Both nationalism and nation states were created by an awareness of geography

The argument

Nationalism requires something to be national about, and on this argument both the sentiment and the political unit it attaches to were produced by the same change: people started moving, and in moving discovered that other people were different. Generally, before the fifteenth century most people did not travel, or if they did they travelled only short distances within their own area. A life lived within a day's walk of where it began offers very few encounters with anyone unfamiliar, and the categories available to such a life are local ones — this village, that valley, this lord. There is no larger unit to belong to because there is nothing to distinguish it from. The increased availability of means of travel — horses, ships and carts — changed the scale at which ordinary experience operated. People were more easily able to visit other places, to see people with other cultures, and to begin making maps that divided these groups into what can be called proto-nation states. The map is the crucial step, because it converts an impression of difference into a boundary: once a line is drawn, the people on either side of it become two groups rather than a gradient of local variations. Before that, many people had never met anyone whose culture or ethnicity differed from their own, and so had no need for any feelings of nationalism, because there was no opposition and no different group against which to compare their own way of life. National feeling is comparative by nature, and comparison needs a second term. Only when people became increasingly aware of these others, and divided them into nation states, did nationalism also begin to develop as a concept. Nation states and nationalism therefore developed together, at the same time, and for the same underlying reason — technological improvements that made the wider world visible.

Context

The European Renaissance: a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth”, based on humanist classical ideas of education and travel, following the Middle Ages.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This argument is most applicable to the development of European nationalism and nation states, particularly England and France. Modern concepts of nationalism, for example in the USA, are demonstrably caused by the structures of modern nation states in opposition to others, whilst in other parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa, nationalism played a large role in the formations of societies and economies before even proto-nation states existed. This interpretation is too narrow to apply to all modern nation states and forms of nationalism.

Rejecting the premises

1. This ignores the fact that some different cultures lived in close proximity to each other, such as the Greek city states. 2. This development of nationalism and nation states only applies in Europe, and does not necessarily explain nationalism and nation states around the world.

Framing

Limited technology and literacy meant many people in the Middle Ages and before had little understanding of different cultures and places. When the Renaissance made travel and cultural exchange possible on a wider scale, people were forced to confront new ways of living and develop nations and nationalism in order to challenge them.