Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

language policy and education – often proved the key catalysts in creating coherent
“imagined communities.” 19 Yet activists’ success also depended crucially on social
conditions and ethnic boundaries in local, real communities. Mass nationalism at the local
level across Central Europe strove to create new forms of loyalty and political legitimacy
based on supposedly inherent ethnics traits. 20 Its success, however, ultimately depended on
the ability to transform individuals’ diverse allegiances – to a particular religion, class,
community, state, or brand of politics – into an overriding national loyalty. Especially in
bilingual communities or ones where shared social practices such as religious worship diluted
the salience of ethnic boundaries in everyday interaction, this required the transformation
of “soft boundaries” into national “hard ones.” 21 While nationalist activists reached out to
communities in diverse ways, adapting their appeals to local social conditions, they all
shared a faith in the nation as a naturally ordained model for eternal group identity. For the
ethnic nationalist of the nineteenth century, the nation demanded overriding social and
political loyalty; it was a permanent, all-encompassing entity for which one was already pre-
enrolled as a member.
19 For the context of D’Azeglio’s quote, see Don Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question
(Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 39. The term “imagined communities” comes from the seminal work
by Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of <strong>Nationalism</strong>, Rev. ed.
(London: Verso, 1991)..
20 Jeremy King has suggested that “nationhood boils down to a set of mutually exclusive and mutually reinforcing
variants on the populist principle of political legitimacy, to a form of loyalty, to a modern discourse structurally
capable of blanketing the political field.” Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism,
Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of
Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press,
2001), 128. Gellner has also defined nationalism as a “theory of political legitimacy.” Ernest Gellner, Nations and
<strong>Nationalism</strong> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1.
21 Prasenjit Duara has described national identity formation as a process of the reifying difference in heterogeneous
societies, of “differentiating … the self from and Other.” Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation:
Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65-66.
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