[A nation is] a named human population that shares myths and memories, a
mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity and equal rights and
duties for all members.
(Anthony Smith, 1991: 43)
[A nation] is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign... all communities larger than primordial villages of face-
to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be
distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined.
(Benedict Anderson, 1991: 6)
A nation is a group of people who feel themselves to be a community bound
together by ties of history, culture and common ancestry. Nations have ‘objective’
characteristics that may include a territory, a language, a religion or common
descent (though not all of these are always present), and ‘subjective’
characteristics, essentially a people’s awareness of their nationality and affection
for it.
(James Kellas, 1998: 3)
All five definitions begin with the idea of a ‘collective’: ‘totality of people’,
‘community of sentiment’, ‘named human population’, ‘imagined political
community’, ‘group of people... community’ but disagreement exists on how this
collective is held together. Bauer maintains the nation possesses a ‘common
character’ or ‘common fate’, which necessarily entails a shared language. Weber
argues that sentiment – or fellow feeling – holds the collective together, but that it
also has a political project, namely the drive to create a state. Smith is more
pluralistic in his understanding of what makes the collective cohere: myths,
memories, mass public culture, homeland, economic unity, rights and duties. The
last basis is, however, distinctly political: the nation has a legal dimension. Anderson
maintains that we ‘imagine’ the nation: because we will never meet more than a
tiny fraction of our fellow citizens the national community is imaginary, constructed
above all through the medium of literature. Finally, Kellas draws attention to the
objective andsubjective dimensions of nationhood – nations require ‘objective
materials’ such as territory or language, but there must also be a corresponding
consciousness of belonging to a nation.
One issue is whether consciousness is an essential requirement of nationhood:
can a group of people constitute a nation without being conscious of it? The five
definitions imply that this should be the case: Bauer talks of ‘national character’,
Weber of a ‘community of sentiment’, Smith of ‘[shared] myths and memories’,
Anderson of the nation as an ‘imagined political community’, and Kellas of
‘subjective characteristics’. However, people can have latent interests, that is,
interests of which they are unaware, or only dimly aware. We explore the importance
of this idea in our discussion of ‘hard’ ethnic nationalism. Certainly, political
theorists are concerned with articulating reasons for action and this does require a
high level of consciousness: a ‘nation’ that existed outside the consciousness of its
‘members’ would be of little interest to political theorists. It is the act of valuing
the nation, or more precisely the sense that we oughtto value the – or our– nation,
or that it is permissible(even if not required) to be partial to our compatriots, that
is the focus of our concern in this chapter.
Chapter 12 Nationalism 261