Perhaps the most common belief in the field holds that nations and nationalism are essentially phenomena of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, that before that century nations and nationalism were largely unknown and that economic and political developments which had been so conducive to their formation and proliferation are now, at the end of the second millennium, beginning to render them obsolete. Underlying these beliefs are certain assumptions about the nature of ethnic communities and nations.
These may be summarized as follows. First, nations and nationalism are regarded as inherently modern – in the sense of recent – phenomena; that is, they emerged in the last two hundred years, in the wake of the French Revolution. Second, nations and nationalisms are treated as the products of the specifically modern conditions of capitalism, industrialism, bureaucracy, mass communications and secularism. Third, nations are essentially recent constructs, and nationalisms are their modern cement, designed to meet the requirements of modernity. Finally, ethnic communities, or ethnies, to use a convenient French word, though much older and more widespread, are neither natural nor given in human history, but are mainly resources and instruments of elites and leaders in their struggles for power. Underlying these views, of course, is the fundamental assumption that modernity constitutes a revolution in human history, perhaps the revolution, one whose effects are ubiquitous and universal, and that all pre-modern eras are at an end and with them all the structures and beliefs that flourished and upheld those earlier, long-gone epochs. The past is, indeed, ‘another country’.1
These are the basic assumptions which underlie what I shall call the ‘modernist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ viewpoints on ethnicity and nationalism, so prevalent today. First I shall say something about the instrumentalist approach.
Briefly, an ‘instrumentalist’ approach is one that regards human beings as having always lived and worked in a wide range of groups. As a result, people have a variety of collective identities, from the family and gender to class, religious and ethnic affiliations. Human beings are continually moving in and out of these collective identities. They choose, and construct, their identities according to the situations in which they find themselves. Hence, for instrumentalists, identity tends to be ‘situational’ rather than pervasive, and must be analysed as a property of individuals rather than of collectivities.2
To understand these views, we have to look on collective identities as so many resources and bounded categories upon which human beings can draw in different environments. Families, schools, congregations, classes, ethnic groups, genders, are all bounded units of resource upon which we, as individuals, can draw at different times and in varying circumstances. Their contents, and their meanings for us, are highly malleable. On the other hand, the social boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is relatively permanent. The cultural contents and meanings of ethnic identities tend to change with cultures, periods, economic and political circumstances, according to the perceptions and attitudes of each member. They are never static, never fixed. It is vain to search for an ‘essence’ in such identities, because they are always being transformed and can always be refashioned according to need. Like Heraclitus’ river, their forms and contents are always in flux, changing according to the current situation and the needs and preoccupations of groups and individuals. Only their social boundaries remain.3
Ethnic communities, or ethnies, are one such bounded resource, or rather set of resources, for individuals. Far from being rooted in human nature and history, not only is each ethnie different, each ethnie is constantly undergoing change. Being Italian or Russian today is not the same as in 1980, let alone 1960 – in the eyes of members of the group as well as outsiders. Nevertheless, ethnicity also provides a defined symbolic and organizational site for individuals and elites to mobilize resources in the pursuit of common goals within a state. Symbols, therefore, are important in shaping aggregates of resources (including people), in defining borders and giving members purpose and direction. Yet symbols, like every other cultural code, are variable and malleable; they can be adapted and even invented to suit group and individual interests and circumstances.4
In stark contrast to instrumentalist views stand those older attitudes to ethnicity which regard collective cultural identities, and especially ethnies, as having deeper roots within human society and history. There are various positions here, which are often included, summarily, under the generic label of ‘primordialism’. The extreme version holds that we have an ethnic identity as we have speech, sight or smell. This form of primordialism regards human beings as belonging ‘by nature’ to fixed ethnic communities, in the same way that they belong to families. This is a common view among nationalists, though not all of them. We find it particularly in the ‘organic’ version of nationalism, which was first elaborated by early nineteenth-century German Romantics, but which can already be found among the followers of Rousseau in France. In this version, just as nations have ‘natural frontiers’, so they have a specific origin and place in nature, as well as a peculiar character, mission and destiny. In this view, no distinction is made between nations and ethnies. Both are seen as equally part of the natural order, and nationalism is a naturalistic attribute of humanity.5
A second version of primordialism is that associated with the recent revival of socio-biology. According to this viewpoint, ethnies and nations are ‘natural’, because they are extensions of kin groups which are selected by genetic evolution for their inclusive fitness – a view that received new impetus when the formulations of socio-biologists like Wilson, Trivers and Badcock were applied to ethnicity. Individual reproductive success is maximized by ‘nepotism’ as well as reciprocity, and cultural similarity is treated as an important means of guiding individuals in their quest for genetic reproduction through inclusive kin groups. The fact of biological origins of ethnic groups is reflected in their cultural myths of origin and descent. The work of Pierre van den Berghe is a succinct example of the application to ethnicity of the socio-biological revival.6
A third version of primordialism holds that ethnicity is in general a prior, given and powerful, indeed sometimes overwhelming or ‘ineffable’, social bond. But this emotional power is not inherent in the ethnic bond itself, it is felt by the participants in a given ethnic encounter or by the members of a particular ethnie. It is the members or participants that attribute a ‘primordial’ quality to their particular ethnie; in their eyes the ethnic tie has logical and temporal priority over other ties, and they acknowledge its compelling power and ‘affect’. This does not mean that ethnies are fixed or static. On the contrary, historical ethnic communities form, flourish and dissolve, or are absorbed by neighbouring or conquering ethnies, even when their claims are fully recognized by their members. On this view, every human being must be a member of one or other ethnic community; ethnicity is essential to our understanding of history; ethnic bonds override other loyalties; yet given ethnies may lose their vitality, may fade and languish, to be revived by outside forces.7
The various versions of primordialism are open to a number of objections. The most obvious is that human beings live in a multiplicity of social groups, some of which are more significant and salient than others at various times. Hence the ethnic tie has no absolute priority. It is just one among a number of widespread but variable bonds that may bind human beings at given times. Second, ethnic ties like other social bonds are subject to economic, social and political forces, and therefore fluctuate and change according to circumstances. Moreover, frequent intermarriage and the importation of scarce skilled labour resulting from depopulation caused by such factors as repeated urban epidemics, extensive trading links with other areas and peoples, and the frequency of external conquests in history, have made it unlikely that more than a very small number of rather isolated ethnies ever possessed the cultural homogeneity and pure ‘essence’ posited by most primordialists (and nationalists). Third, as a result of these factors there is far more latitude for individuals to choose the ethnic community to which they prefer to belong, and so to shape their own and their family’s destiny, than is allowed by primordialists; and this is particularly true of the late twentieth century.8
Besides, the mechanisms proposed by socio-biologists for explaining loyalties to much larger communities than families, mechanisms like nepotism, projection and identification, are open to considerable uncertainty. It is not at all clear why the quest for individual reproductive success should move beyond the extended family to much wider cultural units like ethnies or how far a constant of this kind can help to explain the variable phenomenon of the modern nation. As for the more flexible versions of Geertz and Shils, they too suffer from a certain exaggeration of the a priori, affective and binding quality of ethnicity, and fail to see how ethnic choices are influenced by circumstances. In fact, ethnic solidarities are often the result of perfectly rational strategies of benefit-maximization on the part of individuals and groups, particularly in relation to significant others.9
There is a good deal of misunderstanding here. While some of the criticisms of the ‘strong’ (or naturalist) versions of primordialism are well taken, they overlook, or better explain away, the enduring and binding quality of many ethnies as well as their often dogged persistence over centuries, even when (perhaps because) they are part of wider polyethnic mosaics or hierarchies. They also overlook, or explain away, the powerful feelings of the participants or members of ethnies and nations concerning the collectivities in which they are involved. These feelings of belonging and obligation, of antiquity and dignity, the sense of a tie which is prior to and more powerful than other ties, are in and of themselves vital data for any investigation of the meanings of ethnicity. They cannot be dismissed because some of the primordialist explanations of them are inadequate or tautologous.10
More important, these criticisms confuse the individual with the collective levels. At the collective as opposed to the individual level, ethnicity remains a powerful, explosive and often durable force. Ethnic categorization and ethnic organization have been central to human association and conflict in most periods and continents. Many human beings have sensed the enduring power and hold of ethnic ties, and have often regarded their own ethnie as immemorial. Names, homelands, memories and symbols may linger on for centuries, despite the conquest, colonization or migration of the population they originally designated or delimited; this happened to the Punic culture long after Carthage had been destroyed by Rome, and again in Iran to the Persians when they were conquered by Muslim Arabs and Islamized from the seventh century on, yet retained their Persian name, homeland, myths and memories. In this sense, we may speak of a ‘participants’ primordialism’, a sense of enduring ethnic ties among descendants of the original community, wherever they happened to be.11
I shall now turn to the parallel debate between what we may term the ‘perennialists’ and the ‘modernists’.
This is an argument about nations rather than ethnies and ethnicity. For some scholars, nations too are perennial and immemorial. Their roots stretch back into the medieval era, or even antiquity. There never was an age without its nations and nationalisms, even if the doctrine of self-determination was born in the modern epoch. Every human being feels in ‘his or her bones’ the enduring power of their nation, the almost timeless quality of the national character. Nations can be found from earliest antiquity, from the beginnings of records in ancient Sumer and Egypt, and they have dominated political life in every era since that time.12
This is not a view that commends itself to the great majority of scholars. They subscribe to the rival modernist approach to nations and nationalism. According to this viewpoint, nations and nationalism are quite recent phenomena (usually dated to the time of the French Revolution, but sometimes to the Reformation), the product of the revolutionary modern forces of industrialism, capitalism, bureaucracy, mass communications and secularization. Some scholars combine this modernism with an emphasis on the constructed, even invented, quality of the nation as cultural artefact; and with a strong belief in the historically specific and transitory nature of nations and nationalism. For them, nations and nationalism are essentially nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomena, tied to a particular epoch of ‘modernity’ which is gradually drawing to a close in the West, and whose obsolescence in advanced industrial societies, therefore, is beginning to become apparent at the end of the twentieth century.13
However, the modernist viewpoint is concerned less with the supersession of nationalism, than with its appropriateness or ‘fit’ with modernity. For modernists, both nations and nationalisms must be treated as intrinsic elements of modernity, and as inevitable components of the rise of the modern state. In one version, nations and nationalism are derived directly from the rise and nature of the modern territorial and professionalized state, first in the early modern West and then, through colonialism, in the annexed overseas territories in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It was the transformation of these monarchical sovereign states after the French Revolution through mass democratization and the spread of the ideal of popular sovereignty that brought the nation to prominence, and turned absolutist states into national ones. As we saw in the case of Hobsbawm’s analysis, nationalism on this reading takes its force and meaning only from the conjunction of the nation with the modern state; and it is the state that determines the scope and power of any nationalism. At the same time, nations and nationalisms require external referents, and these are provided by a series of competing national states in a global interstate system.14
In a second version, nations and nationalism may be seen as a means of bridging the gap between state and civil society opened up in Europe since the Reformation, and the consequent alienation that this has engendered. Nationalism attempts to resolve the problem of state-society dissociation through a specious appeal to the idea of natural and historical culture-community, using arguments about authenticity and organic culture derived from Herder. In this way, it seeks to evoke a sense of organic community which masks the class conflicts and factions of modern societies in emotional appeals to solidarity. More recently, it has been argued that the reflexive nature of the state, with its monopoly of administrative, coercive and surveillance powers, and the exigencies of the interstate system, have formed the locus of nations and nationalism. The appeal to a culturally distinctive and sovereign popular community, in a modern era of dislocation, alienation and detraditionalization, complements and legitimates the powers of the modern state in a modern interstate system. Here then is the locus of violence and warfare. On this reading, nations and nationalism are inherent in a self-reflexive modernity that has today become truly global in scope and penetration. Moreover, new modes of distantiation of time and space and the ‘disembedding’ of many elements from their settings, so characteristic of modernity, have created a new desire for local units of trust and cooperation in the face of an alienating world. The nation represents one way of resolving these dialectical tensions created by modernity.15
Alternatively, nations and nationalisms are derived from the requirements of modern industrial social organization and its pressures for mass literacy and mobility. Unlike pre-modern polities and societies with their entrenched divisions between clerical and aristocratic elites and the mass of food-producers with their many local cultures, industrial society is a fluid, growth-orientated society; it derives its drive and legitimacy from its ability to fulfil material expectations. Such a society, whose material basis is industrial urbanism, is characterized by semantic rather than manual work. It has lost any anchorage in restricted and ascriptive role relationships and can only find its social solidarity in a particular kind of culture – a ‘high’ or ‘garden’ culture – either by turning ‘low’, spontaneous and oral cultures into cultivated, literate ones, or by forging the latter from the ‘shreds and patches’ of existing cultural materials, to accord with the needs of a fluid, egalitarian mass society. Only a modern growth-orientated society, capable of creating large-scale economic development, engenders the need for ‘high’ national cultures and the latter can only be sustained by state-directed and standardized, mass, public education systems.16
Modernist theories represent the dominant orthodoxy in the social scientific analysis of nations and nationalism. But there are several objections to all these modernist viewpoints. The first is historical. It is true that nationalism, the ideology and the movement, is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating from the late eighteenth century, but it is also possible to trace the growth of national sentiments which transcend ethnic ties back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, if not earlier, in several states of Western Europe. Among their small clerical and bureaucratic classes, there are expressions of fervent attachment to the concept of the nation as a territorial-cultural and political community as far back as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France, England, Scotland, Spain and Sweden, as well as in Poland and Russia and possibly Switzerland, if not Wales and Ireland. Certainly by the sixteenth century in England and the Netherlands, if not in France, a wider ‘middle-class’ nationalism of the urban educated began to take hold, one which elevated ‘the people’ to the sovereign position, a view soon to be reinforced by the myth of ethnic election encouraged by Puritan doctrines. These are the ‘old, continuous nations’ which Seton-Watson contrasted with the much later ‘nations of design’ created by and in the wake of nationalism.17
Sociologically, too, nation-building has proved elusive. Too often, the construction of nations has been equated with state-building. But state-building, though it may foster a strong nationalism (whether loyal or resistant to the state in question), is not to be confused with the forging of a national cultural and political identity among often culturally heterogenous populations. The establishment of incorporating state institutions is no guarantee of a population’s cultural identification with the state, or of acceptance of the ‘national myth’ of the dominant ethnie; indeed, the invention of a broader, national mythology by the elites to bolster the state’s legitimacy may leave significant segments of the population untouched or alienated. In many of the new states of
Africa and Asia, the assimilative power of the modernizing state has failed to prevent ethnic protest and disruption, let alone erode ethnic boundaries and cultures. In many cases from the Philippines and Sri Lanka to Iraq, Ethiopia and Angola, there has been not the fusion of ethnies through a territorial national identity but the persistence of deep cleavages and ethnic antagonisms that threaten the very existence of the state. In yet other cases, attempted fusion has been seen, often with reason, as ethnocide (if not genocide), and the victimized people or region has turned to mass resistance and protest, if not outright revolt and secession. This antagonism may stem from pre-state and pre-colonial ethnic relations, including ancient enmities, or alternatively from the social, economic or cultural effects of colonial ‘modernization’. All this means that we should be wary of according too much weight to the powers of the modern state in our explanations of modern nations and nationalisms. There are other forces and factors which may predispose cultural populations and areas to the nationalist ideological programme.18
A third problem stems from the instrumentalism of most modernist theories. They have found it difficult to account for the dynamic, explosive, sometimes irrational, nature of ethno-national identity and ethnic nationalism in an increasingly interdependent world. Millions of men and women have sacrificed themselves, even their lives, for the fatherland, for ‘la patrie’, for France, for Italy, for Israel, for Vietnam. The instrumentalist approach to ethnicity, considered above, for all its recognition of the importance of symbols, fails to explain why people should choose ethnicity or nationalism as their vehicle of advancement rather than class or region. Why should so many millions of people respond to flags and anthems, national monuments and shrines, national festivals and commemorations? ‘Rational choice’ theory has sought to overcome this difficulty in terms of rational individualist strategies of maximizing public goods for the culturally defined population; but it still comes up against the uneven, explosive, angular quality of so much ethno-nationalism. Why should so many people be prepared to fight and die for ethnic communities whose struggles seem desperate and where any public good seems continually elusive? Why the readiness to become martyrs for minority causes that appear hopeless?19
This suggests a further gap in modernist and instrumentalist accounts. They concentrate, for the most part, on elite manipulation of ‘the masses’ rather than on the dynamics of mass mobilisation per se. This is the result of the ‘top down’ method employed by most modernist approaches. While the role of elites, notably the intelligentsia, is crucial, not enough attention is paid to the outlook and needs of the poor and powerless, nor to the ways in which their interests and needs are differentiated by class, gender, region and ethnicity. Nor has due weight been accorded to the ways in which each of these groups and strata can and have been mobilized in accordance with their own cultural and political traditions, their memories, myths, symbols and vernacular forms of expression. This is also true of those who, like Hobsbawm, recognize the importance of ‘proto-national’ communities and sentiments among the lower classes, yet refuse to connect them in any way with subsequent modern political nationalisms. Such a strategy debars us from grasping the popular power of nationalism, its capacity for mass mobilization, and the vital energizing role played by culture and symbolism.20
Perhaps most important, what I have called ‘the myth of the modern nation’ fails to grasp the continuing relevance and power of pre-modern ethnic ties and sentiments in providing a firm base for the nation-to-be. In their determination to show that all elements of ‘tradition’ have collapsed or been eroded by the revolutions of modernity, the modernists have failed to demonstrate that the global scope of those revolutions has been more marked in some areas than others, and has penetrated some strata and sectors more profoundly than others. Ethnicity and religion have, in fact, been two sectors that have resisted assimilation to the dominant secular and universalist ethos of modernity. This is even true in some of the Western heartlands of modernity. Though the political force of religion had greatly declined in the West (except Ireland, Spain and America), it is not accidental that the strong national states of Western Europe were built up around sizeable ‘ethnic cores’ (the English, the north-central French, the Castilians, the Swedes) which were able to incorporate, if not assimilate, their smaller neighbours into an enlarged national state, albeit with varying degrees of success. Outside the West, traditional and fundamentalist religions retain a powerful hold on millions of people. This is as true of the Indian subcontinent as of the Islamic lands. Similarly, today, many states outside the West have been able to forge nations where these have rested on the cultural base of a dominant ethnie. This is as true of some East European states (Poland, Romania, Greece) as of those new states in Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Korea) which have had a long tradition of historic domination by a central strategic ethnie.21
In short, this myth of the modern nation has to be recognized for what it is: a semi-ideological account of nations and nationalism, one that chimes with modern preconceptions and needs, especially with those of a mobile, universalist intelligentsia, for whom the nation-state is only a staging-post in humanity’s ascent to a global society and culture. It is as much a myth, in the sense of a widely believed and dramatized tale of a sacred past which serves present needs, as the myth of nationalism itself; and it should be treated with similar caution.22
There are also important empirical objections to modernist approaches.
For one thing, they overlook the era in which a given population begins its ‘entry into modernity’ by engaging in the cultural and political work of nation-formation. To have begun this project in, say, the early nineteenth century in Europe or Latin America, is quite a different kind of undertaking and leads to very different results from the nationalism and nation-building in Africa or Asia since the Second World War. The post-war era has witnessed a much more truly ‘globalizing’ setting of economic, technological and political interdependence than was imaginable, let alone realizable, nearly two centuries ago. Moreover, the difference in timing is important for the very different expressions of various nationalisms and the radically different types of nation that they help to create. The language and symbolism of the nation, if nothing else, are critically affected by the era in which they emerged, being more often than not influenced by one or more national centres – England, France, Russia, Japan, China – which acted as pioneers and models or recipes of national development.23
For another thing, modernist approaches critically undervalue the local cultural and social contexts. The latter are treated as so many ‘local variations’ illustrating the overall themes of nationalist modernization. But a moment’s consideration will convince us of the misleading nature of such exercises. At best, the introduction of elements of ‘modernity’ may help to account for the timing of impulses towards nationalism or nation-formation. They tell us nothing about the character, intensity, durability or scope of the processes of nationalism. No doubt ‘modernity’ played its part in stimulating Aboriginal or Mohawk nationalisms in Australia and Canada, just as it had done in France or Russia; but how much does this tell us, even about the timing, let alone the scope and character, of these utterly different nationalisms which are otherwise ‘worlds apart’?24
Equally important is the fact that nationalism continues to flourish, if in sometimes less violent forms, yet with much vigour and tenacity, in some of the most advanced industrial societies – in France, Canada (Quebec), Catalonia and the United States. This again suggests that cultural movements like ethnic nationalism are relatively independent of the processes of modernity and it raises important problems for modernization theories of nationalism.
In France, with its tradition of revolutions, where an advanced economy, a highly centralized state and professionalized bureaucracy, and a well-educated and relatively affluent population exemplify the features of a fully modernized society at the heart of the global economy, ideologies have come and gone, but nationalism and a powerful sense of national identity remain constant and potent. Negatively, this was expressed in French objections in the 1950s to the European Defence Community, France’s Gaullist opposition in the 1960s and 1970s to NATO and American hegemony, its opposition to American cultural demands in the Uruguay round of the GATT discussions, and the antipathy entertained by many French men and women in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s towards Muslim immigrants, towards Jews and towards ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ and their cultural hegemony. Positively, these feelings were matched by an equally fervent passion for France’s rich cultural and ecological heritage, a powerful attachment to her historical traditions, an ardent love of the French language, a keen sense of her historic frontiers, a visible pride in the symbols of French glory and in her accomplishments from architecture and literature to cuisine and cinema. And all this despite the strong regionalism which France still displays, and the many doubts and criticisms levelled in recent years at the received national traditions in history textbooks, in the art-history canon, in museology and various other fields. Gaullism and its concept of a ‘Europe des Patries’ was only one political expression of this underlying cultural nationalism which roots the French state in French culture and society.25
In Quebec, too, there is a relatively wealthy, advanced industrial society which is part of a wider North American globalizing economy, displaying all the hallmarks of a fervent nationalism which teeters on the brink of ‘sovereignty-association’ while pursuing the goal of complete cultural independence. One might have expected that, after the ‘quiet revolution’ of the 1960s and the successful transfer of much of the professional and business activities of the province to Francophones, the Quebecois would have contented themselves with the assurance of French cultural hegemony and provincial ‘home rule’. But this has not proved to be the case. French Quebecois sentiments and ideologies have remained vibrant, and powerful, forces in the political life of the province, provoking ethnic and national counter-forces from the other provinces of the Canadian federation. Indeed, there are fears that, after the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord and the new powers of the Quebecois opposition party in the Federal Parliament, a new movement of secession on the part of one of its wealthiest ethnic components could finally force through the breakup of the Canadian state.26
Catalonia has, from the late nineteenth century, been one of the most successful commercial and industrial regions of Spain, with Barcelona becoming a leading entrepot and a major European centre of culture. Its cultural nationalism was born of the mid-nineteenth-century literary and cultural Renaixenca and flourished in many literary, cultural, artistic and scientific movements, academies, journals and parties at the turn of the century. Since then, Catalonia has been among the most economically and culturally advanced regions of Europe and after a long popular resistance to the cultural oppression of Franco’s regime, it has once again emerged as a strong centre of ethnic nationalism, winning a large measure of political autonomy from Madrid. Despite (perhaps because of) its thorough modernization, Catalonia remains a nation with a strong sense of its historic national identity and passionate aspirations for maximum autonomy in the Iberian peninsula.27
In the United States of America itself, the most dynamic arena of modernization, a powerful continental providential nationalism is not hard to mobilize. Every time United States soldiers are killed or captured in a UN mission, every time the President agonizes over a foreign-policy issue involving an American military presence, every time trade negotiations threaten to favour America’s competitors, the sense of a separate and unique American history and destiny looms in the background, encouraging Americans to feel their common historical mission as the bearers of freedom and democracy. This shared patriotism, this messianic belief in America, this quasi-religious sense of a common destiny, seems to be independent of the economic and political vicissitudes of the United States or of American society, for it emerges in every kind of context and it does not seem to wane with growing affluence and mass high consumption. The belief in an American Creed, Constitution and way of life, overarching the many cultures of its constituent ethnies, has remained a resilient force, despite the many setbacks and disappointments of Americans at home and abroad.28
In other less developed but rapidly modernizing societies like Poland, Norway and Ireland, ethnic nationalism remains a powerful force, and the sense of common nationality is deeply ingrained and widely diffused in the population. It is fed, of course, by fear of common enemies – in the Polish case by fear of the former Soviet Union, in the Norwegian case by anxiety about the impact, economic, political and cultural, of a European Community led by Germany and France, and in Ireland by historic suspicion of England – but it springs also from the historical legacy of separate statehood and/or incorporation as a marginalized, even submerged and oppressed community in a larger, more advanced state. While it is possible to interpret the vivid expressions of nationalism in these countries as legacies and survivals from a previous, nationalist, era, the fact that they recur and are still widely diffused suggests that it is necessary to look more closely at the social and ethnic origins of these collective sentiments and aspirations.29
There is also the more recent phenomenon of rabid xenophobia and ethnic violence directed against immigrants, Gastarbeiter and asylum-seekers. This takes popular as well as official forms. At the popular level, the last few years have seen virulent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere, together with even more violent hatreds directed at Turkish, Albanian, Gypsy and other immigrants or Gastarbeiter in Germany, Italy, France and the Czech Republic. These have been inflamed by various neo-fascist or neo-Nazi organizations, claiming under the banner of patriotism to defend the purity of the national cultural heritage and received national identities, as well as to safeguard job opportunities for natives. At the official level, both national and Pan-European policies against asylum-seekers and immigrants have been coordinated by European governments and rules of entry have been tightened, at the very moment when the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty have unified the native European populations of the European Union, allowing them free entry and mobility throughout the territories of the union. Here too is striking evidence of the paradox of unification and fragmentation, and of the difficulty of squaring the recent resurgence of ethnic nationalism with any idea of modernization as a painful transition whose successful crossing into the realm of democratic mass affluence is rewarded by national harmony and social peace.30
The continuing power of ethnicity, and the persistence of ethnic nationalisms even in advanced industrial societies, constitutes a major stumbling-block for myths of the transcendence of ethnicity through modernization as well as for recent modernist theories of nations and nationalism. The main reason for this failure is their refusal to link the consequences of modernity with an understanding of the continuing role played by cultural ties and ethnic identities which originated in pre-modern epochs. These ties and identities are found among local and regional communities, that is, among the lower strata – the peasants, tribesmen, artisans, labourers – which have often formed the social bases of mass-mobilizing vernacular nationalisms. This failure has meant a systematic neglect of the popular base and cultural framework of nationalism. To provide a realistic account of the paradox of fragmenting nationalisms amid global transcendence, this analysis must start with this popular base and its ethnic past, with the memories, myths, symbols and traditions of cultural communities. The critique of the fashionable modernist approaches to nationalism provides a necessary starting-point for a better understanding of recent political and social trends.
Any attempt to grasp the post-modern trends of transcendent eclectic globalism and the new localism must, therefore, relate them not merely to processes of modernization, but also to earlier pre-modern identities and legacies that continue to form the bedrock of many modern nations and exert a powerful influence today. Medieval France and Russia form not merely the basis, the crucible, of modern France and Russia; the social relations and cultural practices of the latter are embedded in the traditions, myths, memories, symbols and values that have been handed down from generation to generation, exerting to this day a powerful, if sometimes hidden, influence – in political traditions, in law and customs, in the landscape and its sacred places, in language and literature, architectural forms, artistic and musical legacies, dances, costumes, food and recreations of the people. This means that the continuities with pre-modern influences must be analysed in conjunction with modern and ‘post-modern’ trends and their interrelations revealed, if the current proliferation of cultural identities and ethno-nationalisms in every part of the world is to be explained.31
I conclude with an example of what I have in mind. Even small and neutral national states like Switzerland, which have for so long resisted the temptations of being drawn into European political alliances and rivalries, are now feeling the pull of mass communications, transnational companies and markets, and of European political unification. So much so that even the 700th anniversary celebrations of Switzerland’s political foundation myth in 1991 were somewhat muted; the country’s problems, particularly for its youth, seemed to have little to do with the heroic founding era, or with the simple, sturdy virtues associated with Swiss independence. Today these problems appear to be either local or global, rather than simply national, and the old pedagogical national narrative which was so prevalent in Switzerland until the 1970s, seems less and less relevant.
Yet hardly two decades have passed since Switzerland was rocked by a campaign to keep foreign, mainly Italian, workers out and preserve Swiss jobs for the Swiss and keep the purity of Swiss political culture and the country’s lifestyles intact. This meant preserving the sovereignty of the national state which had been founded in 1848 (or in the earlier Helvetic Republic of 1798) and which had lasted well into the 1970s. Behind that insistence on Swiss political independence stood a much longer history in which the Old Swiss Confederation had defended its cantonal rights and political cultures against a series of external enemies, a long-drawn-out process in which the community had been forged through struggle and by separation of a growing Swiss identity from those of its great neighbours.32
Here three broad epochs of Swiss continuity and transformation may be discerned. First, there was a long, pre-modern era of ethnic formation, when the various cantons were loosely, often ambivalently, brought together on the basis of Alemannic valley traditions and urban institutions, and the common fight to preserve or win back local privileges eroded by the Habsburgs. This was later seen as a heroic era, associated with various foundation legends (Oath of the Rutli, William Tell), and framed by external conflicts with Habsburgs and Burgundians. Only from the sixteenth century did non-Alemannic, French-speaking cantons and cities seek to join the Confederation, forcing the Swiss to seek other, non-linguistic bases for their political identity. This was followed by a period of consolidation on the basis of urban patriciates and interlocking oligarchies.33
When that identity threatened to ossify in the eighteenth century, a movement of cultural and political renewal in Zurich, Berne and Geneva led to the welcoming of French influence and intervention. This opened a second, modern epoch of ideological nationalism and nation-formation, in which various secular elites attempted to spread the ideas of a national Swiss identity to their countrymen. It culminated in the establishment of the Swiss Federation and the 1848 Constitution following the brief religious war of 1847 and the institutionalization of a modern national state.34
Finally, there is the gradual opening out of a neutralist, defensive Swiss national state and political culture to outside economic and political influences, which began in the 1960s but has since accelerated. It is as yet too early to say where this ‘post-modern’ phase will lead and whether it may erode the Swiss polity or Swiss political culture and identity. The point, however, is that we cannot begin to gauge this possibility without taking fully into account the whole length of previous Swiss history and identities, at least as a starting-point for subsequent analysis.35
This is a point both about substance and about method. Substantively, any new mode of Swiss identification will be informed by memories, symbols and traditions of earlier identities. This is inevitable, even if some younger urban Swiss may wish to reject the older identities. Either way, any new European identity among the Swiss youth is likely to be permeated by older Swiss identities. Methodologically, any deeper analysis of changes in collective Swiss identification must accord due weight to these older identities which have guided the majority of Swiss men and women for so many centuries. Any new modes of Swiss identification will, in the long run, owe as much to older Swiss identities as to recent European and global trends. On both levels, the Swiss example provides a helpful guide for understanding the nature of the paradox and for grasping the significance of modern ethnic nationalisms which have recently experienced so marked and widespread a resurgence.