Nationalism Lecture 3: Theories I

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NationalismLecture 3 Theories I

• Prof. Lars-Erik Cederman
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
• Center for Comparative and International Studies
  (CIS) Seilergraben 49, Room G.2
• lcederman_at_ethz.ch
• http//www.icr.ethz.ch/teaching/nationalism
• Assistant Kimberly Sims, CIS, Room E 3,
  k-sims_at_northwestern.edu

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Theories of nationalismMain Debates
Nationalist primordialism
Anti-nationalist ideology
Essentialism
Constructivism
Perennialism
Modernism
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Essentialism
Ethnic cores
See Cederman, Nationalism and Bounded
Integration
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Essentialism

• Essentialism claims that nations are based on
  ancient cultural raw material and that there is
  a one-to-one correspondence between ethnic cores
  and national identities.
• Variations
• Primordialism holds that the nation is natural
• Perennialism contends that the nation is
  pre-modern
• Methodological essentialism reifies the nation
  for analytical reasons

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Constructivism
Cultural Raw Material
Political Identities
Selection Mobilization
Ethnic boundaries
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Constructivism

• Constructivism argues that national identities
  are actively invented and modified by nationalist
  entrepreneurs selecting and mobilizing cultural
  traits for political purposes.
• Variations
• Instrumentalism
• Bounded-institutionalist theories

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Bounded Institutionalism
Cultural Raw Material
Political Identities
Institutional lock-in
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Gellners constructivism

• Targets
• Nationalist primordialism Sleeping Beauty
• Perennialism Dark Gods Theory
• Anti-nationalist ideologies (Marxism
  Liberalism) Wrong-Address Theory
• Gellners response
• Nations are not natural
• Nations are not old
• Nationalism is an integrated part of modernity
  and cannot be wished away

Ernest Gellner
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Gellners philosophy of history
Industrial Society
Pre-Agrarian Society
Agrarian Society
Agro-literate polity with horizontal elite on
top and insulated peasant communities at the
bottom
Vertically integrated large- scale society
unified by culture
Stateless society
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The logic of nationalism

• High culture replaces structure (Thought and
  Change, 1964)
• Key to high culture educational system
• Not the guillotine, but the doctorat détat is
  the main tool and symbol of state power. The
  monopoly of legitimate education is more
  important, more central than the monopoly of
  legitimate violence.

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Gellners typology
Center No education
Education
Pre-nationalist situation
Ethnic nationalism
Periphery No education Education
Classical liberal nationalism
Diaspora nationalism