18 "Presenting" the Past
activities and beliefs of particular instruments, such as warfare (Charles
Tilly), nationalist design (H. Seton-Watson), or political instrument (John
Breuilly).^2
While the dominant theories of nationalism by J. J. Rousseau, J. G. Herder,
J.G. Fichte, Guiseppe Mazzini, and others see nations as "products of the
natural destinies of peoples,"^3 Marxist theorists situate the nation "at the
point of intersection of politics, technology and social transformation."^4
The liberal-rationalists, such as John Plamenatz, Hans Kohn, and Ernest
Gellner, see the nationalist project as an enabling agency to realize the
"universal urge for liberty and progress."^5 In the final analysis, however,
"nation and nationalism are cognitive artifacts we invent to mark off an
intellectual universe," and nationalism is a type of political rationalization
that is used for a variety of political purposes.^6
Benedict Anderson posits that nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism
are "cultural artifacts of a particular kind" distilled toward the end of the
eighteenth century from a complex crossing of discrete historical forces
that then became "'modular/ capable of being transplanted, with vary-
ing degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to
merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and
ideological constellations." First, the cultural conceptions that a particu-
lar script-language offered ontological truth, that the monarch had divine
dispensation, and that temporality was to be perceived with cosmology
and history as the same declined and set the search "for a new way of
linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together." And then "the
convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of
human language" created the possibility of a new form of imagined com-
munity.^7
As lack of history is often equated with want of identity in social rela-
tions of individuals, families, or communities, modern nations too, as Eric
Hobsbawm points out, claim to be the opposite of novel and constructed
but "rooted in the remotest antiquity" and a "natural" community that
requires no definition other than self-assertion. According to Hobsbawm,
"fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse" such as national his-
tory make up the modern nation today. These invented traditions "seek
to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which
automatically implies continuity with the past," and "use history as a
legitimator of action and cement of group action."^8
Is a nation, then, just imagined or invented? Anthony Smith argues that
Anderson, in his historical cases, tends to relegate "the presence or absence
and nature of pre-existent ethnic ties—a lingering or vivid sense of com-
munity which the creators of the modern nation took as the basis of their
work of 'reconstruction.'" He also contends that Hobsbawm's "invention"
analysis reeks of instrumentalism that springs from the Marxian tradition
of class manipulation of the "inert masses" by the ruling elites. Accord-