Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: What is a Nation?
Position‹2 of 4›: Nations are modern creations
Argument‹2 of 3›: Enlightenment ideas created nations

The intellectual revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries created a new political ideology of nationalism centred on the creation of nation-states.

The argument

Nationalism as an ideology emerged in the early 19th century, created by the interaction of various influential though disparate strands of thought — which is to say that it has a datable origin, and that nations as we understand them are therefore modern creations rather than ancient communities finally recognised. Kedourie considered three thinkers central to the emergence of nationalism: Johann Herder, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Fichte. Herder's argument centred on humanity's division into distinct cultural groups. Kant's arguments of individual moral autonomy were combined by Herder into a conception of collective self-determination. The combination is the decisive step, because neither component yields nationalism on its own: cultural difference by itself is merely an observation about how peoples vary, and moral autonomy by itself is a claim about individuals. Joined together, they produce the proposition that a cultural group is the kind of entity that has a right to determine itself. This conception gained traction amongst the intelligentsia, who found that the notion of states being based on cohesive cultural communities provided a new basis for political legitimacy at a time when justifications based on religious and dynastic reasoning were losing influence. The timing matters to the argument: the idea did not have to displace a settled alternative so much as fill a space that was already opening, which is why it spread as quickly as it did. A second, more interested reason reinforced the first. The idea of legitimacy based on cultural cohesiveness also promoted the interests and power of the intelligentsia by making them guardians of national culture — the people qualified to say what the nation's culture consisted of, and therefore what its politics should express. Thus arose nationalism, which based political legitimacy on cultural cohesion supported and propagated by an influential class.

Context

Post-WWII, the victorious powers disavowed nationalism. They saw it as an ideology tainted by the fascist powers they had just defeated. This disavowal came with the assumption that nationalism would slowly wither away. However, nationalism was still clearly a powerful vital force in new post-colonial powers. In Western universities, various thinkers sought to explain this, the most influential being Elie Kedourie in the 1960s and 1970s. Seeing nationalism as an ideology, he sought to explain nationalism through the framework of a history of ideas.

Premises

[P1]Nationalism as an ideology emerged only in the early 19th century, arising from Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, Kant, and Fichte who combined cultural distinctiveness with collective self-determination. [P2] This new ideology supplied a basis for political legitimacy grounded in cultural cohesion, replacing declining religious and dynastic justifications. [P3] The intelligentsia propagated this idea because it positioned them as guardians of national culture, entrenching nationalism as the foundation of the modern state. [C] Therefore, nations are modern creations, products of Enlightenment-era ideas rather than ancient or natural communities.

Counter-arguments

This account makes little provision for areas which had a sense of nationhood before the 18th century such as Ireland, England and Vietnam. This does not explain why the intelligentsia was able to promote its preferred political project so effectively. It focuses on intellectual forces at the expense of examining material realities that underlay the social success of nationalism.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The characteristics of nations existed in many places before the period nationalism supposedly arose. [Rejecting P2] Focusing on the formation of these ideas does little to explain why they were so politically successful and took root.