Ernest Renan argued that a nation is defined not by objective criteria like language or culture, but by a subjective "desire to live together" and shared memories of suffering. Ernest Gellner viewed nations as modern constructs that emerged with industrialization to serve the needs of standardized education and mobility. Anthony Smith argued that modern nations have roots in pre-modern "ethnies" defined by shared ancestry, history, culture, and territory. Benedict Anderson conceived of nations as "imagined communities" made possible by the development of print capitalism and vernacular languages that allowed for unified communication over great distances.

1. Nation and Nationalism
Theories
Ernest Gellner
Anthony Smith
Benedict Anderson

2. What is a nation by
Ernest Renan
 Ernest Renan
(1832– 1892)
He was a French
scholar of language
and history. A
Professor at the
Sorbonne. He is best
known for his
historical works on
early Christianity and
his political theories.
 Qu'est-ce qu'une
nation? (What is a
Nation), 1882
 “The desire of
nations to be
together is the only
real criterion”

3. Nation and Nationalism:
Ernest Renan
 Renan rejects to define the nation by objective
criteria such as shared language, physical
characteristics, culture, custom…etc.
 Two things to constitute principle of a nation:
past and present
 Past – the possession in common of a rich
legacy of remembrance (common sufferings)
 Present – the consent, the desire to live
together to continue to value the heritage which
all hold in common.

4. Nationalism
 Nationalism connects individuals to the
state
 Nationalism connects individuals
 they become sentimentally attached to
the homeland
 they gain a sense of identity and self-
esteem through their national
identification
 they are motivated to help their fellow
nationals and countries
 Nationalism is a “process”

5. Ernest Gellner
 Professor of Philosophy at the London School
of Economics
 Professor of Social Anthropology at
Cambridge University
 Nation and Nationalism (1983)
 Nations and Nationalism are products of
industrialization.
 Emerge of nations and nationalism
marks a sharp disjunction between elder
agrarian societies and modern industrial
society.

6. Mobility and
Cultural Homogenization
 Mobility
 Universal literacy
 standardization of language,
 general sophistication
 Cultural homogenization
“…it must be one in which they can all
breathe and speak and produce; so it must
be the same culture. Moreover, it must now
be a great or high (literate, training-
sustained) culture, and it can no longer be a
diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little
culture or tradition” (p38)

7. Cultural Homogenization
Who does all ?
 create and maintain:
 one kind of culture
 one style of communication,
 one centralized and
standardized educational
system.

8. The Birth of State
 State
 “… nations and states are not the same
contingency. Nationalism holds that they
were destined for each other” (p6)
 Ethnicity
 “… nationalism is a theory of political
legitimacy, which requires that ethnic
boundaries should not cut across political
ones, and, in particular, that ethnic
boundaries within a given state….. should
not separate the power-holders from the
rest.” (p1)

9. Anthony Smith
 Professor of sociology at the London School
of Economics.
 He has specialized in the study of ethnicity
and nationalism, especially the theory of the
nation.
 His major influential works are: theories of
Nationalism (1971), The Ethnic Revival
(1981), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986),
and National Identity (1991).
 His concern is “When did the nations
emerge?”

10. The nation is not old
 Before, nations were generally assumed to
be old; they could be traced back to the
early Middle age.
 Today, both nation and nationalism are
understood as modern phenomena.
 The nation is a product of nationalist
ideologies.
 The nationalism is an expression of
modern, industrial society.
 The nations are phenomena of a
particular stage of history, and embedded
in purely modern conditions.

11. Ethnie
 Smith questions the modernists’ arguments,
“Is the nation a new thing?”
 Smith argues that modern nations have an
“ethnic origin, ethnic core”: Ethnie
1. a collective name
2. a common myth of descent
3. a shared history
4. a distinctive shared culture
5. an association with specific territory
6. a sense of solidarity

12. Ethnic origin of the Nation
 In pre modern communities, people
are connected among the members
and through generation by their
ethnic core.
 The cultural homogeneity was
actually due to nation’s ethnic past
prior to the nation.
 It is because of its ethnic origin the
modern nation is able to attract the
allegiance of so many people.

13. Three revolutions
 When would people’s ethnic sentiment
transform to nationalism and to form a
nation?
 “The origins of the transition to
nationhood are shrouded in obscurity.”
 Three types of revolution (Gemeinschaft
Geselleshaft)
 Economic: the division of labor
 Political: the control of administration
 Cultural: the cultural coordination

14. The Economic Revolution
 The division of labor (capitalism)
 State controlled over key resources like
mining
 State regulated trade and commodity
exchange
 Every region of a country was integrated
as a state-supervised economy
 The division of labor was reorganized
around the center (production, supplier)

15. The Political Revolution
 The control of administration
 In the latter half of the 17th c. a new class of
military professional with a high degree of
training and expertise in science and
technology emerged
 They required the highly trained bureaucrats
supports
 Centralized institutions for higher education
 The new type of bureaucratic state encouraged
the growth of a wealthy bourgeois class and an
allied intelligentsia ( in opposition to the
nobility)
 Strengthen nationalistic policies

16. The Cultural Revolution
 The cultural coordination
(educational revolution)
 The expansion of secularism to
weaken the power of church
 Monarchs claimed that their right
to rule was given by the god.
 Promise the salvation in this life
 Centralized education 
standardized patriotic culture 
citizens

17. Spreading the Nations
 The revolutions achieved:
 Territorial centralization and consolidation
 Cultural standardization
 Nation was gradually formed
“Because these three revolutions were highly
discontinuous, because their effects were felt at
different times in different areas, the nation that was
gradually formed revealed differences in both
content and form.”
 What about non-Western communities?
 The West first and non-Western societies were
stimulated to follow because of their military and
economic success.

18. Benedict Anderson
 Anderson – Professor of International
Relations at Cornell University.
 He specializes in the politics of Southeast
Asia.
 His major work on nationalism,
Imagined Communities, had become one
of the most cited texts in the field.
 He argues that the nation is “imagined.”

19. The Imagined Communities
The nation is imagined
… the nation in
anthropological
sprit; it is an
imagined political
community, and
imagined as both
inherently limited
and sovereign. (p6)

20. Nation/ Nationalism as cultural
artifacts
 “nation-ness as well as nationalism
are cultural artifacts of particular
kind” (p4)
 “nationalism has to be understood
by aligning it, not with self-
consciously held political ideologies,
but with the large cultural systems
that precede it, out of which – as
well as against which- it came into
being” (p12)

21. The Nation is imagined in a
particular way
 The community whose size is beyond face-to-
face contact are all imagined.
 The nation is imagines as limited because a
nation holds limited number of people.
 The nation is imagined as sovereign because
the concept was born in the age in which
realm of absolutism was destroying by
revolution.
 The nation is imagined as community
because the nation is always conceived as a
deep, horizontal comradeship.
 it is this fraternity that makes it
possible for so many millions of people
willingly die for their nation.

22. Print Capitalism
What makes such imagining possible?
Print capitalism (the novels and
newspapers)
 Origins of national consciousness was
print capitalism: The nation was imagined
through language
 In early time: international publishing
houses, ignoring national frontiers,
Latin readers.
 In the mid 16th century,
vernacularizing of print industry.

23. Vernacular Language Press and
National consciousness
The vernacular print language laid the bases for
national consciousness in 3 ways:
1) They created unified fields of exchange and
communication
* Print language made possible for people
who speak different dialects to
communicate
* The fellow- readers were connected
through print, and they formed the
embryo of the nationally imagined
community.

24. Vernacular Language Press and
National consciousness
1) Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to
language which helped to build the
image of antiquity of the nation.
* Archive
2) Print-capitalism created language of
power.
* High German, King’s English or
Central Thai, Tokyo dialect

25. Spread of Nations
 The nation came to be imagined, and
once imagined; it was modeled,
adapted and transformed.
 In the colonized countries, the colonial
state conditioned the natives to
imagined a nation: education for native
people
 Native bureaucrats in colonial
administration, Bilingual intelligentsias
have learned nationalism and copied,
adapted and improved it.

26. Imagined Colony
Imagined nation of colonized countries
 The nation’s model of colonized countries
was colonial state
 Three institutions made such imagination:
 Census
 Before it was for tax and military but
now individual persons are counted
 Map and Map-as-logo
 The model for drawing the national
borders, not the model of
 Necessity for administrative
mechanisms for troops to back their
claims.
 Museum
 Victorious past (conquest)

27. Further studies of Theories of
Nation and Nationalism
 http://www.nationalismproject.org/