Ron Peters's Reviews > Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality

Nations and Nationalism brings up interesting ideas. One is that that the nation is a relatively new concept. For example, in 1909 it was "not possible to know the precise number of Albanians who come to the United States, for these early immigrants did not often identify themselves as Albanians."

Another is that the idea of the nation is nebulous and changes over time. When he investigates defining factors such as language, ethnicity, race, religion, and economics, every factor he puts forward is followed by a string of “yes-buts” that negate their power to uniquely determine the meaning of nationality.

In terms of historical trends, starting with the disintegration of empires such as Austria, Turkey, and Russia, we first saw a concern with forming large “viable” states, with “viability” being economically defined.

Because of their size, these states were often necessarily heterogeneous, e.g., no separate nationhood for the Basques. On the ugly side, he notes that the idea of the nation also became popular at the time of the expansion of colonialism and theories of racial superiority.

Later he documents the emergence of a push for nationhood “even among peoples hitherto only of interest to folklorists,” e.g., Georgians, Lithuanians, Macedonians, and so on. Now the emphasis was more on factors such as ethnicity.

Hobsbawm argues that nationalism was a convenient emotional cement to pull diverse citizens together under a banner of patriotism. These nations were in turn building blocks of world capitalism and bourgeois society. The creation of national economies that interacted with other national economies fostered international trade.

Now instead of a fusion of peoples, we see a fissioning: Quebec, the former Yugoslavia, Biafra, Bangladesh, Catalonia, Scotland, Xinjiang. The downsides of this process have been many and dangerous, e.g., separatism, partition, repression, mass expulsion, refugees, and genocide.

This was also sped up by decolonization from the 1960s onward. It can also be argued that the rise of transnational corporations and globalization has made nation-states, especially large viable nation-states, increasingly superfluous so they “are no longer the force they were.”