Passion Paradox by Joan Cocks

Author:Joan Cocks [Joan Cocks]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Tags: AvE4EvA
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2002-04-27T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

In Defense of Ethnicity, Locality, Nationality The Curious Case of Tom Nairn

national prejudices and traveling ideas

Ideas have always been able to fly on the wings of speech far away from their place of origin. Today, new technologies of global communication and transportation insure that even theories of nationalism will not be nation bound. The half intrinsic, half technologically magnified boundlessness of ideas helps account for the world-straddling effects of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Soon after they were published in the early 1980s, these texts precipitated a sea change in scholarship from London to Prague to Delhi to New York, by taking as their starting point the tension between nationalism’s archaic self-image and modern reality. While Rosa Luxemburg noted the same tension almost a century ago, it reappeared in thought this time unaccompanied by the other contradictions she believed implicated domination in nation formation. By insisting on the modernity of nationalism but soft-pedaling its entanglements with the will to power of ruling classes, political leaders, and majority peoples, Gellner and Anderson, as well as many of their followers, have been able to greet nationalist movements without the automatic impulse to essentialize or chastise them.

To note the reinforcing influence of Gellner and Anderson is not to deny the differences in sensibility and method between the two men. An unabashed sociological objectivist and economic determinist, Gellner asserts that nationalism “suffers from pervasive false consciousness” by misunderstanding its own causes and consequences. Nationalism “defends continuity, but owes everything to a decisive and unutterably profound break in human history.” It “claims to protect an old folk society while in fact helping to build up an anonymous mass society.” It preaches “cultural diversity, when in fact it imposes homogeneity both inside and, to a lesser degree, between political units.” The real backdrop to the formation of large, culturally homogeneous, and politically centralized nation-states, whose populations are literate, and literate in the same language, is the transition from agrarianism to industrialism, and the real cause of nation-states, the “structural requirements of industrial society.”1 Gellner views industrialization and economic growth as politically neutral but humanly positive goods, universally desirable because they are universally desired, with ultimately everyone’s individual interest and no suspect cultural or class interest forwarded by them. Ethnonational discriminations and resentments merely reflect the fact that the seeds of industrialization have blown down on different peoples and regions at different times, so that its fruits are not yet universally set. Gazing at nationalist conflicts with the kindly but aloof eye of an adult watching children in the painful throes of growing up, Gellner implies that those conflicts will be resolved not by political engagement from the inside or by political intervention from the outside but by objective developmental processes.2

Anderson agrees that the archaic self-portrait of the nation is a widespread delusion, for “the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where . . . fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds.

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