IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND MODERN NATION BUILDING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSİS OF ANDERSON AND GELLNER'S THEORIES OF NATIONALISM HAYALİ CEMAATLER VE MODERN ULUS İNŞASI: ANDERSON VE GELLNER'İN MİLLİYETÇİLİK TEORİLERİNİN KARŞILAŞTIRMALI ANALİZİ (original) (raw)

Defining Nations and the role of Nationalism

2019

This essay engages in a discussion about the very first definitions of the term we know as "nation". It tracks back its origins in history and follows its development through the years, going over several renowned authors such as Gellner, Anderson and Smith. This essay also targets "nationalism" and aims to explore what role does it exactly play in the formation of nations. Gellner has defines nationalism using a modernist approach, that it is purely a modern phenomenon without any historic roots. In contrast, Smith sees nationalism through his ethno-symbolic lens and explains that nationalism is an age-old feeling and that, in fact, nations and national identity are formed because of nationalist feelings, and not vice versa.

Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

2016

This clever little book has all that it takés to become a primary source of inspiration to anyone interested in the issue of nationalism, its causes and transformations. Written with admirable clarity and a good deal of humor, its nine chapters present the reader with a refreshing way of looking at this Modern Age universal. To the student of East Central Europe this work offers the possibility of seeing his favorite subject matter placed within a comparative framework (one that goes beyond the usual West European perspective) by an author whose own 'expertise' lies with Indochina and who feels comfortable using the work of anthropology and literary theory to draw insight on political history. Nation-ness remains as legitimate a political value today as it has been for the past two centuries. It has, equally, remained an enigma to social analysis. Rather than seeing it as another ideological 'ism', Anderson prefers to treat the related phenomena of nationality, Nationalism and nation-ness as cultural artifacts, akin to kinship and religion. He defines the nation as "an imagined political Community," since it is impossible for all members to know each other 'personally'. What distinguishes it from other kinds of imagined communities is "the style by which it is imagined." (p. 15) It is imagined as limited since it rests on the notion of membership and thus exclusion. And it is sovereign; the nation connotes the sense of freedom within its protective shell (the reality of oppression notwithstanding). Anderson is certainly not the first to trace the cultural roots of nationalism to the development of mercantile capitalism, to the increased contact with non-European worlds and to the invention of the printing press, both of which gradually undermined the vast imagined dynastie and religious communities of the Middle Ages. The originality of the author's argument comes from showing how print-capitalism aecounts for the development of a new sense of co-presence, a key component in the "obscure genesis of nationalism." The vertical world of the Middle Ages was one in which the 'now' coexisted with the past and future in one simultaneity of presence given by Divine Providence. "In such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance." (p. 30) The medieval 'simultaneity-along-time' is replaced "by an idea of 'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, crosstime, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal eoineidence, and measured by clock and calendar." (p. 30) The novel and the newspaper provided, in different ways, the possibility of presenting an earthly simultaneity in which the reader is made present to a multiplicity of actions and actors who coexist as a 'sociolo-gicaP Community 'in time'. The newspaper draws together events related often only

Imagined communities against the tide? The questioned political projection of nationalism

Debats, 2016

This article deals with the validity of Anderson’s definition of imagined communities and the future of imagination typical of nationalism. It is based on bibliographic review and research on the case of Cerdanya. Three questions of Anderson’s definition are revised: the limitation of the nation, its supposedly inherent sovereignty and the sense of community among unknown people. In this last point, the text focuses also on the consequences that imagined community is embodied for known people every day. It concludes that the production of local identities and dynamics in global, local and regional level represents a challenge for the political projection of imagined communities. Nevertheless, that production is not absolutely questioned. Denationalisation dynamics are produced in sovereignty and delimitation becomes more porous but it carries on the cultural production of community limits by education, army and communications. In addition, some global alternatives to national communities arise, but the nationalist grammar remains intact as a base of community categories and identifications.

Ernest Gellner’s Perspectives on Nationalism in Nations and Nationalism

International Journal of Social Science Research and Review

Nationalism has been one of the fuzziest and elephantine concepts which does not belong strictly to any specific social discipline. In theorizing about the issues of nation and nationalism, Ernest Gellner stood apart from the rest of his generation of post-war social scientists. During the period when the subject of nationalism was most disparaged, Gellner produced many remarkable writings on nationalism. This paper will explore the theoretical underpinnings of nationalism developed by Ernest Gellner in his famous book Nations and Nationalism. He is known to have provided a most logical and thorough explanation of the existence of nationalism as a corollary of modernity. Many issues emerge from his perspectives on nationalism. This paper attempts to explore a few of them. Firstly, it seeks explanations for Gellner’s single-minded obsession with the issues of nations and nationalism. Secondly, his ideas about modernity and nationalism are revisited. And finally, the dissection of the...

Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities

Cambridge University Press, 2023

Nationalism has long been a normatively and empirically contested concept, associated with democratic revolutions and public goods provision, but also with xenophobia, genocide, and wars. Moving beyond facile distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' nationalisms, the authors argue that nationalism is an empirically variegated ideology. Definitional disagreements, Eurocentric conceptualizations, and linear associations between ethnicity and nationalism have hampered our ability to synthesize insights. This Element proposes that nationalism can be broken down productively into parts based on three key questions: (1) Does a nation exist? (2) How do national narratives vary? (3) When do national narratives matter? The answers to these questions generate five dimensions along which nationalism varies: elite fragmentation and popular fragmentation of national communities; ascriptiveness and thickness of national narratives; and salience of national identities.

Rediscovering Nationalism

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, 2015

Different events which happened in Europe made not only Europeans but people all over the world think that the efforts for creating a unified Europe, and a global village is threatening national identities and livelihoods. Although globalization is considered as a buzzword of modern era, nationalism, too, is very much alive in its own way. Nationalism is not only expected to persist but also increase and intensify in response to and in opposition to forces of globalization. Thus according to Anthony Giddens, “the revival of local nationalisms, and an accentuating of local identities, is directly bound up with globalizing influences, to which they stand in opposition.”(Giddens, 1994:5).Therefore this paper will try to answer the question: Is there a link between nationalism and globalization? Can these two forces be complementary rather than contradictory? Is their existence a battle of winners and losers? The paper will shortly see the pros and cons and the implications of these for...

Nationalism: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know

Annual Review of Political Science, 2021

Amid the global resurgence of nationalist governments, what do we know about nationalism? This review takes stock of political science debates on nationalism to critically assess what we already know and what we still need to know. We begin by synthesizing classic debates and tracing the origins of the current consensus that nations are historically contingent and socially constructed. We then highlight three trends in contemporary nationalism scholarship: (a) comparative historical research that treats nationalism as a macropolitical force and excavates the relationships between nations, states, constitutive stories, and political conflict; (b) behavioral research that uses survey data and experiments to gauge the causes and effects of attachment to nations; and (c) ethnographic scholarship that illuminates the everyday processes and practices that perpetuate national belonging. The penultimate section briefly summarizes relevant insights from philosophy, history, and social psychology and identifies knowledge gaps that political scientists are well-positioned to address. A final section calls for more comparative, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional research on nationalism.