NATIONS AND

NATIONALISM

ERNEST GELLNER
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lnst. for ku lturan i op 'lOgi och ctn ologi

BASIL BLACKWELL
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r . What is a Nation?
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We are now at last in a position to attempt some kind of plausible

f answer to this question. Initially there were two especiallypromising
candidates for the construction of a theory of nationality: will and
culture. Obviously, each of them is important and relevant; but, just
as obviously, neither is remotely adequate. It is instructive to con-
sider why this is so.
No doubt will or consent contitutes an important factor in the
formation of most groups, large and small. Mankind has alwaysbeen
organized in groups, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, sometimes
sharply defmed and sometimes loose, sometimes neatly nested and
sometimes overlapping or intertwined. The variety of these possi-
bilities, and of the principles on which the groups were recruited and
maintained, is endless. But two generic agents or catalysts of group
formation and maintenance are obviously crucial: will, voluntary .
f adherence and identification, loyalty, solidarity, on the one hand;
I and fear, coercion, compulsion, on the other . These two possibilities
constitute extreme poles along a kind of spectrum. A few communi-
ties may be based exclusively or very predominantly on one or the
other , but they must be rare. Most persisting groups are based on a
mixture of loyalty and identification (on willed adherence), and of
extraneous incentives , positive or negative, on hopes and fears.
If we defme nations as groups which will themselves to persist as
communities, I the definition-net that we have cast into the sea will
bring forth far too rich a catch . The haul which we shall have trawled
in will indeed include the communities we may easily recognize
as effective and cohesive nations: these genuine nations do in effect
will themselves to be such, and their life may indeed constitute a
kind of continuous, informal, ever self-reaffirming plebiscite. But
(unfortunately for this defmition) the same also applies to many

'Emest Renan , 'Qu'est -ce qu'une Nation', republished in ErnestRenan et

l'Allemagne, Textes receuillis et commentes par Emile Bure, NY, 1945.
 S4 WHAT IS A NATION?
other clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties, not to mention the
many numerous communities and associations of the pre-industrial
age which were not recruited and defined according to the nationalist
principle and which defy it. Will, consent, identification, were not
ever absent from the human scene, even though they were (and con-
tinue to be) also accompanied by calculation, fear and interest. (It is
an interesting and moot question whether sheer inertia , the persis-
tence of aggregates and combinations, is to be counted as tacit
consent or as something else.)
The tacit self-identification has operated on behalf of all kinds of
groupings, larger or smaller than nations, or cutting across them, or
defmed horizontally or in other ways. In brief, even if will were the
basis of a nation (to paraphrase an idealist definition of the state), it
is also the basis of so much else, that we cannot possibly defme the
nation in this manner. It is only because, in the modern, nationalist
age, national units are the preferred,favoured objects of identification
and willed adherence, that the defmition seems tempting, because
those other kinds of group are now so easily forgotten. Those who
take the tacit assumptions of nationalism for granted erroneously
also credit them to humanity at large, in any age. But a defmition
tied to the assumptions and conditions of one age (and even then
constituting an exaggeration), cannot usefully be used to help to
explain the emergenceof that age.
Any defmition of nations in terms of shared culture is another net
which brings in far too rich a catch. Human history is and continues
to be well endowed with cultural differentiations . Cultural boun-
daries are sometimes sharp and sometimes fuzzy; the patterns are
sometimes bold and simple and sometimes tortuous and complex.
For all the reasons we have stressed so much , this richness of differ-
entiation does not, and indeed cannot, normally or generally con-
verge either with the boundaries of political units (the jurisdictions
of effective authorities) or with the boundaries of units blessed by
~e democratic sacraments of consent and will. The agrarian world
simply could not be so neat. The industrial world tends to become
so, or at least to approximate to such simplicity; but that is another
matter, and there are now special factors making it so.
. The establishment of pervasive high cultures (standardized,
lite~acy- and education-based systems of communication ), a process
rapidly gathermg pace throughout the world, has made it seem, to
anyone too deeply immersed in our contemporary assumptions , that
 WHAT IS A NATION? SS
nationality may be defmable in terms of shared culture . Nowadays
people can live only in units defmed by a shared culture, and inter-
nally mobile and fluid. Genuine cultural pluralism ceasesto be viable
under current conditions. But a little bit of historical awareness or
sociological sophistication should dispel the illusion that this was
always so. Culturally plural societies often worked well in the past:
so well, in fact, that cultural plurality was sometimesinvented where
it was previously lacking.
If , for such cogent reasons, these two apparently promising paths
towards the defmition of nationality are barred, is there another
way?
The great, but valid, paradox is this: nations can be defined only <
in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, r-
the other way round. It is not the case that the 'age of nationalism' is
a mere summation of the awakening and political self-assertion of
this, that, or the other nation . Rather, when general social con-
ditions make for standardized , homogeneous, centrally sustained <!
high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minori-
ties, a situation arises in which well-defmed educationally sanctioned
and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with
which men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now
seem to be the natural repositories of political legitimacy. Only then
does it come to appear that any defiance of their boundaries by poli-
tical units constitutes a scandal.
Under these conditions, though under these conditions only,
nations can indeed be defmed in terms both of will and of culture,
and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political
units. In these conditions, men will to be politically united with all
those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to
extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures, and to protect
and impose their culture with the boundaries of their power. The
fusion of will, culture and polity becomes the norm, and one not
easily or frequently defied. (Once, it had been almost universally
defied, with impunity, and had indeed passed unnoticed and undis-
cussed.) These conditions do not defme the human situation as such,
but merely its industrial variant.
It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way
round. Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically
inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses
them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically.
56 WHAT IS A NATION?
Dead languages can be revived, traditions invent~d, quite. fictitio~s
pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, pOSI-
tively inventive aspect of nationalist ardou~ ought not t~ allow an~­
one to conclude , erroneously, that nationahsm IS a contingent, arti-
ficial, ideological invention , which might not hav~ happened, if only
those damned busy -body interfering European thinkers, not content
to leave well alone , had not concocted it and fatefully injected it into
the bloodstream of otherwise viable political communities. The cul-
tural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary his-
torical inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as
well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism
itself, as opposed to the avatars it happens to pick up for its incar-
nations , is itself in the least contingent and accidental.
Nothing could be further from the truth than such a supposition.
Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all it is not what it seems
to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own
inventions, or are modified out of all recognition. Nonetheless the
nationalist principle as such , as distinct from each of its specific
forms , and from the individually distinctive nonsense which it may
preach, has very very deep roots in our shared current condition , is
not at all contingent, and will not easily be denied .
Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own
camouflaged image . In a nationalist age, societies worship them-
selves brazenly and openly , spurning the camouflage . At Nurem-
berg , Nazi German y did not worship itself by pretending to worship
God or even Wotan; it overtly worshipped itself. In milder but just
as significant form , enlightened modernist theologians do not believe,
or even take much intere st in , the doctrines of their faith which had
meant so much to their predecessors. They treat them with a kind of
comic auto-functionalism , as valid simply and only as the conceptual
and ritual tools by means of which a social tradition affirms its
values, continuit y and solidarity, and they systematically obscure
and play down the difference between such a tacitly reductionist
'faith ' ~ and th~ real thing which had preceded it and had played such
a crucial part ill earlier European history , a part which could never
have been played by the unrecognizably diluted, watered-down
current versions.
But the fact that social self-worship , whether virulent and violent
or gentl . e an d evasive,
. .
IS now an openly avowed collective self-
worship, rather than a means of covertly revering society though the
 WHAT IS A NATION? 57
image of God, as Durkheim insisted, does not mean that the current
style is any more veridical than that of a Durkheimian age. The
community may no longer be seen through the prism of the divine,
but nationalism has its own amnesias and selections which, even
when they may be severely secular, can be profoundly distorting and
deceptive.
The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is
this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high ..-
culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the
lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the popu-
lation. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated,
academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reason-
ably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the
establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually
substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a
shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure
of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and
idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. That is what really
happens.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalism affirms and what
nationalists fervently believe. Nationalism usually conquers in the
name of a putative folk culture. Its symbolism is drawn from the
healthy, pristine, vigorous life of the peasants, of the Volk, the
narod. There is a certain element of truth in the nationalist self-
presentation when the narod or Volk is ruled by officialsof another,
an alien high culture, whose oppression must be resisted first by a
cultural revival and reaffirmation, and eventually by a war of national
liberation. If the nationalism prospers it eliminates the alien high
culture, but it does not then replace it by the old local low culture; it
revives, or invents, a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted)
culture of its own, though admittedly one which will have some links
with the earlier local folk styles and dialects. But it was the great
ladies at the Budapest Opera who really went to town in peasant
dresses, or dresses claimed to be such. At the present time in the
Soviet Union the consumers of 'ethnic' gramophone records are not
the remaining ethnic rural population, but the newly urbanized,
appartment-dwelling, educated and multi-lingual population;' who

'Yu, V. Bromley et al., Sooremennye Etnicheskie Protsessy v SSSR (Con-

temporary Ethnic Processes in the USSR), Moscow, 1975.
58 WHAT IS A NATION?
like to express their real or imagined .s en~ents an.d roots, and w.h~
will no doubt indulge in as much natIonalist behaviOur as the politi-
cal situation may allow. . '
So a sociologicalself-deception, a vision of reality through ~ pnsm
of illusion, still persists , but it is not the same a~ th.at which was
analysed by Durkheim. Society no longer worships Its~lf through
religious symbols; a modern, streaml~ed~ on-wheels hi~h. cUI~~e
celebrates itself in song and dance, which It borrows (stylizing It m
the process) from a folk culture which it fondly believes itself to be
perpetuating, defending, and reaffirming.

The courseof true nationalismneverdid run smooth

A characteristic scenario of the evolution of a nationalism - and we

shall have cause to remrn to this kind of scenario - ran something
like this. The Ruritanians were a peasant population speaking a
group of related and more or less mutually intelligible dialects, and
inhabiting a series of discontinuous but not very much separated
pockets within the lands of the Empire of Megalomania. The Ruri-
tanian language, or rather the dialects which could be held to com-
pose it, was not really spoken by anyone other than these peasants .
The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalo-
manian court, which happened to belong to a language group dif-
ferent from the one of which the Ruritanian dialects were an offshoot.
Most, but not all, Ruritanian peasants belonged to a church whose
liturgy was taken from another linguistic group again, and many of
the priests, especially higher up in the hierarchy, spoke a language
which was a modern vernacular version of the liturgical language of
this creed, and which was also very far removed from Ruritanian .
The petty traders of the small towns serving the Ruritanian country-
side were drawn from a different ethnic group and religion still, and
one heartily detested by the Ruritanian peasantry .
In the past the Ruritanian peasants had had many griefs, movingly
and beautifully recorded in their lament-songs (painstakin gly collec-
ted by villageschoolmasters late in the nineteenth century, and made
well known to the international musical public by the compositions
of ~e great Ruritanian national composer L. ). The pitiful opp-
ression of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked , in the eighteenth
century, the guerrilla resistance led by the famous Ruritanian social
 WHAT IS A NATION? 59

bandit K., whose deeds are said still to persist in the local folk
memory, not to mention several novels and two films, one of them
produced by the national artist Z., under highest auspices, soon after
the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.
Honesty compels one to admit that the social bandit was captured
by his own compatriots, and that the tribunal which condemned him
to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Further -
more, shortly after Ruritania first attained independence, a circular
passed between its Ministries of the Interior, Justice and Education,
considering whether it might not now be more politic to celebrate
the village defence units which had opposed the socialbandit and his
gangs, rather than the said social bandit himself, in the interest of
not encouraging opposition to the police.
A careful analysis of the folk songs so painstakingly collected in
the nineteenth century, and now incorporated in the repertoire of
the Ruritanian youth, camping and sports movement, does not dis-
close much evidence of any serious discontent on the part of the
peasantry with their linguistic and cultural situation, howevergrieved
they were by other, more earthy matters . On the contrary, such
awareness as there is of linguistic pluralism within the lyrics of the
songs is ironic , jocular and good-humoured, and consists in part of
bilingual puns , sometimes in questionable taste. It must also be
admitted that one of the most moving of these songs- I often sang it
by the camp fire at the holiday camp to which I was sent during the
summer vacations - celebrates the fate of a shepherd boy, grazing
three bullocks on the seigneurial clover (sic) near the woods, who
was surprised by a group of social bandits, requiring him to sur-
render his overcoat. Combining reckless folly with lack of political
awareness, the shepherd boy refused and was killed. I do not know
whether this song has been suitably re-written since Ruritania went
socialist. Anyway, to return to my main theme : though the songs do
often contain complaints about the condition of the peasantry, they
do not raise the issue of cultural nationalism.
That was yet to come, and presumably post-dates the composition
of the said songs. In the nineteenth century a population explosion
occurred at the same time as certain other areas of the Empire of
Megalomania - but not Ruritania - rapidly industrialized. The
Ruritanian peasants were drawn to seek work in the industrially
more developed areas, and some secured it, on the dreadful terms
prevailing at the time. As backward rustics speaking an obscure and
60 WHAT IS A NATION?
seldom written or taught language, they had a particularly rough
deal in the towns to whose slums they had moved. At the same time,
some Ruritanian lads destined for the church , and educated in both
the court and the liturgical languages, became influenced by the new
liberal ideas in the course of their secondary schooling, and shifted to
a secular training at the university, ending not as priests but as
journalists, teachers and professors. They received encou~agem~nt
from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists
and historians who had come to explore Ruritania. The continuing
labour migration, increasingly widespread elementary education and
conscription provided these Ruritanian awakeners with a growing
audience.
Of course, it was perfectly possible for the Ruritanians, if they
wished to do so (and many did), to assimilate into the dominant
language of Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep
religious custom, differentiated an educated Ruritanian from a simi-
lar Megalomanian. In fact, many did assimilate, often without
bothering to change their names, and the telephone directory of the
old capital of Megalomania (now the Federal Republic of Megalo-
mania) is quite full of Ruritanian names, though often rather comi-
cally spelt in the Megalomanian manner, and adapted to Megalo-
manian phonetic expectations. The point is that after a rather harsh
and painful start in the first generation, the life chances of the off-
spring of the Ruritanian labour migrant were not unduly bad, and
probably at least as good (given his willingness to work hard) as
those of his non-Ruritanian Megalomanian fellow-citizens. So these
offspring shared in the eventually growing prosperity and general
embourgeoisement of the region. Hence, as far as individual life
chances went, there was perhaps no need for a virulent Ruritanian
nationalism.
Nonetheless something of the kind did occur. It would, I think,
?e quite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants
ill ~e movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the
motives and feelings which are so vigorously expressed in the litera-
tur~ of the national revival.They deplored the squalor and neglect of
their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be
fo~d in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their eo-
na~onals were subject, and the alienation from their native culture to
which they were doomed in the proletarian suburbs of the industrial
towns. They preached against these ills, and had the hearing of at
 WHAT IS A NATION? 61

least many of their fellows. The manner in which, when the inter-
national political situati.on came to favour it, Ruritania eventually
attained independence, IS now part of the historical record and need
not be repeated here.
There is, one must repeat, no need to assume any consciouslong-
term calculation of interest on anyone's part. The nationalist intel-
lectuals were full of warm and generous ardour on behalf of the eo-
nationals. When they donned folk costume and trekked over the
hills, composing poems in the forest clearings, they did not also
dream of one day becoming powerful bureaucrats, ambassadors and
ministers. Likewise, the peasants and workers whom they succeeded
in reaching felt resentment at their condition, but had no reveries
about plans of industrial development which one day would bring a
steel mill (quite useless, as it then turned out) to the very heart of the
Ruritanian valleys, thus totally ruining quite a sizeable area of sur-
rounding arable land and pasture. It would be genuinely wrong to
try to reduce these sentiments to calculations of material advantage
or of social mobility. The present theory is sometimes travestied as a
reduction of national sentiment to calculation of prospects of social
promotion. But this is a misrepresentation. In the old days it made
no sense to ask whether the peasants loved their own culture: they
took it for granted, like the air they breathed, and were not con-
scious of either. But when labour migration and bureaucratic em-
ployment became prominent features within their social horizon,
they soon learned the difference between dealing with a co-national,
one understanding and sympathizing with their culture, and some-
one hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be
aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of
it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of
social mobility. In stable self-contained communities culture is often
quite invisible, but when mobility and context-free communication
come to be of the essence of social life, the culture in which one has
been taught to communicate becomes the core of one's identity.
So had there been such calculation (which there was not) it would,
in quite a number of cases (though by no means in all), have been a
very sound one. In fact, given the at least relative paucity of Ruri-
tanian intellectuals, those Ruritanians who did have higher qualifi-
cations secured much better posts in independent Ruritania than
most of them could even have hoped for in Greater Megalomania,
where they had to compete with scholastically more developed
62 WHAT IS A NATION?
ethnic groups. As for the peasants and w.0~kers, they did not benefit
immediately; but the drawing of a political boundary aro~nd the
newly defined ethnic Ruritania did mean the. eventual fosterID~ and
protection of industries in the ~rea ,. and ID ~e end drastically
diminished the need for labour migrauon from It.
What all this amounts to is this: during the early period of indus-
trialization, entrants into the new order who are drawn from cultural
and linguistic groups that are distant from those of the more ad-
vanced centre, suffer considerable disadvantages which are even
greater than those of other economically weak new proletarians who
have the advantage of sharing the culture of the political and eco-
nomic rulers. But the cultural/linguistic distance and capacity to
differentiate themselves from others, which is such a handicap for
individuals, can be and often is eventually a positive advantage for
entire collectivities, or potential collectivities, of these victims of the
newly emergent world. It enables them to conceive and express their
resentments and discontents in intelligible terms. Ruritanians had
previously thought and felt in terms of family unit and village, at
most in terms of a valley, and perhaps on occasion in terms ' of
religion. But now, swept into the melting pot of an early industrial
development, they had no valley and no village: and sometimes no
family. But there were other impoverished and exploited individuals,
and a lot of them spoke dialects recognizably similar, while most of
the better-off spoke something quite alien; and so the new concept of
the Ruritanian nation was born of this contra st, with some encour-
agement from those journalists and teachers . And it was not an
illusion: the attainment of some of the objects of the nascent Ruri-
tanjan national movement did indeed bring relief of the ills which
had helped to engender it. The relief would perhaps have come any-
way; but in this national form, it also brought forth a new high cul-
ture and its guardian state.
.This is one of the two important principles of fission which deter-
mine the emergence of new units , when the industrial world with its
insulated cu~tu~al breathing tanks comes into being . It could be
called.
the principle
. of. barriers to communication ' barriers based on
pre~lOus, pre-mdustnal cultures ; and it operates with special force
du~g the early period of industrialization . The other principle, just
~s important , could be called that of inhibitors of social entropy; and
It deserves separate treatment.