"It has become common for Western scholars to look upon the nation-state as a thoroughly modern creation, an artifact of a global political and economic order that has existed for perhaps four centuries. It’s also common for scholars to see nationalism, a political and cultural ideology, as a prerequisite for the nation-state’s existence. A “nation” exists and matters, in this view, only because people already believe it exists and matters. This makes sense to me. But typical explanations of nationalism neglect its very personal character. Treating nationalism as a political ideology, they fail to explore it as a middle-class affective experience. They try to explain how the French became French, but neglect to ask whether this explains why a Frenchman became a Frenchman. They explain why a flag flies over city hall, but not why it flies over someone’s front yard. At times, they even depict national identity as something that swallows up personal identity.
Among American historians, who are strongly influenced by Western European scholarship, the most common models for the origins of nationalism fall into two broad categories. Both are collective, large-scale accounts. On the one hand, scholars like Elie Kedourie and Eric Hobsbawm have treated nationalism as an idea invented, more or less deliberately, by European intellectuals—almost as a sort of trick played on the masses. According to Elie Kedourie, the concept of the nation itself, in the term’s modern sense, entered common usage only after the French Revolution, and nationalism took form as philosophers devised a theory of freedom that denigrated the individual and unleashed one of history’s most destructive forces. According to Eric Hobsbawm, similarly, modern nations owe their potency to “invented traditions” that give them a fictional aura of ancient legitimacy. Hobsbawm depicts these traditions as artifacts of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, which produced university-trained intellectuals as the spokesmen of the new ruling (middle) classes. In these accounts, the decorations I saw on that house in Massachusetts are side effects of clever statecraft.
The alternative view, taken up by scholars like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, represents the nation as something that emerged naturally from the conditions of modern life. In Ernest Gellner’s interpretation, the nation-state is simply the political unit that makes sense to humans living in an “industrial” society. Whereas agrarian peoples may be content to leave literacy and culture to a specialized class, highly mobile industrial societies must foster widespread literacy and cultural homogeneity. This requires the resources of a nation-sized state, complete with a comprehensive education system. Economic modernization, says Gellner, thus teaches people to look to the nation-state for justice and progress. Meanwhile, Benedict Anderson’s no less ambitious “imagined communities” thesis holds that the nation-state rose together with a totally new sense of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Instead of seeing themselves as subjects under the throne of God, enjoying commonality in a sacred universal order, modern Europeans (and their imperial subjects) came to view themselves as haphazardly coinciding in space and time. Thanks to international trade and the substitution of vernacular official languages for Latin, their conceptual space was defined by the newspaper, the almanac, or the novel, which represented jumbles of events in endless, numbing succession. What the moderns needed was a new basis for solidarity, a new explanation for their being thrown together on a chaotic, one-way journey through time. They found this, Anderson says, in the nation, which was essentially a community of print circulation.
Gellner and especially Anderson thus come closer to capturing what I think is essential; they give us the nation as a way to order human experience in an age of atomization. As local affinities on the one hand and universal order on the other gave way to the fluid marketplace, the nation became a vessel that looked big enough to carry modern humans safely into the future. In this interpretation, the flags flying in that Massachusetts town are simply evidence that the churches and shops have lost their power to define the community. Yet even these accounts, as sensitive as they are to the needs of the person, cling to the idea that nationalism is to be understood ultimately as a political ideology. All of these accounts begin and end as attempts to explain why political revolutions happen."
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