PART I

CIVIL RELIGION AND NATIONALISM

 CHAPTER ONE

HIERARCHY AND COVENANT IN THE

FORMATION OF NATIONS

Anthony D. Smith

For many people, nation and nationalism are nineteenth century phe-
nomena that have no place in a global era. On the one hand, they view
with disgust and alarm recent examples of ethnic conflict and national
antagonism. Furthermore, they continue to affirm the “real”, long-term
obsolescence of nations and nationalism. Today’s world, they argue, is
too interdependent, its economies too intertwined and its mass com-
munications too all-encompassing to permit the finitude of national
boundaries and the exclusivity of national pride. Ours is a hybrid
world, with multiethnic, multi-faith, polyglot societies, such as used to
hold sway in pre-modern and pre-nationalist epochs. Today, accelerat-
ing technological change, trade and currency flows, migration rates,
patterns of labour mobility, cultural intermingling, secularisation and
rationalism all militate against ethnic unity, national communities and
nation states. In such a world, nations and nationalism at best, to use
Eric Hobsbawm’s words, can be a “complicating factor” and no longer
the “major vector of change” that they once had been.1
I do not wish to deny the massive globalising trends that have
engulfed large areas of our planet, though these are not as new as we
often suppose. Instead, I am concerned only with the impact of such
change on the forms and traditions of nations and national identities,
and here I think that we can discern two kinds of responses to the thesis
that globalisation is rendering nations obsolete. The weaker response is
that national states, and hence nations, are adapting to changed condi-
tions by opting for an inclusive, secular “civic” nationalism, either of
the slightly ironical and half-believed variety found in Britain, or of the
more strident, aggressive, secularist type recently on display in France.
The stronger response is that nations, and in some cases national states,

1
See Hobsbawm 1992, ch. 6. On the obsolescence of the national state, see Horsmann
and Marshall 1994.
22 anthony d. smith

are actually being revitalised by the great global changes, and that the
problems of immigration, in particular, are forcing many people in
the West to rethink and reconnect with national identities that their
forbears had often taken for granted. In other words, for all the civic
veneer, there is still considerable attachment to an “ethnic” conception
of the nation and its homeland, and a desire to adapt and make use of
its deep cultural resources in a rapidly changing world.2
It is this stronger response that forms the context of my argument
here. For at the root of these persisting popular ethnic and territorial
attachments lie certain sacred cultural resources, which derive from
pre-modern social and cultural traditions, legacies of antiquity and the
Middle Ages.
The primary goal is to outline these legacies, and more particularly the
sacred traditions to which they gave rise, and illustrate how they con-
tinue to sustain and shape the persisting sense of national identity in
the modern world. My suggestion is that the antiquity, longevity, scope
and sacrality of these traditions go a long way to explaining both the
persistence of nations and the forms that they take.

Theories and Definitions

This is an important issue, and before addressing it, I need to intro-

duce the broader theoretical context. I will start with some preliminary
observations about the phenomena of nationalism, nation and national
identity.

l. Nationalism refers to a particular kind of ideological movement

that seeks to attain and maintain autonomy, unity and identity for a
human population, with some of its members deeming it to constitute
an actual or potential “nation”. As such, it needs to be distinguished
from “national sentiment” or national consciousness, which is a feel-
ing of belonging to a given nation and a desire to increase its status,
power and prosperity. Whereas national sentiment may be found in
many epochs, the ideological movement of nationalism, I argue, is an
early modern and modern phenomenon, and is rarely, if ever, apparent
before the sixteenth century.

2
For the “ethnic-civic” debate, see Miller 1995; also the critique in Yack 1999.
 hierarchy and covenant 23

2. Nation as a concept is both a category of collective identity and a

historically variable form of human community, i.e., the result of cer-
tain broad processes. Ideal-typically, it can be defined as a named and
self-defined human community whose members possess a homeland,
cultivate myths, symbols and memories, create and disseminate a public
culture, and share and observe common laws and customs. Nations, in
principle, can be found in every historical epoch, but in practice they
tend to flourish mainly in the early modern and modern eras, initially
in Europe.

3. The concept of national identity is closely related. It can be defined as

the reproduction and reinterpretation of the pattern of myths, symbols,
memories, values and traditions of a national community, and the iden-
tification of individuals with that pattern and its resulting heritage. These
processes of reproduction, selection, reinterpretation and transmission
of a shared national identity are vital in ensuring the persistence of
nations, but they in turn draw on certain cultural resources or “sacred
foundations”—traditions that are at once usable and sacred.

4. One further concept needs to be described here, that of ethnie or

ethnic community, which I define as a named human community with
myths of common ancestry, historical memories and one or more ele-
ments of shared culture, including a link with a particular territory
and a measure of solidarity. While few nations are directly related to
antecedent ethnies, many of them draw on the cultural resources of such
ethnies, or seek to model themselves on them. This is especially true of
ethnically conceived nations and ethnic nationalisms.3

Yet, to an older generation of scholars, it seemed natural to assume that

every bounded group boasting a collective name, history and culture
should be regarded as a nation, and that nationalism was simply the
national sentiment of nations under threat—a position recently revived
by some medievalist “neo-perennialist” historians, who claim to find
evidence of at least some nations already in the Middle Ages. In contrast,
historians of the modern world, as well as most political scientists, adopt

3
There is a vast literature on definitions of these terms. See, especially, Connor
1994, ch. 4, and Smith 2001, ch. 1.
24 anthony d. smith

a “modernist” stance. They tend to regard as nations only those political-

legal communities that are autonomous, possess borders, are legitimated
(if not created) by nationalism and, above all, boast mass participation
in the social and political life of the nation. As a result, nations are held
to be recent and novel formations, unknown in the ancient or medieval
worlds of empires, city-states and world religions.4
It goes without saying that distinctive histories and cultures, as
I have myself argued, are important for the creation and definition of
nations; the same is true for autonomous political-legal communities
and citizenship. But the perennialist who sees nations everywhere, in
every age, is operating with a definition of “nation” that is too loose and
vague to be helpful, for it is one that can include every ethnic group
and caste, and even some city-states. On the other hand, the modernist
operates with a highly restricted conception of “nation” derived from
modern Western experience, which, as such, tends to rule out a priori
non-Western “ethnic”, as well as pre-modern, types of cultural com-
munities from the category of “nation”. In this conception, non-Western
and pre-modern collective cultural identities become simply negative
mirror-images of the modern West, rather than being understood and
treated in their own right and context. The result is that although the
modernist conception adequately defines the modern nation found in
the West, it is of little use in delineating the features of other possible
kinds of nation.5
Perhaps more importantly, these arguments tend to deflect atten-
tion from dimensions and issues that, I believe, are much more central
to our understanding of ethnicity and nationhood, dimensions that
have been neglected by both major paradigms. I am referring in par-
ticular to the dimensions of community and territory, without which
it would be impossible to conceive of nations or, for that matter, of
ethnies.

4
For a recent modernist statement, see Connor 2004; for the “neo-perennialist”
argument, see Hastings 1997.
5
The view that the modernist conception is too restricted is advanced by Smith
(2002). Routledge (2003) contends that modernists tend to use the past as a mirror-
image of modernity and the modern nation.
 hierarchy and covenant 25

Hierarchical Traditions

As noted, nations are forms of human community that are generated

by the combination of certain broad social processes. These processes
include:

l) Self-definition, a process by which a named “we” is increasingly dif-

ferentiated from named “others”;
2) Cultivation of myths, symbols and memories, by which a founder
heritage of distinctive cultural elements is acquired and transmitted
to future generations;
3) Observance and dissemination of common laws and customs, through
increasingly standardised procedures and institutions;
4) Creation and dissemination of a distinctive public culture, through
shared rituals, symbolic codes and education; and
5) Territorialisation, by which popular memories and attachments are
located in a territory conceived to be a sacred homeland.

Here I want to focus on the last two processes, and especially on the
formation and dissemination of a distinctive public culture. In particular,
I am concerned with certain contrasts and oppositions in these proc-
esses that create different types of ethnie and/or nations, and which,
I argue, continue to exercise considerable influence today.
Starting with the formation of distinctive public cultures, already
in antiquity, three principles of sacred cultural community can be
discerned: the hierarchical, the covenantal and the civic. As a form of
ranked sacred order, hierarchy can be used to describe many different
kinds of communities and states, but essentially it denotes an order that
has been sanctified because it is felt to mirror and embody the celestial
order on earth. Hierarchy comes in different forms. In one version, the
ruler is a god himself and is assisted by priests and nobles who partake
of his sanctity and assist him in his divine role. More commonly, the
ruler is the god’s representative on earth, issuing commands in his name
and exercising his authority in his territories, again with the assistance
of clergy and nobles.
When an ethnic community is more or less coextensive with the
state, it too partakes of this kind of order, and its mode of solidarity
and culture is infused with the principle of hierarchy. Ancient Egypt
provides a prototype of this in its purest form. Here, the Pharaoh was
26 anthony d. smith

regarded as a god and embodied Maat, the Truth, and for long peri-
ods the priests of Re exercised immense influence in the sacred order
of Egyptian society. Mesopotamian society illustrates the alternative
form of hierarchy. Here the ruler was often accorded divine honours.
However, he was himself the human representative of the god, receiving
from the god’s hand the code of laws that implemented this form of
sacred rule on earth, as Hammurabi received his code from the hand
of Shamash, the sun-god.6
Typical of this kind of hierarchical solidarity is the case of Sasanid
Persia, from the third to seventh centuries of the Common Era. In this
empire, state and church became closely linked after the priest Kartir
reformed the old Mazdaist cult, instituting the Zoroastrian religion
with its fire-altars, temples and religious officials. This allowed the state
religion to be used in an attempt to subjugate and bind an ethnically
and religiously heterogeneous population to the dominant Persian
ethnie and its Zoroastrian creed. The rulers only had limited success
in this project, and even powerful kings like Chosroes II failed to unite
the population. Nevertheless, despite large-scale popular revolts, power
remained firmly in the hands of the great landed nobles and priests;
and Chosroes and his successors were able to inspire a cultural and
historical revival that was to bear fruit later in the New Persian litera-
ture, and especially in the epic myths of Iranian ancestry embodied in
Firdausi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings).7
Late medieval Muscovy and early modern Russia are further examples
of the ethnic hierarchical principle. After the fall of Constantinople and
his marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Ivan III sought
to legitimise his primacy in the Russian-speaking territories by adopting
some of the Byzantine ritual and regalia, and by publicising the Russian
realm as the sole remaining bastion of Christian Orthodoxy.
In the next century, this was reinforced by a new ideal, that of Russia
as the “Third Rome”, and the belief that Russians, because of the purity
of their Orthodox faith, constituted a chosen people. Hierarchical
solidarity was further boosted by Ivan IV’s coronation ceremony and

6
For ancient Egypt, see Trigger et al. 1983. On Babylonia, see the monumental
studies of Frankfort 1948 and Jacobsen 1976. The influence of ancient religious
pantheons and their relationships with later empires and civilisations are analysed
by Armstrong (1982, ch. 3).
7
On ancient Achaemenid and Sasanid Persia, see the detailed analysis in Frye 1966;
and more recently, Wiesehofer 2004.
 hierarchy and covenant 27

by the image of the Tsar as the father of his people. It was further
strengthened by the various Church Councils, the composed works
of the Metropolitan, including The Book of Degrees of the Imperial
Genealogy, and the daily liturgy and public ceremonies, such as Palm
Sunday, all of which tended to unite state and church. Nevertheless,
acquisition of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire in the subse-
quent decades accompanied an increasing divergence between Tsar and
people, polity and ethnie, in which hierarchical political solidarity was
often counterposed with a more egalitarian covenantal community of
the Russian people.8
As this example demonstrates, the hierarchical principle could
express and sustain a belief in ethnic election through the ideal of an
ethnic and political mission. Often, the latter principle amounts to no
more than testifying to the true faith and embodying it in a distinctive
public culture. But it may also support expansion of the kingdom in
order to bring the true faith to the heathen. We can see this mission at
work most clearly in Christian kingdoms—in medieval France, Spain,
Hungary, Serbia and Russia. But it can also be found to a certain extent
in Islamic states, notably in Safavid Persia, and as far away as Tokugawa
Japan, albeit shorn of doctrinal and expansionary aspects. Thus, while
the Judeo-Christian component of hierarchical solidarity and missionary
election is undoubtedly the most vivid, widespread and dynamic, it is
not the sole example in ethnic election and its consequences.9

Covenant and Election

The ideal of a covenant between a deity and his people is most readily
associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. While not in practice
incompatible with hierarchy, the covenantal principle implies a more
egalitarian conception of the community and a more intensive and
intimate form of sacred communion between its members. In this
conception, the deity chooses a community to carry out his will by
separating itself from others and devoting its members to the sacred task

8
For the history of early modern Russia, see Crummey 1987; the divergence of
state/Tsar and people is highlighted by Hosking 1993.
9
For the centrality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, see Hastings 1997. This
view overlooks Japanese and Muslim societies, notably Safavid Iran and the
Arabs, who, though united in a wider umma, often displayed a missionary ethno-
religious impulse.
28 anthony d. smith

of performance and witness entrusted to it. The task in question varies

in detail, but it usually involves regulating the life of the community
and the individual through a moral and ritual code that sanctifies the
community, and through it, the world.10
There is more than one version of the covenantal principle. In cases
where it is combined with some form of hierarchical solidarity, the
covenant is often effectuated through some agent of the community,
usually the church. This was true of early Christian Armenia, where
from the early fourth century, the Holy Apostolic Church served as
the fulcrum of the covenant between Christ and His people. This is
hardly surprising in view of the missionary founder’s close kin rela-
tionship with the Armenian ruling house, reinforced by the attempts
of Gregory’s successors to retain unity among Armenia’s great landed
magnates through the offices of the Apostolic Church and in view of
its culture of scriptural devotion and holy martyrdom for church and
kingdom.11
But the covenant may also be effectuated directly by “the people”
as a kin community. This is the Sinaitic ideal in the Old Testament.
Though Moses acted as an intermediary, the whole people of Israel
are recorded as witnessing God’s presence and agreeing to His will,
as detailed in the law code handed down by Moses: “And he [Moses]
took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people:
and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient”
(Exodus 24:7). It is the people who are to be “a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). It is with the people as a whole that
God enters into the covenant, an understanding that inspired periodic
movements of renewal in later times. On the other hand, a hierarchical
element appears from the start: Moses singled out the Levites after the
people betrayed God by worshipping the golden calf, and commanded
them to guard the sanctuary and the ritual code, thus laying the basis for

10
Fuller discussions of the covenant and its connections with the myth of ethnic
election can be found in Hastings 1999 and Smith 2003, chs. 3–4.
11
On the Armenian Church, including the role of the covenant, see Garsoian 1999,
ch. 12; Nersessian 2001; and for the history of ancient and early medieval Armenia, see
Redgate 2000, esp. chs. 4–6. On the history of martyrdom in early Christian Armenia,
as recorded by the historian Elishe, see Thomson 1982, Introduction.
 hierarchy and covenant 29

the later Temple hierarchy; and he also instituted the High Priesthood
from the sons of Aaron.12
The hierarchical elements witnessed in the Armenian Church are
also found in medieval Ethiopia, but again within a covenantal context.
The accession of the “Solomonic” dynasty in 1270, which consciously
harkened back to the earlier Semitic Christian kingdom of Aksum, was
legitimated through a central myth recorded in the fourteenth century
epic, the Kebra-Negast (Book of Kings). In this national epic, Menelik,
son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, returns to Jerusalem as an
adult and steals the Ark of the Covenant, and with it God’s blessing of
His chosen people is transferred to Ethiopia and its people. The great
kings of this dynasty used the myth to effect a thoroughgoing moral and
cultural reform, using Judaic elements of Christianity, and expanding
the borders beyond those of the original kingdom.13
More modern counterparts of the covenantal traditions emerged after
the Reformation among Protestant communities. Some of the most vivid
expressions come from Scotland and Holland. Covenanting became an
important part of the Scots religious tradition from the later sixteenth
century, culminating in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. As
Colin Kidd observes, the Covenanters saw themselves as a latter-day
Israel entering into a solemn compact with God to renew the church
and commonwealth. In Holland, too, Old Testament analogies, like the
crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, readily presented themselves
to Calvinists who fled, north to the United Provinces, from the con-
trol of the repressive Catholic Habsburgs. More generally, a growing
national sentiment saw the Dutch as a chosen people delivered by God
and blessed by Him so long as they adhered to God’s commandments.
Philip Gorski cites the floats that celebrated William of Orange’s tri-
umphal entry into Brussels in 1577 after defeating the king of Spain,
which depicted David slaying Goliath, Moses with his rod freeing the
Israelites, and Joseph freeing Jacob and his children from oppression.
Schama also cites a parallel with the freeing of Israel from Egyptian
and Babylonian oppression, in Adriaan Valerius’ Neder-Lantsche

12
The episode of the golden calf is recounted in Exodus 32. For a brilliant analysis
linking the Exodus and Sinai with revolutionary developments in seventeenth century
England and eighteenth century United States, see Walzer 1985.
13
On medieval Ethiopia and its covenantal myth, see Levine 1974, ch. 7, and
Ullendorff 1988, ch. 2.
30 anthony d. smith

Gedenck-Clanck (The Netherlands Anthem of Commemoration) of

1626, with its fervent prayer for deliverance.14
Here, already, we stand on the threshold of the age of nationalism,
the ideological movement to attain and maintain autonomy, unity
and identity on behalf of a population deemed to constitute an actual
or potential nation; and perhaps it is no accident that ethnies with
a covenantal sense of chosenness, even if confined to only part of a
population, play an important role in the genesis of nationalism. At
the same time, covenant is not a simple alternative to hierarchy. The
two principles are often found in varying combinations. Already in
ancient Israel, the covenant made with the congregation of the people
is supplemented, and framed, by anointed kingship. The people, we are
told, sought to have “Kings to lead them in war, like other peoples”
and the Lord was reluctantly persuaded. But the two principles were in
tension. The prophets reaffirm the covenant: “I will be thy king [saith
the Lord]; . . . I gave thee a king in mine anger, and took him away in
my wrath.” (Hosea 13:10, 11)
In Armenia, another kingdom hemmed in by great powers, this time
by Persia and Byzantium, hierarchy and covenant are more closely
intertwined. Nevertheless, the great nobles and commanders, the ancient
historian Elishe records, sacrificed themselves in battle for the holy cov-
enant and for the people, as had their great model, Judas Maccabeus,
in his struggle with Antiochus Epiphanes’ Syrian Macedonians. But
the tension was not resolved. It reappeared in the Netherlands in 1576
and again in 1582, where, according to Gorski, political pamphlets
reminded the people of the priority of the Hebraic covenant and the
accountability of kings to God and the people. And Michael Walzer
reminds us that the Exodus story and Sinai covenant fuelled powerful
republican sentiments and actions in both seventeenth-century England
and late eighteenth-century America.15

14
See Kidd 1999, 128. Williamson (1979, ch. 3) gives a fuller exposition of the
religious background in sixteenth-century Scotland. On the Netherlands, see Schama
1987, ch. 2, especially p. 98 on Adriaan Valerius; and Gorski 2000.
15
Gorski (2000, 1435) also stresses the role of the myth of the Batavian republic
in the Dutch revolt.
 hierarchy and covenant 31

Civic Traditions

A third form of public culture, at once secular and sacred in content,

has become increasingly important in the modern West. This is the
tradition of the civic commonwealth, associated with classical antiquity.
Though city-states were common in the ancient near East, notably in
ancient Sumer, northwest Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Canaan, the
specifically civic and republican implications of this form of public com-
munity were not realised until the rise of the classical polis in ancient
Greece after the demise of the tyrants, and in republican Rome after
the expulsion of the kings.
The idea of a self-governing body of citizens, however, restricted
the franchise in some cases, and the autonomous system of govern-
ment answerable to no outside power, human or divine, marked a new
stage in the evolution of collective political identity and community.
Nevertheless, in many ways, this too was a form of sacred cultural com-
munity and civic religion. Not only did each city-state have its patron
deity and myths of sacred origin; its distinctive rituals and festivals,
such as the Panathenaic festival of Athens, testified to the powerful
influence of Olympian and chthonian religion in classical Greece. On
the other hand, though the citizens might have felt protected by their
guardian deities, theirs was a secular compact, not a covenant with God;
and their ideal was not the attainment of holiness and self-discipline
under the divine law, but the pursuit of civic liberty. This implied civic
duties and responsibilities in the public sphere, and the creation of a
community of citizens bound by laws allegedly given by ancient law-
givers, like Solon, Lycurgus and Numa, not by the gods. This stands in
stark contrast to the Law of Moses handed down by the Lord, or the
covenant mediated by an apostolic church. In the classical democracies,
especially, principles of civic equality and liberty supplanted aristocratic
hierarchies, and residence and ethnic ancestry replaced noble birth as
the criteria of citizenship and office, at least in some periods.16
Of course, men of noble birth and landed wealth continued to exercise
influence, even in the most radical democracies. In the Roman case,
the centuries-long tension between patricians and plebeians created an

16
On the Greek polis, see Andrewes 1971; on ancient Athens, see the unusual
account in Cohen 2000.
32 anthony d. smith

uneasy balance at the expense of radical reform, and afforded an entry

point for the political ambitions of victorious generals, who competed
with the senatorial class and each other for the spoils and wealth of
empire. Nevertheless, quite early in the principate, the myth of stoic
virtue and austere republicanism was disseminated, and through the
works of Livy, Tacitus and others, exerted a continuing attraction for
intellectuals and clerics of later European kingdoms.17
This tradition of communal self-government and civic liberty was
taken up by the popular classes and their intellectuals in the medieval
Italian communes from the eleventh century onwards, as these city-
states, often refounded on the ruins of old Roman civitates, sought to
emulate Roman forms like the consulate and acquire Roman liberties
and patriotism. Once again, a stream of civic legal enactments were
set within the framework of Christian theology, ritual and worship,
binding them within a wider realm of Christendom that excluded Jews,
heretics and Muslims. Similar identifications with ancient forms are
found among northern burgher communes and the Imperial free cities.
By the sixteenth century, the liberties of the free Swiss cantons in their
Eidgenossenschaft, against their Habsburg overlords, as well as a variety
of assemblies, diets and estates general, often looked back to classical
forms and models, and provided some alternatives to the dominant
hierarchical structures of European kingdoms and principalities.18

Territorialisation

If the different traditions of public culture helped to shape the various

kinds of national identities, processes of identification with specific his-
toric territories powerfully under-girded the formation and persistence
of national public cultures. At the heart of nationalist doctrine stands the
relationship between a chosen community and its homeland, but well
before the advent of nationalism, the notion of land and its exclusive
possession can be found in various expressions of collective sentiment,
going back to ancient Egypt, Israel and Armenia. Indeed, the idea of
desiring and needing to be buried in one’s native land is exemplified by
the second millennium B.C.E. Tale of Sinuhe, the Egyptian official who

17
For national identity in republican Rome, and its later myths, see Gruen 1994.
18
For the Italian city-republics, see Waley 1969; for the Swiss cantons and their
struggle, see Im Hof 1991.
 hierarchy and covenant 33

had fled into exile in Palestine and had prospered there, but in old age
yearned for his homeland and its burial rites.19
Two kinds of territorialisation of nations and their cultures can be
usefully distinguished. The first is diffuse and regionalised. Here the
community forms through the aggregation of distinct city-states into
a larger whole, as in ancient Sumer or Phoenica; or through the union
of distinct regions, as in modern Italy or Germany. Boundaries, too,
are often ragged, as in ancient Greece or early modern Germany and
Poland. Some ancestral or adopted lands lack clear definition, being,
as it were, misshapen or even non-contiguous; one thinks of medieval
Greater and Lesser Armenia, or modern East and West Pakistan fol-
lowing Partition. Borders may fluctuate considerably around a stable
sacred core, often following the fortunes of war, as they did in medieval
Ethiopia or in early modern Russia. Here, a people’s sense of belong-
ing to a sacred territory is mediated through vivid attachments to their
regions and regional cultures.20
At the other end of the continuum is the compact, well-defined
nation, with clearly demarcated borders, a fixed centre and sacred
landscapes. Before the modern epoch, only some island or mountain
ethnies—Japan, Iceland, Tibet—possessed anything resembling this
nationalist dream of compactness and intimacy, and only in certain
periods, unless of course it was imposed by superior force, such as
when the Pharaohs fused the two Egypts, Rome forged Italic unity and
the Tokugawa Shoguns the exclusive national unity of Japan. Tribal
confederacies—Aramean, Israelite or Arab—rarely managed to achieve
such unity, and if so, only for short periods, as testified by the subse-
quent division into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, despite well
proclaimed borders and vivid sacred attachments. Nor have islands and
mountains sufficed on their own to maintain unity; Ireland’s political
divisions before and after the Norman incursion are well known, not to
mention those of medieval Japan. Yet in both, there was a considerable
measure of cultural cohesion, sacred memories, strong popular attach-
ments and a sense of exclusive ownership of the land.21

19
For the Tale of Sinuhe, see Grosby 2002, 31; see also Smith 2003, ch. 6, on
territorialisation.
20
On medieval Ethiopia, see Levine 1974. For a wide-ranging analysis of the Russian
empire, see Kappeler 2001. Medieval Armenia is discussed by Redgate 2000.
21
On Japan, see the discussion in Oguma 2002. For Ireland’s unity and divisions,
see Moody and Martin 1984, 60.
34 anthony d. smith

These examples show that compactness of ethnic or national public

cultures is not simply a matter of political centralisation, important
though that clearly is. The state and its wars may seek to weld terri-
tories and populations into political unions, but without a measure of
public cultural sharing or sacred identity, they are unlikely to achieve
the ideal of compact, intensive and intimate nationhood, which some
ethnic leaders and nationalists have sought to attain. In other words,
for a deep territorialisation of sacred memory and popular attachment,
a true union of land and people through the naturalisation of history
and the historicising of nature—key processes in the formation of
nations—some elements of shared culture and a fund of shared myths
and sacred memories are needed, such as the kind that arose in early
modern Switzerland.22
Of course, in different periods, ethnies and nations may oscillate
between the two poles of compact and regionalised unions, depending
on state policies, military outcomes and the strength and sanctity of
pre-existing regional cultures. Even in ancient Egypt, squeezed along
the Nile by deserts to the east and west, there were periods of central
breakdown and regional government in the administrative nomes;
and the same was true of a generally compact Japan, particularly in
the sixteenth century. One might be tempted to link community and
territorialisation in terms of polar opposites, and think that hierarchy
bred compact territorialisation; examples included ancient Egypt, early
modern France and Japan. Conversely, covenantal public cultures
appear to accompany a more diffuse and regionalised territorialisation,
of the kind witnessed in early Israel and in the late sixteenth century
Netherlands. But even here, things are not always straightforward.
As noted earlier, a covenanted ethnie based on the Jerusalem Temple
emerged in the fairly compact territory of the later kingdom of Judah,
and a similar union of fairly compact territory and covenanted com-
munity briefly emerged in Cromwellian England. Conversely, we find
a more diffuse form of hierarchy in, for example, sprawling Kievan
Rus and the medieval German-speaking lands—with examples of these
permutations apparent in most periods of history.23

22
See the fine analysis by Zimmer and Kaufmann 1998. See also the discussion in
Smith 2003, ch. 6. For a different perspective, see Anderson 1991, ch. 10.
23
On which, see Lehmann 1982. For the regionalisation of the “intermediate” period
Egypt, see Trigger et al. 1983.
 hierarchy and covenant 35

Continuity of Public Cultures

Given these complexities and combinations, can the study of the proc-
esses of territorialised public culture throw light on the formation and
persistence of nations? I think it can; as I hope to show, the distinctions
between hierarchical, covenantal and civic traditions of public culture
remain relevant to the modern world of nations and national states.
This is apparent in cases representing continuity of the forms of ethnic
public culture, as well as in cases of severe rupture and discontinuity.
Of course, this distinction is not absolute. Even in those cases that
manifest the greatest measure of continuity, there are critical moments
of rupture. For example, the hierarchical form of ethnic community
and public culture instituted in England, first by the Anglo-Saxon kings,
then by the Normans and continued by the Tudors and the Anglican
Church, was decisively broken and for a period replaced by covenantal
forms of society and politics under the Protestant Commonwealth.
Puritans, like Milton and Cromwell, fused their exclusive faith with a
new concept of the militant nation by depicting the English as God’s
firstborn, a worthy successor to ancient Israel. In this, they built on a
longstanding sense of English national identity from at least the four-
teenth century, which had flourished more recently in the Elisabethan
period. However, the failure of this new vision’s political expression in
Army rule convinced many of the need to return to some, though not
all, of the earlier hierarchical forms of public culture, like monarchy,
peerage and Anglicanism. Henceforth, these forms were grafted onto
a new concept of an elect English, and later Anglo-British, nation of
civil liberty—a concept that was to fuel not only the revolution of 1688,
but also the more egalitarian late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
movements—Jacobin, Chartist and Christian socialist.24
Till recently, Japan also has evinced a similar near-continuity of
hierarchical ethnic forms, despite periods of political dislocation and
fragmentation. In this context, the revolution of certain samurai clans,
which led to the restoration of the Meiji Emperor, was essentially a
form of conservative neo-traditionalism that sought to revive and use
an ancient institution to sanctify Japan’s rapid modernisation. In this

24
On the English nationalism of Cromwell and Milton, see Kohn 1940; Greenfeld
1992, ch. 1. For a trenchant critique, see Kumar 2003, ch.5, esp. 108–114. For Protestant
Anglo-British nationalism, see Colley 1992.
36 anthony d. smith

connection, the revival of Shinto family cults, the union of popular reli-
gion with Shinto and its cult of the war dead, notably in the Yasukuni
shrine, and the linking of both of these to the worship of the Emperor as
father and protector of the “family-nation” aimed to consolidate a type
of nation that was deeply imbued with earlier hierarchical forms. This
enabled reforms to be implemented that would allow Japan to survive
and compete with the West. Nevertheless, the catastrophic defeat and
suffering of the Second World War shook the Japanese national fabric
and for a time seemed to encompass the collapse of the old order’s
hierarchical principle, but only to see it partially reincarnated in the
deferential, conservative forms of Japanese society and politics, and in
its self-conception as a unique “victim” nation.25
At the other extreme, the United States, despite strong hierarchical
elements in an exclusive white Protestant society, in both the north
and south, has sought to adhere to the original covenantal form of its
union. Even though it was built upon strong pre-existing regional and
provincial cultures, the union was based on national ideologies with
significant covenantal and civic components, most clearly expressed
in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and reiter-
ated in subsequent generations. That there were sound political and
economic reasons for a more than temporary union to mobilise the
people to fight the war against Britain is beside the point. In rejecting
traditional hierarchies and opting for a republic and the protection of
civil and political liberties, the revolutionaries were building on the
earlier covenantal example of English parliamentarian revolt and the
Puritan commonwealth, and adapting it to a civic tradition of public
culture, modelling their republic on that of republican Rome. These
ancient traditions have helped to shape the development of an open,
pluralist but enthusiastic society intent on following its popular civic
and democratic path, oscillating between a strongly separatist stance of
purity reminiscent of the original Israelite covenant and an expansionist
and missionary confrontation with a “profane” world.26

25
Besides, the Emperor survived, along with a conservative sense of Japanese
“uniqueness”; on which, see Yoshino 1992. For a penetrating account of recent exclusive
Japanese self-understanding, see Oguma 2002.
26
On the millennial sense of American destiny, see Tuveson 1968; and notably the
“sublime” American landscapes, see Wilton and Barringer 2002. For an original analysis
of early American nationhood, see Kaufmann 2002.
 hierarchy and covenant 37

Discontinuity of Public Cultures

It appears as if these examples offer some support for the proposition

that the traditions of hierarchy, covenant and civic public culture con-
tinue to shape the ethos of modern nations. But can the same be said
of those nations where there has been a clear rupture and discontinuity
in the forms of their public cultures?
As proposed earlier, a combination of hierarchical public culture and
compact territorialisation might produce a conservative, aristocratic
and monarchical type of nation. From the medieval period onwards,
ancien regime France manifested just such a hierarchical public culture,
with a strong tradition of sacred kingship (“the most Christian king”)
and a sense of public duty in defence of the realm. Moreover, by the
early modern period, the kingdom had attained a relatively compact
territory, the so-called hexagon, itself based on the Roman province of
Gaul and its Frankish successor. Though a strong regionalism persisted
in outlying areas, along with regional cultures, the growing dominance
of Parisian language and culture, and the slow penetration of the cen-
tralised absolutist state, created a relatively unified public in the cities.
By the eighteenth century, there was a growing sense of secularising
nationhood in reaction to earlier religious conflicts.27
This new national sense was articulated by a stratum of intellectual
modernisers who looked to England’s liberal revolution, as well as to
the principles of civic patriotism and liberty of the ancient city-states.
In eighteenth-century France, this new sense of identity stimulated a
revolutionary political and largely middle class movement against hier-
archy and monarchy in favour of the unfettered expression of the will of
the nation. For a short period, from 1789 to 1794, a popular covenantal
element surfaced. This was exemplified in a new-old symbolism of mass
oaths, pageants, festivals and martyrdoms, in which the representatives
of the people acted out a salvation drama of the nation and displayed a
quasi-religious devotion to the patrie in front of the assembled people,
in forms that became increasingly classical and republican.28
From that moment on, politics in a centralising and compact French
homeland oscillated between the poles of ethnic hierarchy and civic

27
The early development of the French sense of nationhood, and the role of royal
and sacred elements, are analysed in Beaune 1985. For the eighteenth century’s secu-
larising nationalism, see the excellent account in Bell 2001.
28
On these civic-religious festivals, see Kohn 1967.
38 anthony d. smith

religion, sometimes violently, as in the Dreyfus Affair. We see this in

the characteristic monuments, statuary and architecture of the period,
as well as in the cult of St. Joan, a Catholic saint from the ancien regime,
who is at the same time a symbol of popular liberty. In the twentieth
century, similar conflicts were often manifest in the tension between
strong Presidents and the Assembly and in the quest for a national
destiny manifested in the figure of the heroic father of the nation,
punctuated by sudden eruptions on behalf of popular liberty against
the existing bureaucratic order. Because of the high degree of territo-
rialisation, the centrality of Paris and its culture, and the strength of
popular attachments to the variety of French landscapes, this quest and
its ensuing conflicts have been that much more potent.29
In modern Germany, the combinations of public culture have yielded
yet more radical and violent outcomes, despite its more regionalised
and diffuse territorialisation. From the thirteenth century onwards,
the political domain of the Holy Roman Empire, together with attach-
ment to the German language and culture, had begun to engender a
measure of consciousness of being German-speaking and “Deutsch”. By
the sixteenth century, a vivid sense of the significance of the German
language and German cultural leadership had emerged among some
humanists and millennial revolutionaries. But it was neither widespread
nor deep-rooted. The breakdown of the Empire after the Thirty Years
War, the division of its German-speaking lands into a few great abso-
lutist states and a large number of smaller principalities, together with
the pervasive influence of French culture, appeared to spell the end of
anything resembling a German-speaking state or nation outside Austria,
even though a diffuse German consciousness persisted in some circles.
Fragmentation and hierarchy appeared to exclude covenant and limit
civic and national sentiment.30
However, the example of the French Revolution, the shock of Jena,
and the growing appeal of a predominantly literary Romanticism soon
stimulated an inchoate movement of resistance to Napoleon. This
was spurred on by ideas of radical civic reform and national renewal
among some intellectuals in the various German-speaking states of
Central Europe, which in turn led to some striking, if rather limited,

29
On the French pursuit of grandeur, often associated with Bonapartism, see Gildea
1994. For the variety of French landscapes, see the essays in Hooson 1994.
30
For early German self-definitions, see Scales 2000, and on German Renaissance
humanists, see Poliakov 1975, ch. 5.
 hierarchy and covenant 39

displays of German brotherhood in the Volunteers Corps at Leipzig

in 1813 and in the quasi-religious celebrations held at the Wartburg
castle in 1817 and at Hambach in 1832. The revolutionary year of
1848 marked a moment of German covenant and civil reform, but
divisions among the deputies in the Frankfurt Parliament over the
definition of Germany and its ragged territories enabled the old hier-
archies to reinstate themselves swiftly, and paved the way for Prussian
unification and domination of most of the non-Habsburg German-
speaking lands. In effect, the Prussian design of Bismarck tacitly adopted
much of the agenda of a Kleindeutsch German nationalism, but without
its liberalism. However, if monarchical hierarchy appeared to triumph
in the Second Reich, with its official celebrations of the victory at
Sedan, popular movements harking back to the compacts of the French
Revolution provided a continual and powerful undercurrent. We see
this in the monuments paid for by public subscription, the growing
cult of medievalism and the quintessential German genius of Dürer
and Luther, the Volkisch literary movement, and the uses of German
and Scandinavian mythology for Wagner’s communal festival of the
arts; and later in the racism of the Pan-German League and various
Volkisch fringe circles.31
Though, on the face of it, a compact of racially pure Germans, what
Himmler called “a union of German-Germanic tribes”, appeared to
be the essence of Hitler’s vision of Nazism, it was framed by an even
stronger version of hierarchy, that of an imperial race state with a
command structure under its Fuhrer. In Nazism’s carefully choreo-
graphed rallies and orchestrated mass demonstrations, with their vast
processions, marching songs, banners and lighting, “ethnic” Germans
renewed their oath to obey their Leader and die for the Fatherland in
fraternal unisonance. This amounted to a secular parody of the ancient
covenant, which nonetheless drew on older religious motifs and rituals
for new pagan political and racial ends, in what George Mosse terms
a mass “civic religion”. At the same time, Nazi political control was
ensured, not only by elite SS discipline and a radical racial ideology,
but also through a series of overlapping hierarchies—of party, state, SS
and army—that sought to counterbalance the centrifugal and divisive

31
The Volkisch writers are analysed in Mosse 1964. Mosse 1975, ch. 3 examines
manifestations of German Romantic nationalism, including the construction of com-
memorative monuments. See also James 2000, ch. 4.
40 anthony d. smith

forces of regionalism, class and confession. Indeed, one could argue

that Germany’s very lack of compact boundaries, and the continuing
vitality of her regions and their cultures, required a greater degree of
centralisation and a heightened elite sense of an all-German landscape
and territory subsuming those of its länder, to create a cohesive, all-
German national public culture.32
Communist Eastern Germany preserved this combination of politi-
cal hierarchy and ideological covenantalism, albeit for diametrically
opposed reasons, especially in the later attempts by the regime to har-
ness selected popular episodes from German history for ideological
legitimacy and bonding with the people. This was in marked contrast
to the economic rationalism and capitalist revival of Western Germany,
whose leaders appeared to turn their backs on the double menace of
charismatic populism and imperial hierarchy in so much of recent
German history. In their place, the dream of European integration
seems to have offered the German elite an alternative destiny, one free
of quasi-religious nostalgia and yearning for ethnic intimacy, with the
promise of release from the demons of the past into a wider, but well-
regulated, neo-liberal order. The hope that this attempt to submerge
past particularism in a post-national Europe reflects the ideals and
sentiments of the majority of Germans is far less certain.33
With its lack of clear boundaries, Russia resembled Germany, but its
heartland or core ethnic area was more compact and clearly defined.
As noted, the early modern Muscovite and Russian state developed as
a typical patrimonial hierarchy, with church and state interdependent
and the Tsar as sacred ruler and father of his people. But a deep schism
in the Orthodox Church following the modernising reforms of the
Patriarch Nikon saw an outburst of covenantalism among the various
sects of Old Believers, many of whom migrated from the centre to found
settlements in distant places, while others vowed to die by immolation
rather than suffer humiliation at the hands of the authorities. Some of
these sects and settlements persisted well into the nineteenth century,
drawing a sizeable minority of the population away from the hierarchi-
cal state, and emphasising the growing divide between a westernising

32
On Nazi political symbolism, see Mosse 1975, and 1994, ch. 5; also James
2000, ch. 6.
33
For Communist East Germany, see Staab 1998, and on East German historical
myths, see Fulbrook 1997.
 hierarchy and covenant 41

and increasingly desacralized hierarchical state and a sacred ethnic

Russian society.34
Later in the nineteenth century, Tsarist social reforms and mod-
ernisation from above, coupled with increasing peasant revolts across
far-flung territories, undermined the hierarchical ideal and created the
conditions in which coteries of radical populist and Marxist intellectu-
als could preach the brotherhood of the people and the equality of the
subject peoples that made up the Tsarist empire. The First World War
destroyed the traditional hierarchy of Tsarism, propelling these rival
movements into the foreground, and ultimately the Bolsheviks into the
seat of power. Proclaiming the fraternal rule of soviets of workers and
land to the peasants, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were able to emerge victorious
from the Civil War, only to be overtaken by an even more rigorous
secular-historical version of hierarchy embodied in a Communist Party
controlled by a central Committee, Politburo and General Secretary.
Here the interests of an all-powerful state were camouflaged by the
new civic religion of proletarian rule, and in the cataclysm of the Great
Patriotic War, wedded to a newly-found Russian ethnic nationalism.
In the course of a few decades, Russian society and the Russian state
had moved from a traditional, if modernising, hierarchy through a
revolutionary period of covenantal solidarity to a new socialist form
of republican equality under tight bureaucratic Party control, only
ultimately to collapse into its separate ethnic nations aspiring to new
non-communist state hierarchies.35

Conclusion

As a single chapter covering such a wide field, this outline of a few

historical cases can only serve as an illustration of my main themes.
In so brief an overview, I cannot pretend to furnish an explanation of
why particular nations developed as they did or why they assumed the
varying characteristics that we recognise. I have had to overlook or omit
a host of economic, political and social factors that were undoubtedly
relevant to the formation and character of these and other nations.
However, this is partly because I believe progress in this field requires a

34
On these traditionalist sects, see Hosking 1997, 72–73.
35
For the Tsarist legacy and intellectuals’ movements, see Pipes 1977; and on the
Soviet period, see Hosking 1985.
42 anthony d. smith

comparative historical and sociological method informed by a theoreti-

cal approach. The hope is that this approach can illuminate research on
specific cases by isolating key variables and dimensions. The approach
adopted here, that of an historical ethno-symbolism, is one that seeks
to trace both continuities and ruptures between relevant ethnies and
nations in terms of persistence and change in their repertoires of myths,
memories, symbols and values, and in the key social and symbolic
processes that combine to produce communities that approximate the
ideal type of “the nation”.36
Here I have focused on the process of creating and disseminating
different kinds of public cultures and their accompanying territoriali-
sation. They constitute, I would argue, the dominant forms of public
culture in a large number of cases of the formation and persistence of
modern nations, and lend support to the view that ethnic and sacred
elements continue to sustain national identities in the modern world.
I am certainly not arguing for a simple linear continuity of different
types, from pre-modern to modern epochs, but rather an oscillation
and a complex interplay between these types. The same holds for the
shape and attachment to territory in the evolution of the “homeland”,
where a linear pattern can rarely be discerned, a fact that should make
us wary of the assumption, entertained by some nationalists, that nations
must be compact, solidary and homogeneous. This was certainly not
the case, as noted, in Germany; nor has it been true of Switzerland,
divided as it is by language, religion and cantonal loyalty.37
One final point can be made in connection with the forms of pub-
lic culture. Nationalism, the ideological movement, sounds peculiarly
covenantal and popular in its thrust; and in its first flush, it may well
be so. It is rarely, however, a mass movement of the whole ethnic com-
munity, and only sometimes the movement of a large minority. Instead,
we usually witness a small minority aiming to speak for the ethnie, or
in the name of “the people” as a whole, to whom it desires to extend
covenantal and civic rights. As for its object, the nation comes in all
shapes and sizes. Some nations, or rather their public cultures, are

36
Accounts of “ethno-symbolic” perspectives are given in Smith 1999, Introduction,
and in Hutchinson 2000. Armstrong (1982) provides a path-breaking application of this
approach to the longue durée of pre-modern Islamic and Christian civilisations.
37
The history of Swiss unification and pluralism is recounted by Im Hof (1991).
For an illuminating analysis of the period since the eighteenth century, see Zimmer
2003.
 hierarchy and covenant 43

hierarchical; others are popular and even egalitarian. Some, though not
all, forms of nationalism may view the nation as an egalitarian form of
comradeship; but the national reality is often at odds with this vision.
At the same time, nationalism is sometimes able to blend covenantal
and civic ideals with a hierarchical, even monarchical, tradition of
public culture through a revival of a sense of ethnic community. The
chameleon-like beauty of nationalism allows for the creation of a civic
religion of the people and aspirations “to build Jerusalem” in every
kind of society, using the sacred legacies and ethnic traditions of their
different pasts.38

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