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What is a Nation?
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Industrialisation created nations

The emergence of capitalism transformed society by promoting linguistic and cultural standardisation within distinct territorial spheres, ushering in the age of nations.

Context

Marxism predicted that nation-states would fade away as it triumphed. By the 1980s the opposite seemed to be happening and historians are trying to understand the enduring presence and appeal of nations by examining their origins.

The Argument

Ernest Gellner emphasises the movement from a feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial one as the driving force behind the emergence of nations.[1] In pre-modern societies, elites sought to differentiate themselves culturally from those they ruled as a way to emphasise their social status. They had little interest in imposing any uniform culture on the various localities they ruled over. People in agricultural societies lived mainly in small, relatively isolated communities and learned necessary skills from immediate kin. Industrial societies create new social circumstances. Workers are far more mobile, more likely to meet strangers, and are adaptable. Navigating these new demands requires a single widespread language that encompasses all aspects of life. This eases communication between strangers. It also provides a common idiom by which specialist information can be transmitted. While some of groups assimilate, others resist cultural homogenisation and in doing so create their own standardised literate culture. The result is the conceptualisation of various separate nations where new cultural groups are disadvantaged by the new system and seek to secede to form their own political body.

Counter arguments

Arguments which centre nations around a created linguistic and cultural homogeneity fail to provide for nations which have no politically dominant lingua franca, such as Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. There exists evidence of strong senses of national identities in a number of pre-industrial and pre-literate societies across history. Gellner's explanation also struggles to explain how in the 20th century strong nationalist movements also developed in countries such as India, Indonesia, and China . These countries had little industrial development and managed to cultivate substantial support from peasants with little exposure to industrial labour or mass education of the sort Gellner describes.

Proponents

Premises

[P1] The transition from agricultural to industrial economies transforms society by increasing mobility and specialisation. [P2] New standardised forms of culture develop to cope with these changes by easing communication. [P3] These new means of communications reshape popular mentalities creating communities that identify themselves based on newly constructed linguistic and cultural homogeneity. [P4] Assimilation into these communities or resistance to assimilation by building rival cultures fuels the rise of nations.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] There are examples of nations with no dominant linguistic or cultural group. [Rejecting P4] Nationalist movements developed in countries which had neither industrialised nor provided mass education.

References

  1. https://nationalismstudies.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/ernest-gellner-2/
This page was last edited on Friday, 31 Jan 2020 at 14:41 UTC

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