LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      Making Nations: Sovereignty and Equality

       No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them, are ethnicized—that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community.

      —Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology”

       Nationalism was the form in which democracy appeared in the world, contained in the idea of the nation as a butterfly in a cocoon.

      —Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity

      Thinkers and scholars have struggled for more than a hundred years with the issue of nationalism but have not come up with an unambiguous and universally accepted definition. A widely accepted description will probably be achieved only after the age of the nation has ended, when Minerva’s owl takes flight and we see past this overarching collective identity that so powerfully shapes modern culture.¹

      But it is only proper that a historical work, particularly one likely to cause controversy, should begin its explorations with a look, however brief, at the basic concepts that it will employ. In any event, this is sure to be a challenging, even exhausting, voyage, but a lexicon that consists of explanations of the conceptual apparatus employed in this book may prevent superfluous wandering and frequent stumbling.

      European languages use the term “nation,” which derives from the late Latin natio. Until the twentieth century, this term denoted mainly human groups of various sizes and with internal connections. For example, in ancient Rome it commonly referred to aliens (as well as to species of animals). In the Middle Ages it could denote groups of students who came from afar. In England at the start of the modern era it denoted the aristocratic strata. Now and then it was used in reference to populations of a common origin, sometimes a group speaking a particular language. The term was used in diverse ways throughout the nineteenth century, and its precise significance remains a subject of controversy to this day.

      The great French historian Marc Bloch said that “to the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs.”² We might add that one source of anachronism in historiographical research (though not the only one) is human laziness, which naturally affects the creation of terminology. Many words that have come down to us from the past and, in a different guise, continue to serve us in the present are sent back, charged with a new connotation. In that way, distant history is made to look similar, and closer, to our present-day world.

      A close reading of historical and political works, or even of a modern European dictionary, reveals a constant migration of meanings within the boundaries of terms and concepts, especially those devised to interpret changing social reality.³ We can agree that the word “stone,” for instance, though context-dependent, does correspond more or less to a specific and agreed object. Like many other abstract terms, however, concepts such as “people,” “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “nationalism,” “country,” and “homeland” have, over the course of history, been given countless meanings—at times contradictory, at times complementary, always problematic. The term “nation” was translated into modern Hebrew as le’om or umah, both words derived, like so many others, from the rich biblical lexicon.⁴ But before taking the discussion to the crucial “national” issue, and trying to define “nation,” which still very reluctantly submits to an unequivocal definition, we should stop to consider two other problematic concepts that keep tripping up the clumsy feet of professional scholars.