Shortly after Nations and Nationalism was published, Gellner made one of his then frequent trips to Moscow. Handing a copy of the book to his friend Anatoly Khazanov, he remarked that the book contained his life. Khazanov devoured the book that very night, met Gellner the next day, and asked if he had been referring to the long parable about the relations between the Ruritanians and the Empire of Megalomania. Gellner replied in the negative, stressing that it was the book as a whole that held within it his experiences.1 There are passages where this is obviously true. Modernity obviates the state’s need to rely on specialized middlemen, Gellner claimed, where it had hitherto acted as their guardian. Much discontent is therefore defused by dispossessing such groups, in ‘a pathetic theatre of humiliation … to the delectation of the majority’. In no case was this more true than in that of European Jews.
These persecutions illustrate, better than any others, the kind of fate which is likely to befall culturally distinguishable, economically privileged and politically defenceless communities, at a time when the age of specialized communities, of the traditional form of organic division of labour, is over.2
Just as importantly, the book deploys Gellner’s full intellectual repertoire. He draws from Hume and Kant when seeking to explain the nature of the modern self, but relies just as much on his philosophy of history. And the book is clearly that of an anthropologist, distinguishing between structure and culture and acknowledging the character of pre-industrial societies, and offering particularly interesting insights about the relationship between Islam and nationalism. Finally, one should note that the book is written, so to speak, from the inside, allowing for varied staccato comments on multiple issues – the struggles of states over peoples, the reasons for the unlikelihood that pan-Arab nationalism’s defeat would be reversed, the behaviour of empires, the mythical character of much nationalist ideology – that were further developed by later theorists. Each re-reading reveals new insights.
Nations and Nationalism was declared one of the hundred most influential books since the war.3 It is extremely ambitious, offering nothing less than a general theory, and it was generally very well received – it would become his best-selling work, widely read the world over.4 More was involved here than the sheer intellectual merits of his case – which had, after all, appeared previously, at least in essence, two decades earlier in Thought and Change.5 What mattered was the revival of nationalist movements in the world, most obviously following the collapse of Soviet hegemony.6 In the last decade of Gellner’s life, he attended a huge number of conferences on nationalism, his theory often the subject of discussion and criticism. This led him to further develop his position, and to offer prescriptive comments; he also replied to his critics.7 Two comments from his last rebuttal should be borne in mind as we proceed, for they address the criticisms that he most often faced. The first comment – noting his love of Czech folk songs – was cited above, in chapter one. Gellner insisted that he was sensitive to the appeal of nationalism, refusing to accept the charge that his account of nationalist motivation was merely instrumental.8 His second comment sought to refute the charge that his theory was functionalist in the illicit, teleological sense of lacking causal agency.
I accept entirely this repudiation of teleological explanation: I have many needs which, whatever their urgency or intensity, nature has not deemed fit to satisfy. Bitter experience, quite apart from the canons of scientific propriety, have taught me this unpalatable truth. Needs engender no realities. But my theory does not sin against this. It is straightforwardly causal. Political and economic forces, the aspirations of governments for greater power and of individuals for greater wealth, have in certain circumstances produced a world in which the division of labour is very advanced, the occupational structure highly unstable, and most work is semantic and communicative rather than physical. This situation in turn leads to the adoption of a standard and codified, literacy-linked (‘High’) idiom, requires business of all kinds to be conducted in its terms, and reduces persons who are not masters of that idiom (or not acceptable to its practitioners) to the status of humiliated second-class members, a condition from which one plausible and much-frequented escape route led through nationalist politics.9
Gellner can and should be upheld on both these counts. But our concluding assessment of his theory argues that his claim that it is causal is neither complete nor entirely correct. In particular, his entirely proper functionalist account of nationalism – that homogeneity is a prerequisite for the success of society – needs to be treated with caution. In this matter one can follow Gellner himself, in a sense: for, in this crucial area, he changed his mind, or at least wobbled in an important way.
It is not often appreciated that the logic of the book’s argument is very similar, for all its varied and interesting asides, to that of the treatment of nationalism found in Thought and Change, with such novelties as there are appearing only towards the end of the monograph. This is certainly true of the set of definitions which open the book. These spell out the implications of the earlier claim in Thought and Change that the national principle meant rule by one’s co-culturals. Both sentiment and movement are seen within the terms of this principle, now expressed as the principle of political legitimacy asserting that polity and nation should coincide.10 Gellner makes much of the difficulty of defining the nation, noting that both cultural and voluntarist definitions are often inadequate – for each can apply to many social relations other than the national. But the book overcomes the difficulty, asserting that modern circumstances prioritize a national culture which is willed because it provides the only framework within which a decent life is possible.11
The circumstances in question are explained in terms both of his philosophy of history and his interpretation of modern epistemology. Gellner considers nationalism to be modern because agro-literate polities were not societies in the modern sense. Rather, specialized elites ruled over communities, as we have seen, which characteristically managed their own affairs, a situation exemplified by the millet system of the Ottoman Empire. Industrial society is held to be utterly different. A scintillating restatement of the ideas of Hume and Kant spells out the character of life under this mode of production in a new and suggestive manner. Just as fact is freed from value, so too is role freed from social structure. Social mobility is enabled by the spread of generic education – that is, educational training which is often less specialized than that of the clerical elite of agrarian societies. Such training allows for movement between jobs during a single lifetime, thereby creating a baseline egalitarianism that characterizes modern life.12
The fundamental reason that Gellner felt so sure of his theory was the fact that virtually every state in the modern world, whatever their political beliefs, pays obeisance to the deity of education.13 But far more than that is involved.
The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of individuals, typically, and for the majority of men now hinges on their education; and the limits of the culture within which they were educated are also the limits of the world within which they can, morally and professionally, breathe. A man’s education is by far his most precious investment, and in effect confers his identity on him.14
The key sentiment here needs immediate highlighting. A powerful retort to the charge that his account of nationalist motivation is thin, bloodless and instrumental is that the feeling on which nationalism is based is that of the desire to avoid humiliation. A more subtle answer is that the desire to work should not be seen in purely economic terms. This is how critics coming from an established community, taking its character for granted, see employment. But Gellner writes from the position of an outsider, knowing that a job symbolizes the ability to gain admission into a society in the first place.
The chapter that follows the discussion of the modern self builds on his earlier claim that nationalism, properly understood, is not about the expression of prior national identities but rather the actual creation of these very identities.
It is not the case that nationalism imposes homogeneity out of a willful cultural Machtbedürfniss; it is the objective need for homogeneity which is reflected in nationalism.15
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, the other way round.16
It is phrases such as these which seem to posit history as the unfolding of a mechanistic process, leading many to raise against Gellner the charge of illicit functionalism.17 Gellner’s views are certainly expressed so forcefully that one can understand why this indictment has so often been made. But it should be rejected. One consideration to bear in mind is that the forcefulness derives from Gellner’s determined rejection of nationalist ideology, of nationalists’ self-understanding which declares that the nation was always there, ready, as their favoured metaphor has it, to be awakened by a kiss.18 He insists that this will not do, pointing to the fact that so very often a new world, of literacy and shared belonging, is created by nationalists for the first time. Just as importantly, the social engineering involved very often leads to the destruction of other potential nations, at least when measured in terms of linguistic variety – there being something like 8,000 languages and a mere 200 or so states. A key principle for Gellner is accordingly that nationalism is rather weak: many cultural units assimilate to larger ethnic groups, and it is impossible to predict in advance which ones will eventually manage to turn themselves into nation-states.19 But the most significant consideration is the undoubted fact that he does indeed offer a causal account of the origins of the nationalist principle. This is necessary, for insisting that the sharing of a literate high culture is necessary for modern social life does not for a moment explain why there need to be so many different cultures. Why was it that the culture of specialized elites sitting atop the self-help communities of agrarian society could not be accepted by everyone under their control?
Gellner essentially repeats his account of industrialization’s uneven spread from Thought and Change, this time using a new parable: the relations between the backward peasants of Ruritania and the Empire of Megalomania – the former quite properly seen as Czechs and Slovaks, the latter as the German-speakers of Vienna. The presupposition of the whole argument is simple:
Early industrialism means population explosion, rapid urbanization, labour migration, and also the economic and political penetration of previously more or less inward-turned communities, by a global economy and a centralizing polity.20
The subtle composite portrait that follows concentrates on intellectuals and peasants-turned-workers, omitting the traditional tribal chiefs who had played some role in the argument of Thought and Change. Concentration on Central Europe rather than North Africa also means that the intellectuals are seen in a slightly different light. The few Ruritanian peasants who become intellectuals, fluent in both the language of court and of church (that is, at least in the Austrian case, German and Latin respectively), became influenced by liberal ideas, thereby ending up as teachers and professors rather than priests. Gellner stressed that a large proportion of this group chose to assimilate into the dominant political culture, as was possible given that no identifiable trait, religious or otherwise, prevented this from happening. To become German was, after all, to join a world civilization and rise in the social hierarchy. But not every intellectual took this path. Many were moved by the sufferings of the Ruritanian peasants who had arrived in urban areas. No explanation is given as to why intellectuals preferred one path to the other.21 In contrast, the position facing peasants arriving in towns is all too clear. It was not just that the effects of early industrialization were harsh. Rather, the need to operate in a language other than their own led to the sense of humiliation already noted, that is, the fear that one might permanently remain a second-class citizen. So here was the raw material for a nationalist movement – intellectuals feeling empathy for their fellows, their affinity often wedded to romantic notions of folk community, and peasants-turned-workers suddenly aware of how much easier it is to deal with officials in one’s own language. Gellner issued a caveat at this point, anticipating even at this early stage a criticism that had been made of his earlier work on nationalism. He drew a distinction between the actual motives of actors, and motives that they might have had if they had calculated their interests in purely materialist terms. The motives that they might have had – but didn’t – would have included career advancement for the intellectuals (opportunities might be greater in Megalomania but the competition was stiffer) and the possibility of economic development for the workers.22 But these motives did not drive the process: what mattered was the generosity of the intellectuals and the humiliation of those forced to deal with bureaucrats steeped in a different linguistic and cultural code.
A particular but only partial innovation of the book is the distinction made between the situation just described, that is, one in which fission may or may not take place due to communication barriers, and a more deterministic situation in which the creation of social homogeneity is made more difficult by the entropy-resistant features of certain groups. Gellner makes the point in abstract terms to begin with, by imagining some people possessed of an ineradicable blueness. The difference is then simple: ‘Ruritanian culture can be shed; blueness cannot’.23 This has been seen as a major change from his earlier work: human beings, or rather some of them, are now seen as less malleable than was implied in the initial formulation of Gellner’s views.24 But this is not quite right. The theory in Thought and Change is redefined here and incorporated within a larger frame. The causal agency in the initial formulation was, so to speak, obvious and absolute: intellectuals had no choice but to play the nationalist card because their social mobility was blocked. The monograph makes the point brutally with regard to sub-Saharan Africa. ‘The nationalism that this engendered was simply the summation of all the blacks, the non-whites of a given historically accidental territory, now unified by the new administrative machinery’.25 This account of the region’s situation continued by noting the remarkable immutability of African borders, suggesting, however, that it was still too soon to know whether nation-building would take place via the use of a colonial language or through the choice of a native tongue. But Gellner did feel that nationalism in Africa was more likely to be effective, that is, successful in nation-building, when it could ally itself with a world religion. In this context, he offered an account of developments in the Horn of Africa, noting with bitter irony that the declaration of equality for all ethnic groups in Ethiopia was ‘followed fairly soon by a systematic liquidation of intellectuals drawn from the non-Amharic group, a regrettably rational policy from the viewpoint of preventing the emergence of rival nationalisms within the empire’.26
The discussion of entropy-resistant traits goes somewhat further, in a slightly speculative manner. For when Gellner moves from the abstract to the concrete, often matters are not at all straightforward. He argued that the ‘pervasive values and attitudes … linked to religion … have a limpet-like persistence … for the populations that carry them’, citing both the situation in Ulster and the difficulties facing Kabyles in metropolitan France – and noting in both cases that the fissure between the groups involved was cultural, not physical.27 However, consider this passage:
If, however, the hypothetical blues possess no territorial base in which they can plausibly hope to establish an independent blue land, (or alternatively, if they do have one, but this blue homeland is, for one reason or another, too exiguous and unattractive to secure the return to it of the blues dispersed in other regions), then the plight of the blues is serious indeed.28
It is not clear to whom this refers. Perhaps Gellner had in mind African-Americans in the United States, identifiable in physical terms, thereby being subject to racial prejudice.29 But the reference might as easily apply to European Jews. Whilst some Jews at the end of the nineteenth century were recognizable ‘physically’, others clearly were not. It was this latter group that Hitler so disliked. In this case, what mattered was the determination of the majority to exclude a minority – or, rather, to weed them out.30 Often traits that had been shed were again made real by the actions of others. Of course this situation can change, as was the case with the slow erosion of the Catholic and Protestant pillars of Dutch society in recent years. But this scarcely dents Gellner’s case which concerns, after all, entropy-resistance rather than, so to speak, entropy-impossibility.
If the thoughts on entropy-resistance do most to add consistency to his work on nationalism as a whole, the creation of a typology of nationalism-engendering and nationalism-thwarting situations was innovative. Eight potential situations are created by means of three variables – access or the lack of it to both power and education, and the presence or absence of a shared cultural background.
The typology of nationalism-engendering and nationalism-thwarting situations
| P | ~P | |||
| E | ~E | |||
| 1 | A | A | early industrialism without ethnic catalyst | |
| 2 | A | B | ‘Habsburg’ (and points east and south) nationalism | |
| E | E | |||
| 3 | A | A | mature homogeneous industrialism | |
| 4 | A | B | classical liberal Western nationalism | |
| ~E | E | |||
| 5 | A | A | Decembrist revolutionary but not nationalist | |
| 6 | A | B | diaspora nationalism | |
| ~E | ~E | |||
| 7 | A | A | untypical pre-nationalist situation | |
| 8 | A | B | typical pre-nationalist situation |
Here, ~ stands for negation, absence; P stands for power; E for access to modern-style education; and A and B for names of individual cultures. Each numbered line represents one possible situation; a line containing both A and B shows a situation in which two cultures co-exist within a single territory, and a line with A and A stands for cultural homogeneity within a similar territory. If A and B stand under an E and/or a P, then the cultural group in question does have access to education or power; if it stands under an ~E or ~P, it lacks such access. The situation of any group is indicated by the nearest E and P above it.31
Five scenarios generated by the scheme do not create nationalism. Line one refers to a world in which state preceded nation, that is, in which national homogeneity had, at least to some extent, been established early on. This social world saw class conflict but little change of borders, for class without an ethnic catalyst is held to be relatively powerless. Once educational standards are more broadly shared, societies of this type move to line three. Lines seven and eight refer to the agrarian world, in which nationalism is by definition ruled out. In contrast line five sees a situation in which some of the powerless are educated at a higher level than their rulers, though both belong to the same cultural pool. This situation can lead to revolution, but not to nationalism. With these cases out of the way, it can be seen that there are three nationalism-prone situations, a fact which pleased Gellner since it improved upon the binary opposition between Western and Eastern forms of nationalism proposed by John Plamenatz.32 He is in fact very close to Plamenatz in the way that he describes lines four and two, respectively ‘classical Western liberal nationalism’ and “Habsburg” (and points east and south) nationalism’. Western nationalism in effect unites culturally advanced areas hitherto lacking a single political system – in large part securing this by expelling alien rulers. The classic instances of this type are nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, both so prominently possessing high literate culture that the possibility of liberalism is present precisely because rather little social engineering is involved. Line two requires social engineering. Here, the culture in question is bereft of a high tradition, thereby demanding much effort to create one out of a folk tradition. This most certainly applied to the Ruritanians of Central Europe, not least the Czechs. But it applies just as much and possibly more so to the south, on which the discussion of nationalism in Thought and Change had concentrated. Ruritanians and the colonized belong to the same category of Gellner’s scheme.
These first two nationalism-creating situations are recognizable from Thought and Change, although their character is more clearly described thanks to the new typology. But the nationalism of line six is identified and characterized in the monograph for the first time. Diaspora nationalism is that of a cultural group different from the majority ethnicity, bereft of power but possessing high education and skills. Such groups were almost essential to traditional empires, with the British for example making particular use of South Asians in Africa and the West Indies. Members of these diasporas can serve as palace guards, financiers or bureaucrats – roles which, when handled by locals tied into kinship networks, can be used as positions from which to attack the state. The occupants of these positions have included Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Chinese and Indians. Many are treated as pariahs, excluded from mainstream society by status considerations.
The advantage … of dealing with a minority, one with whom you could not eat, marry, or enter into political or military alliance, was that both parties could concentrate on a rational cost-benefit analysis of the actual specific deal in question, and expect, on the whole, to get what they bargained for, neither more nor less. Within the minority community, of course, relationships were once again many-stranded, and hence deals were less rational and reliable, and more many-sided. But in the wider society, those who lack status can honour a contract.33
These groups often do very well in a modernizing world. But they are also placed in a very dangerous position, at once militarily weak, conspicuous and successful. The newly created intellectuals of a modernizing society are all too likely to covet positions that guarantee fame and fortune. From this follows either genocide or expulsion. Diaspora members who foresee this have but two choices, that of finding some way to assimilate or that of creating their own state, as was famously true of the Zionists who created Israel.
There are two final novelties to Nations and Nationalism. On the one hand, there is an extended discussion about the future of nationalism. National feelings were likely to attenuate once the hump on the road to industrial society had been passed, an important expression of optimism for Gellner given that he straddled the worlds of rationalism and nationalism. This envisions a world already discussed, that of ‘ironic cultural nationalism’, in which a shared cultural style is necessary even though it does not command our full loyalty. There was a paradox about the world of greater affluence, in which the stakes of conflict seem to be diminished: ‘intellectuals, the driving force of initial nationalism, are now, in a world of nation-states, often the ones who move with the greatest ease between states, with the least prejudice, as once they did in the days of an international inter-state clerisy’.34 Nonetheless, Gellner rejected any facile idea of convergence, though it might well apply at the highest occupational levels:
[I]t remains difficult to imagine two large, politically viable, independence-worthy cultures cohabiting under a single political roof, and trusting a single political centre to maintain and service both cultures with perfect or even adequate impartiality.35
On the other hand, a very powerful short chapter on ideology makes three particular claims.36 First, Gellner distinguishes his theory from that of Karl Deutsch.37 He claims that Deutsch saw nationalism as resting on the communication of particular messages, a reassuring doctrine since it suggests that different messages could produce different ideologies. Gellner would have none of this: it was the spread of mass communication media, rather than any particular content that they might deliver, which sustained national identification. Second, he forcefully insisted that Kant’s idea of self-determination had no relationship, as Kedourie had claimed, with the principle of national self-determination. Kant’s insistence that the self not be based on anything contingent made him the sparest of universalist cosmopolitans, far removed from nationalism’s concern with the need for rootedness. Finally, Gellner considered false theories created in order to explain nationalism. Three had been mentioned in Thought and Change, namely those theories which saw nationalism as universal, as the result merely of ideas, and as the preserve of the Dark Gods.38 He now added Marxism to this list.
Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that the Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. It is now necessary for revolutionary activists to persuade the wrongful recipient to hand over the message, and the zeal it engenders, to the rightful and intended recipient.39
It is worth noting that his typology had sought to explain nationalism without any reference to class, understood as an agent of historical destiny. This was not to say that he ignored social inequality. Very much to the contrary, his fully developed position was that neither class nor nation could be relied upon to act permanently, almost metaphysically, as movers of the historical process. If class without nation was powerless, so too was the nation in the absence of social inequality.40
The disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union, as noted, put nationalism at the centre of world politics and intellectual attention in the last decade of Gellner’s life. This resulted in a considerable record of publications: several prefaces to the many translations of Nations and Nationalism; interviews, especially in Eastern Europe; various prefaces to books on nationalism; a large number of articles on nationalism, the most original of which were collected in Encounters with Nationalism in 1994; the important ‘Reply to Critics’; and a posthumously published short book on Nationalism.41 As some of this material was repetitive, it makes most sense to deal with it analytically, by considering in turn the additions to the theory and responses to some of his critics, before turning to the prescriptive turn in his thought occasioned by worries about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The additions to the basic theory can in turn be divided into three. First, Gellner put forward a new way of classifying nationalism, largely overlapping with the previous typology – with the exception that diaspora nationalism is not specified as a type in its own right, and the sub-Saharan situation drops out of the picture altogether. There are two elements to the new classification, the first concerned with stages and the second with geographic zones. It can be said immediately that the stadial theory is marred by only really considering European history. No such criticism can be levelled against the description of zones, because it was purposely designed as a description of Europe. Let us take each of these categories in turn.42
The first stage is held to be exemplified by the Congress of Vienna. At first sight, the most obvious point about the peacemakers at Vienna is that they paid little attention to the nationalist principle. However, Gellner suggested that the world had already changed, and explained why this was so in a passage whose importance resides in the agency it attributes to nineteenth-century European elites.
[T]he rulers themselves, were part and parcel of the changes and were eager to advance some of them, which were conducive to the enhancement of their own wealth and power. They rationalised administration, continuing the work of the pre-Napoleonic Enlightened Despots, and were quite eager to expand education. A centralised orderly bureaucracy, implementing general rules and appointed by the centre, not selected, like some Ottoman pasha, in virtue of their local power base, had to use one language or another to communicate with each other from one end of the empire to the other. It ceased to be the ethnically neutral Latin, and became the ethnically divisive German. This in itself, even if the society governed by the new bureaucracy had not been changing, was bound to have potent nationalist-type implications: when the bureaucracy becomes more pervasive and intrusive, and employs one vernacular, the choice of that language become, important for people.43
The second stage is that of irredentism, or, more accurately given that not all nationalist movements sought to bring in peoples left outside their homelands, of the self-styled ‘awakeners’ of nations. Gellner’s attempt to deal with the exceptions to his theory – that is, Greek and Balkan nationalisms, both clearly present and powerful before the impact of industrialization – concerns us below. The central contention is, however, very much in line with his general theory: nationalist ideas triumphed, but few boundaries were changed – thereby demonstrating that weakness of nationalism found at the centre of his theory. The fact that the third stage, that of the Treaty of Versailles and of Woodrow Wilson’s call within it for national self-determination, contributes so much to the growth of nationalism in effect amounts to a new innovation in Gellner’s approach. The role of geopolitics in the initial theory had been accidental; here it becomes much more central. And this centrality does not apply only to the creation of nation-states. The new units were fragile and feeble, haunted by the presence of significant minorities from nearby homelands to which they could appeal for help. Such internal weakness amounted to a vacuum into which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union moved with appalling ease. Their interventions exemplified the fourth stage, that of ethnic cleansing (and of mass murder and population transfer) carried out amidst the fog of war. If the illustrative material for this point is drawn from European experience, a claim to generality is made of the last stage, that of the attenuation of national feelings. The central idea echoes the discussion of nationalism’s future from Gellner’s monograph: ‘Stable government plus affluence and the expectation of growth do jointly militate against extremism’.44 But Gellner adds to this the claim that a great ideological change has begun to have a major generalized impact: ‘the brilliant success of the two major defeated nations and the economic malaise of some of the victors have made it plain that what makes you big, important, rich and strong in the modern world is not acreage, but rates of growth’.45
The geographical zones described by Gellner are witnesses to differing links between state and culture. The first zone is that of the Atlantic seaboard, in which – with the exception of Ireland (and a critic might add Great Britain, Spain and Belgium) – state and culture were interlinked for centuries, thereby creating sufficient cultural homogeneity to spare this world any severe nationalist conflict. The second and third zones are very familiar, namely those of liberal unification nationalism in Italy and Germany (where the bride of culture was ready, merely awaiting its state) and of the classic nationalism of East and Central Europe. The latter was bound to be illiberal, as Plamenatz (again cited here) had stressed, given the sheer amount of cultural engineering involved due both to their mixed populations and to their need to shape a folk culture into the high culture of a national state. In contrast, the fourth geographical zone Gellner identified represents another innovation in his thought. This is the Soviet Union. This reconstituted empire had no trouble containing nationalism, with later scholarship showing indeed that it affirmed, albeit merely for purposes of transition, some ethnicities – interestingly, as Gellner noted, at the expense of Russians themselves.46 But once the Soviet Union was defeated in the economic Cold War, nationalism quickly occupied the resulting vacuum. He finished his account by wondering where post-Soviet politics would fit, in terms of his stadial theory. ‘Shall we see the proliferation of small, weak, inexperienced and minority-haunted states, or ethnic cleansing, or a diminution of the intensity of the ethnic intrusion into politics?’47 If Yugoslavia had manifested the worst possible outcome, the situation in Russia was as yet unclear – but it was one which filled Gellner with foreboding.
A final innovation in this zonal system is the introduction of a fifth zone, designed to accommodate Islam. His last thoughts here are novel, for they differ from the argument he made about Islam and nationalism in Nations and Nationalism. The monograph had stressed the secularization-resistant capacity of Islam familiar to us from Muslim Society, that is, its ability to survive in the modern world by stressing the scripturalism and discipline of its high culture.48 The dilemma faced by most developing countries was exemplified in Russia, torn between Westernizers and populists, the former tuned in to the needs of modernity at the cost of abandoning their own culture and the latter proud of a native tradition but more or less unable to deal with the task of modernization. In contrast, Muslims could appeal to their roots – for these were the roots of the high tradition rather than of the tribes, so legalistic and rigid as to be eminently suited to the modern age. The situation as a whole was very different from that of Europe, where secularization preceded the age of nationalism. This might seem to suggest that only the power of Islam was important in modernity. However, he stressed the link between Islam and nationalism. In Algeria, the high culture proved a rallying ground against the colonizers. More generally, Gellner suggested that the ‘political conjurers could build their patter around the strict theology, while they shuffled the cards dealing with political morality according to their own preference, without attracting too much attention’.49 We have already seen that his later reflections, after the publication of Nations and Nationalism, are very different. He continued to argue that Islam had an enormous advantage when confronting its own backwardness. But he had come to see revived Islam as a force with the potential to go beyond nationalism:
For a long time, nationalism and even various forms of Marxist-nationalist syncretism were prominent. Islamism and nationalism could also co-exist: it was not clear whether Islam deserved praise for being the social cement of the Arabs, or whether Arabs deserved respect for being the carriers of Islam. Ambiguities of this kind are not uncommon in the ideological life of societies. But by now, much of the ambiguity is dispersed: fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant and victorious trend. Whether this will continue to be so we do not know …50
His views here have already been criticized. Both Turkey and Algeria see national patterns trumping Islamic norms; it is further evident that Islam has not triumphed over nationalism in Malaysia or Indonesia. And shared Muslim faith was not enough to prevent the break-up of Pakistan in 1971.51
The third and final set of additions is rather more ad hoc. Rather different accounts are offered, to begin with, of Greek and Balkan nationalism, both of which gathered steam well before the impact of industrialization, as already noted. A certain amusement colours Gellner’s account of the Greek case; the initial rising took place in Romania, where Greeks were but a rich minority, and aimed at the restoration of Byzantium rather than the creation of a nation-state. But the fact that the Greeks were traders allowed him to argue that some of them were touched by industrialization before it fully arrived. However, this makes no sense of the Balkan cases, above all that of Serbia. The crux of Gellner’s explanation revolves around the fact that the rulers were of a different religion than the ruled, allowing for group self-identification that was reminiscent of Algeria. Further, Christianity served as a conductor of the Enlightenment.
This conductivity must also be part of the reason why the Romanovs modernised faster than the Ottomans, thereby creating a messianic intelligentsia whose salvation politics proved fatal in 1917 – a fate Turkey was spared in as far as the Young Turks were pragmatists concerned with state power, not salvation-drunk messianists. Bandit-rebels in Balkan mountains, knowing themselves to be culturally distinct from those they were fighting, and moreover linked, by faith or loss-of-faith, to a new uniquely powerful civilisation, thereby became ideological bandits: in other words, nationalists.52
The Balkans also feature in a second set of amendments to his theory, designed to explain the murderous virulence of nationalism, both in general and with more particular reference to the purportedly liberal unification nationalisms of Italy and Germany. The intense feelings generated by the ills of early industrialization were once again offered as a generic factor. But two further factors, both novel to Gellner’s work on nationalism thus far, were adduced. First, nationalism is likely to be particularly vicious in societies in which the principle of honour and the practice of self-policing are paramount. This certainly applies in the Balkans and in the Caucasus. Gellner cited short stories by Milovan Djilas to make a further point, namely that much of the killing in these cases takes place within the ethnic group concerned. This returns us to a phenomenon noted above, namely the unwillingness of some groups to let their members escape the cage of cohesion. Most attention was given to a second, ideological, factor. The romantic reaction against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment gained real bite, that is, moved well beyond the benign position of Herder, when it was joined together with instinctualist, neo-Darwinian views of popularized Nietzschean hue. The community was now to be biologically rather than merely culturally different. It was to affirm its specificity ‘politically with an aggressiveness which was more of an end than a means, which was the expression and precondition of true vitality’.53 Stressing the importance of roots led Gellner to reformulate his comments about middlemen in particularly striking form. ‘Superficial smart alecks with a shallow urban cleverness, who can assume any accent and are committed to none, are the very model of a moral pathology’.54 The fact that these figures can now no longer be clearly identified on the basis of their religion, abandoned as they became cosmopolitan, makes it necessary, if they are to be excluded, to switch from asking them about their faith to asking them about their grandparents.55 A comment is called for regarding this important late addition. Gellner had once irritated Anthony Smith, as noted, when asserting in general lectures at the LSE that the Holocaust was best seen as an unnecessary mistake of industrial society, leading Smith to characterize Gellner thereafter as a non-Marxist materialist thinker. If there had been truth to this in his earlier years, there is no doubt that in his late and mature thought he was fully aware of cultural forces within modernity.
Gellner constantly engaged with his critics. His most important responses – concerning the motivation of nationalists and the causes that occasion their movements – have been at the centre of this chapter. But his more particular responses to two LSE figures also must be noted. Smith had been Gellner’s doctoral student, and Gellner often introduced him at lectures by saying how proud he was to have taught someone who had come to dominate the bibliography of modern research into nationalism. But they did not agree. Gellner felt that Smith’s doctoral dissertation had not properly interpreted Gellner’s own theory, downplaying its structural content.56 He became still more sceptical when Smith developed an alternative theory of his own, stressing that an historic ethnic core was essential for any modern nation-state’s success and viability.57 Gellner had always noted that nationalists often used shreds and patches of previous ethnic identities, and he admitted in conversation that he was puzzled by seemingly proto-nationalist language in Shakespeare. But these melanges were only myths, created for modern circumstances. It was this last position that was on view in a celebrated public debate with Smith at Warwick two months before Gellner’s death.58 Wittily drawing a parallel between the question of nationalism’s ethnic roots and the celebrated nineteenth-century debate as to whether Adam did or did not have a navel, Gellner stated his position in the bluntest of terms:
Some nations have navels, some achieve navels, some have navels thrust upon them. Those possessed of genuine ones are probably in a minority, but it matters little. It is the need for navels engendered by modernity that matters.59
This passage is taken from Nationalism, demonstrating that key ideas were used, polished and then reused. The book cites Estonia as a wholly invented nation; the Czech case showed how much internal conflict there could be in ideas of national self-perception.60 And underlying this last critique was a very particular view of culture. Cultures could transmit practices over time and yet occasionally change completely, and with speed. Any account of nationalism emphasizing internal culture was doomed to failure, even though there might be a high degree of cultural continuity in any particular case, because of the existence of rival national cultures. Explanation needed to stand outside all national cultures to explain why the principle of nationality had such broad appeal.61
Gellner’s second set of comments were addressed to his friend Elie Kedourie – whose insistence that nationalism was not a permanent fixture of the historical record had, Gellner always said happily awoken him from his own dogmatic slumbers. Gellner could not accept the idealism of Kedourie’s account (nor its view that Kant had provided ideological cover for nationalists), unable to believe that an ideological invention could be so influential unless it somehow fitted with structural conditions. His own causal arguments led to continuing disagreements with Kedourie. First, in Gellner’s view nationalism resulted more from the unevenness of industrialism’s spread and the humiliation that this involved for some than from the top-down activity of a power-hungry nationalist elite.62 Second, he rejected Kedourie’s charge that he was claiming that industry could only arise amongst nationally homogeneous populations: very much to the contrary, it could arise in multinational situations, and it was this very fact that created the tensions that led to nationalism.63 Finally, Gellner noted that Kedourie’s own late work on nationalism made much of the dislocations caused by European imperialism, suggesting a convergence between their two positions.64
That Gellner was deeply disturbed by nationalist violence in the last years of his life was apparent in the utter seriousness with which he approached the issue.65 There were two related components to his visceral fear. On the one hand, there was the recollection of ‘the sequel to the analogous break-up of the Habsburg empire, which led to a political system so feeble that it fell to Hitler and Stalin with barely a sign of resistance’.66 On the other hand, his belief that state socialism had atomized society made him fear that the quickest route to independent social organization was likely to be that of ethnic mobilization.67 He was a strong and open supporter of Gorbachev, endorsing the strategy of using the party as a means to reform itself. The alternative position, that of Yeltsin, scared him stiff, for its desire to counterbalance the party by calling for ethnic mobilization looked set to open a Pandora’s box of ethnic conflict. However, he acknowledged after the coup attempt that Yeltsin had been fundamentally right: Gorbachev had not been able to carry the party with him, and only the presence of a countervailing force had prevented some sort of return to the bunker.68 But this particular outcome did not alleviate his fear, unsurprising given events in the erstwhile Yugoslavia and in Chechnya, and his later fears of conflict in the Caucasus.
It is hard to say whether political events made him more aware of Malinowski’s political theory or whether his discovery of the Hapsburg roots of Malinowski’s work – as the result of the centenary birthday celebrations held in London and in Cracow in 1984 – had a wholly autonomous effect of their own. But there can be no doubt that his interpretation of Malinowski, on which he was working at the end of his life as we shall see later, provided him with a new way of thinking about nationalism. Of course, in his last debate with Anthony Smith his argument was in effect Malinowskian in saying that our sense of history is based on our current needs. But it is ‘The Political Thought of Bronisław Malinowski’, a reconsideration of Malinowski’s late and wholly neglected Freedom and Civilization, that most clearly signals a change in Gellner’s theory of nationalism.69 Gellner’s argument is paradoxical, accepting the injustice of inequality between imperialists and colonized, but refusing to accept as a corollary the view that the colonized should gain independence as fast as possible to become like their erstwhile rulers. Rather what is needed is an egalitarianism in which all nations are ruled from the outside. ‘No nation is fit to rule itself … They fight each other, and they oppress their own minorities and hamper – if not worse – the free expression of their culture’.70 Indirect rule is necessary, as practised in effect by both the British and Austrian empires, and as to be practised putatively in the future by an international organization such as the League of Nations. A policy of this sort would work well in England.
The League commissioner, perhaps a minor Habsburg archduke, would work discreetly from some functional but unostentatious secretariat, located in a new edifice in some anonymous London suburb – say Neasden. An architect in the Bauhaus tradition would be commissioned to design it. All ritual and symbolic activities, on the other hand, would continue to be based in Buckingham Palace. Thus the English would be emotionally spared any visible, let alone conspicuous, externalization or expression of their diminished sovereignty.71
Gellner highlighted the attractiveness of this option. History had shown that Austro-Hungary in its last years was morally more attractive than the Soviet Union under Stalin – that Franz Joseph, as Gellner liked to quip, was preferable to Joseph.72 Further, the ‘universal protection of cultural autonomy, combined with political constraint imposed by a benevolent centre, must clearly appeal to an age such as ours, which suffers from the opposite condition – political independence blended with dreary cultural standardization’.73
This enthusiastic endorsement of Malinowski’s position is clearly and without question far removed from the main thrust of his prior work on nationalism. It is not wrong to see his main analytical work as arguing that multinational arrangements are doomed, something accentuated at the end of Nations and Nationalism when he had argued, as noted above, that it was unlikely that a state would support two cultures within its territory. It was this that led him, in his earliest sustained visits to the Soviet Union, to feel that his theory would apply even more strongly to the socialist world. There were descriptive considerations at work here: the European Union was something like an Austro-Hungary that works, though the causal waters were muddied here by the fact that contemporary European nationalism’s virulence had been diminished by the achievement of affluence – and, one might add, by ethnic cleansing. But his new position was very largely prescriptive; it was dictated by sheer fear. The question that must concern us as we proceed is this: is this change of tone a straightforward contradiction within his thought, or merely the expression of a deep but potentially resolvable tension?
Gellner finished Nations and Nationalism with a metaphor, that of a transition from the world of Kokoschka to that of Modigliani, the former chaotic and the latter more orderly.74 This captures all too accurately the ethnic homogenization that took place in Europe, properly characterized as the Dark Continent of the twentieth century.75 That Gellner offered an explanation of this tectonic shift is a huge intellectual achievement. Any complete assessment of the state of the field in the study of nationalism is impossible here, given both the efflorescence of theory and of empirical studies of nationalist movements throughout the world. But some of these developments can be cited in order to assess Gellner’s contribution, with particular reference to his causal claims and to his more general view that homogeneity is necessary for societal success. It may be helpful to say at the outset that political considerations must be added to Gellner’s important account with its socio-economic causal model. Doing so will allow us to modify his definition of the phenomenon under consideration.
There are clear causal arguments in his work. Active discrimination, exclusion and the possibility of being murdered led many members of diasporas to realize that only the establishment of their own state could provide protection. The theory of nationalism present in Thought and Change, restated in the monograph via his analysis of entropy-resistance, stresses a block on social mobility so absolute that the rise of nationalist politics was all but inevitable. In contrast, there seems to be something like flexibility in the parable about the Ruritanians, for there was the opportunity, taken by many, of assimilating to the dominant culture. There is a sense in which this flexibility had to be there, for otherwise Gellner’s prescriptive comments would be rendered nonsensical, simple contradictions of all that he had said previously. At issue within his thought is the great tension just described, between the major analytical expectation that multinational polities are doomed and the hope that they might somehow survive. With this thought in mind, let us turn to the European material – and more particularly the Bohemian material – from which he drew. I begin by bracketing his causal account, without challenging its validity.
Some basic historical points need to be made immediately. Gellner’s account of the forces operative in the age of nationalism is essentially apolitical.76 This means that insufficient attention is paid to geopolitical conflict. Some of the mechanisms leading to the worst nationalist excess are best understood within this framework.77 The most dangerous situations arise when rival national movements claiming the same piece of territory are backed by powerful neighbouring states. The fear that assistance for one’s rival may come from abroad encourages pre-emptive cleansing, for those rivals can all too easily be dubbed a fifth column likely to betray the state; equally, the fear that one might be cleansed makes it rational to look to one’s homeland for support. And one can go beyond these variables by referring to Max Weber, showing how nationalism was affected by two elements taken to constitute the strength of a state. First, Weber was a Fleet Professor, convinced that imperial possessions were necessary for the well-being of the state. Secure sources of supplies mattered quite as much as markets, for geopolitical autonomy depended upon the ability to feed one’s population and to have the raw materials required to produce a full complement of weapons. There is, secondly, a less well-known side to Weber’s politics, neatly summed up in the nickname used by his friends: ‘Polish Max’. This referred to his early research project on Polish labour on the East Elbian Junker estates. The attitude that Weber took to such labour – that it would weaken the fabric of the nation – was entirely typical of the time. The leading edge of power seemed to reside in monolingual nation-states, not least as multinationalism was considered likely to undermine military efficiency. Somewhat in the spirit of Gellner’s own desire to distinguish different moods in the history of European nationalism, one can say that this protean force is best seen in Freudian terms as labile, prone to be coloured by its surroundings. In the late nineteenth century nationalism was closely linked to imperialism: a strong state needed – or, rather, in order to be strong its leaders felt that it needed– both a nationally homogeneous people and imperial possessions if it was to survive in a hostile world. It is crucial to highlight here the active role of some of the Megalomanias of the time. Politically conscious movements tend to arise when states act on civil society, whether in terms of taxation, repression, exclusion or conscription. This most certainly applies to nationalism. The earliest demands against many imperial systems were for the simple recognition of historic rights. Exit from the empire became a fully attractive option only when people felt so voiceless that loyalty was destroyed.78 Secessionist impulses very often resulted from the drive of great powers to homogenize their territories. Differently put, some great powers sought to become nations – a possibility for the Tsarist Empire if the Ukrainians remained ‘little Russians’ but a permanent impossibility for the Hapsburgs given the absence of a Staatsvolk of sufficient size.79 The analytical point here is the one noted in the previous chapter. Social movements gain their character not just from socio-economic circumstances, but also from the nature of the political environment in which they have to operate.
It might seem as if these historical considerations fit within Gellner’s theory. Had he not stressed the unsettling effects of the introduction by the leading power of a single state language?80 Furthermore, he offered a defence against the politically centred view expressed in the paragraph above:
Oppression is not some kind of independent and additional factor: cultural differentiation, inoffensive under the old intimate social order, is automatically experienced as oppression in the age of anonymity, mobility, and pervasive bureaucratization with a standardized idiom.81
But the phenomenology involved is subtly different, rendering politics autonomous in a way that does not really fit Gellner’s theory.82 The repression involved was not any old repression, not a mere concern to keep order, nor a desire to establish more modern bureaucratic rule. Rather, these great powers sought to become nation-states themselves – a desire which meant not just establishing a state language but banning the languages of other ethnicities. Their leaders felt that forging a national identity was necessary: revolutionary France had shown that national loyalty could generate enormous power, and as Clausewitz, the great Prussian reformer and theorist, stressed, this changed the terms of state competition thereafter.83 It was this sort of repression that ruled out the possibility of minority-group loyalty, making exit the only viable strategy. But two further implications need to be stressed.
First, Gellner’s approach to nationalism is one-sided in that it centres on secession. This is misguided: nationalism could and did involve large states quite as much – indeed one could argue that nationalism has had its greatest effect on the world as the result of French, German and American actions. Second, rulers can themselves be nationalists, seeking to establish a homogenous world. Kedourie was right in this matter, even if the actors really involved were rather different than he had imagined – military leaders such as Clausewitz rather than mere intellectuals. If one takes seriously the charge of illicit functionalism levelled against Gellner, that is, the charge that he teleologically suggests that the needs of industrialism will somehow inevitably be met, a way to save the theory is here – by stressing the agency of political leaders.84 The point I wish to make is that such agency has indeed marked the historical record at times. As such, it must form part of any general theory of nationalism. This is not to say that Gellner’s own genuinely causal account, socio-economic rather than political in character, should be rejected. The claim rather is that the theory needs to be complemented.
Gellner was offered this recuperation of his theory and chose not to accept it, insisting that his own causal account was perfectly adequate.85 One reason for his insistence is probably that his theory derives from a consideration of Austro-Hungary. In his last years in Prague he liked to refer, surely correctly, to the empire as less a prison-house than a kindergarten of nations. The fact that Vienna could never rule over anything like a German majority, however defined, meant, as noted, that it was virtually necessary to accommodate linguistic variety. The state did not seek to destroy other languages, though at times it promoted the use of German – but promoted it, most of the time, for reasons of bureaucratic efficiency rather than ethnic mobilization. It was permissible to teach Czech in primary schools from the eighteenth century, and this was extended in the nineteenth century to secondary schools, albeit in a complex and halting process of extension, withdrawal, and further extension. In 1882, the Czechs gained their own university, and extended their cultural activity in every sphere. One measure of Vienna’s attitude was the Crown Prince’s attendance at the first performance at the Národní Divadlo, surely the greatest symbol of the Czech national revival. Further, the Czechs made steady progress in the newly industrializing towns, most importantly Prague, which they came to dominate culturally by the turn of the century.86 Equally, the Bohemian lands became ever more prosperous, providing something like half of Cisleithania’s industrial output in the early years of the century. Very complex schemes were introduced to allow for greater linguistic equality, especially at a local level. These were often resisted, sometimes by rioting, but nonetheless slowly inched forward. Finally, it is worth noting that in the years before 1914 the Czechs themselves were gaining a significant number of positions in the central bureaucracy.
This largely addresses only one side of the matter, that is, from Vienna’s perspective. When one turns to the attitude of the Czechs themselves, the notion that nationalism must involve the campaign for an independent state makes still less sense. Czechs were aware that independence, however conceived, would be dangerous, given the possibility of intervention from either Berlin or St Petersburg. Had Austria not been there, it would have been necessary to invent her! Almost as important for many Czech intellectuals was the realization that some sort of accommodation with the increasingly politically conscious German community was required, especially in light of the geopolitical alliance between Vienna and Berlin. Bluntly put, there was almost no Czech voice at the end of the nineteenth century calling for independence. What Czech leaders sought was a more liberal empire, perhaps a constitutional monarchy, in which their voice could be heard, guaranteeing the protection and flourishing of the identity that they were trying to create. It is particularly revealing in this matter that the very slight beginnings of Masaryk’s pro-independence stance came only in the years immediately before 1914, when he felt that the Czechs were gaining strength and solidarity and that Vienna was becoming more intransigent.87 Masaryk finally opted for independence only during the war, at a moment when Vienna introduced centralist and Germanizing schemes designed to diminish gains that had already been won by the Czechs. The absolutely vital point here concerns Gellner’s definition of nationalism. It is erroneous: not every nation seeks its own state. Nationalism is better defined in the simplest terms as the desire for the national group to prosper – a condition that can be achieved inside a larger framework, especially since going it alone often exposes the group to great danger.88
This counterfactual debate, of whether Austro-Hungary was doomed as the result of its nationalities problems, has no resolution. The most balanced discussion is that of Danish scholar Peter Bugge. That the Czechs did not seek independence at least suggests that the empire might have survived. Hence Bugge’s account of its failure differs from that offered by Gellner in his parable of Megalomania and the Ruritanians, in that it is based on a contrast between horizontal and vertical forms of political organization – that is, roughly speaking, between interest-based politics across national groups and nationally delineated political demands. There were signs of horizontal organization in the Bohemian lands by the end of the nineteenth century: bourgeois interests usually took this form, and significant moves in this direction could be detected amongst both industrial and agrarian workers.89 Factors limiting this horizontal organization often had little to do with national conflict – the desire of the great landowners to divide and rule played a role, for example, in preventing the emergence of a class-based opposition that would have threatened their position. In the end, however, the fundamental factor preventing the consolidation of horizontal political organization was the character of the state.
[N]ationalism was a residual political phenomenon. The lower social strata’s access to political decision-making always lagged behind the national communities’ willingness to embrace them, and since the state – the parliament and the government – denied them the possibility of asserting their social interests and maybe even suppressed their (trans-national) attempts to organize, they had only the national to turn to. National radicalism was also stimulated by the political parties’ lack of genuine influence on the policies of the executive. The court, the nobility, and the top bureaucracy had an interest in a weak or paralyzed Reichsrat, and Austrian parliamentary politics was caught in a vicious circle: the less political influence, the greater the incitement to prove one’s importance to the voters with spectacular manifestations of national zeal; and the more the Reichsrat was exposed to obstructions and fights, the harder it was to argue for the virtues of a democratic approach.90
The state censuses, demanding selection of a single narrowly defined identity, helped to further politicize matters. So too did the constant back and forth between concession and repression, that is, the inability of the state to make up its mind regarding its treatment of minorities. There is surely an explanation for this. What mattered most to the state was its position in the international arena. A period of quietism, free from geopolitical involvement, would certainly have helped to diminish levels of internal conflict, perhaps by allowing the state to operate in a less unitary manner. But the empire sought power and glory, as its sustained desire to acquire new possessions so obviously demonstrated. A final point can be added. Once national movements gain political consciousness a Pandora’s box is opened. Differently put, a reform that might work in one set of circumstances may fail in another. Timing matters. The exceptionally sophisticated cantonization-type principles enshrined in Moravia’s pre-First World War compromise did not look set to establish ethnic peace. Very much to the contrary, outright political conflict was replaced with legal arguments about which community children ought to belong to officially, thereby determining which language they would be taught.91 A comparison with Switzerland suggests itself at this point. Cantons within Switzerland did indeed become cages, albeit cages maintained more by social pressure than by legal edict. But the deep tradition in Switzerland of popular politics and eventually democracy provided a safety valve – the emergence of the same horizontal interest groups that were stymied in the Bohemian case.92
These comments aim to correct Gellner by stressing the importance of politics, of the ways in which liberal politics might contain secession. But several additional points – relevant beyond this particular case – should be made. First, Gellner’s account of the relations between Ruritania and Megalomania steps back to some extent from its original brilliant insight, namely that nations are claims as much as they are realities, and that social and linguistic engineering was required to turn the Czech from a low into a high culture. To be precise, the parable of Megalomania and the Ruritanians gives the impression that the Czechs were a solid ‘Ruritanian’ nation unable to advance only because its life chances were limited by a bureaucracy bound to operate in German. But Czechs were a less firmly established community than this suggests. Rather, Czech language activists were often frustrated by the refusal of their would-be ‘pure’ Czech target group to abandon their multiple identities, which were based on complex linguistic abilities.93 Secondly, the sociology in Gellner’s account concentrates on the links between intellectuals and the newly urbanized working class, seeing the latter as the troops set to realize the vision of the former. Matters were more complex. To begin with, Gellner slightly underplays the sheer ideological élan of intellectuals, less driven to sympathize with poor workers than to assiduously copy best practice from elsewhere. More importantly, his sociology of support for nationalism is distinctly amiss. Workers were not really discriminated against linguistically, not least since early industrial work was not especially abstract – it required the use of but few words in a new language, all of them easily learnt. This is not to deny that workers became caged nationally, by the end of the century rejecting the courting of Viennese social democrats, nor is it to dispute Gellner’s awareness that industrialization dislocates and uproots, with the cult of the nation presenting an obvious new source of meaning – and humiliation certainly a factor in the general equation.94 Still, the shock troops of the national movement tended to be the newly educated, that is, those individuals whose life chances would immediately be affected should the language of administration, in Bohemia and perhaps even in the bureaucracy’s inner core, cease to be conducted solely in German.95 Finally, it is important to remember that political compromise in Bohemia was always difficult and eventually impossible because of the behaviour of the German community. At best, the Germans were asked to give up their position of dominance, at worst to submerge themselves inside a Czech-speaking community. Formerly dominant minorities are often intransigent.96 Over time, this group defined itself in increasingly ethnic terms, as noted, and looked for support not just to Vienna but also to Berlin.97
Let us now ask whether constitutional design can allow for many nations to live peacefully under a single roof – and thereby approach the related question of whether national homogeneity is necessary to the smooth workings of a modern industrial society. This is not to suggest that the past should be forgotten. The facts that no European empire was able to decompress successfully, and that liberal political structures in much of Europe were consolidated only on the back of ethnic cleansing, demand that the prospects be considered with humility. Still, might liberalism one day be a solution to the national question, instead of the happy by-product of horror?
It is of course true – indeed it is nothing less than a tautology – that the survival of a society depends on its members sharing a set of expectations. We are indebted to Gellner for making us realize that high culture must be added to the Hobbesian minimum if a modern society is to prosper. Beyond this point, however, a vital distinction needs to be drawn. It is true that national homogeneity helps those countries which possess it. Small, nationally homogeneous states, for example, are amongst the most advanced in the world, exemplars not just of the ability to act flexibly in the world market, but also of consolidated social democracy and high levels of welfare. Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are clear examples here and perhaps Ireland as well.98 One could add recent cases which seem to support Gellner’s position. After the collapse of communism Czechoslovakia looked set for a stalemate, to some extent structurally determined by the large industries of the Slovaks. The Slovaks’ needs were very different from the decentralized and smaller-scale industries of the Czechs, the former needing state support, the latter more prepared to compete in international markets. Separation has allowed for two separate strategies, and both groups have benefited.99
But all this does not mean that countries with diverse populations should try to become nationally homogeneous, although they certainly need a cultural consensus that recognizes difference. There are two sets of reasons to avoid nationalizing homogenization. On the one hand, it may well cause disaster.100 To insist on the need for total national unity is to encourage pre-emptive ethnic cleansing.101 The same is true of calls for partition as a means to end ethnic conflict. The separation of Czechs and Slovaks was peaceable because the border between the two areas was historic and mutually recognized. In contrast, partitions make a fresh cut into territory that had previously been unitary, with dreadful results.102 On the other hand, national demands can be and sometimes are satisfied by the protection of a minority group’s voice and cultural rights. In order to be a complete, fully participating Indian citizen one needs, for example, facility in at least three languages. Two of these languages, Hindi and English, are the official languages of the central state, the latter still present because so many elites resisted its extirpation at the time of independence, given that their fluency gave them a cultural advantage. A third language is that of one’s state, and a fourth is that of a minority within such a state. One less language is required if one is a Hindi speaker within a state which has Hindi as its official language. The point is a simple one: by and large, India functions on the basis of this linguistic diversity.103 And there are other factors making India a state-nation rather than a nation-state, including the unity established as part of a common struggle against the British – and the continuing presence of the Indian army and of a genuinely meritocratic and powerful state bureaucracy, together giving backbone to the state.104 Of course, this is but an example of the possibilities inherent in federal and consociational arrangements of varied sorts.105 It may yet prove to be the case that such arrangements can work even in Iraq, that most suffering of states.106 And one can add to optimism of this sort. The link between imperialism and nationalism has largely been broken, as Gellner stressed: national prosperity does seem to result from participation in leading markets rather than from the possession of territory.107 The intensity and stakes of geopolitical competition have accordingly been lowered somewhat, thereby diminishing the compulsion for states to be unitary. Finally, it may be that national homogeneity is better at mimicry than at innovation – it may even be possible that innovation will matter ever more within modern political economy.
Gellner’s prescriptive turn entertained hopes of this sort. He feared the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and came, as we shall see, to dislike what he termed the claustrophilia of the Czech Republic in which he died – despite the fact that in a sense the national homogeneity that country achieved fulfilled his theoretical conditions! But the hopes he entertained were limited and cautious, as they should have been.108 Recent empirical inquiry seems to show that the spread of education is linked to nationalist conflict, as Gellner had argued, in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Cyprus.109 And the link between nationalism and imperialism is not completely broken: Vladimir Putin, to give but one example, is not cognizant of the certain fact that retaining Chechnya will hinder rather than help the Russian economy. Further, there most certainly are areas in the world in which nations fight over the same territory, as was recently the case in the erstwhile Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, making murderous homogenizing drives a potential reality in a significant number of places. Of course, illiberal state policies towards national minorities exist in some abundance – notably in Tibet, Southern Sudan, Kashmir, Chechnya and Kurdistan. In these circumstances, secessionist nationalism is likely to flourish quite as powerfully as it did within European history. Then there is the sad fact that many federal and consociational schemes have failed, leaving open the question of whether the devolution of power appeases or abets secessionist nationalism. Finally, it may be that there are new structural elements within world politics that might reinforce the unpleasant side of nationalism.110 The neo-liberal economic policies encouraged by the United States do nothing to help state-building, and at worst help to weaken states that had begun to gain capacity. Ethnic mobilization is all too easy in such circumstances, and its suppression well beyond the power of states bereft of bureaucracies and merit-based armies. Secondly, the end of Leninist state socialism means that a major meaning-system which had been an alternative to nationalism is no longer available. Third, the gap left by socialism’s decline has been filled, especially in much of the Middle East, by Islamism. If nationalism has changed its character for the better in some places, as the link with imperialism has been broken, it may be that it will mutate once again into a lethal brew linked to religious fundamentalism. Hence we can conclude that Gellner was, so to speak, in the right place, utterly torn between fear and hope, never allowing the latter to replace hard-headed analysis.
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1Interview with Khazanov, 2 January 1999.
2Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983, p. 107.
3‘The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the War’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 December 2008.
4B. Barry, ‘Review of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism’, Ethics, vol. 95, 1984; J. Kellas, ‘Review of Nations and Nationalism’, International Affairs, vol. 60, 1984; A. D. Smith, ‘Book review: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism’, Millennium, vol. 13, 1983; B. Crick, ‘The Gad-fly and the Eagle’, New Statesman, 16 September 1983; W. Johnson, ‘State Power’, New Society, 25 August 1983; J. Breuilly, ‘Reflections on Nationalism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 15, 1985 and J. Dunn, ‘For the Good of the Country’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 21 October 1983. It is very noticeable, in contrast, that the book’s publication in the United States passed almost without comment.
5We shall see that Nations and Nationalism found a way to incorporate key elements of the earlier treatment of nationalism, heavily based on the experience of decolonization, within the more general theory.
6J. Breuilly, ‘Introduction’ to Nations and Nationalism, 2nd Edition, Oxford, 2007, pp. xix–xx. Breuilly argues convincingly that Gellner had been something of a voice in the wilderness in regard to nationalism in the years after the publication of Thought and Change. He believes that the field was dominated by Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism – a book which loathed nationalism, making much of its anti-rational character. (Breuilly is a little parochial here: it was Karl Deutsch rather than Kedourie who dominated the field in the United States.) It would be nice, but probably mistaken, to think that it was the rationality of Gellner’s structural account of nationalism that led to its sudden prominence.
7Gellner replied to papers criticizing his view of nationalism by Perry Anderson, Kenneth Minogue, Michael Mann, Anthony Smith, Brendan O’Leary and Nicholas Stargardt in ‘Reply to Critics’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1996. O’Leary revised his paper in light of these criticisms, to the new version forming part of J. A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge, 1998. The papers mentioned, together with those in The State of the Nation and Breuilly’s ‘Introduction’, present the main criticisms directed at Gellner’s theory. But these papers are only the tip of a large iceberg of critical commentary.
8‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 624–5. He is replying in this instance to P. Anderson, ‘Science, Politics, Enchantment’, in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. The same point is made in Dunn, ‘For the Good of the Country’.
9Ibid., pp. 627–8.
10Nations and Nationalism, chapter 1.
11Ibid., pp. 7, 53–5 .
12Breuilly’s excellent ‘Introduction’ cites papers written in the years between the appearance of Thought and Change and Nations and Nationalism, but unaccountably misses the 1973 paper ‘Scale and Nation’, in Contemporary Thought and Politics, London, 1974. This important paper spells out more thoroughly than had Thought and Change the precise character of work in industrial societies. A further point can be made about the second edition in which Breuilly’s introduction appears. The earliest printing of the book’s first edition was fronted by three quotations, one of them – ‘Our politics however was a rather less daring form of culture’ – was written by J. Sládaček, and then circulated in Prague in samizdat form before later publication in Index. In printings of the book in the 1990s Gellner took care to identify Sládaček as Petr Pithart, ‘subsequently prime minister of the Czech lands’. This correction is missing from the second edition of the book.
13Nations and Nationalism, p. 28.
14Ibid., p. 36.
15Ibid., p. 46.
16Ibid., p. 55.
17Illicit functionalist statements are even more apparent in Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge, 1998, chapters 6 and 7.
18The force of his argument led Benedict Anderson to chastise him (Imagined Communities, London, 1983, p. 15) for seeing in nationalist statements falsity rather than the act of creation. One imagines that Gellner’s ‘ferocity’ in this matter derives in part from his Jewish background, given that so much nationalist ideology included so many false claims about Jews.
19B. O’Leary, ‘Ernest Gellner’s Diagnoses of Nationalism: A Critical Overview, or, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Ernest Gellner’s Philosophy of Nationalism’, in Hall, The State of the Nation, pp. 49–51, argued against Gellner on this point outlining mechanisms allowing for prediction – or retrodiction. We will see that Gellner felt that O’Leary had a tendency to take national feeling for granted. (In fact, O’Leary recognizes that tribal societies are not national, claiming rather that once national sentiment is created it is unlikely to disappear). O’Leary is a very distinguished descendant of Gellner, but on the latter point another such, David Laitin, stands closer – for he makes much of the mutability of national feeling (Nations, States and Violence, New York, 2008). Both political scientists depart from Gellner’s habitual insistence on the inevitability of the one-to-one correspondence between nation and state.
20Nations and Nationalism, p. 42.
21Language and Solitude, p. 23, notes the lack of a proper explanation, but suggests that late entrants to the dominant group are likely to be disadvantaged.
22Ibid., pp. 61–2.
23Ibid., p. 69.
24O’Leary, ‘Ernest Gellner’s Diagnoses of Nationalism’, p. 50.
25Nations and Nationalism, p. 83.
26Ibid., p. 85. Gellner is here drawing on the work of Ioan Lewis. Gellner offered initial comments about the relationship between Islam and nationalism at this point; these are considered in the next section of this chapter.
27Ibid., p. 71. The language here is slightly strange, at least when considering the Irish case, for it dismisses entirely the legitimate grievances that were involved.
28Ibid., p. 69. Gellner went on to contrast this situation with that of Ruritanians, who might benefit from a federalism giving them regional autonomy in combination with the ability to move unhindered within the larger state. He suggested that different groups might accept less than total independence voluntarily, and cited Quebec, somewhat against the spirit of the comments made about that nation in Thought and Change, as an example. In contrast, others – notably the Ibos in Nigeria – had been deprived of the federal option by force.
29Brendan O’Leary suggests this, stating that Gellner sees race as more entropy-resistant than culture or language – thereby rightly avoiding racism while again insisting, as in his early anthropology, that a cultural story might have a foundation in physical reality.
30The distinction between a group caging its own members and a majority refusing to allow a minority to assimilate is made particularly fruitfully by D. Laitin, ‘Nationalism and Language: A Post-Soviet Perspective’, in Hall, The State of the Nation. Laitin suggests that theorizing these factors can usefully add to Gellner’s more economistic account. Gellner’s position is not really, as argued, economistic, and he was well aware of Laitin’s factors, even if he did not formally place them at the centre of his theory.
31Ibid., p. 94, and chapter 7 passim.
32J. Plamenatz, ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in E. Kamenka, (ed.), Nationalism, The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, London, 1973 – deemed by Gellner to be ‘the Sad Reflections of a Montenegrin in Oxford’ (Nations and Nationalism, p. 99).
33Ibid., p. 104.
34Ibid., p. 118.
35Ibid., p. 119.
36It also replies to criticisms made by Kedourie of Thought and Change; these are considered below.
37K. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, New York, 1966, discussed by Gellner in Nations and Nationalism, pp. 126–7.
38Nations and Nationalism, pp. 129–30. His arguments against the first of these positions were repeated on several occasions, not least in ‘The Sacred and the National’, in Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994 – a striking discussion of C. C. O’Brien, Godland: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge (MA), 1988.
39Ibid., p. 129.
40Ibid. His comments on the relationship between Marxism and nationalism are most forcefully stated when addressing the work of Tom Nairn and Miroslav Hroch. Gellner greatly admired the intellectual honesty of Tom Nairn, reviewing favourably his The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, London, 1977, in ‘Nationalism, or the New Confessions of a Justified Edinburgh Sinner’, in Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory, Cambridge, 1979 – whilst stressing that the arguments marshalled by Nairn did not sit comfortably with the New Left Review stable to which he was attached. Nairn’s views about nationalism were deeply indebted to Gellner’s chapter in Thought and Change. He would occasionally tease Gellner about the House of Windsor, earning the reply that the situation was really not that bad and could be lived with. Gellner certainly had a strong attachment to Scotland. He did not often comment on the nationalist fringes of Great Britain, although he did condemn the unnecessary killing in Northern Ireland – refusing at the same time to condemn terrorists in some places, notably Palestine (‘Ruthless Liberalism’, Fortnight, April 1995, p. 28). Nairn wrote an interesting piece – ‘The Curse of Rurality: Limits of Modernization Theory’, in Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation – shortly after Gellner died. In it he repeated the charge that Gellner was soft on ‘Windsordom’, treating it as equivalent to Austro-Hungary, and suggested that the transition to modernity was proving to be far less smooth than Gellner had imagined. In contrast, relations with Hroch seem to have been slightly strained. Gellner admired Hroch’s detailed empirical study of small national movements, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, Cambridge, 1985 – first published in German in 1968. But shortly before his death, and only once communism had fallen, he made clear his distance from its explanatory argument – in ‘The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, London, 1996 (his essay was first published in Russian in 1992, and then in Italian in 1993). If the main argument against Hroch was that class and nation needed each other to change historical patterns, Gellner added to this a careful dissection of the Marxist metaphysics that Hroch had employed (or perhaps been forced to employ) in his book. Hroch contested Gellner’s arguments after the latter’s death, in ‘Real and Constructed: The Nature of the Nation’, in Hall, The State of the Nation.
41A near complete bibliography of Gellner’s writings on nationalism is available in Hall, The State of the Nation, pp. 307–10.
42Gellner is here close to E. H. Carr’s Nationalism and After, London, 1945. In a lecture at the end of his life (‘Nationalism and the International Order’, in Encounters with Nationalism), he noted that he had read Carr’s book early in his career.
43Nationalism, London, 1997, p. 39.
44Ibid., p. 48.
45Ibid.
46T. A. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–39, Ithaca, 2001; Nationalism, pp. 56–8.
47Nationalism, pp. 57–8.
48Gellner suggested that Confucianism lacked equivalent power in modern circumstances, and ascribed this to the nature of its doctrine – ‘a little too brazenly deferential and inegalitarian for modern taste’ (Nations and Nationalism, p. 80).
49Ibid., p. 81. He cited as examples of this flexibility the conservative regimes of Saudi Arabia and Northern Nigeria, and socially radical ones such as Libya, South Yemen and Algeria.
50Nationalism, p. 83.
51O’Leary, ‘Ernest Gellner’s Diagnoses of Nationalism’, p. 75.
52Ibid., p. 42.
53Ibid., p. 70.
54Ibid., p. 73.
55Ibid.
56A. D. Smith, ‘Addendum to Gellner’s Theory’, in Theories of Nationalism, London, 1983, pp. 265–7.
57A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford, 1988. Cf. A. D. Smith, ‘State-Making and Nation-Building’, in J. A. Hall. (ed.), States in History, Oxford, 1986.
58The exchange was reprinted in Nations and Nationalism, vol. 10, 1996.
59Nationalism, p. 101.
60Ibid., chapter 15.
61Ibid., pp. 93, 95.
62Nations and Nationalism, p. 39. But he also pointed out, against Kedourie, that the educationally privileged of the diaspora could also be driven towards nationalism, essentially to escape the activities of, so to speak, native nationalist movements.
63Ibid., pp. 108–9.
64Ibid., pp. 128–9, referring to Kedourie’s long introduction to his edited volume Nationalism in Asia and Africa, London, 1970.
65Steven Lukes attended many of Gellner’s lectures over the years, and recalled a complete change in tone in a lecture given in Vienna which addressed the potential that nationalist violence would be unleashed by the collapse of communism (Lukes interview with B. O’Leary, 27 February 2001).
66‘Nationalism in Eastern Europe’, New Left Review, no. 189, 1991, p. 134.
67Ibid., p. 133.
68Ibid., p. 134.
69‘The Political Thought of Bronislaw Malinowski’, Current Anthropology, vol. 28, 1987, reprinted as ‘A Non-nationalist Pole’ in Encounters with Nationalism.
70‘A Non-nationalist Pole’, p. 76.
71Ibid., p. 78.
72Ibid., p. 77.
73Ibid., p. 79.
74Nations and Nationalism, p. 139.
75M. Mazower, The Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, 1999.
76This is also the central claim of O’Leary, ‘On the Nature of Nationalism’.
77M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005.
78These concepts are of course those of A. O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge (MA), 1978.
79D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, London, 2000.
80In an interesting response (‘Reply to Critics’, p. 636. Cf. Nationalism, p. 39) to an article by Michael Mann (‘The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie, [eds], Transition to Modernity, Cambridge, 1992), Gellner made it clear that state modernization in general, rather than industrialization per se, was responsible for the onset of nationalism. To be fair, Gellner had never treated industrialization as a synonym for the mode of production, rather as a synonym for modernity.
81‘Reply to Critics’, p. 637 – responding here to O’Leary, ‘On the Nature of Nationalism’.
82One justification for the claim made at the start of this chapter that the key book contains all sorts of comments about nationalism, can be found at this point. Gellner entertains this political oppression theory in Nations and Nationalism (p. 57), but rapidly qualifies it by saying that ethnic markers are more often emphasized by romantic members of the middle and upper classes than by ‘the lower orders’.
83Gellner noted (‘Reply to Critics’, p. 626) that he had not claimed that nationalism was best seen in Listian terms as an ideology designed to force industrialization, stressing instead the causal argument present in the parable of Megalomania and Ruritania. (He had in mind here R. Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, Oxford, 1988, critically discussed in ‘Nationalism and Marxism’, in Encounters with Nationalism.) The claim here is that large states were active, seeking to become nation-states themselves, in order to increase their military and economic power.
84O’Leary suggested saving the theory this way, using Jon Elster’s notion of ‘filter explanations’, in ‘On the Nature of Nationalism’.
85‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 627–8.
86G. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, Princeton, 1981. A similar story is told of Budweis/Budĕjovice by J. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948, Princeton, 2002.
87Bugge, Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception, and Politics, 1780–1914, Doctoral Dissertation, Aarhus University, 1994 (revised edition forthcoming from Harvard University Press), chapter 10.
88An important general point can be made here by noting a second disagreement with Brendan O’Leary. Johnson (‘State Power’) had noted in his admiring review that it was hard to imagine how one could refute Nations and Nationalism. Indeed the book is full of riches, with occasional comments pointing in directions that differ from the main thrust of the argument. O’Leary suggests that Gellner always felt that nationalists could be satisfied with home rule rather than secession, arguing further that self-government matters more than prosperity – not least as its absence helps occasion nationalist demands. I have no trouble with either claim insofar as they refer to empirical reality. But I still believe that Nations and Nationalism is essentially about the end of multinational entities, and less due to the desire for self-government than O’Leary suggests. Only this reading makes sense of the fact that the prescriptive turn of Gellner’s later years sees him arguing against his earlier self.
89An obvious and important related consideration should be borne in mind. The Bohemian economy was booming in the two decades before the First World War. This brute fact provided the background to the behaviour of bourgeois and socialist forces. There was very little sign of bourgeois forces in Bohemia calling for anything like secession. More striking still were arguments made by the socialists to the effect that the imperial territory should be preserved so that modern economies of scale could be protected for the future.
90Bugge, Czech Nation-Building, p. 316.
91T. Zahra, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945’, Central European History, vol. 37, 2005.
92J. Steinberg, Why Switzerland?, Cambridge, 1996.
93P. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambridge (MA), 2006. Criticism can be made of this view (and of the related positions of Bugge’s Czech Nation-Building and King’s Budweisers into Czechs and Germans) that there were nationalist actors without widespread nationalist sentiment. These scholars pay great attention to culturally mixed areas, in which language repertoires were complex. Gellner can be defended, at least in part, on the grounds that such mixed areas were by no means the norm. Thus there was a considerable ontic base for Czech nationalism, as Bugge admitted in conversation in Aarhus in November 2007.
94P. Bugge, Czech Nation-Building, pp. 317–18.
95These social groups have a prominent role in E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, 1990, p. 117. The book’s arguments are otherwise generally close and indebted to those of Gellner.
96The last conference that Gellner organized – and spoke at on the day of his death – dealt with groups of this sort.
97P. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914, Ann Arbor, 1996.
98J. L. Campbell and J. A. Hall, ‘Defending the Gellnerian premise: Denmark in Historical and Comparative Context’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 16, 2010.
99Of course, qualifications to even these generalizations are necessary. Nationally homogeneous states can be divided by class or ideology, even when small – as was true for many years of the Republic of Ireland, and as is still true of Serbia today.
100Laitin, Nations, States and Violence, chapter 5.
101D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Population in the Near Abroad, Ithaca, 1998, chapter 12.
102B. O’Leary, ‘Analyzing Partition: Definition, Classification and Explanation’, Political Geography, vol. 8, 2007.
103D. Laitin, Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa, Cambridge, 1992.
104A. Stepan, ‘Comparative Theory and Political Practice: Do We Need a “State-Nation” Model as Well as a “Nation-State” Model’, Government and Opposition, vol. 43, 2008. However, in conversation Gellner was wont to insist on a reservation: India had not yet made a complete transition to modern industrial society, making it possible that ethnic mobilization might yet adversely affect its cohesion.
105For recent reviews of current thinking on these mechanisms see B. O’Leary, ‘Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Arguments’, and J. McGarry and B. O’Leary, ‘Federation as a Method of Ethnic Conflict Regulation’, in S. Noel (ed.), From Power Sharing to Democracy: Post-Conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies, Montreal and Kingston, 2005. These excellent papers add to politically prescriptive sociological analysis. At least some of the sociology concerned resembles Gellner’s, notably the insistence that these schemes look set to do best in conditions of affluence.
106This is the case argued with characteristic brilliance by B. O’Leary, Getting Out of Iraq with Integrity, Philadelphia, 2009.
107Nationalism, p. 48.
108The last chapter of Nationalism insisted (p. 102) that there is ‘no magic formula for calming ethnic conflict and replacing it with sweetness and light’. He cautiously endorsed stability, affluence and continuity, but insisted that no principles of political cartography would ever be available which would allow for complete clarity – for a move, to adapt his metaphor, from Modigliani to Mondrian.
109I am drawing here on forthcoming work by Matthew Lange of McGill University in Montreal.
110Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, chapter 17.