Guest Contributor

Cyril Jayet, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Sorbonne University

Nationalism is commonly viewed as a very powerful ideology. One of the most well-known sociologists of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, even contented that nation-ness is the “most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” [1]. Nationalism also seems to hamper any effort to build a transnational power that would have a stronger legitimacy than the nation-states. For example, in the context of EU studies, national identities are considered as one of the strongest determinants of a negative attitude toward the EU. Economic and environmental crisis have stressed the need for international regulations, but those appear as very difficult to create in a world still dominated by nation-states. The Covid-19 crisis has raised a new unforeseen challenge to internationalization, with the nation-state reinstating their borders. This occurs even in the EU, the most politically integrated supranational entity.

Despite this importance of nationalism, when one attempts to understand what nations actually are, it seems to be a very complex puzzle. It is impossible to find a common accepted definition and the differences of definitions are not about minor details. They are often about the ontological status of nations, about how nations exist:  sometimes nations are only imagined communities; sometime they exist as clearly bounded groups sharing a common culture, a language, or common ancestries. This creates a strange puzzle: nations appear to be a very powerful force, but they are impossible to define or even to clearly identify.

I propose to shed light on this puzzle by making use of various authors from very different traditions, from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to more general sociological theory. I believe that better understanding this puzzle shall help us better understand how nations boost political legitimacy and mold political systems. This shall be of great importance in a world which is in need of stronger international regulations.

From objectivism to constructivism

I propose a typology of how classical sociologists of nationalism defined the concept of nation and dealt with their empirical reality. I distinguish four possibilities: objectivism, subjectivism, eliminativism, and constructivism. The first two assume that nations exist: objectivism does so by listing numerous criteria such as having a common language, a common culture, some shared ancestries, etc. This approach can be found, for example, in the work of Marcel Mauss or Anthony Smith.  Subjectivism only assumes a shared feeling of belonging among the members of a nation. The most well-known theory of nation framed in this way is Benedict Anderson’s description of nations as imagined communities. Those approaches are easily subjected to criticisms. There is a huge diversity of nations and it is impossible to find a list of necessary and sufficient criteria to describe nations as diverse as China, India, the United States, Switzerland, Brazil or Iceland. Some nations have a common language, other have many different ones and the same would be true for any criteria such as the feeling of belonging or cultural traits. The eliminativist approach provides a radical answer to this problem: it empties the concept of its problematic elements by defining nation as the population of a state. This type of definition can be found in the work of John Breuilly and more generally of researchers that focus on the history of the State. From this perspective, we have not really found the meaning of ‘nation’ – we have just assumed that there are no such things as nations, there are just populations living in states.

The last approach I call constructivism and it can be found in Roger Brubaker’s work. It proposes to turn to processes and the effects of ‘nation’ as a category of practice, rather than a category of analysis that would describe a certain kind of group. Constructivism contests the existence of the group and proposes to focus only on the processes that involved this categorization, rather than on the characteristics of the group. This approach leads us to focus on the political and structural consequences of this category rather than on the characteristics of ‘nations’ as groups.

This approach appears to be a good starting point as it does not require the fulfilment of an impossible task: finding some criteria that would be true for all groups that are considered as nation. It draws the attention on clearly observable processes: how the category of nation is used and what are its consequences. We shall argue that this specific solution about nation can be grounded in a more general philosophical stance about language and category inspired by Wittgenstein.

A detour by the philosophy of language and sociological theory

The problem we found when looking for the meaning of nation, the diversity of its meaning, can be considered as common to most concepts. To argue that there is only one meaning of nation that a careful analysis could bring to light leads to Platonism: the attempt to find the true meaning of a concept, as though this meaning were hidden in a realm of ideas. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy sets out to refute this approach. Instead of seeking the true meaning of a concept, he simply proposed to describe its various and different uses (1953). He argued that most of the time a word has many different uses which are only related to one another by a family resemblance. There is therefore not one common criterion that would be shared by all uses of the concept, but many resemblances. This simple but important idea seems to solve a large part of the problem. It supposes that it is pointless to try to find the real definition of ‘nation’ and that we should instead be interested in studying the diversity of uses of this concept.

Another fundamental idea from Wittgenstein shall also help us going beyond an analysis that sees ‘nation’ only as a category: the concept of form of life. In a famous citation, Wittgenstein contended that ‘to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’. Wittgenstein seeks to go beyond a psychological conception of meaning, for which the meaning of a world would only be in our head, to focus on the complex relations between language and social life. He also expressed this idea by writing that if a lion could speak, we would not understand it. If the meaning of our words comes from our social life, this also means that they cannot be easily translated into another language, for this language would need to be able to describe the same kind of social life. Understanding the concept of nation requires one therefore not only to understand a cognitive mechanism, but also a form of life or, in more sociological terms, to understand how this concept is part of a particular organization of social life. It contributes to creating this social life but it also stems from it.

The concept of nation is very often used to explain and legitimize the unity of the population living under a state – a state whose borders are ultimately arbitrary, because they are the results of wars and political conflicts. Therefore, the concept of nation can be used in various ways to establish the unity of the people and to distinguish the nation from its neighbors. In each state, based on its history, scholars and intellectuals can invent different narratives to explain the unity of its population or, on the contrary, to celebrate its diversity. These narratives, which explain why a particular population is under the power of the same state, can have an important impact on this population, contributing to its sense of unity. This idea of nation is a double-edged sword, however, especially in a context in which most states are multicultural. It can be used against a state when some parts of its population consider themselves as very different from the rest of the population. These minorities can turn against their state and claim their autonomy to create a ‘real nation-state’.

Constructivism and the weakness of nationalism

Constructivism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language appear at first sight as giving a simple solution: focusing on how the category of nation is used rather than seeking for its true meaning. It does not however entirely resolve the problem. Constructivism avoids reifying social reality by focusing on categories and processes, but it tends to overlook the consequences of the processes it asks to shed light on. If one assumes that the category of nation has a performative character, it means that nations are created by those who believe in nations – or at least they created something that looks like nation. We seem to be almost back to where we started: nations are created by the use of the category of “nation” and thus they exist as special kinds of groups.

There is however another important piece of the puzzle that explains why it is not so easy to speak of nation as bounded groups, even historically and politically constructed. I call it Gellner’s thesis of the ‘weakness of nationalism’. Contrary to many scholars that emphasize the strength of nationalism, Gellner argues that nationalism is weak. Gellner defines nationalism as the political theory according to which the cultural unit should correspond to the political unit. If we consider language as a measure of cultural unity and thus the basis for a nation, Gellner remarks that there are several thousand spoken languages, but only around a few hundred nation-states. Therefore, most potential nations do not demand to have their own state, or have not succeeded in having it come into being. The world of states therefore seems much more complex than the nationalist ideology according to which one state should correspond to each nation.

The puzzle of the concept of nation therefore comes from the contradiction between the strength of the assumption that members of the same state should have some commonality and the fact that the map of the world does not correspond to this assumption. This is an important part of the solution to the puzzle of the existence of nations. Sociologists of nation generally argue that nations are created through political mechanisms. It is important however to insist on the fact that those processes often fail or succeed only to a moderate degree. That is why nations are still contested realities and hard to identify: only parts of the society are nationalized the way nationalists want. Moreover, nationalism is only one manner among many others through which the state legitimizes its power and according to which the social reality is built. This explains why the reality of the existence of a ‘nation’ is a matter of degree and specific to each nation-state. In each nation-state, not only will the attempt to build the nation obey different principles and follow from different narratives, but it will also only succeed to a certain degree, depending on the specific conditions of the State. We can draw here an analogy with Wittgenstein’s description of language:

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (Wittgenstein 1953, no.18)

We can think of society using the same model. Nationalism is only one of the numerous ways that we organize social life. Society is like a city made of multiple architectural styles belonging to different periods of time or social groups. Therefore, there are many aspects of our social life that are organized by nationalism, but there are also many other principles that intervene. Legal theory, economic theories, political theories, socialism, conservatism, religion – all of these ideologies or systems of ideas contribute to the construction of social reality. Nationalism is thus like an architectural style in a city: it is used to build some buildings or even some districts, but it does not make the entire city. It is used more in some ‘boroughs’ and less in others; it has been destroyed in some places and reconstructed elsewhere. Therefore, there is no one object which is a ‘nation’, because the social reality is much more complex.  Some ‘parts’ of society are built according to nationalist principles – the correspondence between the political unit and the cultural one – but not the whole society and not to a sufficient extent to conclude that nations really exist. This provides a simple solution to the paradox that we have observed right from the beginning.

Conclusion

From this theoretical analysis of the meaning of the concept of nation, we can attempt to formulate some first ideas on how nations are an obstacle to the existence of an international political order. If nations appear as being important and hampering efforts to build transnational regulation, it may not because be the idea of nation or the identity and feeling it convey would be so strong, but because it is also already deeply anchored in our political and social systems. A large part of education, the media, the communication, the organization of the party system and how it builds elites are organized on a nation-state basis. This creates different values, interests, elite networks and solidarities across the different nation-states. It is therefore not surprising that transforming this political order encounters so many obstacles – it requires a change to political and social equilibria that are the result of conflicts of political forces created in the nation-state frames. Building international regulations is therefore not a matter of creating an identity to support it, but of a long-term transformation of those political and social forces. This means transforming the society and political system, from how it selects political elites to how political parties are created, but also the many different ways by which nationalism and the idea of nation are institutionalized through different social practices.  This is therefore a very long historical, social and political process that can transform the established political system. We shall add that this process shall be similar to the process of constructing nation: it shall be a messy process, with parts of the political system becoming internationalized and parts of it remaining nationalized. The conflict between nation-states and internationalism is therefore here to stay for a long time and the end product of this conflict will not be a victory of one system against another but a hybrid social construction that will mix different traits of both as a hotchpotch of national and international institutions.

References:

[1] Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books.