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Gellner and Post-Soviet Nationalism
From: Cambridge University Press
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David Laitin |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The aftershocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union have provided an opportunity to examine the practical applications of Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism. Gellner's typical storyline has macro-historical forces (industrialisation and modernisation) impelling unspecified actors (minorities, states, lands, classes)--explained by the needs of those conglomerates--into nationalist movements. The lesson to be learned, according to David D. Laitin, is that this theory requires revision. |
 he collapse of the Soviet Union meant for millions liberation from a regime that created the Gulag archipelago, in which their relatives, their friends and untold numbers whom they never met were incarcerated and/or murdered; for millions more it meant the possibility to associate and interact freely with people throughout the globe; for still millions more it meant a catastrophic disruption of working life, of social security and of status in a new society they could hardly understand; for millions again it meant a feeling of hope, of security, of future possibility, as a member of a 'nation' that would now have its own state. Hardly to be compared with these earth-shattering effects, it is none the less noteworthy that the Soviet collapse has drawn scores of social scientists back to the seminal work of Ernest Gellner, who gave us a framework for analysing how nationalism arises, when it is powerful and when it is weak. |
Gellner's importance
The most important contribution of Gellner's work on nationalism has been its unrelenting insistence that the existence of a 'nation' is not a sufficient condition for the emergence of nationalism; rather nationalism is the result of the uneven diffusion of industrialisation. The theory is evocatively explicated in Gellner's 'just-so' story, related in Thought and Change, which has a robust plot. In it, there are two territories, A and B, which are parts of an overarching empire. Modernisation hits the world 'in a devastating but untidy flood', coming first through A, and only later to B. This means that as A finally ploughs through the misery and dislocation of early modernisation, B will still be mired in it. Impoverished and hopeless youth in B will consequently seek to better their lives by migrating to A. From this situation, different sorts of nationalism will arise. If Bs can blend into A without being noticed, and B's intellectuals get elite positions in A, then there will emerge a wider A-&-B society, on the road to becoming a nation. Nationalism will be the doctrine of the A-&-B elites seeking to naturalise state power inside the boundaries of A-&-B, through the standardisation of a national culture. However, if Bs cannot blend in--that is, when Bs are radically differentiated from As by race, skin colour, or religion, what Gellner later calls 'entropy-resistant' classifications (Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983, ch. 6)--the discontent from Bs unable to achieve social mobility in A will express itself in a form of separatist nationalism, of an A vs. B type. In both the A-&-B and A vs. B cases, nationalism was impelled not by culture, but rather by the uneven development of modernisation (Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, 1965, pp. 166-8). |
As for language, a cultural feature that is not entropy-resistant, Gellner's story has clear implications. Clerks are the drones of modern society; full citizenship in such a society therefore requires literacy; and practical necessity demands that all clerk/citizens can communicate efficiently with each other in a single language. Small communities with their own language cannot produce the range of specialists needed to run a modern society; therefore the nation-state is the minimal territorial unit in the modern world. And the nation-state will impose a standard dialect or language within its boundaries, more associated with scholastic high culture than the folk cultures of the peasants--demonstrating that the claim by nationalists that they represent the 'folk' is a sham--and this new standard language will become the distinguishing mark of the nation. This theory, however, does not predict a universal industrial culture, or a universal language of industrial society, mainly because uneven development will assure break-away nationalisms (from those places where assimilation is blocked by a jealous working class focusing on cultural difference in order to discriminate against migrants) whose leaders will consecrate some dialect or a language that differentiates it from its neighbour. |
The motivating factor in this model is the opportunity for bureaucratic and other literacy-demanding jobs that impels rural folk to learn the elite language of the cities to which they had migrated. If mobility prospects are blocked, these migrants will sense higher expected economic returns for having their own nation-state, where the elite dialect of their language would become the basis for white-collar jobs, and these frustrated job-seekers would then become recruits for a nationalist movement. To be sure, Gellner shied away from this bald economism, and claimed that his theory had been 'travestied' by others who held that nationalism was based upon calculations. 'This formulation', he protests, 'is a misrepresentation' (Nations and Nationalism, p. 61). He points to the real experience of rural migrants into a city ruled by bureaucrats who speak a language absolutely foreign to them. 'This very concrete experience', Gellner imagines, helps them learn 'the difference between dealing with a conational, one understanding and sympathising with their culture, and someone hostile to it'. From this experience, a sort of 'love' can emerge for their culture, 'without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of social mobility'. None the less, Gellner admits, 'had there been such calculation (which there was not) it would, in quite a number of cases ... have been a very sound one [to become nationalists]' (Nations and Nationalism, p. 61). And so, even though his peasant-migrants never calculated, they more-or-less acted as if they had! |
Gellner's weakness
It is an intellectual treat to read Gellner's clear, acerbic and powerful prose, whether battling Kedourie, one-upping Hroch, or elaborating his alternative vision. Yet, Gellner's work, especially apparent today when modernisation theory has faced generations of critics, is deeply flawed. Its functionalism runs mad. Its reifications deny human agency. And when the theory does include agents, these agents are portrayed in caricature. |
In functionalist logic, the identification of a 'need' is used to explain an outcome, ignoring the historical reality that many needs go unfulfilled, to the detriment of organisations and individuals. The need itself, it should be apparent, can hardly explain its fulfilment, though Gellner often writes that it can. In Nations and Nationalism, for example, Gellner summarises his explanation of why centralised states monopolise culture within their boundaries. This kind of state, he tells us:
must be so. Its economy depends on mobility and communication between individuals, at a level which can only be achieved if those individuals have been socialised into a high culture, and indeed into the same high culture ... Also, the economic tasks set these individuals do not allow them to be both soldiers and citizens of local petty communities ... So the economy needs both the new type of central culture and the central state; the culture needs the state; and the state probably needs the homogeneous cultural branding of its flock ... So the culture needs to be sustained as a culture, and not as the carrier or scarcely noticed accompaniment of a faith. (Nations and Nationalism, pp. 140-2.)
The needs of high cultures, he earlier asserts, explain the modern reality of nation-states. 'In the industrial world high cultures prevail, but they need a state not a church, and they need a state each', we are told. 'That is one way of summing up the emergence of the nationalist age' (Nations and Nationalism, pp. 72-3). |
In his subtle and clever posthumous Nationalism (1997, p. 54), Gellner softens his functionalist view of social causation. 'In the second zone', Gellner writes with his focus on Germany and Italy, 'nationalism could be benign and liberal; it had no inherent need to go nasty (even if in the end it did).' Here 'needs' could not explain fascism. But for Gellner, that is an anomaly. Usually, needs create fulfilling outcomes. |
As in many functionalist accounts, Gellner relies on a technique of reification, giving human attributes to unspecified globs of humanity or territory. 'Mankind is irreversibly committed to industrial society', Gellner preaches (Nations and Nationalism, p. 39). How precisely one can feel, or see, or measure this commitment, or find precisely where it resides, is left to the readers' imaginations. 'Cultural minorities', we are told, 'refrain from developing an effective nationalism because they have no hope of success ...' (Thought and Change, p. 174). How do groups of people, most of whom don't know each other, we can ask, 'refrain' from doing anything? Elsewhere: 'advanced lands do not have any interest in sharing their prosperity with the ill-trained latest arrivals' (Thought and Change, p. 167). How can we attribute 'interests' to lands? |
Reifications come from all corners of his work. In his chapter on 'What is a Nation?' in Nations and Nationalism (pp. 55, 56, 58), he affirms that 'Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures ... '; that ' [N]ationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures ... and most often transforms them radically'; that 'The cultures [nationalism] claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions'; that '[S]ocieties worship themselves brazenly and openly ... in a nationalist age'; that '[N]ationalism has its own amnesias ... which ... can be profoundly distorting'; and that 'Modern ... society ... believes itself to be perpetuating ... a folk culture.' And in Nationalism (p. 53), he writes that in his second zone, that of Prussia and Italy, 'A nation wanted its own state in addition to its own main poet ....' In these snippets, polities, nationalism, and societies are humanised, and are given intentions and goals. His argument with Hroch is revealing. In it, Gellner points out that Hroch 'faces one of the most persistent and deep issues in this field: is it nations, or is it classes, which are the real and principal actors in history?' (E. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, 1994, p. 194). Gellner never even suggests that it may be 'people'. |
To be sure, actors are not entirely absent from Gellner's writings. In Nationalism, Gellner introduces more fully the goals and aspirations of the 'nationalist', thereby overcoming some of his functionalism and reification. But his view of nationalists is quite caricatured. Nationalists are in fact aware, 'with great bitterness' that their nations did not always exist (Nationalism, p. 8). Perhaps, though, some were aware with a sense of irony, or maybe were not aware due to self-imposed amnesia, that their nation did not always exist. And immediately following, Gellner writes, 'The nationalist squares the assumption of the universality of nationalism with its widespread absence ... by claiming that it was there ... but ... asleep' (Nationalism, p. 8). 'Reawakening' is indeed a common trope by nationalists; but the presentation of this line of nationalist thought hardly captures the complex set of reasons that motivates real nationalists. Caricatured visions of actors are an insufficiently powerful substitute for a functionalist logic without any actors at all. |
Correcting Gellner
Gellner's use of functionalism, reification and caricature, in my judgement, were for him a shorthand, to elide the issue of mechanisms, in order to get at the basic structure of nationalism. In that regard--where nationalism is firmly placed into a social calculus--I am thoroughly in debt to Gellner's work. What I propose to do is to purge Gellner's theory of its excessive functionalism and reification in order to specify more precisely the mechanisms he chooses to ignore. Thus I want to construct a more plausible micro component as a complement to Gellner's macro theory. |
One way to do this, as I have already suggested, is to assume that people are oftentimes the principal actors in history. Don't misunderstand; I'm not a radical methodological individualist. By no means am I opposed to macro-theorising, in analysing the structural effects of industrialisation, of state construction, and of interstate conflicts of interest. Rather, I believe that our macro stories must be made consistent with parallel stories told on a micro level. That is to say, the predictions of the macro and micro stories need to be calibrated. It may be the case, for example, from a macro perspective, that cultural minorities 'refrain' from nationalism due to low probability of success. None the less, a convincing theory would need to show that for all (or most) members of that set, there would be no individual interest in developing a nationalist programme, and insufficient resources to 'sell' it to the putative members of that nation. To be sure, Gellner often reconciles the micro and macro stories, especially when writing about the role of the intelligentsia in the forging of nationalism (Thought and Change, pp. 169-70). But the typical story line has macro-historical forces (industrialisation and modernisation) impelling unspecified actors (minorities, states, lands, classes)--explained by the needs of those conglomerates--into nationalist movements. This requires revision. |
What I am proposing is that we discharge some of the weight carried by the functionalist logic in Gellner's formulation; and replace it with a model that takes individual incentives more strongly into account. |
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