One tribute to the intellectual power and weight of evidence brought
to bear by these new critiques of nationalism--now of course several
decades old--has been their effect on those who, broadly speaking,
disagree with their basic thrust. In response to them, recent
scholars like John Armstrong and Anthony Smith, tending to a view of
nationalism as a natural rather than constructed phenomenon, have
greatly adapted and refined the old arguments for "primordialism"
(indeed to the point that Smith would probably deny that he is a
"primordialist" at all). However, at the core of their approach is
still the belief that conscious ethnic attachments are of great
antiquity, and that it is these which form the true basis of modern
national feeling and explain the remarkable success of modern
nationalisms, their capacity to mobilize support and generate
passion. In Smith's words,

"Not only did many nations and nationalisms spring up on the basis of
pre-existing ethnie and their ethnocentrisms, but . . . in order to
forge a 'nation' today, it is vital to create and crystallize ethnic
components, the lack of which is likely to constitute a serious
impediment to 'nation-building.'"

And,

"The modernist definition of the nation omits important components.
Even today, a nation qua nation must possess a common history and
culture, that is to say, common myths of descent, common memories and
common symbols of culture. Otherwise, we should be talking only of
territorial states. It is the conjunction, and interpenetration, of
these cultural or 'ethnic' elements with the political, territorial,
educational and economic ones, that we may term 'civic', that produce
a modern nation."

Smith also points out that to "invent" an ethnie--as opposed to a
"nation"--is difficult to the point of impossibility. It can be
shaped and cultivated, but mainly it has to grow.

Between a convinced, old-style nationalist and a Hobsbawm there can
obviously be neither compromise nor quarter. But this should not be
so between Dr. Smith and most of the "constructivists", since few of
these would in the end seek to deny ethnicity a role in nationalism,
just as Smith and his supporters would not deny that the ideological
form of nationalism--as opposed to its emotional content--is indeed a
development of the past two centuries. As so often happens, however,
the dispute has been calcified by the adoption of dogmatic positions,
ones often in excess of what the work of the authors themselves will
support. Even the principals sometimes formulate their positions in
extreme terms. Thus Hobsbawm has declared that:

"The 'nation' . . . belongs exclusively to a particular, and
historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it
relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the
'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality
except insofar as both relate to it."

The Mechanistic Fallacy

The member of the constructivist camp who has developed the most
brilliant insights concerning the cultural creation of modern
nationalisms and national identities in the European empires in Asia
is Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities. One thing that
makes his work so valuable is that it shows how new ways of
nationalist thinking were generated by numerous creative
imaginations, rather than consciously "constructed", in response to
new historical and social circumstances. He highlights especially the
creation for the first time of "monoglot mass reading publics" as a
consequence of capitalism, the printing press, and the new education
systems; and of course the creation of new "intelligentsias"--often
badly paid and socially marginal, but desperately aspiring to power
and glory--to serve these new masters and audiences.

On this score, Anderson has leveled some cogent criticism at Gellner,
who once asserted that, "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations
to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist."
In Anderson's words: "Gellner is so anxious to show us that
nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates
'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to
'imagining' and 'creation.'" (It is only fair to say that Gellner's
bald formulation in this instance is hardly typical of his immensely
deep and subtle mind. Elsewhere, he has written that, while
nationalism is a created phenomenon, under the historical
circumstances of modern times "nationalism does become a natural
phenomenon, one flowing fairly inescapably from the general
situation.")

This same criticism could also be leveled at the phrase "the
invention of tradition", and the approach represented in the famous
collection of essays of that name edited by Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger. I believe that the word "invention" in this context is
utterly mistaken, necessarily implying as it does a sudden and
radical break with the past, a mechanistic and artificial creation,
and an act of conscious human will. As some of the essays in
Hobsbawm's own collection suggest, the people responsible for
"inventing" these new traditions were themselves absolutely convinced
that they were in fact rediscovering, adapting, and regenerating old
traditions. Prys Morgan, for example, in his essay on the Welsh
national revival, writes that "the Eisteddfod [the Welsh national
song and culture festival] was not in any way a deliberate invention,
the first recorded meeting having been held in Cardigan . . . in
1176", even if the form the revived Eisteddfod took from the
eighteenth century on became something very new. Here, as elsewhere,
what we have is an organic development, not a mechanistic one; a
generation, not an invention. In general, "new" traditions represent
genuine, if hopeless and even sometimes comical, strivings to
"rediscover" old traditions, on the basis of very real feelings of
continuity, identity, and loss.

To take another musical example, this was true of the great Latvian
and Estonian song festivals organized from the later nineteenth
century to the present day. These were quite new, and played a key
part in the generation of the modern Baltic national identities. But
it seems clear from the evidence that not merely were the songs
themselves the product of a continuous tradition of great antiquity,
but so too was a sense of ethnic (though not "national")
identification and common hostility toward non-Estonians and
non-Latvians.

Where new elites are in fact forced to "invent" traditions and
national identities out of whole cloth, as in the colonially created
states of Africa, they produce fantasies that are hardly convincing
even to themselves, and are incapable of inspiring sincere loyalty
and sacrifice. For what can also be said with some confidence is that
there is a crucial relationship between the capacity of a new
nationalism to mobilize people and retain their allegiance, and the
depth of its rootedness in pre-existing loyalties and identities,
whether ethnic or religious. These loyalties do not have to be
national or proto-national in any strict sense--consider the complex
but enormously important role of Hinduism in underpinning Indian
unity--but they do have to be there, or the new national plant is
likely to prove a weak and sickly one.

The most successful example in history of an "invented" nation was
probably that of Great Britain, or rather the Union between Britain
and Scotland. Indeed, so successful was it that not only did it
overcome for more than two centuries the ancient enmity between
England and Scotland, but it almost completely subsumed both Scottish
and English nationalisms. Nairn and others have pointed to the way in
which the success of the British idea was founded on partnership in
the growing British Empire, one that proved immensely profitable not
only for the English but for the Scottish upper and middle classes.
So overwhelmingly did English nationalism become confused with
British imperial patriotism that today it finds tremendous difficulty
in even giving itself a name, and survives in public only in strange
disguises like "Euroskepticism." With the last major colony, Hong
Kong, now gone, it will be very interesting to see how British
identities develop from here on.

However, there was more to Britishness than the advantage of empire.
A brilliant study by Linda Colley has examined all the ways in which
the new British identity was formed in the eighteenth century, on the
basis of very powerful existing elements in both England and
Scotland--notably Protestantism and hostility to Catholic Europe,
especially France--and it was this that gave "Britain" much of its
emotional and cultural force. It was by no means therefore simply
"invented", even if numerous paid scribes and artists did consciously
set out to foster it.

Conversely, of course, the example of Britain is certainly evidence
that the classical nationalist argument is also radically flawed, for
it shows that there is nothing at all inevitable about the creation
of nation-states based on one linguistic and ethnic group. Gellner
and others are quite right when they argue for the existence of a
multiplicity of loyalties and identities alongside the strictly
national one, in the past as in the present. To judge by Colley's
work, successful nationalism needs to be seen as a force that has
achieved success largely by feeding on as many as possible of those
other allegiances.

Academics should therefore keep a check on themselves when writing
about the "invention" of traditions and nationalisms; for it does
rather tend to flatter their own vanity as intellectuals, both
because they present themselves as seeing through the ideas that have
deluded simpler folk, and also because the idea of intellectuals
sitting down and inventing nations and traditions is inherently
gratifying if you are yourself an intellectual.

Essay Types: Essay