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Ernest Gellner: Some Extracts
| Ernest Gellner is probably the best-known of the commentators who treat nationalism as a ‘“problem” - meaning that he regards it, quite correctly, as a central feature of nineteenth-century European history and an socio-political invention of that era, but ultimately the chief force which fuelled imperialism abroad and led to international conflict in Europe culminating in the two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45). His position is therefore that of the liberal humanitarian supporting civil society with ‘rights’ derived from legal tradition and social concensus rather than sovereignty or nation considered as transcendent forces, to be fought for and defended, and in reference to which such ‘rights’ can be asserted for a given ethnicity or class and denied to other peoples. Gellner’s position - which may be read as an explicit condemnation of the Fascist doctriine which dominated war-time Germany from the 1930 to the end of World War II, is that of classical civic liberalism of the ‘post-war’ period - a tolerant outlook which is currently under threat from the rising tide of European nationalisms in the post-9/11 world of East-West and South-North migration with the characteristic response of the ‘host’ nations to sudden large incursions of apparently ’alien’ peoples. [BS 2006; rev. 2025.] |
| Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1983) |
‘[The essence of nationalism is a] political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.’ (p.1.)
‘Nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries with a given state [...] should not separate the power-holders from the rest.’ (Ibid., p.1.)
‘It is nationalism which engenders nations and not the other way around.’ (Ibid., p.55.) Cf. another formulation of the same idea: ‘nationalist invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner, Thought and Change, 1964, p.18.)
‘[The modern nation-state] is above all the protector not of a faith, but of a culture and a maintainer of the inescapably homogeneous and standardising educational system, which alone can turn out the kind of personnel capable of switching from one job to another within a growing economy and a mobile society, and indeed of performing jobs which involve manipulating meanings and people rather than things. For most of these men, however, the limits of their culture are the limits, not perhaps of the world, but of their own employability and hence dignity.’ (Nations and Nationalism, p.110.)
‘National ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myths invert reality: it claims to defend folk culture while in fact it is forging a high culture; it claims to protect an old folk society while in fact helping to build up an anonymous mass society [...] It preaches and defends cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser extent, between political units.’
‘[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, in a situation in which it cannot rely on largely eroded sub-groups either to police its citizens, or to inspire them with that minimum of moral zeal and social identification without which social life becomes very difficult.’ (pp.124-25.)
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| Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1994) |
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| Here Gellner gives an account of the transition from traditional (and feudal) society in which people had a fixed status in their society given at birth and maintained by the culture that surrounded them, to modern society in which the idea of “high culture” was conceived as a dimension in which men could differentiate themselves from each other by “talent”. This society seems to require a new conception of shared culture, to which the idea of the nation is an essential part. Now read on ... [BS 2006] |
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| Preface |
Agrarian society indeed largely a stable system of ascribed statuses: but culture, with its richly differentiated and almost endless nuances […] to underwrite, render visible and reinforce those statuses’ but thata this does not create wide-ranging bonds and does not underwrite political boundaries. By comparison, modern man makes his own position no by a single contract but by a multiplicity of minor contracts … in order to negotiate and articulate these contracts, he must speak in the same idiom as his numerous partners. A large, anonymous and mobile mass of individuals, negotiating countless contracts with each other, is obliged to share a culture. They must learn to follow the same rules in articulating their terms … a shared, standardising culture indicates the eligibility and ability of participants to take part in this open [vii] market of negotiable, specific statuses, to be effective members of the same collectivity. [viii] So a shared (.i.e., one whose members have been trained by an educational system to formulate and understand context-free messages in a shared idiom) high culture becomes enormously important. It is no longer the privilege of a limited clerical or legal stratum; instead it is a precondition of any social participation at all, of moral citizenship. [viii]
It is this new importance of a shared culture which makes men into nationalists: the congruence between their own culture and that of the political, economic and educational bureaucracies which surround them, becomes the most important single fact of their lives. […] their first political concern must be that they are members of a political unit which identifies with their idiom, ensures it perpetuation, employment, defence. That is what nationalism is.
Yet nationalism is not the only charater on the ideological scene. Men are or are not nationalists, but they also have their attitudes to religion, to traditional institutions, to the imperative of economic development, to the issues of the availability of universal truth or, on the contrary, the validity of relative local truths. Positions adopted on these issues can be combined with nationalism, or be in conflict with it, in a wide variety of ways. They have their elective affinities and repugnancies, but there is more than one pattern of alignment. (pp.vii-viii.)
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ENG312C2 - University of Ulster |