Industrialisation created nations

The argument

Ernest Gellner emphasises the movement from a feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial one as the driving force behind the emergence of nations — which means that on his account nations are not ancient communities finally waking up, but the product of a particular economic transformation. The starting point is what pre-modern societies did not need. In them, elites sought to differentiate themselves culturally from those they ruled as a way to emphasise their social status; cultural distance was the point, so they had little interest in imposing any uniform culture on the various localities they ruled over. The ruled had no more use for uniformity than the rulers did. People in agricultural societies lived mainly in small, relatively isolated communities and learned necessary skills from immediate kin, so a shared idiom spanning a whole territory would have solved a problem nobody had. Industrial societies create new social circumstances that reverse this. Workers are far more mobile, more likely to meet strangers, and have to be adaptable. Navigating these new demands requires a single widespread language that encompasses all aspects of life: it eases communication between strangers who share no local context, and it provides a common idiom by which specialist information can be transmitted. A standardised literate culture stops being an ornament and becomes infrastructure — and because it can no longer be picked up from immediate kin, it has to be produced and maintained at scale. That process does not run evenly. While some groups assimilate into the dominant standardised culture, others resist cultural homogenisation and in doing so create their own standardised literate culture instead. The result is the conceptualisation of various separate nations, as the new cultural groups disadvantaged by the new system seek to secede and form their own political body. The nation, on this account, is a modern creation rather than an inheritance.

Context

Marxism predicted that nation-states would fade away as it triumphed. By the 1980s the opposite seemed to be happening and historians are trying to understand the enduring presence and appeal of nations by examining their origins.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Arguments which centre nations around a created linguistic and cultural homogeneity fail to provide for nations which have no politically dominant lingua franca, such as Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. There exists evidence of strong senses of national identities in a number of pre-industrial and pre-literate societies across history. Gellner's explanation also struggles to explain how in the 20th century strong nationalist movements also developed in countries such as India, Indonesia, and China . These countries had little industrial development and managed to cultivate substantial support from peasants with little exposure to industrial labour or mass education of the sort Gellner describes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] There are examples of nations with no dominant linguistic or cultural group. [Rejecting P4] Nationalist movements developed in countries which had neither industrialised nor provided mass education.