Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

chapter 9
Identity Construct #4: Nation
Whereas race, gender, and class offer essentialists something tangible when
defi ning essence (skin color, sex organs, and economic standing), national
identities are not quite so accommodating. The nation seems at once to
be all around us, yet something we can not quite touch or see. Is it the
government, the army, a legal code, patrimonial documents, art, language,
or something else entirely? Where exactly does the nation reside? Despite
the apparent challenge of answering these questions, the belief in national
essence by nationalists and their celebration of it have defi ned human existence
over the last two hundred years. With alarming regularity, millions
of people have not only killed for their nations, they have willingly died
for them.
The modern concept of the nation-state emerged in the wake of the
French Revolution in 1789. The monarchies of the ancien régime were being
swept aside by the new ideas of modern government and republics grounded
in Enlightenment values. Whereas the ideological justifi cations for monarchy
were the principles of God’s will and of status by birth, the foundations
for the new political order were individual liberties based on natural law
and government by and for the people. At least in theory, nation-states were
built on the notion that people fi rst recognized themselves as individuals
and then agreed to come together in a unifi ed whole for the purpose of collectively
administering their own lives. Admittedly, nation-states (then and
now) often failed to live up to these ideals, if they even aspired to them, but,
at least in principle, a nation-state was fundamentally different from the
monarchical and aristocratic system of the past.
Modernist hermeneutics and its corresponding belief in national essence
provided the necessary justifi cation for creating the nation. A person who