Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality by Eric Hobsbawm

    Nations and Nationalism was an amazing book that has only furthered my recent interest in nationalism. Hobsbawm discusses the history of national feelings and their development in a historical context up to the Cold War era. The book was excellent. My reflection is below.

    In discussing nationalism, Hobsbawm defines it as the idea that the political and the national unit should be congruent, citing Gellner. For Hobsbawm, the "nation" is not a primary or unchanging entity. Instead, the nation exists only in relation to the nation-state. Nationalism begets nations, and not the other way around. And states beget both nationalisms and nations. There were not primordial peoples who formed the nations. Instead, they are modern inventions projected onto the past. He quotes the Polish liberator Colonel Pilsudski: "It is the state which makes the nation and not the nation the state." Similarly, the author writes that, "languages multiply with states; not the other way around." Hobsbawm is a critic of the nation, and quotes Renan, "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation." He seems firmly anti-nationalism.

    One of the most interesting questions of the book is how a group of people can become a nation. And how can that nation form a nation-state? For example, why did the Cornish fail to become a nation where the Scottish succeeded. First, says Hobsbawm, there is a threshold question of population that vaguely addresses the issue; to form a nation, a people need to be sufficiently numerous. But beyond that he identifies three criteria. First, it helps to have a historic association with a current or past state with a lengthy and recent past. This helped the English, the French, the Spanish, the Poles, and others. Second, there may be the existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative language. This was the basis of Italian and German nationhood, since they did not have long state histories to look back on. And a third factor is a proven capacity for conquest. Imperial power makes people aware of their nationhood.

    An interesting theme was that early nationalism was all about unification of people into one. The people of what is now France ceased to be Normans, Bretons, Occitan, etc. and chose one dialect as "French." Hobsbawm says that nationals languages are actually all like Hebrew, being created to serve a state's purpose. Although unlike Hebrew they usually pick a standard out of many spoken languages and downgrade the rest to dialects. But many of the more recent nationalism seek to break away from states. This is much more difficult because they are lacking the state support that helps so many nations to be born, and they also appear to observers as a sort of regression, whereas unification into larger states has an air of progress about it. So there was a sort of shift that occurred in the 19th century when nationalism ceased to refer to a top-down effort to inculcate national feelings as a means of centralization, but rather just the feelings of common people themselves, arising spontaneously around the 1880s or so. From 1880 through the Peace of Versailles, nationalism abandoned the "threshold question" and created unlimited numbers of self-determining peoples, and the multiplication of "unhistorical nations" led to a greater focus on ethnicity and language as the only criteria of nationhood.

    In coming to the essence of nationality, Hobsbawm identifies many factors in national development that are not decisive. Language is one that he considers as being a state development. He also rejects any ethnic origin of bloodline, since there are many cases of peoples combining into a nation based on belief, not blood; he cites Russian nationalism as one that combines people of many origins. The most decisive factor for Hobsbawm in creating "proto-national" ideas that are fertile ground for nationalism is that existence of a "historical nation."

    But there is also a revolutionary concept of a nation that comes from France and the United States in the late 18th century. "Americans are those who wish to be." The French concept of the nation, at least at the time of the Revolution, was just a plebiscite of those living within the realm. French nationality was citizenship- language, history, or ethnicity were irrelevant. Patrick Henry even served in the legislature. But France eventually merged non-state patriotism with state nationalism, and today the French state is associated with the dominant grouping- the French.

    Nationalism and socialism were in historic conflict, but had a coming together after World War One in Fascist movements. Mussolini was a socialist before he was a Fascist. Hitler's party sought to combine aspects of nationalism and socialism in the "National Socialist German Workers' Party," clearly identifying the national twice and the social twice. While it was conventional to believe that nationalism was incompatible with international class struggle and vice versa, the inter-war period saw parties combine the two. For the most part, loyalties did not conflict in peoples' heads. British, French, and German workers all supported their national states in WWI, but then went on strike for better wages, deaf to accusations of unpatriotism. Hobsbawm even goes so far as to assert that the combination of national and social demands was a more effective mobilizer, since nationalism was limited in appeal to the discontented lower middle classes. There are many examples of this national/social combination beyond the fascists. The Finnish Socialist Party became the de facto national party of the Finns, and Mensheviks did the same in Georgia. The Dashnaks did the same in Armenia and the Jewish socialists also developed national ideas in both Zionist and non-Zionist directions.

    At the time of writing in the late 1980s, Hobsbawm asserts that nationalism was in decline. Not by any means gone, but historically less important than it was. It would seem that in the last thirty years there has been a resurgence of its importance however. But we may still be heading to the world he predicts in the long term, of supra- and infra-nationality, and the decline of the nation-state as an operational entity. 

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this was interesting: "'Patriots,' in the original sense of the word, were the opposite of those who believed in 'my country, right or wrong,' namely - as Dr. Johnson, citing the ironical use of the word put it - 'factious disturbers of govern-ment.' More seriously, the French Revolution, which appears to have used the term in the manner pioneered by Americans and more especially the Dutch Revolution of 1783, though of patriots as those who showed the love of their country by wishing to renew it by reform or revolution."
• In discussing the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the 19th century, Hobsbawm criticizes the decision to ask what language was spoken at home on the census. The result was to turn the census into a "battlefield between nationalities," and that "by asking the language question censuses for the first time forced everyone to choose not only a nationality, but a linguistic nationality." This fomented further nationalism, according to Hobsbawm. I would like to know what he would think about US censuses and race. 
• As of 1980, only 6.5% of papers circulating in Barcelona were in Catalan. But while 80% of all inhabitants of Catalonia spoke Catalan and 91% of inhabitants of Galicia spoke Galician, only 30% of the inhabitants of Basque country spoke the language in 1977.
• Hobsbawm classifies anti-imperial movements as either local educated elites imitating European 'national self-determination,' popular anti-Western xenophobia, or "the natural high spirits of martial tribes."
• I thought this was fascinating data about West Germans right at the time of the fall of Communism. When asked, 83% thought they knew what capitalism was, 78% said the same of socialism, and 71% for the state. But only 34% said they knew what "the nation" was. 90% of well-educated Germans claimed to know all four terms, but only 54% of Germans with only primary education claimed to know what the state and the nation were. 43% said that the nation and state were different, which should have been obvious since there was a West Germany and an East Germany. But 35% believed that they were inseparable. About a third believed that East Germans now formed a different nation.