Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

industrialized societies. In this model the nation was not ordained by nature, as
primordialists suggest, but instead was simply ordained by modernity. 24
The thread tying together nationalist activists, historians professing primordial nations,
and their constructivist critics is a belief in the salience of nations as socially coherent
membership groups. Rogers Brubaker has labeled this “groupist” thinking, which assumes
that nations are “substantial, enduring collectivities.” 25 Much groupist thinking stems from
a conflation of nationalist activists with the broader populations whom activists claimed to
represent. Activists portrayed nations, based on their own personal experiences, as a thick
social web of nationalist youth groups, self-help societies, singing choirs, sports teams,
political committees, and paramilitary gangs. Their internalist narratives of national
organization are then subsequently portrayed by historians as a model of societies at large.
In an ideal type of this nationalized society, all citizens constructed their social circles,
educated their children, cast their ballots, organized their economic interests and channeled
their passions within the social bounds constructed by nationalist organizations. Historical
narratives working within various iterations of this model, however, conflate the practices of
a small group of committed nationalist activists with their claims for the existence of clear-
cut national groups. 26 Just because Central European activists envisioned society as divided
into stable national groups of Germans and Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians, does not mean
24 According to Gellner, “<strong>Nationalism</strong> as such is fated to prevail, but not any one particular nationalism.” Gellner,
Nations and <strong>Nationalism</strong>, 47.
25 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8, ———,
<strong>Nationalism</strong> Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 21.
26 Brubaker, <strong>Nationalism</strong> Reframed, 15. Brubaker calls this a conflation of “categories of practice” with “categories of
analysis.”
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