How did the rhetoric of nationalism shift during the second half of the nineteenth century?
Answers
No one is more categorical about the origin of nationalism than Elie Kedourie (1993, 1): ‘Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. […] These ideas have become firmly naturalized in the political rhetoric of the West which has been taken over for the use of the whole world.’ This encapsulates the conventional view of the origin and spread of nationalism: nationalism which supplies ‘a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states’ (Kedourie 1993, 1), the cornerstone of the modern political system, was born in Europe and it is now shared across the globe. Nationalism, in the conventional view, is intrinsically western. Consequently, nationalism found in the rest of the world is an adapted/acculturated version of the original at best, if not a mindless act of copying the western model.
This understanding of the origin of nationalism is widely shared among scholars of nationalism, which has, most likely, stemmed from the perceived affinity between nationalism and modernisation. Regardless of whether nationalism is a cause or product of modernisation, it is clear there is a consensus that nationalism is part and parcel of a wider phenomenon of becoming modern.[1] As seen above, for Kedourie, nationalism is a product of modernisation in the sphere of political ideas, which started off with the Enlightenment, a major catalyst of which was Immanuel Kant’s insistence on the centrality of self-determination (Kedourie 1993). For Ernest Gellner, whose contribution to the development of theories of nationalism is seen to be second to none (Hall 1998; Malešević & Haugaard 2007), nationalism is a societal response to the shift towards industrial society (Gellner 1983). Gellner’s theory of nationalism has been labelled ‘functionalist’ by Charles Taylor (1998) because of its focus on the relationship between modern societies as economies and the modern state, which indicates that Gellner’s theorisation took place within the broader context of theorising modernisation in the second half of the twentieth century. It is important to note at this stage that the theorisation of modernity and modernisation is seen as Euro- or western-centric in that these theories assume European/western experiences of social change constitute the global standard to which the rest of the world should converge.