The diligent British scholar, it seems, considers that the ethnos is no longer a linguistic community with a common way of life; that the ethnos does not inhabit a particular territory but needs only to be associated with one; that the ethnos need not have an actual history, for ancient myths can continue to serve this function equally well. The shared memory is not a conscious process moving from the present to the past (since there is always someone around who can organize it) but rather a “natural” process, neither religious nor national, which flows by itself from past to present. Smith’s definition of ethnos, therefore, matches the way Zionists see the Jewish presence in history—it also matches the old concept of pan-Slav identity, or that of the Aryans or Indo-Europeans, or even of the Black Hebrews in the United States—but is quite unlike the accepted connotation among the traditional community of anthropologists.9
Toward the end of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first, “ethnicity”—which Étienne Balibar rightly described as entirely fictitious—has experienced a resurgence in popularity. This French philosopher has reiterated that nations are not ethnic, and that even what is deemed to be their ethnic origin is dubious. It is in fact nationalization that creates a sense of ethnic identity in societies—“represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community.”10 Unfortunately, this critical approach, which warns against ethnobiological or ethnoreligious definitions, has not had sufficient impact. Various theoreticians of nationality, like nationality-supporting historians, continue to thicken their theories and hence their narratives with essentialist, ethnicist verbiage. The relative retreat of the classic sovereign nationalism in the Western world in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first has not weakened this trend; indeed, in some ways it has strengthened it.
Be that as it may, if the present work sometimes errs and occasionally uses the term “people”—though not the term ethnos, on account of its biological resonances—it will be pointing very cautiously to a fairly fluid human community, usually a premodern one and especially one in the early stages of modernization. The cultural and linguistic structures held in common by such a group have never been very strong, but arose because of a particular administrative communication that gradually blended, under kingdoms or principalities, with “lower” cultures. The “people” is therefore a social group that inhabits a defined territory and exhibits at least the outlines of shared norms and secular cultural practices (related dialects, foods, clothing, music, and so on). Such linguistic and ethnographic features, which predate the nation-states, were not rigidly consolidated, and the boundary between them and the comparable features of other groups was not essential or unequivocal. It is precisely the accidental history of interstate relations that in many cases determined the location of the barrier between “peoples.”
Sometimes, as has already been stated, such a “people” has served as the Archimedean point for the launching of a new nation—a point that has often been worn down in the nationalizing enterprises of modern culture. The culture of the English “people” became hegemonic in Britain much as the culture of the Île-de-France and the administrative language of the Bourbon monarchs came to dominate their realm. By contrast, the Welsh “people,” the Breton, Bavarian, Andalusian, even the Yiddish “people,” have been almost entirely shredded in the process.
Constructing a nation can also lead to the opposite outcome. Cultural-linguistic minorities, which had not been sharply defined before the era of nationalism, begin to acquire—owing to hasty engineering dictated from the center, or to alienating discrimination—a new, distinguishing sense of identity (modernization can intensify subtle differences). In such cases the reaction, especially among the intellectual elites of the group excluded from the hegemon, can harden, turning amorphous distinctions into an essentialist basis for a struggle for self-rule—namely, for national separation. (This issue will be more fully addressed below.)
Another comment, of special relevance to the present work: Where the common denominator of a premodern human group consisted solely of religious norms and practices (cults, rituals, precepts, prayers, religious symbols, and the like), the terms used here will be “religious congregation,” “religious community,” or “religious civilization.” I may as well add that, prior to the national era, “peoples” both emerged and disappeared, just as kingdoms did, in the unfolding of history. (Again, I shall return to this matter below.) Religious communities, on the other hand, usually persisted in the longue durée, to use the well-known term coined by Fernand Braudel, because they preserved and reproduced tradition-minded intellectual strata.
At times, even religious cultures—when weakened yet still relatively stable, or even when disintegrating—served, much as did popular folklore or the language of state administration, as valuable raw material for the forging of nations. Belgium, Pakistan, Ireland and Israel, despite manifold differences, serve as good illustrations. In all these cases, we find a common denominator in the form of national construction, even when the starting point was a religious community or “people.” Despite the major importance of religious elements in the ways a nation is created, we must not forget that nationality has helped define the contours of the emergent modern religious temperament. There must, therefore, be a significant decline in the intensity of religious fatalism when large human groups, mainly their political and intellectual elites, take control of their destiny and begin to make national history.11
Peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such. To be sure, as cultural building materials they have been vital in the fashioning of the new national identities, but they lack the decisive characteristics that total modernity, falling upon them like a raptor, carries below its wings.
THE NATION: BOUNDARIES AND DEFINITIONS
Much has been written about the fact that the issue of nationality did not produce its own Tocqueville, Marx, Weber or Durkheim on the social thinking behind it. “Class,” “democracy,” “capitalism,” and even “state” were quite closely diagnosed, but “nation” and “nationalism” have been neglected—starved of theoretical calories. The main, though not sole, reason for this is that “nations,” as a synonym for “peoples,” were perceived as primary, almost natural, entities—in existence since time immemorial. A good many authors, including scholars of history, noted the developments that had taken place in the human groups designated as nations, but these were perceived as minor changes in entities regarded as primeval.
Most of these thinkers lived in emerging national cultures, so they tended to think from within them and were unable to examine them from outside. Moreover, they wrote in the new national languages, and were thus held captive by their principal working tool: the past was made to conform closely to the linguistic and conceptual structures molded in the nineteenth century. As Marx, seeing the social realities of his time, assumed that history was essentially a vast supernarrative of class struggles, so most of the others, principally the historians, imagined the past as the constant rise and fall of eternal nations, and their mutual conflicts thickly and solemnly packed the history books. The new nation-states naturally encouraged and generously funded such imagery and writing, thereby helping to reinforce the contours of the new national identities.
Reading the works of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill or the French philosopher Ernest Renan, we encounter some divergent insights, unusual for