Nation and nationalism are variously defined and described. The imagination explanation treats the nation as an abstract concept that emerges in specific historical circumstances in which human agency and imagination play a crucial role. The evolutionary explanation regards the rise of nations as an inevitable process in the "movement of history" and a necessary and beneficial stage in the development of human society. The nation-building concept of Karl Deutsch points to the underlying sociodemographic processes that set in motion and fuel the growth of nations and activities of the nationalists. In the constructed arguments, historians re-emphasize the activities and beliefs of particular instruments, such as warfare (Charles Tilly), nationalist design (H. Seton-Watson), or political instrument (John Breuilly).
While the dominant theories of nationalism by J. J. Rousseau, J. G. Herder, J.G. Fichte, Guiseppe Mazzini, and others see nations as "products of the natural destinies of peoples," Marxist theorists situate the nation "at the point of intersection of politics, technology and social transformation." The liberal-rationalists, such as John Plamenatz, Hans Kohn, and Ernest Gellner, see the nationalist project as an enabling agency to realize the "universal urge for liberty and progress." In the final analysis, however, "nation and nationalism are cognitive artifacts we invent to mark off an intellectual universe," and nationalism is a type of political rationalization that is used for a variety of political purposes.
Benedict Anderson posits that nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism are "cultural artifacts of a particular kind" distilled toward the end of the eighteenth century from a complex crossing of discrete historical forces that then became "'modular/ capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations." First, the cultural conceptions that a particular script-language offered ontological truth, that the monarch had divine dispensation, and that temporality was to be perceived with cosmology and history as the same declined and set the search "for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together." And then "the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language" created the possibility of a new form of imagined community.
As lack of history is often equated with want of identity in social relations of individuals, families, or communities, modern nations too, as Eric Hobsbawm points out, claim to be the opposite of novel and constructed but "rooted in the remotest antiquity" and a "natural" community that requires no definition other than self-assertion. According to Hobsbawm, "fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse" such as national history make up the modern nation today. These invented traditions "seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past," and "use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group action."
Is a nation, then, just imagined or invented? Anthony Smith argues that Anderson, in his historical cases, tends to relegate "the presence or absence and nature of pre-existent ethnic ties—a lingering or vivid sense of community which the creators of the modern nation took as the basis of their work of 'reconstruction.'" He also contends that Hobsbawm's "invention" analysis reeks of instrumentalism that springs from the Marxian tradition of class manipulation of the "inert masses" by the ruling elites. Accord ing to Smith, the role of the intelligentsia is far more circumscribed than the imagination and invention approaches suggest. As he highlights the role of "the heritage of pre-modern ethnic ties," Hobsbawm clarifies that nations are "dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below." Accordingly, one of the several criteria by which people indicate belonging to a human collectivity is the membership of a historical nation. When knowing one's history becomes part of being a nation, we "find narration at the centre of nation" in the form of origin stories, myths of founding fathers, genealogies of heroes, and so forth.
So nation-state and national history go hand in hand in defining groups and legitimizing the groups' actions. The nation-state has come to symbolize what "we" are, and it "is the site of the most fundamental division between inside and outside, us and them, domestic and foreign." History is an inevitable prerequisite for the creation of this collective consciousness and its conscious capacity to act. While creating this collective consciousness, the self is always delineated in relation to the Other. The constitution of the self with esteem and the Other with exoticism invariably results in the disposition of the Other as a less-than-equal subject. Hence the sociopolitical organization is rife with representational practices that are oriented more often toward "sharpening boundaries" rather than toward "softening boundaries."
Contending that "every social community reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary" and that "it is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative," Etienne Balibar critiques the role of history and ideology in "the nation form." The "pre-history events," the "qualitatively distinct events spread out over time," which do not belong to a particular nation, are "repeated or integrated into new political structures" and made to play a role in the genesis of national formations. The historical production of the people presupposes the constitution of a specific ideological form that should be "a mass phenomenon and a phenomenon of individuation" and should effect an "interpellation of individuals as subjects." This ideological form facilitates communication between individuals and social groups "not by suppressing all differences, but by relativizing them and subordinating them to itself in such a way that it is the symbolic difference between 'ourselves' and 'foreigners' which wins out and which is lived as irreducible." Calling the community instituted by the nation-state a "fictive ethnicity" ("understood by analogy with the persona ficta of the juridical tradition in the sense of an institutional effect, a 'fabrication'"), Balibar argues that "it is fictive ethnicity which makes it possible for the expression of a pre-existing unity to be seen in the state, and continually to measure the state against its 'historic mission' in the service of the nation and, as a consequence, to idealize politics."
~~"Presenting" the Past: Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India -by- S.P. Udayakumar
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