In what may prove to be the final work in a prolific career over four decades, Anthony Smith has condensed the key conclusions of a lifetime into this brief review of theories of nationalism, with a focus on his approach of “historical ethno-symbolism.” Since he is thoroughly right in the main thrust of his argument, one hopes his brevity here will attract readers who are unfamiliar with his previous works.
Smith's main goal is to define a middle ground among three competing understandings of nations and nationalism: modernism, neo-perennialism, and postmodern constructivism. According to the modernist view, nations and nationalism are the product of modernization, emerging as a result of the combined forces of urbanization, industrialization, and mass secular education. Only in the context of modernity, modernists argue, did it become possible and indispensible for linguistic communities to emerge as political communities demanding autonomy and, preferably, sovereignty. Thus modernization enabled—and, ultimately, required—elites to create nations that did not previously exist. Neo-perennialists object to this argument by pointing out that at least some nations, such as the English and the French, can be identified as having existed already in the fourteenth century, while some others (such as the Armenian and Jewish peoples) are even older. Postmodern constructivists protest that both of these schools of thought give too much credence to the claims of the nationalists; the nation is “ultimately a fiction engineered by elites using ‘invented traditions’ for purposes of social control” (p. 11). What scholars need to do, in this view, is to dissect the on-the-ground discursive practices that accomplish this work.
Smith's ethno-symbolism sees value in all three approaches. Thus along with the modernists, ethno-symbolism sees the nation as a real sociological community embedded in a particular historical context, resulting from material conditions and constructed in recent times using the material resources of modern states and economies. Along with the neo-perennialists, ethno-symbolism recognizes that there were pre-modern nations, considering nationalists' claims about their nations' antiquity as a matter for empirical investigation, neither accepting such claims wholesale like the older primordialists, nor rejecting them by definitional fiat like the modernists. Finally, along with the constructivists, ethno-symbolism recognizes that national identities are socially constructed, and that they achieve their significance “on the ground” in discursive and symbolic practices that are reproduced by ordinary people in their everyday lives.
All of this is difficult to dispute. Regarding the radical skepticism of the postmodernists, Smith argues that their “emphasis on hybridization and the fragmentation of … national identity has been challenged empirically as well as theoretically” (p. 12). Smith recognizes that nationalist discourse is typically multivocal, but he also notes that official nationalist narratives persist, and postmodernist claims that the nation-state is being superseded do not hold up, failing to account for the continuing dominance of the nation-state in world politics. While nation-states and nationalism do continue to be challenged by migration, ethnic diversity, international human rights discourses, and so on, their position is hardly weaker than it was in the past; it is only weaker than traditional nationalist discourses claimed their positions to be in the past. Postmodernists must thus oddly accept nationalists' exaggerated claims about the past in order to justify their own argument that the national idea is now in decline.
The distinctive contribution of ethno-symbolism, as the name implies, is to highlight the importance of ethnicity and of symbolic practices in nationalist theory and practice, beginning with the formation of nations. Opposing the radical constructivism of the postmodernists, Smith argues that nationalizing elites do not invent the nation from whole cloth; rather, they select and adapt pre-existing cultural elements. That is, nationalists “select the most promising dialect for a new ‘purified’ language, incorporate the most widespread customs, adapt well-known symbols for political ends … and politicize existing myths of heroes and saints” (p. 32). Nations are thus understood to be social constructions, but they are not infinitely or quickly malleable. Rather, “nations were forged in stages over longer periods out of pre-existing cultural and political ties” (p. 44). Nationalizing elites, Smith emphasizes, are constrained by their culture: their nationalist ideas must have “resonance” with the population they are appealing to, or those ideas will fail. All of this thoroughly debunks the radical modernist position articulated by Ernest Gellner (as quoted by Smith): “modernists like myself believe that the world was created round the end of the eighteen century, and nothing before makes the slightest difference to the issues we face” (p. 16).
Again criticizing the postmodernists, Smith points out that as communities of action, nations are remarkably similar in the goals they pursue: autonomy, unity, identity, authenticity, homeland, dignity, continuity, and destiny. This combination of objectives, Smith notes, makes nationalisms much like religions: they generally have myths of homelands sanctified by saints' tombs, golden ages, narratives of a destiny earned through sacrifice, and in some cases (such as the Dutch, English, and Americans) myths of chosenness or election.
The modernist and postmodernist views, Smith argues, overlook this appeal by nationalism to transcendent values, and therefore they “fail to do justice to the very dimensions that have made nations and nationalism so significant a part of the modern world, namely, the sway they continue to hold over the hearts and minds of millions of men and women” (p. 42). Like Darth Vader, Smith is saying to his opponents: “You underestimate the power of the dark side of the force [of nationalism].” Nationalism, Smith points out, “convey[s] a sense of close-knit community that is able to demand from its members the ultimate sacrifice” (p. 42). At the same time, Smith is careful to distance himself from the simple primordialism of earlier theorists like Elie Kedourie: nationalist elites cannot easily or simply “tap into the ‘atavistic’ emotions of the masses” (p. 31). On the one hand, nationalism does not only have a dark side; on the other, its appeals—whether dark or light—are successful only when they resonate with society.
In making these arguments, Smith has done a signal service, but the book accomplishes much less than it might. It is too brief, oddly repetitive at times, yet much too thin on the empirical evidence that would strongly prove his case to skeptics. On the central question of mass-elite interactions, it is theoretically thin, failing to posit the mechanism by which followers choose leaders and leaders choose their direction. To do so, Smith might have tapped either the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer, perhaps allied with the transactional sociology of Charles Tilly; or he might have built on the political psychology of David Sears's symbolic politics logic; but he simply does not think the issue through. Similarly, political scientists will look in vain for serious engagement with most leading political scientists' works on ethnicity and nationalism (though Smith argues strongly that the two topics are closely related). He says nothing even of those scholars who largely agree with him, such as Donald Horowitz, Marc Howard Ross, or Crawford Young, and then oddly concludes that the symbolist approach has not been applied to study ethnic conflict—though of course it has in political science.
Despite these flaws, Smith's work is a useful summary of a valuable perspective on nations and nationalism, one from which political science still has much to learn.
