Volume 7, No. 3, March 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Introduction
The resurgence of nationalism and ethnonationalist conflict in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its associated Eastern European states in their transition from a form of socialism to a market-oriented direction led by bourgeois forces allied with world capitalism during the decade of the 1990s, has prompted a new round of discussion and debate on the origins and development of nationalism and the nation-state that has implications for contemporary nationalism and nationalist movements in the world today. This discussion and debate has been framed within the context of classical and contemporary social theory addressing the nature and role of the state and nation, as well as class and ethnicity, in an attempt to understand the relationship between these phenomena as part of an analysis of the development and transformation of society and social relations in the late 20th century. This paper provides a critical analysis of classical and contemporary mainstream and Marxist theories of the nation, nationalism and ethnic conflict. After an examination of select classical bourgeois statements on the nature of the nation and nationalism, I provide a critique of contemporary bourgeois and neo-Marxist formulations and adopt a class analysis approach informed by historical materialism to explain the class nature and dynamics of nationalism and ethnonational conflict.
Conventional social theories on the nature and sources of nationalism and ethnic conflict cover a time span encompassing classical to contemporary statements that provide a conservative perspective to the analysis of ethnonational phenomena that have taken centre-stage in the late 20th century. This section of the paper provides an overview of the statements of some of the most influential bourgeois theorists associated with classical and contemporary theories of nationalism and ethnic conflict that came to dominate the mainstream literature in the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries. While I provide here an outline of several strands of bourgeois theorising on the nation and nationalism, no attempt is made to undertake a comprehensive and exhaustive survey of all mainstream bourgeois theories of nationalism and ethnic conflict.
Classical Mainstream Statements
The central figures that have occupied a prominent place in the literature on classical bourgeois theories of the nation and nationalism have been Ernest Renan and Max Weber. There are, of course, other influential theorists who have made a lasting contribution to the development of mainstream, conventional theories of nationalism and national/ethnic identity, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herder, Johann Fichte and Giuseppi Mazzini, among others. However, Renan’s and Weber’s classical statements on these phenomena stand out as prime examples of bourgeois theories that have informed, in one way or another, all other subsequent mainstream formulations of the nation, nationalism and ethno-nationalist conflict in the 20th century.
In his classic statement “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”, originally delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, Ernest Renan provides the following definition of the nation: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Only two things, actually, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other is in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrances; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage which all hold in common…To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again, that is the essential condition for being a nation.”1 “A nation,” Renan continues, “is a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those that one is disposed to make again.”2 Thus, according to Renan’s view, “A great aggregation of men, with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates a moral conscience which is called a nation. When this moral conscience proves its strength by sacrifices that demand abdication of the individual for the benefit of the community, it is legitimate, and it has a right to exist.”3 This subjective, idealist view of the nation is consistent with Renan’s conclusion, where he states: “Through their varied, frequently opposing, abilities, nations serve the common cause of civilization; each holds one note in the concert of humanity, which, in the long run, is the highest ideal to which we can aspire.”4
Defining the nation in these terms, Renan highlights one aspect of the fundamental features of mainstream bourgeois theories of the nation and nationalism: a subjective, idealist conception of the nation that is largely a product of the mind, an abstraction that emerges from the collective imagination. Another equally important aspect of bourgeois theorising on this question is the overemphasis on ethnic and cultural phenomena to explain the origins and development of the nation and nationalism, historically and today. In this view, culture and ethnicity, divorced from class forces in society, take on a life of their own and form the basis of social relations and social movements and their ideologies, including nationalism.
Max Weber’s classic statement on this question fits into both of these ideological frames of thought. A subjective, idealist conception of the nation that incorporates an ethno-cultural definition of nationalism and national identity is how Weber developed his approach to this question in the classic context. In a key passage in one of his major works, Weber writes: “If the concept of ‘nation’ can in any way be defined unambiguously, it certainly cannot be stated in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation. In the sense of those using the term at a given time, the concept undoubtedly means, above all, that one may exact from certain groups of men a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups. Thus, the concept belongs in the sphere of values.”5 In this sense, “A nation is a community of sentiment,” writes Weber, “and one must be clearly aware of the fact that sentiments of solidarity, very heterogeneous in both their nature and their origin, are comprised within national sentiments.”6 Moreover: “The idea of the ‘nation’ is apt to include the notions of common descent and of an essential, though frequently indefinite, homogeneity. The nation has these notions in common with the sentiment of solidarity of ethnic communities, which is also nourished from various sources.7 Weber goes on to point out that the “sentiment of solidarity” that goes with the “idea of the nation” is well integrated into a cultural frame of reference facilitated by a collective “mission” that solidifies a community and gives it its sociocultural, as well as national, identity: “The earliest and most energetic manifestations of the idea [of the nation], in some form, even though it may have been veiled, have contained the legend of a providential ‘mission’. Those to whom the representatives of the idea zealously turned were expected to shoulder this mission. Another element of the early idea was the notion that this mission was facilitated solely through the very cultivation of the peculiarity of the group set off as a nation. Therewith, in so far as its self-justification is sought in the value of its content, this mission can consistently be thought of only as a specific ‘culture’ mission. The significance of the ‘nation’ is usually anchored in the superiority, or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preserved and developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of the group.”8
Weber’s conventional, idealist views on the nation and national identity in such cultural, value-centred terms, complements well the arguments of other classical mainstream theorists, such as Renan, who have provided the foundations for subsequent bourgeois theories of the nation and nationalism developed by their contemporaries. Among later bourgeois theorists who have followed this path, one may include Hans Kohn, Carlton Hayes and Louis Snyder.
In his book The Idea of Nationalism, Hans Kohn writes: “Nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness.”9 Kohn goes on to state: “Nationalism is an idea, an idée-force, which fills man’s brain and heart with new thoughts and new sentiments, and drives him to translate his consciousness into deeds of organized action.10 “Nationalism,” writes Kohn, “recognizes the nation-state as the ideal form of political organization.”11 Hence, in this sense, “Nationalism demands the nation-state; the creation of the nation-state strengthens nationalism.”12 Elsewhere, in Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, Kohn writes: “Nationalism is a state of mind, in which the supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due the nation-state.”13
The relationship between nationality and the nation-state is an aspect of the phenomenon of nationalism that Carlton Hayes also emphasised in his writings on nationalism. For Hayes, the term “nationalism” is used in the first instance “to denote an actual historical process, the process of establishing nationalities as political units, of building out of tribes and empires the modern institution of the national state.”14 On the other hand, nationalism, according to Hayes, can also be described as “a contemporary popular belief, the belief that one’s own nationality or national state has such intrinsic worth and excellence as to require one to be loyal to it above every other thing and particularly to bestow upon it what amounts to supreme religious worship.”15 Thus, in this latter sense, nationalism is described by Hayes as a phenomenon that has metaphysical properties. Viewing nationalism as a belief (as a religion), Hayes in his book Nationalism: A Religion goes on to characterise the phenomenon in broad moralistic terms – as a force for “good” or as a force for “evil”, i.e., “as a blessing or as a curse,” as he puts it.16
Louis Snyder, another mainstream theorist in the tradition of Kohn and Hayes, provides a similar view on the nature and meaning of modern nationalism.17 Attempting to define nationalism at the broadest and most general level, Snyder writes: “The term nationalism admits of no simple definition. It is a complex phenomenon, often vague and mysterious in character.”18 Speaking of “its most perplexing feature”, he says: nationalism “may differ in its forms” as it is “used in so many different senses” and “has many faces”, such that “the effort continues as scholars seek to unravel the mysteries of an elusive historical phenomenon.”19 Having mystified the phenomenon beyond any concrete social meaning, Snyder defines nationalism as a “state of mind” as Kohn had done, as “nationalism” for Snyder “is a condition of mind, feeling, or sentiment.”20 “Nationalism is a powerful emotion,” he writes, “a form of consciousness by which the individual proclaims his supreme loyalty to the nation.”21
This broad, psychological and metaphysical focus on the purported “mysterious” and “elusive” nature of nationalism by these earlier mainstream theorists has given way to a variety of more recent contemporary bourgeois theories that are more sophisticated in their reasoning through the adoption of a socio-cultural perspective that incorporates questions related to ethnicity and ethno-national issues. Although these later theorists have, as those before them, remained silent on class and the class nature of nationalism and ethnonational conflict, they have nonetheless provided divergent perspectives that require our attention at least briefly.
Contemporary Mainstream Views
Among the most prominent of contemporary mainstream bourgeois theorists of nationalism one could cite Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Walker Connor, Karl Deutsch, John Breuilly and Anthony D Smith.22 We shall focus here on the views of three of these theorists – Kedourie, Gellner, and Connor – as representing a sampling of dominant mainstream views on this question in recent years.
Elie Kedourie, one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent of more recent contemporary mainstream theorists of nationalism, provides a critique of various theories of the nation and nationalism that base their legitimacy on one or another aspect of social and historical existence. “In nationalist doctrine,” he writes, “language, race, culture, and sometimes even religion, constitute different aspects of the same primordial entity, the nation.”23 While “it is misplaced ingenuity,” Kedourie continues, “to try and classify nationalisms according to the particular aspect which they choose to emphasize,” the premises on which such theory is based make its claims all the more evident: “What is beyond doubt is that the doctrine divides humanity into separate and distinct nations, claims that such nations must constitute sovereign states, and asserts that the members of a nation reach freedom and fulfillment by cultivating the peculiar identity of their own nation and by sinking their own persons in the greater whole of the nation.”24 To Kedourie, such view that characterises the nation and the division of the world by nation-states as natural, i.e., as part of the natural order of things, is unfounded and is therefore a fallacy. Rejecting various materialist approaches to the problem, Kedourie opts for an idealist definition of the nation and nationalism based on Ernest Renan’s classic statement on the individual will. Referring to Renan’s view of the nation, Kedourie approvingly writes: “Having examined the different criteria which are used to distinguish nations, and having found them wanting, [Renan] concluded that the will of the individual must ultimately indicate whether a nation exists or not.”25 Kedourie goes on to argue that the individual, “in pursuit of self-determination, wills himself as the member of a nation.”26 In agreement with Renan’s own description of the nation as “a daily plebiscite”, Kedourie points out that “the metaphor is felicitous, if only because it indicates so well that nationalism is ultimately based on will.” Thus, Kedourie continues: “National self-determination is, in the final analysis, a determination of the will; and nationalism is, in the first place, a method of teaching the right determination of the will.”27
Such a subjectivist argument, divorced from the social basis that gives rise to the phenomenon of nationalism in the form of a collective national will, is a product of an idealist formulation and lacks a basis in material reality. Failure to identify the social and class forces that are the decisive agents of nationalist ideology and nationalist movements leads Kedourie to a blind alley and an intellectual eclecticism that contributes very little to our understanding of this important social phenomenon.
Ernest Gellner, another prominent mainstream bourgeois theorist of nationalism, provides a different set of answers to this question. For Gellner, the primary unifying factor that nationalism utilises to rally the masses behind the nationalist banner is culture. Culture, in Gellner’s view, plays a decisive role in defining national identity, and the particular use to which culture is put by the nationalist forces determines the impact of nationalism on society: “Nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.”28 In a fashion similar to that of Kedourie’s idealist, subjectivist argument, Gellner argues: “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”29 “Admittedly,” he concedes, “nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically.”30 But, Gellner points out: 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. It is not the case that the “age of nationalism” is a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of this, that, or the other nation. Rather, when general social conditions make for standardised, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minorities, a situation arises in which well-defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now seem to be the natural repositories of political legitimacy.31 Elsewhere, in his book, Encounters with Nationalism, Gellner writes: “Modern nationalism, which is a passionate identification with large, anonymous communities of shared culture and cultural imagery, creates its units out of pre-existing differences of various kinds.”32 And that, “It is this new importance of a shared culture,” Gellner asserts, “which makes men into nationalists.” “In the past,” he concludes, “social structure not culture held society together; but that has now changed. That is the secret of nationalism: the new role of culture in industrial and industrialized society.”33
Notwithstanding some basic philosophical differences, Gellner’s emphasis on culture as the source of nationalism and ethnonational identity (i.e., his emphasis on the primacy of superstructural phenomena), nevertheless places him in the same ideological camp as Kedourie. Thus, while Kedourie sees nationalism as an idea and speaks of the individual will and that Gellner bases his argument on cultural factors, both their theories are constructed in the superstructural sphere, i.e., in the realm of ideas, values, beliefs, tradition, culture, etc. – not in the sphere of fundamental social-structural conditions, let alone class and class relations.
Walker Connor is another contemporary mainstream bourgeois theorist who has had a major impact on dominant mainstream theories of the nation and nationalism. Viewing the nation in similarly psychological terms as associated with belief systems, Connor provides the following observation: “Defining and conceptualizing the nation is…difficult because the essence of a nation is intangible. This essence is a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all other people in a most vital way. The nature of that bond and its well-spring remain shadowy and elusive, and the consequent difficulty of defining the nation is usually acknowledged by those who attempt this task.”34 Connor goes on to emphasise that “when analyzing sociopolitical situations, what ultimately matters is not what is but what people believe is. And a subconscious belief in the group’s separate origin and evolution is an important ingredient of national psychology.”35 Thus, referring to “a mass psychological vibration predicated upon an intuitive sense of consanguinity”, Connor places national identity and nationalism in the sphere of beliefs and feelings and writes: “It is the intuitive conviction which can give to nations a psychological dimension.”36
Aside from the similarly idealist philosophical and theoretical orientations of these contemporary mainstream bourgeois theorists, the thread that runs through their ideologically-tainted conservative arguments is their open and undisguised anti-communism. It is, in essence, their uniform politically-charged ideological attack on Marxism that unites these bourgeois apologists to develop their respective anti-Marxist (bourgeois) theories to counter the claims of the Marxist classics. That this is the case with bourgeois theories of nationalism in general, and with the two of the more prominent contemporary bourgeois theorists like Kedourie and Gellner in particular, is made clear by their own pronouncements in no uncertain terms.
Elie Kedourie, for example, in the July 1984 dated “Afterword” to the fourth, expanded edition of his book Nationalism, published posthumously in 1993, writes: “Marxism has also purported to offer an explanation of nationalism which makes it into an epiphenomenon which appears at a particular stage of economic development, when the bourgeoisie and its capitalist mode of production are in the ascendant. Nationalism is an expression of bourgeois interests. Here too, what nationalist ideology asserts or denies becomes of no interest, since it is a product of false consciousness, which must fade away as capitalism inevitably succumbs to its crisis. The bourgeoisie will then be dispossessed and swept away by the victorious proletariat, and with it all the superstructure of the bourgeois state, bourgeois culture, bourgeois ideology, etc. This is a manifest absurdity.”37
Ernest Gellner goes a step further in attacking Marxism in a politically-motivated, ideological polemic designed to discredit an intellectual orientation of long standing. In Encounters with Nationalism, published in 1994, Gellner writes: “The Marxist mistakes in social metaphysics and in sociology converge on what of course is the single most crucial and disastrous error in the system. The supposition that the communist social order will require no political organization but will in some unexplained way be self-adjusting…The sad consequence is that societies living ‘under the banner of Marxism’ are simply deprived of any idiom in which even to discuss their political predicament…As for the political form of communist society, they cannot really discuss it at all.”38 Later in his book, Gellner continues: “It is indeed true that Marxism is formally the official doctrine and state religion over extensive parts of the globe. However, at present neither rulers nor subjects in these states have much faith in it, or take it very seriously. It is exceedingly hard to find Marxists in Marxist societies, though it is still possible to find some in non-Marxist ones.”39 Finally, Gellner cannot resist taking pleasure in the recent transformations that are taking place in the former Soviet Union and East European socialist states when he writes with a contemptuous sarcasm that makes a mockery of the pursuit of scientific knowledge and scholarship: “Marxism,” he says, “had taught that civil society was a kind of moral fraud, but 70 years of secular messianism has engendered a passionate thirst for just this fraud. Marxism had seen the liberal state as a kind of executive committee of the bourgeoisie; now a committee is striving, not too convincingly, to create a bourgeoisie which it could serve, and hopes that it is not too blatant a lumpenbourgeoisie. We can only watch these efforts with trepidation, and wish them well. The best one can say is that a dogmatic pessimism is unjustified.”40
There are, of course, other more sophisticated and sociologically-oriented bourgeois theorists who focus on ethnic groups and ethnonationalist movements as central to the nationalist project placed in historical context, such as that developed by Anthony D Smith, Charles Tilly and Anthony Giddens. Still, in one form or another, these ‘liberal’ attempts to explain the origin, nature and development of nations and nationalism, as well as ethnicity and ethno-national conflict, are predicated on a variety of anti-Marxist contemporary mainstream perspectives that have become quite fashionable in bourgeois circles in recent years, as in the case of Giddens’s neo-Weberian critique of Marxism in his book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, where he attacks Marxists, and Marxism in general, for failing to provide the “right” answers.41
Contrary to what Giddens asserts when he says, on page 1 of his book, “My intention is not to produce a critique of historical materialism written in hostile mien, declaring Marxism to be redundant or exhausted,” he goes on in the same breath a few sentences later to unleash an all out attack against Marxism in an attempt to accomplish precisely the opposite of what he claims: “There is much in Marx that is mistaken, ambiguous or inconsistent,” he writes, “and in many respects Marx’s writings exemplify features of nineteenth-century thought which are plainly defective…”42 “Let me try to put the facts of the matter as bluntly as possible,” Giddens continues. “If by ‘historical materialism’ we mean the conception that the history of human societies can be understood in terms of the progressive augmentation of the forces of production, then it is based on false premises, and the time has come finally to abandon it. If historical materialism means that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’, it is so patently erroneous that it is difficult to see why so many have felt obliged to take it seriously. If, finally, historical materialism means that Marx’s scheme of the evolution of societies (from tribal society, Ancient society, feudalism, to capitalism; and thence to socialism, together with the ‘stagnant’ offshoot of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ in the East) provides a defensible basis for analysing world history, then it is also to be rejected.”43 “First of all,” Giddens admits, “much of this book is an attack upon the idea of ‘mode of production’ as a useful analytical concept.”44 “Anyone who rejects Marx’s evolutionary scheme, and a good deal of the substantive content of his materialist conception of history besides – as I do – ” Giddens continues, “must pursue the implications right through.”45 Thus, “Marx’s more general pronouncements upon human history, especially in those most famous of all passages in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, have to be treated with great caution and, in some major respects, simply discarded.”46 Finally, “Marx’s comments on non-Capitalist societies,” Giddens writes, “are relatively scrappy and often unoriginal. Some of them, in my view, are just as erroneous as are certain of his more general statements. It is not their unsatisfactory character but rather the tenacity with which many Marxists have sought to cling to whatever gems they claim to find there which is astonishing.”47
Following his sweeping attack on Marx, Giddens offers the following proposal: “In diverging from Marx I want to propose the elements of an alternative interpretation of history.”48 He writes: “A fundamental component of my arguments is the supposition that the articulation of time-space relations in social systems has to be examined in conjunction with the generation of power. A preoccupation with power forms a leading thread of this book. I maintain that power was never satisfactorily theorized by Marx, and that this failure is at origin of some of the chief limitations of his scheme of historical analysis.”49
This is a claim that is totally unfounded, as power and power relations constitute the cornerstone of Marx’s analysis of society and social relations. As to Giddens’ critique of Marxist views on nationalism, he offers the same worn-out anti-communist fallacies: “Even the most orthodox of Marxists,” he writes, “are today prepared to concede that there is little to be found in Marx’s writings relevant to the interpretation of the rise of nationalism.”50 Elsewhere, in the second volume of his book, Giddens continues: “It is manifestly the case that Marx paid little attention to the nature and impact of nationalism, and the comments he does make are mostly neither instructive nor profound. Subsequent Marxists have been very much concerned with ‘the national question’, but it cannot be pretended that the literature thereby generated has done a great deal to illuminate the nature or origins of nationalism. None of the various Marxist interpretations which seek to treat nationalism as some kind of masked expression of the interests of the dominant class has much plausibility either.”51
In all the cases discussed above, including both earlier and more recent mainstream efforts, to search for alternative non-Marxist theories of nations, nationalism and ethno-national conflict, the underlying, driving-force of bourgeois theorising on these questions has been a rejection of Marxist theory in favour of its bourgeois counterparts which, in essence, reveals the anti-communist nature of bourgeois ‘scholarship’ that is presented as the only acceptable and viable alternative supposedly superseding Marxism.
In the next section of the paper, I sweep aside such diversionary, eclectic bourgeois attempts at sowing confusion on this important subject, and provide the outlines of a Marxist alternative that is firmly based on a class analysis of national phenomena that reveals the class nature of nationalism and ethnic conflict to expose the class forces involved in promoting and perpetuating class-driven national interests that have fostered, and continue to foster, ethnonational conflict in order to derail or postpone class struggle and social revolution.
Notes
(To be continued)