Julio Canzone is on holiday in Italy and France

He will return 2 May 2005.

Fin.

goddamned nation building

In the previous section, we touched upon the idea that the nation is a conceptual category which connotes kinship among a group of people and identifies these nationals as the chief repository of legitimacy. This thought is compatible with Gellner’s definition of nationalism as a political principle which “holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”[1] This view of the nation points to a dualism in the nature of nationality: there is an ethnic aspect to nationality, which views the people as a community related by some unspecified tie, as well as a civic aspect which views the people as endowed with political rights and as being the source of legitimacy for any governing body.

As history can attest, these two aspects of nationality are not always congruent. In the case of the Irish, the Poles, or the Serbs, their nation was subsumed in a larger empire, subject to the administration of another nation, which drove separatist sentiments. On the other hand, as in the cases of Germany and Italy, a nation may be divided among numerous territorial entities, the unification of which is the driving nationalist imperative. Only when there is a harmony between these two factors can we speak of what is generally known as the “nation-state,” or, as Connor puts it, the “integrated state.” And while some examples have been fortunate enough to have a nation circumscribed to a geographical location—as with Iceland or Japan—for states with potentially competing national identities, a process of nation-building is imperative.

Nation building has two essential elements: the cultivation of belief in the distinctiveness of one’s culture, and the development of a shared sense of participation in matters affecting the population and of rights and duties of group members.[2] Unsurprisingly, these correlate both with our description of the aims of nationalism and our insight into the dual nature of nationality. Yet nation building, despite being an application of nationalist principles, differs from nationalism in that it is typically in the remit of state actors who sought stability from the social changes that were sweeping the political landscape. In the transition from the feudal order, nation building helped to balance society’s concerns about the power of the state—now rapidly diminishing from its position of absolute authority in the Middle Ages—and the concomitant rise of the people with their calls for participation.

During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, society continued to become increasingly influential and autonomous with regards to the state, which began to face serious constraints on its power. From industrialization and the rapid rise of the bourgeoisie came a class of people loathe to accept the arbitrary use of state power in the private sphere or into market affairs.[3] The heavy-handed authoritarianism of the past was no longer tolerable, though, due to the changes in society, neither was it necessary to engage in the activities of the state. Contemporary sociologists acknowledge that the modern political order requires a preexisting “political community” wherein private actors can willingly cede some prerogatives to the public sphere because of “shared understandings” about rights and duties between the ruler and the ruled.[4] The existence of such a political community provided the government with other avenues than coercion to ensure and assert its authority.[5]

In short, the state no longer enjoyed the total authority that it once enjoyed over the political, social, and economic rights of the people. As Gianfranco Poggi puts it in his classic tome, The State:

Far from society being treated as an object of political management by a state operating chiefly in the light of interests exclusive to itself and to which those of society had to be subordinated, the state itself had to become an instrumentality of society’s autonomous, self-regulating development. The state’s very existence, and its mode of operation, would have to seek justification in the extent to which it allowed that development to unfold according to its own logic, rather than imperiously directing and bending it to the state’s own ends.[6]

The new states which were relinquished their claims to absolute power and engaged in the integration with society were the driving force for the liberal, democratic order that proliferated in Western Europe in the past 200 years. In the United Kingdom and France this change manifested itself the right to form associations, to receive formal education, and the right to political participation and representation through the vote. After the 1848 Revolution, the movement for representative democracy swept over Europe, affecting the liberal strongholds of France and England, but also Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Norway.[7] Though the loosening of the former strictures on political rights was fitful, the process was wide-reaching: by the 1800s most regimes in Western Europe had enhanced popular support through the grant of a voice in political matters.

Despite the extension of political rights to the populace, it should not be imagined that this development atrophied the power of the state; in many regards the capacity of the state to engage in certain activities was greatly enhanced by the creation of citizenship and the spread of popular sovereignty. As Samuel Finer points out in his essay, these changes allowed for the raising of national, mass armies with deep loyalty to the state.[8] The feeling of citizenship and of the shared obligations between state and society also aided in the mobilization of resources: not only were armies being levied, but also taxes for projects deemed to be in the national interest. These new national armies made possible by the extension of citizenship served to reinforce the effectiveness of citizenship as a social adhesive; like the educational system, national service was another effective means towards the homogenization of society and the socialization in national ideas of citizenship and the nation.

In the past two hundred or so years, ruling regimes have nurtured loyalty through the dual process of inculcating beliefs and myths about the ties that bind and define the nation, and the granting to society of a political say through the franchise. This process has been largely successful in creating “integrated states.” The state deployed nationalist ideas, aiming to forge ties within the societal mass and to reinforce the idea that said group corresponded to the legitimate political voice of the state—in effect creating a group that embodies both the civic and ethnic criteria of the nation. The resulting integrated political community which is embodied by the “nation” permits the voluntary subordination of society to the directives of the government, creating a harmonious social and political order. Most modern states have undergone this process of integration, and enjoy stability, a political order based on persuasion rather than coercion, and a general consensus on political means and ends. Russia, as we shall see in the following chapter, has never fully undergone this process of nation integration or nation building, which has exacerbated aggressive nationalism and weakened the structural underpinnings of the Russian state.

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[1] Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism, 1.

[2] Finer, Samuel E. “State and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military”

[3] Poggi, Gianfranco. The State.

[4] Bendix, Reinhard. Nation-Building and Citizenship.

[5] Idib.

[6] Ibid

[7] Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship

[8] Finer, page whatevs