Trivedi 1/21 'Nations'

On Thursday Jan 21 Professor Trivedi discussed with us the idea of a nation.

We began with Ernest Renan, a Frenchman, who wrote ‘What is A Nation?’ in 1882 after the violent popular uprisings of 1848. In this essay he rejected the commonly held beliefs that nations are rooted in religion, dynasties geography language and especially race (which at the time was understood as natural and biological rather than a social construct). Citing the many different tribes that comprise the Anglo-Saxon and French races, he said that the idea of a single history of a homogenous people is a fiction. Rather, he argues poetically that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” (Renan 52). It becomes clear in the final section that a nation is the shared idea and belief in a common story and struggle. For instance we discussed the different ways we could tell the story of the founding of our nation, the U.S. focusing on the revolution for liberty and democracy rather than the take-over of Native American land and people.

We then discussed Anthony Smith who wrote ‘The Origins of Nations’ shortly after the final decolonization period of the 1960s and 70s when several new countries were formed. He first rejects the idea that nations are only modern but notes how many ancient civilizations show nationalist tendencies. He secondly argues against Renan that nations are not merely constructs, rather they are a process and a combination of constructed and real commonalities among a body of people and their territory. Here, he introduces his idea of a ethnies which are groups of people that usually share (1) a name (2) origins (3) history/ memory (4) territory (5) language religion of customs (6) a sense of solidarity. He stipulates that these things are not necessarily in common from time immemorial but are understood commonalities during the process of becoming a nation.

Finally, we discussed E. J. Hobsbawm’s ‘The nation as novelty; from revolution to liberalism’ which he wrote after the Second World War, but before Smith’s time. Unlike Smith he argues that although the definition of nation changes over time he does understand them as modern. He dates the rise of nations to the 1830s and argues that they rise out of revolutions and are fundamentally economic units. He describes education, the army, and the common currencies / fiscal policies as technologies of nationhood.