Eric Hobsbawm Nationalism Pdf

[Julia Dodoo]

Hobsbawmgraduated from the University of Cambridge and lectured in Italy, the U.S., England, and South America. He became a member of The Association of Socialist Pupils at the age of 14 and of the Communist Party when he was 19. During the Soviet Invasion of Hungary in 1956, most of its members left the British Communist Party, but Hobsbawm and a few colleagues did not. Yet he protested the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was in favour of the Prague Spring.

So, in his view, what is a nation? Hobsbawm, while in essence re-hashing a Gellnarian view, ultimately refuses to settle on a single definition of the nation, arguing that objective definitions are doomed to fail because exceptions can always be found (Hobsbawm: 1990 5). This does not mean, however, that Hobsbawm has no tangible theory of nationalism (Hobsbawm: 1990 9-10);

The Taliban movement, which began in 1994 among Pashtuns of Kandahar, is engaged on a mission to create a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan. Afghan nationalism as such is not an important element in the Taliban worldview, yet the Taliban had and have as a basic goal to reunite the entire territory of Afghanistan. Moreover, the xenophobic isolationist stance of Afghan nationalism under the Taliban continues to exploit popular Afghan suspicions of Western plots and interference to that end.

On the surface, it may have at times seemed that Afghanistan would disintegrate under into its constituent ethnic components or a plethora of new mini-states emerging out of the wreck of war, but it has not. During the war, there grew and remained popular autonomous sentiment demanding the withdrawal of NATO troops, culminating with the June 2013 security handover from NATO to Afghan forces. Clearly, there can be little sense of a pan-afghan ethnically or linguistically-based nationalism, so why does it remain increasingly content in its new democratic form? Again, perhaps Hobsbawm has the answer.

This is certainly the case in Afghanistan. However, Afghanistan remains under the influence of competing narratives and traditions which, coupled with the as-of-yet sub-par economy, might explain why Afghan nationalism is not yet fully developed as a unifying popular force.

The Kachin people, living mainly in northeastern Myanmar with a population of 1.5 million people, are traditionally hill dwellers. They see themselves as largely Kachin and not at all Burmese, even though the state of Kachin belongs to Myanmar (and previously Burma). Nationalistic feelings in Kachin are high because they long for their own national sovereignty and do not want to be ruled by the government of Myanmar.

As a result, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) was formed. It is one of the largest resistance organization in Myanmar against the central government. Under KIO, it has an armed wing called the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). There are several accounts of clashes between the KIA and the Burmese army as the Kachin people attempt to fight for their own independence via force. Even though the KIA signed a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese government in 1994, they did not disarm or surrender and they continue to recruit, train and mobilize soldiers.

Discussion Questions: Are cultural and ethnic factors the main driving force of nationalism in this case? Or is it that the KIO is playing the ethnic card in order to garner more support for political and economic reasons, as Hobsbawm might suggest?

If anything, Qubec is good example for the power of the invention of tradition. Consider the name used to represent the nation. Today most nationalists within La Belle Province consider themselves Qubecois. Very few, if any, would associate with the term Canadiens. Yet, this is the banner that the early French Canadians used to distinguish themselves from the British. The very notion of Qubecois is a manufactured one that has little connection with the original French settlers of the country. Indeed, even the widely celebrated national holiday, St-Jean Baptiste Day, was only celebrated with regularity at the very end of the 19th century and today bears little resemblance to the original holiday with its religious character.

The normative question that Hobsbawm is trying to answer through his work, which he views as the central problem of our age, is how to organize the coexistence of multiple ethnic/religious/linguistic groups. As described in the article by Beiner on the Nairn-Hobsbawm debate, while Nairn views the proliferation of states as beneficial, Hobsbawm, as analysed by Beiner (1989: 175), objects to this idea for a number of reasons:

In fact, Hobsbawm is a proponent of larger, more stable, multinational states. While he does not seem to have an answer to this own question, he remains optimistic that as long as there are functional multinational states around such as Britain, there is hope (Beiner 1989: 174).

Discussion question: Are multinational states viable? Can multiple nations peacefully coexist in the current political system? Are their countries we could cite as success stories? Would Britain even qualify as one of these given the Scottish referendum on the horizon?

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The purpose of this article is to lay out the debates and arguments around three key broader issues that dominate nationalism studies: (a) the meaning of a nation and nationalism and the relationship between political and cultural nationalism; (b) the origins and character of nations and nationalism; and (c) the civic-ethnic dichotomy and the relationship between nationalism and liberalism. It does not aim to provide definitive answers to the complex problems associated with nations and nationalism but rather to provide an overview of these debates by examining the existing literature on nations and nationalism. The final section discusses the position of new approaches to nations and nationalism and how they have problematised the key assumptions of the mainstream understanding of nationalism. The article, in light of an overview of the literature, draws four important conclusions. First, the academic journey of nationalism has reached a stage where the current consensus is that nations are socially constructed and historically contingent phenomena, and the current focus of the scholarship is on looking at the intersection between the cultural and political aspects of nationalism. Second, nations and nationalism possess a multifaceted character with particularity, subjectivity, and relativity as their defining features, representing that a single, universal explanation of nationalism is neither feasible nor morally desirable. Third, to understand the multiplicity and diversity of nations and nationalism and the ways in which elements of this multidimensionality intersect, it is necessary to treat them as open-ended, unstable, dispersed, protean, particular, and contingent phenomena. Finally, deep contestation constitutes a source of power and strength for nations and nationalism.

The phenomena of nation and nationalism are the forces that shape the modern world, among others. They are global phenomena occurring worldwide, despite the scepticism articulated by many scholars about their continuing survival and relevance. They, as modern concepts, first originated in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Within the study of nationalism, though scholars are deeply divided on the origins of nations and nationalism, there is a general consensus that they bloomed and acquired their modern political meanings and significance in the context of the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution defined the nation as a democratic, sovereign, secular republic of equal citizens, a definition that dominated nationalist studies and movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. By asserting the principles of democracy, constitutionalism, equality, national self-determination, the sovereignty of the people, and republicanism as the basis for the new political order in Europe, the revolution significantly contributed to the spread of the phenomena of nation and nationalism from France to other countries in Europe, particularly Italy, Germany, Russia, and Spain. The Napoleonic wars, the 1848 revolutions, and post-1848 national unification-oriented movements made the nation and nationalism fashionable throughout Europe and North America in the 19th century. As milestones in the development of nation and nationalism in the 20th century, anticolonial movements widely extended them to three non-western continents: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, nation and nationalism have acquired a global presence, taking various forms in different socio-economic and political contexts.

While there is a general consensus that nations and nationalism are happening everywhere, scholarship on nationalism is deeply engrossed in intense debates about the meaning of nation and nationalism, their origins, and their nature and scope. This article provides a theoretical review of these debates and is based on an examination of existing literature on nations and nationalism. Accordingly, the article is divided into four broad sections. The first section examines the debates and disputes about the meaning of a nation and nationalism and the relationship between political and cultural nationalism. The second section discusses the competing arguments of primordialism, modernism, and ethnosymbolism about the origins of nations and nationalism. The following section analyses the intense debates about the civic-ethnic dichotomy and the relationship between nationalism and liberalism. The fourth section discusses the position of new approaches to nations and nationalism and the ways they have problematised the key assumptions of the mainstream understanding of nationalism. The main findings are summarised in the conclusion.

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