a national minority. 'National minority,' like 'external national homeland' or 'nationalizing state,' designates a political stance,- not an ethnodemographic fact. Minority nationalist stances characteristically involve a self-understanding in specifically 'national ' rather than merely 'ethnic ' terms, a demand for state recognition of their distinct ethnocultural nationality, and the assertion of certain collective, nationality-based cultural or political rights. Although national minority and homeland nationalisms both define themselves in opposition to the 'nationalizing' nationalisms of the state in which the minorities live, they are not necessarily harmoniously aligned. Divergence is especially likely when homeland nationalisms are strategically adopted by the homeland state as a means of advancing other, non-nationalist political goals; in this case ethnic co-nationals abroad may be precipitously abandoned when, for example, geopolitical goals require this.

The triadic relational interplay between national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands has not been confined to Europe. One of the most important instances, for example, has involved the overseas Chinese, the nationalizing southeast Asian states in which they live, and China as external national homeland.5 Within Europe, moreover, the triadic nexus existed before the great twentieth-century reconfigurations of political space: thus in the final 'dualist' phase of the Habsburg Empire, when Hungary was (in the domestic sphere) virtually an independent state, there was a tense triadic relation between Hungarian Serbs as national minority, Hungary as nationalizing state, and the Kingdom of Serbia as external national homeland.

'The locus classicus of the triadic nexus, however, was interwar East Central Europe. The post-World War I settlements, though ostensibly based on the principle of national self-determination, in fact assigned tens of millions of people to nation-states other than 'their own' at the same time that they focused unprecedented attention on the national or putatively national quality of both persons and territories. Most fatefully, millions of Germans were left as minorities in the region's new or reconstituted (and strongly nationalizing) states, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. They belonged by citizenship to these new states but by ethnic nationality to an initially prostrate but obviously still powerful external national homeland. Similarly, more than three million Hungarians suddenly became national minorities in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, linked by shared ethnicity to their openly irredentist 'homeland'; while substantial Bulgarian and Macedonian minorities, assigned to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Romania, were linked by shared (or in the case of Macedonians, putatively shared) ethnic nationality to equally irredentist Bulgaria. Some 6 or 7 million Ukrainians and Belarusians in the eastern borderlands of nationalizing Poland were linked to larger co-ethnic populations in the Soviet Union who possessed their own nominally sovereign (and in the 1920s, culturally quite autonomous) 'national states' in the Soviet federal scheme.

The post-Communist reorganization of political space has had similar consequences. Again, tens of millions of people became residents and citizens of new states conceived as 'belonging to' an ethnic nationality other than their own. Most dramatically, some 25 million ethnic Russians have been transformed, by a drastic shrinkage of political space, from privileged national group, culturally and politically at home throughout the Soviet Union, into minorities of precarious status, disputed membership, and uncertain identity in a host of incipient nonRussian nation-states. But many other groups in the region - including large numbers of Hungarians, Albanians, Serbs, Turks, and Armenians - found themselves similarly 'mismatched,' attached by formal citizenship to one state (in most cases a new - and nationalizing - state) yet by ethnonational affinity to another. (pp. 4-7)



This book is not about the resurgence of nationalism. Nationalism is not a 'force' to be measured as resurgent or receding. It is a heterogeneous set of 'nation'-oriented idioms, practices, and possibilities that are continuously available or 'endemic' in modem cultural and political life. 'Nation' is so central, and protean, a category of modem political and cultural thought, discourse, and practice that it is hard indeed to imagine a world without nationalism. But precisely because nationalism is so protean and polymorphous, it makes little sense to ask how strong nationalism is, or whether it is receding or advancing.

My concern in this book is not with the resurgence but with the reframing of nationalism, not with how much nationalism there is but with what kind, not with the strength but with the characteristic structure and style of nationalist politics in post-Communist Europe and Eurasia. These old-new nationalisms, while strikingly similar in some respects to those of interwar Central and Eastern Europe, differ sharply from the state-seeking and nation-building nationalisms on which most theories of nationalism have been built. To attend seriously to the distinctive forms, dynamics, and consequences of these old-new nationalisms will be a key challenge for the study of nationalism in the next decade. Ibis book is offered as a preliminary step toward meeting that challenge. (p. 10)

Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Michael Hechter's

NOTE: Michael Hechter is one of the world's formost sociologists of nationalism. He currently teaches at the University of Washington and serves on The Nationalism Project's advisory committee. His books include Internal Colonialism (1975, 1999) and Containing Nationalism (2000). Containing Nationalism offers a unified explanation of the dynamics of nationalism across the broad sweep of time and space. Among other things, it explains why nationalism is largely confined to modern history, why it is supported by specific forms of inequality between cultural groups, and why it is inclusive at some times and exclusive at others. The section quoted here offers a typology of nationalisms.



"It is widely appreciated that there are important differences between nationalist movements. Much effort has been made to create typologies that aim to capture some of the relevant distinctions (see, for example, Hall 1993). Most of these distinguish the liberal, culturally inclusive (Sleeping Beauty) nationalisms characteristic of Western Europe from the illiberal, culturally exclusive (Frankenstein's monster) nationalisms more often found elsewhere. Whereas these normative differences between nationalist movements have been enormously important in history, it is doubtful that they can be explained if the dimensions of nationalism are chosen on normative grounds. To explain why nationalism has taken such different forms in different societies, it is better to seek a typology that is derived from analytical considerations.

"If nationalism is collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit, then a simple analytic typology of nationalism flows directly out of this definition. Further, this typology helps account for the normative differences between types of nationalism.

"State-building nationalism is the nationalism that is embodied in the attempt to assimilate or incorporate culturally distinctive territories in a given state. It is the result of the conscious efforts of central rulers to make a multicultural population culturally homogeneous. Thus, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the rulers of England and France attempted fitfully perhaps, and with more or less success-to foster homogeneity in their realms by inducing culturally distinctive populations in each country's Celtic regions to assimilate to their own culture. Since the rationale for state-building nationalism is often geopolitical - to secure borders from real or potential rivals - this kind of nationalism tends to be culturally inclusive. However, much less liberal means of skinning a culturally homogeneous cat have been resorted to in history, as well. Central rulers of a given culture also can unify their country by expelling culturally alien populations (as in the Spanish Reconquista), or by exterminating them (often the fate of the indigenous peoples of North America).

"Peripheral nationalism occurs when a culturally distinctive territory resists incorporation into an expanding state, or attempts to secede and set up its own government (as in Quebec, Scotland and Catalonia). Often this type of nationalism is spurred by the the very efforts of state-building nationalism described above.

"Irredentist nationalism occurs with the attempt to extend the existing boundaries of a state by incorporating territories of an adjacent state occupied principally by co-nationals (as in the case of the Sudeten Germans).

"Finally, unification nationalism involves the merger of a politically divided but culturally homogeneous territory into one state, as famously occurred in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy. In this case, the effort to render cultural and governance boundaries congruent requires the establishment of a new state encompassing the members of the nation. Whereas state-building nationalism tends to be culturally inclusive, unification nationalism is often culturally exclusive.

"Although patriotism - the desire to raise the prestige and power of one's own nation state relative to rivals in the international system - is often considered to be nationalistic, the present definition rules this usage out. Patriotism is no form of nationalism at all, for here the boundaries of the nation and governance unit are already congruent. This limitation is not, however, very damaging. Since few states, if any, qualify as nation states, patriotism (as defined in this book) hardly exists. Most of what passes as patriotism in common parlance implicitly advances the interests of one nation at the expense of others in multinational states. In the present framework, such activities are instances of state-building nationalism.

"The preceding typology is not exhaustive. It has no place for nationalist movements - like Zionism and Mormonism - that resulted from the migration of religious groups to distant promised lands. Such movements have been exceedingly rare, however..."

Hechter, Michael. Containing Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. See pages 15-17.

Anthony D. Smith's

NOTE: Anthony D. Smith is one of most important contemporary scholars of nationalism. He is Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press) and is the author of many books on the subject including his "classic" The Ethnic Origins of Nations.



"Perhaps the central question in our understanding of nationalism is the role of the past in the creation of the present. This is certainly the area in which there have been the sharpest divisions between theorists of nationalism. Nationalists, perennialists, modernists and post-modernists have presented us with very different interpretations of that role. The manner in which they have viewed the place of ethnic history has largely determined their understanding of nations and nationalism today.

"For nationalists themselves, the role of the past is clear and unproblematic. The nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members. The task of the nationalist is simply to remind his or her compatriots of their glorious past, so that they can recreate and relive those glories.

"For perennialists, too, the nation is immemorial. National forms may change and particular nations may dissolve, but the identity of a nation is unchanging. Yet the nation is not part of any natural order, so one can choose one's nation, and later generations can build something new on their ancient ethnic foundations. The task of nationalism is to rediscover and appropriate a submerged past in order the better to build on it.

"For the modernist, in contrast, the past is largely irrelevant. The nation is a modern phenomenon, the product of nationalist ideologies, which themselves are the expression of modern, industrial society. The nationalist is free to use ethnic heritages, but nation-building can proceed without the aid of an ethnic past. Hence, nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.

"For the post-modernist, the past is more problematic. Though nations are modern and the product of modern cultural conditions, nationalists who want to disseminate the concept of the nation will make liberal use of elements from the ethnic past, where they appear to answer to present needs and preoccupations. The present creates the past in its own image. So modem nationalist intellectuals will freely select, invent and mix traditions in their quest for the imagined political community.

"None of these formulations seems to be satisfactory. History is no sweetshop in which its children may 'pick and mix'; but neither is it an unchanging essence or succession of superimposed strata. Nor can history be simply disregarded, as more than one nationalism has found to its cost. The challenge for scholars as well as nations is to represent the relationship of ethnic past to modem nation more accurately and convincingly.

"... nationalists have a vital role to play in the construction of nations, not as culinary artists or social engineers, but as political archaeologists rediscovering and reinterpreting the communal past in order to regenerate the community. Their task is indeed selective - they forget as well as remember the past - but to succeed in their task they must meet certain criteria. Their interpretations must be consonant not only with the ideological demands of nationalism, but also with the scientific evidence, popular resonance and patterning of particular ethnohistories. Episodes like the recovery of Hatsor and Masada, of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the legends of the Kalevala, and the ruins of Teotihuacan, have met these criteria and in different ways have come to underpin and define the sense of modern nationality in Israel, Egypt, Finland and Mexico. Yigal Yadin, Howard Carter, Elias Lonnrot and Manuel Gamio form essential links in the complex relationship between an active national present and an often ancient ethnic heritage, between the defining ethnic past and its modern nationalist authenticators and appropriators. In this continually renewed two-way relationship between ethnic past and nationalist present lies the secret of the nation's explosive energy and the awful power it exerts over its members."

Smith, Anthony D. "Gastronomy or geology? The role of nationalism in the reconstruction of nations." Nations and Nationalism 1, no. 1 (1994): 3-23. See pages 18-19.

Adrian Hastings's

NOTE: Adrian Hastings is an Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Leeds. He is author of a number of books, including The Construction of Nationhood which is quoted from below. This book represents a direct reply to Eric Hobsbawm and is based on a series of Wiles Lectures which Hastings delivered in Belfast in May 1996. (Interestingly, Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780 is based on a series of Wiles Lectures which he delivered in May 1985.)



Let me begin by briefly setting out my central theses, themes to which we will return from one angle or another again and again.

1. For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.
2. An ethnicity is a group of people with a shared cultural identity and spoken language. It constitutes the major distinguishing element in all pre-national societies, but may survive as a strong subdivision with a loyalty of its own within established nations.
3. A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethniclty. Formed from one or more ethnicities, and normally identified by a literature of its own, it possesses or claims the right to political identity and autonomy as a people, together with the control of specific territory, comparable to that of biblical Israel and of other independent entities in a world thought of as one of nation-states.
4. A nation-state is a state which identifies itself in terms of one specific nation whose people are not seen simply as 'subjects' of the sovereign but as a horizontally bonded society to whom the state in a sense belongs. There is thus an identity of character between state and people. In some way the state's sovereignty is inherent within the people, expressive of its historic identity. In it, ideally, there is a basic equivalence between the borders and character of the political unit upon the one hand and a selfconscious cultural community on the other. In most cases this is a dream as much as a reality. Most nation-states in fact include groups of people who do not belong to its core culture or feel themselves to be part of a nation so defined. Nevertheless almost all modern states act on the bland assumption that they are nation-states.
5. 'Nationalism' means two things: a theory and a practice. As a political theory - that each 'nation' should have its own 'state' - it derives from the nineteenth century. However, that general principle motivates few nationalists. In practice nationalism is strong only in particularist terms, deriving from the belief that one's own ethnic or national tradition is especially valuable and needs to be defended at almost any cost through creation or extension of its own nation-state. If nationalism became theoretically central to western political thinking in the nineteenth century, it existed as a powerful reality in some places long before that. As something which can empower large numbers of ordinary people, nationalism is a movement which seeks to provide a state for a given 'nation' or further to advance the supposed interests of its own 'nation-state' regardless of other considerations. It arises chiefly where and when a particular ethnicity or nation feels itself threatened in regard to its own proper character, extent or importance, either by external attack or by the state system of which it has hitherto formed part; but nationalism can also be stoked up to fuel the expansionist imperialism of a powerful nation-state, though this is still likely to be done under the guise of an imagined threat or grievance.
6. Religion is an integral element of many cultures, most ethnicities and some states. The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed. Moreover, religion has produced the dominant character of some state-shaped nations and of some nationalisms. Biblical Christianity both undergirds the cultural and political world out of which the phenomena of nationhood and nationalism as a whole developed and in a number of important cases provided a crucial ingredient for the particular history of both nations and nationalisms.

I will be suggesting that England presents the prototype of both a nation and a nation-state in the fullest sense, that its national development, while not wholly uncomparable with that of other Atlantic coastal societies, does precede every other - both in the date at which it can fairly be detected and in the roundness that it achieved centuries before the eighteenth. It most clearly manifests, in the pre- Enlightenment era, almost every appropriate 'national' characteristic. Indeed it does more than 'manifest' the nature of a nation, it establishes it. In the words of a very recent writer, Liah Greenfeld, 'The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation, it was the birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism.' Moreover, its importance for us lies too both in its relationship with religion and in the precise impact of English nationalism on its neighbours and colonies. Much of this, I will be claiming, was detectable already in Saxon times by the end of the tenth century. Despite the, often exaggerated, counter-action of the Norman Conquest, an English nation-state survived 1066, grew fairly steadily in the strength of its national consciousness through the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but emerged still more vociferously with its vernacular literary renaissance and the pressures of the Hundred Years War by the end of the fourteenth. Nevertheless the greatest intensity of its nationalist experience together with its overseas impact must undoubtedly be located in and after the late sixteenth century.

I will argue that there appears to be no comparable case in Europe and that it was this English model, wholly preceding the late eighteenth century, in which this sort of process is held by modernist theory to find its roots, which was then re-employed, remarkably little changed, in America and elsewhere. I will not suggest that English nationalism preceded an English nationhood. On the contrary. However English nationalism of a sort was present already in the fourteenth century in the long wars with France and still more in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Indeed, without the impact of English nationalism, the history of England's neighbours seems virtually unintelligible.

Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. pp. 2-5.