Theories of Nationalism by Anthony D. Smith

Anthony D. Smith defines a nation as a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a single economy and common rights and duties for all members. He defines nationalism as an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity of the human population, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’.
Source: Warwick Debates

Nationalism, in the words of Ernest Gellner, ‘is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’.
Source: Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations

Scottish Nationalism Related
page 10: nationalism with a small ‘n’ refers to the political behaviour of all major parties in Scotland, whilst Nationalists with a capital ‘N’ refers only to parties who seek a fully independent Scotland, i.e. the SNP… unionist arguments for Scotland’s continued incorporation within the UK state are made in the ‘interest’ of Scotland and as such are nationalist with a small ‘n’

Theories of Nationalism, Anthony D. Smith Chapter 1: The Doctrine and its Critics Key word: Kedourie In 1962, a schoolteacher, Isaga Mukirane, established the Rwenzururu Kingdom in the Toro district of Uganda. The Konzo and Amba tribes had petitioned the Toro and Uganda governments. In 1959, 103,868 Konzo and 32,866 Amba were counted in the Toro district, where there were 183,492 Toro. Minority tribes had resented Toro governance as they held the administrative positions and the best lands, teachers and doctors, and their language was used in courts and councils, schools and churches. The Konzo and Amba walked out of parliament once the Toro Agreement came up for revision, and violence followed. Revolt was crushed by 1967 except in the mountains. (p1)

Notes to page 2 in page 289: Argyle 1969 argues in an article that most European nationalist movements started from literary and historical associations, broke out into violence over the issue of cultural facilities, invented or rediscovered a common and glorious past and competed for bureaucracy posts. The same can be said for the African tribalist movements, for example, the BaKongo A.B.A.K.O of 1952, or the Kikuyu Central Assocation of 1928, the Soli Tribal Assocation in Northern Rhodesia, the Zulu Society, the Ibo N.C.N.C. and Luo Union in Kampala. Thus, African tribalism, according to Argyle, can be compared to European Nationalism. There are small nations, like the Basque, which number only 500,000.

Each UN nation possesses a flag, anthem, administration, educational system, army, judicial system, legislature, citizenship rights, founding myth and constitution, coinage and capital. (p2)

“There is considerable difficulty in deciding whether Fascism and especially racism and Nazism are really just further developments of nationalism, or rather quite different ideological movements. Clearly, one’s overall attitude to nationalism will be affected by the decision.” (p4)

“There is no doubt that traditional nationalism is one ingredient of the Fascist constellation; but the other ingredients and the whole tenor of Fascist regimes and movements seem to me to be more important and even overriding (that is, where Fascism is being used in a strict sense rather than as a term of abuse).” (p4)

“Nationalism, in its main outlines, has shown remarkable staying power. It is an ideological movement which has continually reappeared in new guises – liberal, traditionalist, socialist, etc. and won out… Despite protean local variation, it has reappeared as a consistent set of demands and beliefs with regard to political and social arrangements.” (p6)

Quoting Mill, 1872 “It is, in general, a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationality… Where the sentiment of nationalist exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do, if not to determine with which the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.” (p9)

Lord Acton declared in his 1862 essay “Nationality does not aim at either liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind.” (p9)

“Achad Ha’am, the zionist thinker, admits that what really counts for the definition of a nation is subjective feeling.” (p11) His quote: “If I feel the spirit of Jewish nationality in my heart so that it stamps all my inward life with its seal, then the spirit of Jewish nationality exists in me; and its existence is not at an end even if all my Jewish contemporaries should cease to feel it in their hearts.”

“The version of nationalism elaborated by the German romantics – notably Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Arndt, Jahn and Muller- might be more accurately called the ‘organic version’. It holds that the subject of history is the nation, a phenomenon at once unique, ‘natural’ and ‘objective’. The nation stands over and above the individuals who compose it, and the members possess common mental characteristics which are objectively ascertainable and mark them off from non-members. ‘Nature’ itself has ordained this cultural individuality, and the proof of history, institutions, descent and religion. From these external differences we must infer a distinctive ‘spirit’ of the nation, with its own independent causal power. Such a spirit welds the parts of a nation into an organic ‘whole’, which turns an aggregate of individuals and elements into a unique seamless pattern, on which the parts in turn depend for their life and form.” (p16)

“Nationalists recognised that the exercise of the individual ‘will’ could never ensure freedom or stability for the community.” (p19)

“For nationalists, will and aspiration are predicated of the pre-existent nation. It is not your will and my aspirations that matter; it is the nation’s, however embryonic. To Burke, Rousseau, Zimmerman, Jefferson, Bolingbroke and Motesquieu, as well as for the German romantics and African and Asian nationalists today, nations are distinct and natural entities which thereby embody the collective will.” (p19)

“…Brotherhood born among those who have grown and suffered together, of individuals who can pool their memories undeer a succession of common historical experiences” (p23)

Chapter Two: The Imitation of Kant “The precise date of nationalism’s genesis is a matter of dispute: Kohn tends to favour 1642, Acton the 1772 Partition of Poland, Kedourie 1806, the date of Fichte’s famous addresses to the German Nation in Berlin. Most, however, opt for 1789- with the proviso that the revolution served merely to bring together the elements of the nationalist idea, which were brewing up throughout the previous two centuries.” (p27)

“Yet common to all the historical theories is the assumption of a specific European origin for an idea which has since been carried to other parts of the world in an inexorable process.” (p27)

“Why did nationalism arise, and why at the end of the eighteenth century? Basically, answers Kedourie, because of a revolution in European philosophy, and a breakdown in European society.” (p31)

“The first was the work of Kant. In epistemology, he had set out to oppose both metaphysical dogmatism and Hume’s radical scepticism; but he ended by completely separating appearance and reality. Our knowledge, Kant contended, is based on sensations emanating from things-in-themselves; and the perceiving self, with the help of categories inherent in it, imposes a synthetic intelligible unity on what would, otherwise, remain a chaos of unrelated and incoherent impressions’. Yet, because these categories (including time and space) are logically prior to and independent of experience, ‘we can never know things as they really are, as they exist in themselves independent of our observation’. In ethics too, Kant effected a similar separation. If liberty and virtue are not to be mere illusions based on opinions, morality cannot be based on knowledge of the phenomenal world. Neither the will of God nor the natural world can be the source of moral value, for then man’s freedom would disappear and morality become meaningless. Virtue depends on a continual struggle against the natural inclinations, and upon a free choice to obey the inward moral law or categorical imperative. Hence Kant’s ‘new formula’ in ethics amounts to this: ‘the good will, which is the free will, is also the autonomous will’. The individual is here the self-determining centre of the universe. Even the existence of God depends on a man’s need for moral freedom; and true religion becomes for Kant’s followers, Schleiermacher and Schlegel, simply the intuitive quest for man’s perfection, and the spontaneous expression of a free will.’ (p31)

‘Political consequences of ethical and epistemological dualism are far reaching. Self-determination becomes the supreme good.’

Kant maintained that (quoted in p32 but original is Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason, 1793) “One must be free in order to learn how to use one’s powers freely and usefully. To be sure, the first attempts will be brutal, and will bring about a more painful and more dangerous state than when one was under the orders, but also under the protection, of a third party. However, one never ripens into reason except through one’s own experiences, and one must be free in order to be able to undergo them.”

“It follows that republicanism is the sole possible form of government, for only in a republic can the laws express the autonomous will of the citizens. And, just as in ethics, a man must fight his inclinations, so in politics, social action and development depends on the citizen’s activism. Of course, Kant was not a nationalist, nor was he responsible for the emendations of his followers. It was, in fact, Fichte who resolved the philosophical difficulties raised by the Kantian doctrine in favour of a ‘subjectivist’ interpretation. Men after all do know how to distinguish reality from fantasy; they do generally agree about the features of a world independent of the senses. Surely, he argued, it must be because that world is a product of a universal consciousness or Ego (as opposed to Kant’s individual consciousness), which guarantees its rationality and stability. The world is coherent because it is a manifestation of the Ego, it is ‘an organic whole, no part of which can exist without the existence of all the rest’. Fichte’s subjectivism, when applied to politics, results in an organic theory of the state.” (p32)

“But this transformation in the realm of ideas was only possible, and influential, because of the accompanying upheaval in social life. Kedourie points to the low social status of the German romantics, as sons of pastors, artisans and small farmers, whose upward mobility was blocked at the time… These men were driven to import philosophy into politics because society and state in eighteenth century Europe seemed cold and heartless.” (p33)

“Provincial, narrow, philistine society of the German principalities, or of a Prussia which for all its official enlightenment was, at bottom, dependent on the harsh will of a strict master.” Fichte, 1796

“To maintain communal solidarity and the regime’s legitimacy, a new mythology is erected around the rebirth of the purified nation bent on restoring a golden age soiled by oppressors.” (p49)

“In Persia, Argentina, Czechoslovakia and Nigeria, and in French West Africa, nationalism, while attacking naturally the colonialist or imperial regimes, was a liberal, reformist and democratic force before the military interventions.” (p61)

“Two objections can be made to the utility and possibility of definition of nationalism. The first is logical, and as such, pertains to all definitions. Popper, for example, has argued that definitions cannot capture the ‘essence’ of phenomena. To attempt to enclose the phenomenon, as it were, within arbitrary walls, only ends in an infinite regress: the definiens must be further defined, since it will always contain more definienda, especially in the social sciences. This does not, of course, preclude us from making ad hoc distinctions in meaning within a term, if this serves to clarify the problem under discussion. But this is a mere operational demand.” (p165).

“The first reference to it [nationalism] appears at Leipzig University, which was founded in 1409 after a religious and scholastic dispute at Prague involving Bohemian and non-Bohemian nationes. The sense in which the term was used was restricted: a union to defend the common interests of the compatriots of one of the four nationes among the Leipzig professors. According to Hubner’s Staats-Lexicon of 1704, the term was forbidden in the seventeenth century.” (p167)

“In France, nationalism seems to have been used first by Abbe Barnel in 1798l but in the early nineteenth century it is rarely found” (p167)

“’Nationalism’ and ‘national sentiment’ need to be distinguished for analytic purposes, though empirically they are often closely related.” (p169)

“Nationalists reject the often-repeated distinction between ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ nationalism. Prudence may dictate the temporary playing down of the overt political implications of the independence ideal in favour of a limited cultural autonomy, such as was favoured by the personalist schemes of the austro-marxists, otto bauer and karl renner. But, as Lenin and Stalin, as well as the Habsburg rulers, were quick to realise, the ‘right’ to have one’s own language taught in one’s own schools, courts manned by one’s own judges, newspapers produced by one’s co-nationals and for them, an indigenous literate and art, one’s own local institutions such as churches, and one’s own customs, has immediate political consequences.” (p172)

“languages other than English have separate terms for legal citizenship and nationality. German, for example, distinguishes Staatsangebörigkeit from Nationalitat, citizenship from ethnic nationality.” (p177)

Belongs to political scientist Handman “Irredentism seeks the unification of an independent state with conationals under foreign domination” (p199)

[Fascism] “Its mainsprings are worship of the State as a corporate entity, belief in the Leader and the elite whose will is infallible, and a sense of what is often described as vitalistic nihilism. That is, the return to the worship of the primeval force or energy proceeds from the exhaustion od all efforts to construct a rationalist philosophy. This is ideologically a far cry from Fichte’s subjectivist idealism, and even further from the democratic populism of Herder and Rousseau” (p260)

Unrelated definitions of Fascism Roger Griffin: “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Robert Paxton: “A form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democraic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleaning and external expansion.