The ‘Imagined’ Nation

Debates about contested concepts, such as: state, nation, nationalism, or national identity are far from new. Indeed, authors like Ernest Gellner (1983), Anthony Smith (1991), or Benedict Anderson (2006) amongst others, have largely discussed such topics from different and often overlapping perspectives.

In the twentieth century, the state was the most widely recognized norm of political

association, under the auspices of nationalist principles. While the state’s legitimacy

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derived from the nation it sought to represent, only nations with their own states could feel autonomous in a world of ‘nation-states’. This way, state and nation became increasingly confused notions that, despite being the cause of much conflict all over the world, also served to strengthen both concepts: state and nation (Smith, 1991: 168). On the one hand, a state has been generally understood as “a self-governing political entity, with internationally recognized boundaries and a government that provides public services and police power. It enjoys sovereignty, meaning that no other state has authority over the country’s territory and external recognition” (Assal, 2011: 2). On the other hand, a nation signifies a cultural and political bond, uniting in one political community a culturally homogeneous group of people, sharing a common history, homeland or territory, public culture, economy and legal rights and duties for all members, which clearly differentiates it from any conception of state, which exclusively refers to public institutions, exercising a monopoly of coercion in a given territory (Smith, 1991: 14). Such definition of nation implies that nations might exist without their corresponding state. Similarly, when a nation has its own state, this is called a nation-state (Assal, 2011: 2).

Usually grouped in regional inter-state systems, nation-states have been acknowledged as the only constituents of the so-called ‘inter-national’ community (Smith, 1991: 168).

Nation-states are collective actors legitimated by clear expressions of the national will and of national identity, whereby they must show that their citizens are clearly differentiated from ‘foreigners’, and that, at the same time, internally they are as much similar to each other as possible. In other words legitimization requires internal homogenization.

However, while geo-political demands can reinforce ethnically homogenous states, they can also undermine the cohesion of ethnically plural states. Given the prior existence of ethnic communities in many areas, the attempt to impose on surviving ethnically heterogeneous regions a system of compact and bureaucratic states is doomed to produce instability and deep ethnic conflicts wherever such states fail to fit the already existing ethnic diversity (ibid., 169).

A first element to be considered under the concept of nation is the territory, in that nations must possess compact and defined territories, whereby people and territory must belong to each other in a sort of intimate relationship where the land in question is not any land, but the ‘historic’ land, the ‘homeland’, whose natural resources also become exclusive to the people, in that they are not for foreign use and exploitation (Smith, 1991:

9). A second element is that of the patria; namely, a community of laws and regulating

institutions with the same political purposes, which can be expressed through highly

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centralized institutions and laws, or through the union of separate provinces, whose federal institutions and laws both protect local freedoms and express common political will and sentiments. In any case, together with the sense of legal and political community there is a sense of legal equality among the members making up such community or citizenship, which confers people a series of civil, legal, political, and socio-economic rights (ibid., 10). Finally, the legal equality of the members in a political community in a specific homeland is supposed to gather a series of common values and traditions among its population, or at least, its ‘core’ community. In other words, nations must have a measure of common culture and a civic ideology, a set of sentiments and ideas, binding the population together (ibid., 11).

For the purposes of this dissertation, however, it is important to emphasize that even though the components of the standard Western model of nation (historic territory, legal-political community, legal-legal-political equality of members, and common civic culture and ideology) have remained vital elements in most non-Western conceptions of a nation, a rather different model of nation emerged outside the West. The main feature of such non-Western or ‘ethnic’ conception of the nation is that a nation is above all a community of common descent, emphasizing a community of birth and native culture (Smith, 1991: 11).

Such ethnic model highlights the descent (or presumed descent), rather than the territory.

The nation can, thus, trace its roots to an attributed common ancestry and its members are differentiated from outsiders by their family ties, which justifies the strong popular element in the ethnic conception of the nation, made up by elements such as: genealogy and presumed descent ties, popular mobilization, vernacular languages, customs and traditions (ibid., 12).

Interestingly, a more recent approach emphasizes a series of subjective properties of

nationhood, whereby nations are seen as a recent invention, as “the artefacts of men’s

convictions and loyalties and solidarities” (Gellner, 1983: 7), or as what Anderson calls

them, ‘imagined communities’, where most of their members believe them to be nations,

which deserve a self-government (Norman, 2006: 4). From this perspective, nations are

imagined as limited because all of them have finite, somehow elastic, boundaries. They are

imagined as sovereign because the concept was born at a time when nations dreamt of

being free, and the indicator and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally,

nations are imagined as communities, because, “regardless of the actual inequality and

exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal

comradeship” (Anderson, 2006: 7). Indeed, it is this fraternity that has led, over the past

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two centuries, millions of people, not only to kill, but also to die for such limited imaginings (ibid.). Additionally, nations are imagined political communities because their members will never know the majority of their co-nationals, who are, nevertheless, considered as relatives and close friends, objects of personal identification (ibid., 6). “Both nations and national identities exist because of the beliefs, convictions, sentiments, and attitudes of individual people” (Norman, 2006:34). Identifying oneself with one’s nation involves having a sense that one enjoys a special standing among one’s co-nationals, which implies additional moral responsibilities. The problem, however, is that these special duties might conflict with commonsense (Heath Wellman, 2005: 104).

Indeed, it could be argued that many words normally used to refer to the nation, such as:

homeland, motherland, or patria, denote something to which one is naturally tied; namely,

something un-chosen. Thus, nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage, or

birth, all of them attributes that one cannot help (Anderson, 2006: 143). It is precisely the

fact of being un-chosen that ultimately characterizes this ‘nation-ness’ with a halo of

disinterestedness, and just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices, not so much in the

huge scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the unprecedented numbers

persuaded to lay down their lives for the sake of the nation (ibid., 144). Indeed,

nationalism’s roots in fear and hatred of ‘the other’, and its affinities with racism easily

remind us that “nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love” (ibid., 141).