Nations and Nationalism ANTHONY D. SMITH JOHN BREUILLY SUSAN-MARY GRANT AVIEL ROSHWAL Aviel Roshwald's The Endurance of Nationalism

Fourth Nations and Nationalism debate on
Aviel Roshwalds The Endurance of

Nationalism
ANTHONY D. SMITH,
n
JOHN BREUILLY,
nn
SUSAN-
MARY GRANT
nnn
and AVIEL ROSHWALD
nnnn
n
Emeritus Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of
Economics
nn
Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Department of Government at
the London School of Economics
nnn
Professor of American History at Newcastle University
nnnn
Professor of History at Georgetown University, USA
Anthony D. Smith: opening remarks
This is the fourth in the series of Debates organised, hosted and published by
Nations and Nationalism, one of the two journals of ASEN, The Association
for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. So far we have organised three
Debates: on Michael Manns The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing, in 2005; on Krishan Kumars The Making of English National
Identity, in 2006; and on John Hutchinsons Nations as Zones of Conict,
earlier this year.
Our aim in these Debates is to explore the issues raised by key new works in
the eld of ethnicity and nationalism. To this end, we invite scholars of
different theoretical persuasions to examine their basic arguments and the
supporting evidence. This is in line with the overall purpose of ASEN. ASEN
was founded by research students in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, to raise
the prole of studies in nationalism and ethnicity, by promoting research
through its two journals, Nations and Nationalism, and Studies in Ethnicity
and Nationalism (SEN), both published by Blackwell; by bringing together
students and scholars from all over the world in our major annual Con-
ference, which this year, in April 2008, will be devoted to the subject of Civic
and Ethnic Conceptions of Nationhood; and by publicising new scholarship
through these Debates and in our Seminars.
So today we are discussing the new book by Professor Aviel Roshwald
entitled The Endurance of Nationalism, and published last year. Here to debate
its theses are Professor Roshwald himself, from Georgetown University,
where he is Professor of History; Professor John Breuilly, my successor as
Nations and Nationalism 14 (4), 2008, 637663.
r The authors 2008. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008
Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at LSE; and Professor Susan-Mary
Grant, Professor of History at the University of Newcastle.
As Chair, my role is largely ceremonial. However, I would like to open the
proceedings with a few remarks about Aviel Roshwalds ne book. Fortu-
nately for me, I was not cast as one of the debaters, as I could nd little with
which to disagree. In fact, I nd Professor Roshwalds basic theses extremely
attractive. These I take to be threefold:
1. The endurance of nationalism springs from certain unresolved antinomies,
from which it draws recurrent strength;
2. National identity is one of several identities and it is the many links
between nationalism and these other identities that makes it so pervasive
and persistent;
3. While national conicts are always the product of wider economic,
political and cultural factors, at their explosive heart is a clash of rival
symbolisms and visions.
The bulk of the book is devoted to analyses of the ve paradoxes of
nationalism, which are illuminated with vivid examples drawn from the
Middle East, Europe and North America.
For Roshwald, nationalism is at once ancient and very modern; it employs
twin conceptions of time, cyclical and linear; it seeks self-determination while
manifesting a sense of victimhood; it insists on the nations particularity of
chosenness while claiming a universal mission; and nally, it reveals a
symbiosis of kindred and mingled blood, of ethnic and civic nationhood.
Through these antinomies, nationalism is constantly able to renew itself and
adapt to different situations; like the giant Antaeus whose strength was always
revived when his feet touched mother earth, in the same way nationalism is
continually rekindled in the hearts and minds of men and women everywhere.
Of the many things to commend in this wide-ranging and perceptive book,
I found the discussion of the two conceptions of time particularly illuminat-
ing. It must surely make us think again about the frequent characterisation of
the nation as moving only in linear fashion through empty homogeneous
time. I was also struck by the more controversial idea of the French
Revolution, taken as a whole, as an example of Covenant to be embraced
or reviled; and by the attempt to draw the American experience, which is so
often treated as exceptional, into the mainstream of theories of nationalism.
I also have two questions, one at each end of the historical spectrum. I am
quite prepared to entertain the possibility of pre-modern nations. But should
we really consider ancient Athens to be a nation, simply because of its size
and extent and because Aristotle thought so? This is not an arcane issue.
Because, if Athens, then why not Rome? Why not Venice or Florence or
Amsterdam? These were all more than simply cities. They were large,
populous city-states, and at times, independent republics, with burning
sentiments of citizen solidarity, and a distinct sense of collective identity in
638 Smith, Breuilly, Grant and Roshwald
a bounded territory the very characteristics of Professor Roshwalds
denition of the nation. And certainly, they all had ideologies or mentalities
based on the claim to a distinct identity which for Aviel Roshwald constitutes
nationalism. Is this once again just a question of scholars employing quite
different denitions of nation and nationalism? Certainly, it is one on which,
after all these years, I can lay no claim to any special insight, and so for me,
the problem of ancient Athens, and of city-states in general, remains
unresolved.
My other question is also really theoretical. In describing the vivid sense of
nationhood among the ancient Jews, and he might have added the early
Christian Armenians and perhaps even the ancient Egyptians, Professor
Roshwald has made out a strong case for the antiquity of nations. So I nd
it puzzling that, in the nal pages of the book, he should argue that only in an
age that sets great store by the ideal of popular sovereignty, that is, the
modern epoch, can and does nationalism become universal. Does this mean
that, in practice, nations and nationalism are really phenomena of the
modern, democratic epoch? Are we then to conclude from this that Aviel
Roshwald is, after all, a modernist?
I look forward to his elucidation, and to the Debate.
John Breuilly: Aviel Roshwalds The Endurance of Nationalism
This is a knowledgeable, wide-ranging study with important and persuasive
arguments about inherent tensions in modern nationalism. However, in a
debate the emphasis is on disagreement and here I will criticise links between
denitions, evidence and argument, especially in relation to Roshwalds
treatment of nationalism in ancient Jewish history.
Is it [nationalism] an ideology or an anthropological phenomenon? Is it an outgrowth
of liberal democracy or is it inherently intolerant and conducive to authoritarianism? Is
it an aspect of modernity or a reaction against it? These are stimulating and productive
questions to ask, but ones to which there is no denitive response because each of them
can be answered both in the afrmative and in the negative, depending on what
historical context and which manifestation or form of nationalism one has in mind
(Roshwald 2001:1).
1
In Endurance Roshwald leaves aside historical context. A measure of the shift
from one book to the other can be seen by comparing denitions of
nationalism.
I will use the term nation to refer to any community larger than one of mutual
acquaintance that claims some form of collective, bounded, territorial sovereignty
in the name of its distinct identity, or any population in its capacity as a society on
whose behalf such claims are asserted. Nationalism refers to any ideology or set of
attitudes, emotions, and mentalities based on the assertion of such claims (regardless
of whether or not those claims have been fullled)(Roshwald 2006: 3, emphasis
in original).
Debate The Endurance of Nationalism 639
. . . Nation will refer to any group that thinks of its common identity (however
dened) as a basis for claiming some form of collective, political-territorial self-
determination, or any population in its aspect as a group on behalf of which such
claims are made. Nationalism refers to an ideology based on the articulation of such
claims and that serves as the framework for political action designed to further
them(Roshwald 2001: 6).
The denitions of nation are similar, but not those of nationalism. Ethnic
Nationalism stresses ideology in relation to political action. In Endurance, the
focus is narrowed by omitting action but broadened by including attitudes,
emotions and mentalities.
Anthony Smith provides another denition. Denitions are neither true
nor false; arguments based on different denitions pass each other by. What
matters is the usefulness of denitions. On substantive and methodological
grounds I contend that the political denition of Ethnic Nationalism is more
useful than a focus on ideological movements or mentalities.
2
It is the politics of nationalism which makes it signicant and denite. As
idea it is banal; as sentiment elusive. If nationalist politics had not shaped
modern state power, few would study it. One might argue that such politics
only arises from ideologies or mentalities but this is unconvincing. Ethnic
Nationalism shows that in central Europe nationalist ideology and emotions
had limited inuence before politico-military breakdown generated signicant
nationalist politics and/or urbanisation and mass migration mobilised ethnic
consciousness.
A denition omitting context and specic manifestation produces
free-oating speculation. The problem is compounded when evidence is
decient. The Hebrew Scriptures were probably compiled in systematic
form around the exile of 586538 BCE.
3
The earliest surviving manuscript
dates to about 900 AD though others, conrming its accuracy, date to 200/
300 BCE. We have other written sources and archaeological evidence which
conrm external events but tell us nothing about mentalities. The Hebrew
Scriptures articulate the beliefs of an elite as it was losing political indepen-
dence, how those beliefs hardened under imperial rule (with a short period of
limited autonomy) and underpinned uprisings against Roman rule, the nal
repression of which led to dispersal. (For basic political analysis see Finer
1999.)
We can only speculate about politics and popular sentiments. We cannot
check the Hebrew Scriptures against other texts. The Hebrew Scriptures
express beliefs about a whole people covenanting to live in their homeland
according to the law of the one and only God in ways which imply limitations
on monarchical power and ethnic identity. However, we cannot demonstrate
that such beliefs were widely shared and practised or shaped political
action.
So far as action is concerned (and actions not only speak louder than words
but enable us to gauge the signicance of words) all we can denitely claim is
that around the time of Christ there were efforts by Jewish groups to throw off
Roman rule. Such ethno-centric uprisings especially when imperial power
interferes with customs and beliefs are found on the peripheries of all
empires. It is not helpful to treat these as nationalism, although it is a
standard practice of nationalist historians.
4
Roshwald claims that dispersed elites (p. 14), like those who produced the
Hebrew Scriptures, shape the values of the whole population. That is a guess.
My guess would be the opposite. Ethnic Nationalism uses appropriate
evidence (diaries, police reports, letters, press reports). These show how little
the nationalist message communicated to peasant populations in the early
twentieth century. Why should ancient Israel lacking all the modern
institutions which enable mass communication and politics be so different?
Roshwald advances the narrower argument that even if this is only elite
discourse, it is like that of modern nationalists. The argument is weak.
Modern nationalist elites engage our attention because of their known
political impact. They were oppositional. (When gures are represented as
oppositional in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is retrospectively by writers in
authority.)
Nationalism proposes alternatives to existing political arrangements and
ideas; it is not the ethnic colouration given to authority by its priestly elite.
5
Modern nationalism is formulated in conict with other nationalisms; it is not
just an ethnic rejection of a hostile external world.
6
It is simply not helpful to
put such different cases in the same frame. The same is true of the ancient
Greek case.
7
Analysis of nationalist symbolism must distinguish between content and
use if it is to avoid confusion.
8
However, this entails that we cannot establish
meaning (content) without knowing about (non-discursive) use. Uncontex-
tualised texts do not permit demonstrable connections between meaning and
use. A denition of nationalism which explicitly excludes non-discursive use
excludes veriable claims about meaning. Inadequate evidence and method
go together.
There are four more issues I will address: comparison by analogy;
uniqueness, inuence; explanation.
All societies face dilemmas about inclusion and exclusion. The Hebrew
Scriptures provide abundant and profound arguments and stories on many
of these and Roshwald illuminatingly analyses them. Modern nationalism
confronts similar dilemmas. Therefore, at a certain level, one can compare the
discourses. The key phrase, however, is at a certain level. In Endurance,
Roshwald resorts to analogies because true comparison does not work.
He argues, for example, that the Covenant resembles modern social contract
theory. (It helps that writers like Hobbes made similar points.) However,
the source of sovereignty in contract theory is the people (or rather the
equal individuals who constitute the people); in the Covenant it is God.
The modern concept of popular sovereignty must be institutionalised
(republics, constitutions, elections, freedom of speech and assembly)
because it explicitly challenges top-down concepts of authority; no such
institutional arguments are needed in the Hebrew Scriptures.
9
Argument by
analogy misleads.
My second point is the opposite. Writers on ancient Jewish history stress its
uniqueness. Empires, tribes, city-states can be studied generically but the
Hebrew Scriptures reveal a case like no other.
10
However, the concept of
uniqueness forbids comparison. Roshwald shifts between describing unique-
ness and comparison by analogy. One can deal with these problems by
distinguishing comparability from connection and moving beyond description
to explanation.
Ancient Greece and Israel were not cases in which nationalism could or did
arise but they have had immense subsequent inuence, including on modern
nationalism. Their heritage was preserved by Rome and Christianity. Most
defeated societies are forgotten. The irony is that the dominant values of the
victors were universalist and cosmopolitan. Notions like a Chosen People or
government as institutionalised will of its citizenry were marginalised. Yet
Christianity included the Old Testament in its holy texts; post-Roman rulers
drew upon it for models of kingship; the Protestant Reformation revived the
motif of Chosen Peoples.
In the modern age of nationalism these texts were again transformed. The
Jewish diaspora product of Roman repression and Christian persecution
developed a strong inward-looking ethno-religious identity projected, in a
quietist way, upon its past. Subsequent nationalist readings combined
demands for independence in the homeland and the diaspora identity of an
ethno-religious group with claims to be like other nations and the rejection of
enlightenment assimilationism. A clear example is the 1862 text by Moses
Hess, Rome and Jerusalem (Hess 1962).
Hess formulates his nationalism in imitation of and against competing
nationalisms. He stresses race and language, prioritising Jewishness as ethnic
identity over Judaism as religion. This nation is one amongst many but with a
unique world mission: the classic Herderian view. Hess confronts the unsatisfac-
tory present with an imagined past when the Jewish nation lived independently in
its homeland in order to inspire pursuit of a nationalist future. Hess made the
Jewish story a secular nationalist one, placing it in linear, progressive time.
Nationalist ritual distinguishes symbolic content from use. There is little
sense of literal re-enactment such as reincarnation, the real presence of Christ
at communion, or the summoning of saints and warriors literally to ght
present battles. Nationalist ceremonies are distanced from the events they
enshrine. The Alamo was only turned into a site of memory at the end of the
nineteenth century, as mass nationalism developed in the USA. The Orange
Order was founded well over a century after the Battle of the Boyne which it
made central to its ceremonial. The use of the Blood River Covenant by
Afrikaaner nationalists came a century after the occasion when the vow
(mythically) was made. Nationalism imposes itself as an additional, transfor-
mative layer upon earlier traditions, claiming to re-enact but actually seeking
to inspire for a new struggle. I nd it impossible meaningfully to engage with
speculative arguments about nationalist discourses mixing different senses of
time but I do contend that nationalist ritual and ceremonial distinguish
between symbolic content (rituals about the past) and use (mobilising for a
political objective).
What makes ancient Greek and Jewish history so inuential is not that they
are like modernity but that they were preserved and transformed in such ways
that they can appear to be like modernity. What matters is their connections to,
not their comparability with, modernity.
Modernists do not wish simply to describe unique cases but also to explain.
What kind of explanation is sought and how can it cope with apparently
ancient forms of nationalism?
Critics object that modernists load the denition of nationalism to t only
modernity, for example, by including explicit political aspects rather than
treating nationalism as discursive formation.
11
Modernists must relax the
denition to enable debate. This is like criticising an economic historian for
linking modernity with the massive use of inanimate power. Clearly this
denition of power loads the dice in favour of modern times. But if we
worked with a more relaxed denition of power we would miss the point.
Modernity is not dened in terms of inanimate power. Rather the transforma-
tions associated with modernity are only possible on this basis. Just as steam
power underpinned the emergence of new kinds of transport and production,
so did the ideas and institutions of popular sovereignty and the separate,
specialised territorial state ruling over society underpin the emergence of new
kinds of political ideology and action one type of which is nationalism.
How might then one explain nationalist elements claimed for ancient
Israel and Athens? Apart from arguments about subsequent inuence and the
imposition of modern meanings, these belong to a class of organised polities
located on the periphery of one or more threatening empires. Their institu-
tions commercial city-state, confederal pastoral kingdom reinforced the
beliefs of their political and priestly elites about embodying a distinct set of
values and ways of life. Literacy and ritual centres transmitted and reinforced
this sense from elite generation to generation. That sense was intensied as the
autonomous polity was threatened and destroyed. Peripheries of other
empires produced similar responses. However, many of those societies were
nomadic and non-literate. Even where settled and literate, they were not
preserved for nationalist reappropriation by the very empires and religions
which destroyed them.
If nationalism is to be explained it must be dened in ways that connect
its language to its politics, its symbols to their uses, with arguments supported
by appropriate evidence. Dening nationalism as ideology or mentality
enables one to provide speculative descriptions of nationalist dilemmas in
ancient Israel and Greece but little more. Only when Roshwalds arguments
move to modern times, to authentic nationalism, and to cases where we have
evidence about political action and not just discourse, do they acquire
persuasive force.
Susan-Mary Grant: the once and future nation(alism): myths, memories and
materialism in the persistence of the national idea
Nationalism, Aviel Roshwald announces at the start of his book, pervades
the modern world (Roshwald 2006: 1). By the works conclusion, American
material culture the ubiquitous lifestyle statement that many resent as
American imperialism even as they buy into it appears to be the most
pervasive force. It is into the abyss of the shopping mall, he suggests, that
nationalism might fall or, more optimistically, out of which it might rise as a
source of emotional sustenance for otherwise abstract and impersonal values
of pluralism and tolerance (Roshwald 2006: 301). Neither America nor its
consumer culture is the main focus of this work, of course, but since
Roshwald has, in a signicant and some will consider controversial departure
from many studies of nationalism, included the United States as a valid case
study not only for how nationalism is constructed but where it might be
heading, it is as well to acknowledge that at the outset. Roshwalds recogni-
tion of America as derived from and susceptible to the forces of nationalism
is, indeed, a welcome challenge to the long-held notion of American
exceptionalism; yet the inclusion of the United States is perhaps inevitable
in a work that challenges the equally pervasive notion of nationalism itself as
exceptional, both product and process of modernity, a doctrine, as Elie
Kedourie famously dened it, invented in Europe at the beginning of the
nineteenth century (Kedourie 1993: 1). The ow of new information and
novel analytical perspectives of recent years has, Roshwald believes, ex-
ceeded the carrying capacity of many of the existing theoretical paradigms
particularly those that adhere to the view that nationalism can only be
understood as a strictly modern, fundamentally secular phenomenon (Rosh-
wald 2006: 1).
As far as nationalism goes, ve seems to be the magic number. Liah
Greenfeld explored Five Roads to Modernity (1992), and now Roshwald has
selected ve distinct nationalist tensions through which to assess and explain
the enduring power of nationalism, its origins, its modications, and its
dominance in the modern world. From its roots in antiquity through its use
essentially its collapsing of chronological time, Roshwald shows how
nationalism is grounded in apparently contradictory yet mutually reinforcing
patterns of violation and volition, chosenness and mission, and, of course,
ethnic and civic paradigms. Utilising the work of, among others, Adrian
Hastings, Steven Grosby, Anthony Smith and Benedict Anderson as jumping-
off points, Roshwald seeks to push these scholars conclusions further along
the ethno-symbolist road. The crux of much of his argument is grounded in
the apparent contradistinction between cyclical time (pre-modern) and linear
time (modern), one that he challenges throughout the work, beginning with an
exploration of the Judeo-Christian origins of the linear conception of
history. In each case, Roshwald argues, contradiction is the key, not only
to the form of nationalism expressed in the various examples he provides, but
in its persistence as a force the force of the modern world, one fuelled by
competing visions of an idealized, static community. Modern nationalism, he
posits, relies on a set of common assumptions established in the pre-modern
era through which the nation is conceptualised and in the context of which its
lineaments ethnic/civic, religious/secular, personal/political are continu-
ously renegotiated, and equally continually reinforced via, for example,
independence-day celebrations . . . an occasion for the reliving or at least
recounting of a nations primordial act of self-determination; as such, it
represents the meeting ground and even battleground for modern and pre-
modern sensibilities, rather than a manifestation of modernity pure and
simple (Roshwald 2006: 2, 21, 32).
Many scholars of nationalism will nd this well-crafted thesis suggestive,
but some may question the appropriateness of the example of the United
States. Although the United States seems an anomaly in a thesis that collapses
pre-modern and modern to make its case, in fact America ts the pattern that
Roshwald has traced very clearly; the relative proximity of its past to its
present makes tracking the processes described relatively straightforward.
Roshwald begins with what is fast becoming the starting-point for any
discussion of the United States these days; the destruction of the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the two
historical perspectives brought to the fore in its aftermath: the attack on
the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the raising of the
American ag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima in 1945,
the latter in the form of a postage stamp that echoed in its design the iconic
image constructed by Joe Rosenthal of the marines on Iwo Jima. In this
way, Roshwald suggests, the nearly six decades separating World War II
marines from twenty-rst-century reghters evaporates, and the subsequent
invocation of American sacred texts the Declaration of Independence
and Lincolns Gettysburg Address serves to reinforce how [t]imeless
images from the nations distant past were cobbled together to form an
improvised framework of meaning for the shocking events of 9/11 (Roshwald
2006: 478).
Pearl Harbor was, certainly, the immediate comparison that Americans
turned to in the days following the 9/11 attacks, an analogy reinforced when
the Pacic Command sent the ag from the USS Arizona Memorial to
Washington and installed it over the Pentagon. Similarly, Rosenthals
photograph of the ve US marines and a navy medic on Mount Suribachi
had in 1945 been quickly turned into both commemorative stamp (the
most successful of its kind) and public sculpture. The invocation of both Pearl
Harbor and Iwo Jima in 2001, therefore, was not only invoking the American
past but repeating it, in fundamental ways as far as both commemoration and,
arguably, nationalism were concerned (Piehler 2004: xiv, 1356). In this sense
the American response to 9/11 was anything but improvised, but was
following an already-established pattern. Roshwalds point could have been
reinforced further by the observation that at the memorial service for the dead
of 9/11 Americans sang the nineteenth-century Battle Hymn of the Republic,
the original words of which promised as he died to make men holy, let us die
to make men free, as the Union went marching on. It was not just World War
II that Americans turned to for reinforcement and solace in 2001, but another,
more distant and actually far more divisive war, the Civil War of 186165.
This is a point Roshwald does not make, but it is worth highlighting because
the memorialisation of violence and tragedy are fundamental components of
nationalism; in the American case, it may be as well to consider not simply
what Americans choose to remember in this context, but what they choose
to forget.
Roshwald touches on the broader issue of memory and forgetting at
various points in his consideration of the curved arrow of time and
throughout the work. His examples range from the modern eras invocation
of the colonial past through the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries
rewriting of the history of Reconstruction (186577), the Vietnam Memorial
and the broader consecration of the American landscape, to the Alamo and
the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush. In places the
somewhat erratic nature of the evidence leaves the reader rather at sea in
terms of tracing the ways in which Americans actually access the past in the
construction of a modern nationalism.
The shift from East Anglian non-conformists to the US Governments
Annual National Prayer Breakfast, for example, is a case in point. The chasm
dividing the devout of colonial New England and the politically astute of
twenty-rst-century Washington is more than a mere temporal one. The
invocation of Massachusetts Bay Puritanism is not the most obvious route
into the modern nation, so along with the collapsing of the temporal divide a
certain amount of restyling of Puritan garb has surely gone on in order to
make the religiosity of the colonial past applicable to the American present.
These powerful strains of religiosity that Roshwald quite rightly highlights
as signicant are possibly less striking than he suggests (Roshwald 2006: 51).
Religion may have been removed from the State in the American case, but it is
and always has been present just about everywhere else since the nations
inception.
If there is one crucial element absent from Roshwalds American examples
throughout the work it is certainly not the religious one, but it is one that has
impacted on the American collapsing of past into present in terms of religion
and virtually everything else, and that is the issue of race. Race in America is
not synonymous with ethnicity, and the African-American experience has a
unique and signicant resonance in American nationalism. Race is implicit in
almost every example provided, from the brief mention of Reconstruction
onwards, but never fully made explicit until near the end of the work, when it
is acknowledged that Theodore Roosevelts vision of racial inclusiveness was,
to put it tactfully, somewhat limited, and that the nation as a whole did not
get around to desegregating its armed forces until after World War II (in fact,
it was the Korean conict that saw the armed forces nally desegregated)
(Roshwald 2006: 269). For much of the work, however, the fraught issue of
race and its role in American nationalism is notable by its absence.
The discussion of war memorials is a case in point. Roshwald rightly
highlights the way in which the National Malls ensemble of memorials serves
to connect discrete historical episodes and human tragedies into a larger, more
meaningful whole that transcends any particular historical period. What is
missing from the Mall, of course, is the Civil War part of the national story.
The Spirit of Freedom memorial to African-American troops in that conict
stands on the corner of 10th and U Streets in Washington, but the Mall is
telling a very different, and as Roshwald points out, necessarily cohesive
national narrative of the nations advance from challenge to challenge,
triumph to triumph in the course of historical time (Roshwald 2006: 65).
This is not a narrative that readily incorporates an internecine conict, let
alone one fought in the shadow of slavery. The broader implications of the
sacralisation of the American landscape could have been further emphasised
with even a brief mention of the ways in which Americans commemorate
foreign wars, not in the heart of the nation, but abroad.
Mention of how Americans perceive foreign burial of their troops is
relegated to an endnote that observes how American cemeteries, like British
ones, for troops buried abroad became symbolic extensions of their native
soil (Roshwald 2006: 82). However, the corner of a foreign eld that is for
ever the United States is not quite representative of the nation, but differs
from it in one crucial respect: only apart from American soil were American
troops buried without distinction of rank, creed or color, at a time when
burial at home was segregated along racial lines (Robin 1995: 60). The
national narrative presented to outsiders in the aftermath of World War I, in
other words, tted the pattern Roshwald identies on the Mall, but hardly
represented the domestic reality. In this regard it is apposite that, of all the
American conicts Roshwald has touched on, the one he devotes the most
attention to is the Alamo, a military defeat. Roshwald interprets the
importance of the Alamo as deriving from the sense of violation, and
subsequent victory achieved through suffering, that the siege represented
(Roshwald 2006: 94). Here, too, the issue of race slavery, specically was a
factor in the politics of American expansion in the 1830s and 1840s, but the
focus on the Alamo generally, and on Davy Crockett in particular, avoids any
disturbing references to the subject. Americans may Remember the Alamo,
but here, too, before they retrieve aspects of their past for nationalist
purposes, they edit that past quite severely.
In remembering the Alamo in the way they do, many Americans of
course by no means all reinforce the sense of their nation as chosen, a
redeemer nation, in Ernest Tuvesens (1968) phrase; in any discussion of
American nationalism, this idea, sometimes in the context of the related
concept of Manifest Destiny, is what usually springs rst to mind. Roshwald
acknowledges this in his assertion that [i]n no contemporary instance is the
idea of covenant more central to national identity than it is in the United
States of America. The role and function of the Constitution in both
expressing and validating this sense of covenant is explored in some detail,
but the upholding of this document as an original covenant . . . made among
the members of the American nation as a whole during the Civil War was a
far from straightforward process. The observation that [i]n short order, then,
the Constitution became not just a framework of government but a consti-
tutive element of American national identity, rather simplies a series of
challenges and modications made between 1861 and 1865 and, again, the
issue of race, and the role of the Declaration of Independence in constituting
the strongest sacred document of the American nation is rather obscured.
Ultimately, rather than being a document that denes who they are as a
national community, the Constitution and arguably more so the Declara-
tion of Independence denes who they want to be; a crucial distinction, some
acknowledgement of which might have reinforced the point (Roshwald 2006:
1758, 1868).
Ultimately, much of the very ne discussion of the American case here is
driven by, and working toward, the present day, and to the ways in which
Americas sense of mission impacts on the modern world, and indeed on
modern nationalisms, not just the American variant. Tracking Americas
entry into world affairs in a major way with World War I the beginnings of
what became known, by Americans at least, as the American Century
Roshwald devotes a great deal of space to Woodrow Wilson, whose use of the
nations historical covenant and redeemer role was designed to do no less than
full the liberal internationalist vision (Roshwald 2006: 188). Absent is the
fact that one of Wilsons rst acts as president was to segregate government
ofces in Washington. Removing Wilsons global ambitions from the context
both of his domestic policies and the racial realities of early-twentieth-century
America obscures the compromises that he, and many Americans, made in
order to sustain the idea of the nations missionary role as exemplar for the
world.
Much the same observation could be made of elements in the Christian
Right in the United States today. This is a group that Roshwald emphasises,
but its quite natural tendency to align itself with both the ideology and the
rhetoric of some of the more depressing of the Old Testament prophets, whilst
making for good copy and strong evidence for Roshwalds thesis, may not be
reective of the nation as a whole. Here, the nation-image of the extreme
Right clashes somewhat with the broader self-image of the nation as a refuge
for immigrants, who have, as Roshwald notes, lent a concrete, human
dimension to the idea of the United States as the chosen nation (Roshwald
2006: 216). The discrepancy between the ideal and the immigrant reality, of
course, offers perhaps the most contested ground over which the various
component parts of American nationalism struggle, and the search for a
resolution is the subject of one of Roshwalds concluding contemplations of
the United States in his section on kinship imagery in civic frameworks of
nationhood. Here, a variety of commentators, from James Madison to
Theodore Roosevelt, provide their angle on how blood might relate to
belonging in the American case, leading Roshwald to conclude that it is
bloodshed, rather than blood itself, that seems to be the preferred method of
squaring the civic circle with its ethnic components. Tying many of his themes
together here mission, sacrice, violation and volition Roshwald shows
how the balance of power between literal and gurative ideas of national
kinship in Americas case have shifted over time, yet remain inextricably
linked to the nations historical core (Roshwald 2006: 272).
In the end, as far as Americas global inuence is concerned, we might
return to Woodrow Wilson, that most vocal of proponents of American
chosenness and mission. At the conclusion of this extremely stimulating study,
Roshwald makes what he may have considered a provocative but, by that
stage in the argument, almost throw-away point: the substance of American
national identity and patriotic solidarity, he proposes, is itself being
transformed by an entire generations monomaniacal obsession with the
acquisition of Hummers, Nikes, and iPods. He cites Robert Reichs observa-
tion really criticism, of course that the War on Terror was inaugurated by
a call to shop and, by extrapolation (since one cannot exist without the other)
to sell (Roshwald 2006: 300). This is no new departure for the United States,
however, neither in the context of war nor in the wider context of nationalism.
On this point, and in conclusion, Roshwald might wish to consider the
implications of Wilsons particular brand of retail therapy advice, offered to
American salesmen as the nation hovered on the brink of European conict:
Lift your eyes to the horizons of business. Do not look too close at the little processes
with which you are concerned, but let your thoughts and your imaginations run abroad
throughout the whole world. And with the inspiration of the thought that you are
Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity
wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and
more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.
12
Aviel Roshwald: texts and contexts in the study of nationalism
First, I wish to thank John Breuilly and Susan-Mary Grant for taking the time
to read and comment on my book and for participating in this debate. I am
also most grateful to Anthony Smith for his gracious chairing of the debate as
well as for his kind words, stimulating questions, and thoughtful commentary.
John Breuilly suggests that my most recent book attempts to answer either-
or questions about nationalism questions that I previously presented as
unanswerable in the abstract (Roshwald 2001). But in fact, The Endurance of
Nationalism is an attempt to explore how ostensibly contradictory aspects of
nationalism variously interact with one another depending on historical,
cultural, and geopolitical context. The only thing I point to that remotely
resembles a xed formula is the pervasiveness of both clashes and synergies
between ostensibly opposing forces such as the ethnic and civic, particularistic
and universalistic, primordial and constructed facets of nationalism. How
such dialectical relationships evolve and which of the contrasting potential-
ities of nationalism prevail are matters of circumstance, context, and human
choice, as I stress throughout the book.
My book questions the utility of theories of nationalism that identify it
exclusively with modernity. John Breuilly argues that my position is akin to
rejecting the connection between steam power and industrialisation. I would
argue conversely that associating nationalism exclusively with political
modernity is analogous to identifying the division of labor exclusively with
industrialisation, as though divisions of labor had not existed in one form or
another prior to the mechanisation of production. Just as it is impossible to
understand the impact of economic modernisation on the division of labor
without recognising the antiquity (in one form or another) of the latter, so
does the modernist perspective on nationalism stand in the way of exploring
how modernity has shaped, and been affected by, nationalism.
I am no post-modernist, and I fully agree with John Breuilly that the
analysis of discourse detached from historical context is an exercise in futility.
Text cannot be understood without context. That said, a very great propor-
tion of the context we have for the study of historical texts from any period
consists of other texts. To take the Hebrew Bible as an example, this is itself
a compilation of dozens of texts written, edited, and compiled over hundreds
of years. If we seek to study any given book of the Hebrew Bible, among our
most important interpretive and contextualising tools are to be found in other
Hebrew scriptures that ended up being included in the very compilation
known as the Hebrew Bible. There are linguistic, stylistic, topical, theological,
and ideological continuities, but also differences, among these various
scriptures as well as within many individual books of the Hebrew Bible. It
is precisely such tensions and inconsistencies that rst gave modern students
of the Bible the analytical traction they needed to subject the scriptures to
rigorous scholarly analysis. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology
vastly enhanced scholars ability to contextualise the Hebrew Scriptures. Of
course, the most critically important fruits of these archaeological labors were
themselves textual in nature. The ability to decipher ancient Egyptian,
Sumerian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic writings far surpassed in historiographical
importance any of the ancient temples, palaces, or fortications unearthed in
the Middle East. Likewise, our understanding of ancient Greek, Roman, and
Chinese societies draws disproportionately on written sources (Herodotus,
Thucydides, Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Sima Qian) that scholars have been able to
date and contextualise with varying degrees of accuracy based largely on other
written sources, including the inscriptions on ancient monuments, tombs,
coins, etc.
So in fact we know a good deal about the context of such ancient writings,
and I remain rather perplexed by the widespread reluctance among many
scholars outside of Jewish Studies to approach Biblical texts as historical
documents that can, with a critical eye, be plumbed for information like any
other ancient source. I suspect this reects the lingering notion that these are
sacred texts, to be taken at face value by believers and to be dismissed as
religious hokum by secular intellectuals. In any case, to say that we have no
sense of how widespread or inuential among Jews the writings of the Hebrew
Scriptures were by the late Second Temple period, or what some of the most
prevalent conceptions of ethnic, religious, and national identity were among
the Jewish communities of that era is no more true than to say that we have no
idea how inuential the ideal of the republic was in Ciceros Rome. To be
sure, we cannot in fact pinpoint with the accuracy we would like to exactly
what percentage of Romes population knew or cared anything about politics.
But reading Cicero against the background of other contemporaneous
evidence allows us to reasonably surmise that a broad cross-section of the
population was involved in or affected by the heated political and ideological
controversies and conicts of the day. Scholars have applied similar com-
parative analysis and triangulation techniques to various Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Greek-language Jewish sources (e.g. the Mishnah, the Jewish Apocrypha,
the writings of Philo and Josephus), Roman sources (notably Tacitus, but also
Cicero), carbon-dated letters from the Bar Kochba revolt in the second
century CE, numismatic evidence from the rst century CE Great Revolt as
well as the Bar Kochba revolt, and so forth. Thus we know that Jewish
communities from around the Mediterranean and Middle East maintained
their links to the Promised Land through annual contributions towards the
upkeep of the Temple in Jerusalem. Within Judaea, mass pilgrimages to the
Temple were the norm thrice annually. There are multiple attestations to the
regular reading of passages from the Torah in synagogues both within Judaea
and in the Diaspora by late Second Temple times. So it would actually require
quite a stretch of the imagination to think that a very broad socio-economic
cross-section of the Jewish population in Roman times was not exposed to and
familiar with the basic concepts of covenant, territory, and peoplehood that
are so central to the Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the narratives of the New
Testament would make no sense were this not the case. Jesus is portrayed as
coming from a humble background himself and preaching to the common
folk of Galilee. Yet his sermons clearly assume basic familiarity with the
precepts of the Torah. And why would the Romans inscribe INRI (the
acronym for the Latin phrase Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) on the
cross, as the Gospels record, if not to mock Jewish hopes for religio-political
redemption?
It is also clear that, regardless of what percentage of the population
embraced religio-nationalist beliefs, the intertwined conceptions of covenant,
land, and nation were politically operative in the great rebellions that broke
out against Roman rule in the rst and second centuries CE. Coins from the
Bar Kochba revolt of 132135 CE bear inscriptions such as Year Two of the
Freedom of Israel. The simplest reading of such inscriptions is as slogans of
national liberation heavily suffused with religio-messianic meanings as well,
to be sure. All of this is elaborated upon in great detail now in David
Goodblatts Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Goodblatt 2006). In
brief, a relative wealth of sources has afforded us an unusually nuanced
understanding of the cultural matrix of Jewish nationalism in the rst and
second centuries CE.
As to the Ancient Greek case, it is true, as Anthony Smith suggests, that the
face-to-face manner in which Athenian democracy functioned presents a
challenge to the notion of Athens as imagined community. Nonetheless,
having a citizenry numbering in the tens of thousands made Athens much
larger and potentially more dependent for its cohesion on nationalist myths
than was necessarily the case for some of the other, typically much smaller,
Greek poleis. Moreover, Athenians imagined themselves to be linked not only
to their contemporary fellow citizens, but also to their ancestors, and
presumably they had not met all of them. Athenian citizenship law was
very closely and explicitly linked to ideas of shared ancestry. In principle,
citizenry was off limits to residents of alien ancestry, even if the rule was often
observed in the breach. So there was a strong, not just incidental, ethno-
territorial component to ofcial, legal constructions of Athenian identity.
As Anthony Smith stresses, Athenians also saw themselves as part of a
larger, Hellenic cultural community, which complicates the question of where
the boundaries of nationhood lay. But if we were to decide that such
ambiguities are incompatible with the existence of national identity, then
for consistencys sake we would also have to avoid speaking of contemporary
Egyptian or Syrian national identity in light of the broader phenomenon of
pan-Arab ethno-cultural and political consciousness. We would not be able to
speak of Venezuelan or Mexican nationalisms given that they are embedded
within a wider matrix of Latin American cultural identity. I think it would be
more helpful to recognise that the difculty of dening boundaries of
membership and authority in the face of such blurred lines is one of the
fundamental challenges every nationalism has to tackle in one form or
another. Indeed, it is precisely the existence of such troubling grey zones
that spur nationalists to action in many cases.
Anthony Smith poses a challenging question about whether the Florentine
and Venetian republics should not be considered nation-states if ancient
Athens is to be counted as one. I must confess I am insufciently versed in the
history of Renaissance Italy to answer authoritatively one way or the other.
I would say that to the extent that these republics linked their authority to a
notion of bounded territory, popular identity, and distinctive public culture,
they could indeed be considered nation-states. To the extent that they were
governed by elites who did not concern themselves with questions of popular
identity or territorially rooted ethno-cultural distinctiveness (comparable, say, to
the Athenian myth of autochthony), they might be better classed as oligarchic
polities, or even as collective commercial enterprises with territorial bases.
How can it be, Professor Breuilly challenges, that in early twentieth-
century Eastern Europe there were peasant populations with little or no sense
of national identity whereas large populations were capable of being moved
by nationalist emotions in portions of the ancient world? Well, I would say
that it is a conceit of the moderns to imagine that none of their achievements
could have been anticipated by the ancients. In the case of the ancient Jews,
religion was the vehicle for propagation of national identity, and the
(con)textual evidence of multiple ancient sources gives us every reason to
think that the Jewish masses, urban and rural alike, were familiar with the
basic tenets of Biblical Judaism by Roman times. Ancient Athens was a
prosperous trading emporium with a very large urban population. There
should be little difculty understanding why mass politicisation was possible
there on a scale unimaginable among pre-1914 East European peasants.
So what role if any, one might ask, does my position leave for modernity? I
do not propose that all forms of nationalism are the same regardless of place
or epoch. Modern nationalism is distinctive by virtue of its establishment as
an abstract model and a global norm; hence its rapid spread largely under
the impact of imperial expansion and collapse to societies some of which
seem to have lacked any recognisably national form of consciousness prior to
their sudden incarnation as nation-states. In the case of the Jews, their
religious liturgy and traditions maintained the sense of national identity (in
the form of daily repeated expressions of longing for a return to the ancestral
land, redemption understood as a restoration of the Davidic kingdom, etc.)
across the time and space of the Diaspora. Where modern thinkers, starting
with Spinoza, innovated was by introducing the possibility of a secularised
Jewish national identity. Where Zionism innovated was not by projecting a
nationalist meaning on Biblical texts, but in rejecting what had become the
prevalent religious notion to the effect that national redemption must await
the coming of the messiah.
Zionism also emulated other modern nationalist movements by emphasis-
ing the notion of popular sovereignty. As I argue in the book, the idea of
popular sovereignty is implicit in the Biblical idea of the covenant between
God and his Chosen People (a covenant whose fundamental provisions enjoin
mutual obligation and common subjection to the Law upon the members of
the Chosen People, in return for which they are promised control of a
bounded territory). One of the distinguishing features of modern nationalism
is its association with the secularised version of the Covenant the Social
Contract
13
and its explicit embrace of the ideal of popular sovereignty. This
is certainly a good example of one of the signicant differences between pre-
modern and modern nationalisms. But we cannot place such differences in
perspective unless we also recognise the commonalities and continuities. And
to point out the salience of such continuities represents more than argument
by analogy it highlights one of the many blindspots that have prevented so
many theorists from seriously comparing pre-modern and modern manifesta-
tions of ethno-political identity.
To claim that the ancient Jewish case is so unique that it cannot be
subjected to historical comparison risks reversion to a pre-modern notion of
Sacred History that would undo two hundred years of critical Biblical
scholarship. Every historical case is unique. The point of comparative analysis
is to highlight the commonalities and differences among unique cases and to
explore whether there are some underlying patterns of cause and effect or
dialectical interaction that help shape or constrain the political and ideolo-
gical choices available to societies at various stages of development. What an
incorporation of ancient history into the comparative study of nationalism
suggests is that nationalism is liable to manifest itself whenever centralised
political authority (be it indigenous or imperial) either builds upon or
threatens the existence of a territorially centered community of cultural
fellowship. In other words, nationalism may be a more banal (dare I say
normal?) phenomenon than modernists have presumed an option available
to a greater variety of societies with a broader range of socio-economic
characteristics than has hitherto been thought to be the case. My sense is that
nationalism has become over-theorised, in the sense that a complex theory of
nationalism almost inevitably makes it appear more contingent on highly
specialised conditions than is in fact the case. The most interesting and
potentially productive areas of theorisation lie in the exploration of how and
why nationalism manifests itself in particular forms and patterns peaceful or
aggressive, inclusive or intolerant, religious or secular, sporadic or globally
pervasive and how it interacts with other categories of identity and
authority.
As may be apparent from some of my remarks, John Breuillys insistence
on nationalism as a political phenomenon is something I can accept, subject to
a broad denition of what constitutes the political. If I understand Breuilly
correctly, he contends that nationalism is a meaningful, analytically useful
concept only if it is strictly and exclusively associated with programs of radical
political opposition and change; the invocation of nationhood in any other
context is just so much empty verbiage or substanceless discourse. Given that,
I nd it curious that John Breuilly himself questions my application of the
term nationalism to the ancient Jews precisely because of his belief that what I
call nationalism only manifested itself in the framework of rebellions against
Rome. I would have thought this represented exactly the kind of dramatic
political operationalisation of national identity that he regards as the hall-
mark of true nationalism.
In any case, my sense is that drawing a sharp contrast between political
action and political culture presents us with a false dichotomy. An exclusive
identication of nationalism with oppositional political action would mean
that the moment a nationalist movement or regime gains its political ends the
nationalism in question ceases to exist unless and until the gains in question
are challenged or threatened. According to the narrow denition of nation-
alism, its success signies its extinction. Applying such a perspective to a well-
known case such as Serbian nationalism would suggest a scenario along the
following lines: The Serbians had a nationalist movement that took the form
of irredentism towards Bosnia prior to World War I. The creation of a
Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia brought Serbian nationalism to an end. The
destruction of Yugoslavia under Nazi occupation created a context in which
Serbian nationalism reappeared as a form of political and military resistance
until the reestablishment of Yugoslavia under Communist auspices. And then
Slobodan Milos evic reinvented oppositional Serbian nationalism as the
Communist edice began to crumble. I nd something profoundly unsatisfy-
ing about this vision of nationalism as a kind of ideological Rip van Winkle
that falls asleep for generations in the absence of a transformative agenda,
only to leap to its feet fully energised the moment circumstances create an
opening for radical political-territorial change.
One of the advantages I would claim for my broader denition of the term
nationalism is precisely that it can help us connect the dots and place the
periodic manifestations of politically self-conscious, activist nationalism in a
broad sense of historical context. Michael Billig has coined the term banal
nationalism to describe the ongoing cultivation of an ostensibly passive form
of national consciousness during periods when the security or boundaries of
the nation-state are not under threat (Billig 1995). Rogers Brubaker and
Margit Feischmidt have recently suggested that the presence or absence of an
available past and a continuous commemorative tradition spanning many
generations can play an important role in determining whether or not a
governments or movements invocation of nationalist themes strikes a
resonant chord among the targeted audience (Brubaker and Feischmidt
2004). Perhaps there is room for a terminological compromise whereby we
can distinguish between national consciousness and nationalism, with the
latter term denoting explicitly and self-consciously political manifestations of
the former. But I would contend that the two are mutually inuential and
closely intertwined: Nationalism is unlikely to take deep root where there is no
national consciousness to invoke, and of course national consciousness is in
turn shaped over time by the politics of nationalism. It is when we consider
particular manifestations of political nationalism outside the longer-term
framework of commemorative traditions that we risk losing all sense of
historical and cultural context.
Now, it is true that in my earlier book I took issue with the notion that
nationalisms infusion into mass consciousness is a precondition for its
success. Cases such as Lithuania and Estonia point to the possibility of
nation-states being created almost by default amidst a breakdown of larger
imperial structures. But the nationalist elites who play key roles in the
establishment of such nation-states must themselves have something tangible,
something emotionally resonant, to latch onto if they are to believe in the
nationalist gospel they preach. And their chances of successfully nationalising
the masses and thus gaining long-term stability and legitimacy for their states
are radically reduced if there is nothing culturally distinctive in language,
religion, or commemorative tradition about the putative nation. Thus,
Lithuania and Estonia made a certain obvious sense as nation-states insofar
as the Lithuanian and Estonian languages are signicantly different from
neighboring tongues. Belarusan identity has been harder to establish in part
because the linguistic frontier between Belarusan and Russian is so blurry.
Furthermore, what one might term overnight nationalisms are likely to
arise only in a world where the nation-state has already become a dominant
and attractive model of socio-political organisation. And the nation-state
would not have been such an inuential model in societies lacking powerful
and longstanding traditions of territorially and culturally bounded popular
identity had it not been for its association with great powers such as Britain
and France, where nationalism did arise gradually and incrementally out of
the intersection of cultural homogeneities and heterogeneities with the rise of
the centralised state and the concepts of social contract and popular
sovereignty. Comparable processes (i.e. ones marked by distinctive elements
as well as startling similarities to their latter-day counterparts) had happened
sporadically in ancient times in such cases as ancient Judaea and Athens,
where the crystallisation of a centralised kingdom and city-state intersected
with the concepts of covenant and democracy, respectively. And it so happens
that the rise of the nation-state in countries such as Britain, France, and the
Netherlands was heavily inuenced by, among other things, the covenantal
model of nationhood found in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is one of many
reasons why an understanding of modern nationalism remains incomplete
without: (a) a clear conception of its ancient predecessors and (b) an under-
standing of the intimately dialectical relationship between national conscious-
ness and nationalism.
Does my emphasis on the recentness of nationalism as a quasi-universal
phenomenon mean, as Anthony Smith provocatively asks, that I am a
modernist after all? If the linking of statehood to territorially bounded,
popular cultural identity is a modern phenomenon, then I suppose one could
say that I am a modernist, but one who believes that this aspect of modernity
could and did manifest itself in ancient times. Conversely, one of the
distinctively paradoxical qualities of modern nationalism has been the
combination of its powerful global appeal as a basis for political legitimacy
and its weakness as a source of internal cohesion in countries, many of them
post-colonial political-territorial entities, that lack any preexisting tradition of
shared cultural distinctiveness or political unity and whose governments often
respect the principles of popular sovereignty in name only.
In response to Susan-Mary Grants critique of my discussion of religion
and American nationalism, of course there are radical differences between
seventeenth-century Puritanism and the contemporary Evangelical Right. But
are contemporary right-wing religious conceptions of Americas relationship
to the world not shaped in part by a continuously evolving (and diversely
interpreted) tradition of American chosenness? After all, my point is that even
secular notions of Americas role in the world are shaped by an earlier
religious tradition, just as English Protestant exceptionalism evolved into
secularised notions of Britains mission in the world that survived long past
the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. I do not mean to suggest that all forms of
religious nationalism are the same regardless of historical context. I do mean
to say that the (unavoidably selective) memory of past syntheses of religious
and national identity form part of the context, the cultural matrix, within
which latter-day formulations of identity are made. Again, this is not to
suggest that all Americans embrace an explicitly religious vision of national
identity or national mission. My claim is rather that the legacy of the
Covenantal ideal continues to color both secular and religious, liberal and
conservative, conceptions of the United States role in the world even as that
ideal continues to be adapted, shaped, and contested by political and social
forces over time.
Susan-Mary Grants point about the absence of a Civil War memorial on
the National Mall in Washington, DC is well taken. This is indeed a perfect
example of Renans point about the importance of selective amnesia in the
maintenance of national consciousness (Renan 1996). I do describe the
sanitised nature of post-Reconstruction commemorations of the Civil War
on p. 59 of the book.
I certainly agree with Professor Grant that the topic of race is inextricably
and painfully intertwined with the evolution of American national identity.
Racism as a general phenomenon comes up late in my discussion of American
identity because of the books thematic structure: The chapter dealing with
ethnic and civic forms of nationalism happens to be the last one. However, it
is important to recognise that the history of American racial politics cannot be
reduced to a simple BlackWhite dichotomy. In the context of American
society, Latinos have also persistently been perceived and classied as
members of a racial minority. And the sections of The Endurance of
Nationalism that deal with the Alamo focus primarily on the clash between
Anglo and Latino claims about the history and symbolic meaning of this
political shrine. (On the racial aspects of that clash, see especially pp. 1067.)
For that matter, I do also describe the role of slavery in the events leading up
to the rebellion of Texas against Mexico (on p. 92 of the book) and I point to
the traditional reluctance on the part of Anglo-Texans to acknowledge the
signicance of this factor (p. 94).
Prof. Grant is certainly right to draw attention to the shocking incongruity
between Woodrow Wilsons professions of idealism in foreign policy and his
institutionalisation of racial segregation in the federal government. Wilsons
engagement with the world ended in failure and a withdrawal into isolation-
ism. In the course of Americas more consistent engagement with the world
during the Cold War, the incongruity between democratising rhetoric abroad
and racial segregation at home became too painful an embarrassment to bear,
and this may have been one of the factors contributing to the federal
governments gradual embrace of the civil rights cause. The crisis unleashed
by the September 11 attacks has placed new strains on the American
commitment to human and civil rights even as it has stimulated a renewed
rhetorical commitment to the global propagation of pluralistic and demo-
cratic ideals. How the United States contends with this new version of a
familiar dilemma will, I suspect, remain a politically volatile issue for years to
come.
Anthony D. Smith: Postscript: Athens and Jerusalem
The Debate focused mainly on questions about the enduring quality of
nationalism from antiquity to the modern American experience, and in
particular on questions of denition and the two cases of ancient nationalism
that Aviel Roshwald explored in The Endurance of Nationalism, ancient
Athens and Judea.
Roshwald argued that nationalism (as well as the nation) is ancient and
modern and so, chronologically enduring. And he does so on the basis of a
broad denition of nationalism, which he denes as any ideology or set of
attitudes, emotions, and mentalities based on the assertion of such claims
(regardless of whether or not those claims have been fullled). The claims in
question are to some form of collective, bounded, territorial sovereignty
in the name of its distinct identity (Roshwald 2006: 3).
This seems to me to conate nationalism with national sentiment. For
analytic purposes, I nd it helpful to separate the two concepts (as well as
both from the concept of nation). I dene nationalism as an ideological
movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on
behalf of a population some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual
or potential nation whereas national sentiment is a feeling of attachment
to the nation and a desire for its well-being. Hence, in its effects, nationalism is
always political, even if it does not always aim for outright independence and
sovereignty. In this book, Roshwald has in my view dened national
sentiment rather than nationalism, and this alters the basis of his argument
about the two ancient cases, which for him attest to the antiquity, and hence
endurance, of nationalism.
Ancient Athens and Greece
Turning to Athens, there are two issues. The rst concerns the possibility of
nding nationalism either in ancient Greece or in Athens?
Ancient Greece was certainly an ethnocultural network, but we nd no
ideological movement to unify Greece before 338 BC, only a few ideologues of
pan-Hellenism around Isocrates in the early fourth century. There was some
Greek national sentiment, albeit eeting, especially in the Persian Wars, and
plenty of ethno-cultural exclusion of non-Greeks, albeit intermittent. None of
this can be called nationalism.
Ancient Athens evinced a fervent patriotism on occasion, and its sense of
solidarity was decidedly political (Hall, 1997). It also introduced an ethnic
criterion for citizenship (though not for residence) in 45l BC. But there was no
ideological movement in Athens to attain and maintain autonomy, unity and
identity of an actual or potential nation. If we are to believe Thucydides
report, Pericles in his Funeral Oration asked the Athenians to fall in love with
their city (polis), not with their nation (pace Aristotle), much less with Greece.
This raises the second and more important issue: should we regard either
ancient Greece or Athens as a nation? I dene a nation as a named and self-
dening human community whose members occupy an historic territory,
cultivate shared symbols, memories, myths and traditions, create and dis-
seminate a distinctive public culture, and observe uniform laws and shared
customs.
Moses Finley (1986) argued that ancient Greeks should be seen as
comprising a Kulturnation, and not a Staatsnation. I think even this rather
overstates its degree of unity, and I would prefer to treat them as a rather
dispersed ethnic community, sharing common festivals, cults, calendars,
genealogies, interrelated dialects, architectural styles, etc., but one that was
also sub-divided in many of these respects into Ionian, Dorian, Aeolian and
Boeotian sub-ethnies; and certainly not a nation as I have dened it (see
Alty 1982).
What of ancient Athens? Edward Cohen (2000) claims that, because of its
size and scale, as well as Aristotles judgment, ancient Athens constituted an
ethnos (nation), not a polis (city-state) like the other Greek city-states. Attica
was very large and populous by the standards of the times, and its citizens
quite dispersed (and they did not by any means all come together to debate
and decide things). The Athenians also had uniform laws and shared customs,
as well as a strong territorial attachment. At the same time, Athens public
culture was not really distinctive; it shared much of it with other Greek poleis,
especially the Ionian ones, and the myths, symbols, memories and traditions,
which its members cultivated, though they had local variants, were the
common coinage of all Greeks, as was their language.
However, in Athens we have one of the ancient models of public culture
that was to be so crucial for early modern Europe, partly because some of the
social and symbolic processes which conduce to nationhood were present in
the Athenian case, even if their effects were diluted by the salience of other
larger types of community, such as the Greek ethnic community and its sub-
ethnies.
Besides, this still leaves unresolved the question I raised at the opening. If
we decide to designate Athens as a nation, we would have to do the same for
Republican Rome before c.150 BC, for medieval Florence, Genoa, Milan and
Venice, as well as some of the larger Swiss, Flemish, Dutch and German city-
states.
The difculty is not that politics has been omitted from the denition of
nationalism, for here we are dealing with the concept of the nation, but rather
that, though some of the medieval examples like Florence and Venice were
called nazioni and drew on classical models, the communities in question
lacked cultural distinctiveness; they tended to be embedded in larger cultural-
linguistic units, as ancient Athens was in Greece. Of course, this raises the
important question of how these larger city-states related to subsequent and
overlapping nations.
As for the question of evidence in ancient Greece, we are reliant for early
Greek and Athenian history mainly on Thucydides and Herodotus, and there
are few external records to act as a check until the Persian Wars in the early
fth century. Besides, Herodotus was dependent on his foreign informants for
his tales about various peoples before the Greeks. As for Thucydides, he had
few sources for early Greek history, and he most probably invented the
speeches which he puts into the mouths of the spokesmen for various poleis in
the course of the Peloponnesian War.
Ancient Judah/Judea
The evidence here is much more limited and controversial.
Nevertheless, there are some external records that can act as partial checks
some Egyptian and Assyrian records from the tenth to seventh centuries BC;
and for the later post-Exilic period, various texts (some of them collected in
the Apocrypha, notably Maccabees I and II), the Dead Sea Scrolls (some of
which date from the second century BC) and Josephus Antiquities as well as
Jewish War, not to mention various Greek and Latin authors from the fourth
century BC onwards.
As for the Hebrew Bible, while scholars are very divided on the dating of the
Torah, there are strong arguments for considering the date of its initial
compilation to be in the late eighth to late seventh centuries (Hezekiah to
Josiah, both of whom were strong reformist kings), with some of the laws dating
to even earlier periods. (See the essay by Frendo in John Day 2004; Schniede-
wind 2005; also Friedman, 1997.) The Book of Deuteronomy is generally
thought to be that found in the Temple in Josiahs reign, c. 62l BC, and to have
been read by Josiah to all the people (II Kings 22); the Books of Kings
themselves are also thought to have come from that period or the slightly later
time of the Babylonian Exile. As for the texts, the Masoretic Texts of c. AD
900 are more or less identical to the Dead Sea Scrolls and it is very likely that
Ezras Torah (read to the people of Jerusalem) of c. 450 BC was much the same.
For our purposes, the truth-content of events prior to the United Monarchy
is far less important than their mythic content, as Walker Connor reminds us;
for example, the Mosaic texts were re-enacted in successive Passover festivals
ordered by various kings of Judah (and of course they still are).
How then shall we designate ancient Judah and its ideology?
Once again, we must address two issues: rst, can we nd nationalism in
ancient Judah and/or Judea?
On the denition given above, not before the Roman period, i.e. the
Zealots and Bar-Kochba. The latter were undoubtedly political, or better
religio-political, uprisings to restore the Hasmonean national state, which
Herod and then the Romans had taken over. I think this distinguishes them
from mere ethnic resistance movements; though both kinds of movement are
political, the Zealots and Bar-Kochba aimed to restore national autonomy,
unity and identity, and rebuild a Jewish state (Mendels 1992).
The second issue is whether or how far we can speak of a Jewish nation in
ancient Judah and/or Judea?
We might start by asking whether there was any national sentiment
among the elites of the kingdom of Judah or among the Persian-period Jewish
community in and around Jerusalem, and later of Judea. My reading of the
Second Book of Kings, especially the reigns of Hezekiah (and his resistance to
Sennacherib) and Josiah (again, against the retreating Assyrians and advan-
cing Egyptians), like that of Steven Grosby (2002), suggests there was
considerable national sentiment, at least in Jerusalem and its Temple (an
institution of central importance for Judaism and the people, e.g. the three
annual pilgrim festivals). Of course, we shall never know how far it spread to
the villagers of Judah, and later Judea. But Josiahs reform programme was
pretty root and branch (literally) and few could have been unaware of it.
Whether they shared his religio-national zeal, we shall never know. But they
well knew the alternatives on offer from Egypt and Mesopotamia and I
share the view that the protracted threats from Assyria, in particular, helped
to bring more inhabitants of Judea over to Yahwism and its idea of the
Covenant and the chosen people.
It follows that, from an early (pre-Exilic) period, the central ideas of the
Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) were never just the preserve of the Temple
hierarchy, the Court and the Prophets; they percolated out to the villages
(Tekoa (Amos), Anathoth (Jeremiah)), and were reinforced by royal, and
later priestly-scribal (Ezra), reforms. By the second century BC, with the
formation of religious parties such as Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes, and
the beginnings of the synagogue, they were much more widely disseminated,
as Seth Schwartz (2004) so convincingly argues.
So, can we speak of a Jewish nation in the seventh century, or again in the
second century BC to second century AD?
There are strong arguments in favour of such a designation.
There was a considerable degree of territorialisation of memories and
attachments (centred on the capital in Jerusalem), as well as of uniformity of
common customs of the Torah, of a distinctive public culture in the Temple, a
clear self-denition vis-a` -vis others, and a fund of shared memories, myths,
symbols, values and traditions. Jewish distinctiveness was a common theme of
classical authors, many of them (but by no means all) hostile to the Jews.
Admittedly, the rise of a self-conscious Jewish nation in the seventh century
was cut off by Josiahs early death in battle in 605 BC and the subsequent
conquest of Jerusalem (and deportations of Jewish elites) by Nebuchadrezzar
in 586. But it had lasted long enough to preserve in an elite a Jewish self-
consciousness with a programme of (biblical) compilation and editing, which
eventuated in the political act of restoration to Judah and rebuilding of the
Temple after 520, which on turn became the basis for a (much later) semi-
autonomous client-kingdom and Jewish commonwealth.
So, while modern Zionism undoubtedly added a new layer of nationalist
meanings, it had a rm foundation on which to build. Given the presence of
strong national sentiments in ancient Judea and the long line of later medieval
Jewish thought about ancient Israel and Judah and the Land of Israel (Eretz-
Israel), neither Zionism in general nor Moses Hess in particular can take the
credit for the persistence of the vivid sense of Jewish nationhood among so
many Jews before and into modern times.
Hess (like Rousseau before him) knew very little about the history of the
Jews or Jewish tradition (neither did Herzl) though he was right about the
communal orientation of Judaism. It was because of that long Jewish
tradition that the persecuted Jewish masses of Eastern Europe were attracted
to political Zionisms promise of return and regeneration as a nation upon the
ancient homeland and the restoration of an independent Jewish state, not seen
since 63 BC.
Notes
1 Henceforth I will refer to this book as Ethnic Nationalism and the book under debate as
Endurance.
2 In my own work I favour political denitions of nationalism. I also prefer to treat nation as
an ideological term used by nationalists rather than a group. No group denition works.
Roshwald retreats to claims made by the nation (implying that the nation exists) or on behalf
of the group (i.e by nationalists).
3 My main source for Bible scholarship is Barton and Muddiman (2001).
4 Nationalist historians of Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and other European countries
often trace the lineage of their nation back to periphery resistance against the Romans.
5 I argue that nationalism rst develops as distinct idea, sentiment and politics when
disentangled from and opposed to dominant political ideas, sentiments and politics. It is this
explicit dissent (also between and within different nationalisms) which distinguishes it and makes
it much more than an ethnocentric element in discourses about divine authority. Of course, once
this oppositional idea has achieved power, it becomes one element in a new structure of authority.
6 The importance of conict within nationalism is stressed in Hutchinson (2005).
7 See Anthony Smiths criticisms of Roshwalds argument concerning Greek and Athenian
nationalism.
8 The most helpful argument to this effect that I know of is Zimmer (2003).
9 Finer (1999) writes of Hebrew kingship as being limited but the only institutional
mechanism appears to be the individual initiatives taken by prophets and judges who act not in
the name of the people but of God. Indeed, the people are usually a great disappointment to the
prophets.
10 This is true even of as hard-headed and secular-political an analysis as that of Finer (1999).
11 This is the term used in Calhoun (2007) (see chapter 7, note 1, for an account of the term).
12 Woodrow Wilson, Democracy of Business, Speech delivered 10 July 1916 to the Worlds
Salesmanship Congress, Detroit, in Albert Bushnell Hart (ed.), Selected Addresses and Public
Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacic, 2002): 132-37,
quotation 137.
13 The relationship between Biblical Covenant and modern social contract theory consists of
more than some references to the Hebrew Bible in Thomas Hobbes work. Much of Spinozas
political theory is presented in the form of a secular reinterpretation of the Biblical Covenant.
Political Hebraism substantively shaped the work of other Dutch and English social-contract
theorists of the seventeenth century. For references to the literature on this topic, see The
Endurance of Nationalism, p. 228. See also Jacobs (2006).
References
Alty, J. H. 1982. Dorians and Ionians, Journal of Hellenic Studies 102: 114.
Barton, John and John Muddiman (eds.), 2001. The Oxford Bible Commentary. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications.
Brubaker, Rogers and Feischmidt, Margit. 2004. 1848 in 1998: the politics of commemoration in
Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, in Rogers Brubaker (ed.), Ethnicity without Groups.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Calhoun, Craig. 2007. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London:
Routledge.
Cohen, Edward. 2000. The Athenian Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Day, John (ed.), 2004. In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel. London: T. and T. Clark International.
Finer, S. M. 1999. The History of Government from the Earliest Times: 1, Book 1, chapter 5, The
Jewish Kingdoms, 1025587 BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finley, Moses. 1986. The Use and Abuse of History. London: Hogarth Press.
Friedman, Richard E. 1997. Who Wrote the Bible? (2nd edn). San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins.
Goodblatt, David. 2006. Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Grosby, Steven. 2002. Biblical Ideas of Nationality, Ancient and Modern. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisebrauns.
Hall, Jonathan. 1997. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hess, Moses. 1962. Rom und Jerusalem (1862). in Horst Lademacher (ed.), Moses Hess:
Ausgewahlte schriften. Cologne: J. Melzer.
Hutchinson, John. 2005. Nations as Zones of Conict. London: Sage.
Jacobs, Jonathan. 2006. Return to the sources: political Hebraism and the making of modern
politics, Hebraic Political Studies 1, 3: 32842.
Kedourie, Elie. 1993. Nationalism (4th edn). Oxford: Blackwell, [1960].
Mendels, Doron. 1992. The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism. New York: Doubleday.
Piehler, G. Kurt. 2004. Remembering War the American Way, Paperback edn. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Books, [1995].
Renan, Ernest. 1996. What is a Nation?, trans. Martin Thom in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor
Suny (eds.), Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Robin, Ron. 1995. A foothold in Europe: the aesthetics and politics of American war
cemeteries in Western Europe, Journal of American Studies 29, 1: 5572.
Roshwald, Aviel. 2001. Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the
Middle East, 19141923. London: Routledge.
Roshwald, Aviel. 2006. The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schniedewind, William. 2005. How the Bible Became a Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Schwartz, Seth. 2004. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Tuveson, Ernest Lee. 1968. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of Americas Millennial Role. Chicago, IL
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Zimmer, Oliver. 2003. Boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources: towards a process-oriented
approach to national identity, Nations and Nationalism 9, 2: 17393.

Nations and Nationalism ANTHONY D. SMITH JOHN BREUILLY SUSAN-MARY GRANT AVIEL ROSHWAL Aviel Roshwald's The Endurance of Nationalism

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Nations and Nationalism ANTHONY D. SMITH JOHN BREUILLY SUSAN-MARY GRANT AVIEL ROSHWAL Aviel Roshwald's The Endurance of Nationalism

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Fourth Nations and Nationalism debate on

Aviel Roshwalds The Endurance of

S-ar putea să vă placă și