Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

38 John Hutchinson
this was true up to the 1960s, claims that since the 1980s recognition of the
incapacity of individual nation-states to deliver such benefits has led to a surrender
of core powers (see above), and to a loosening of their authority (Wallace 1997). Each
views national identifications as at best the psychological underpinnings of a
collective unit (the state) whose justification is the achievement of economic and
social progress.
Such interpretations share the perspective of scholars such as Benedict Anderson
(1991), Ernest Gellner (1983), and Eric Hobsbawm (1990) who regard the nation
as a construct, even an invention, of the modern bureaucratic state and industrial
capitalism. The nation is essentially a political project focused on autonomy and
citizenship that resonates with modern necessities. ‘Modernist’ scholars are right to
distinguish nations from earlier ethnic communities as entities based on notions of
popular sovereignty and a consolidated territory and economy. But this perspective,
I argue, is one-dimensional and cannot explain the persistence of nations in the
modern world. Nations are a form of ethnic group, and as such are quasi-kinship
groups, regulated by myths of common descent, a sense of shared history, and
a distinctive culture. They are communities of fate. Through identifying with an
historic community embodied in myths, symbols and culture, which has survived
disaster in the past, individuals combine in a society to overcome contingency and
find a unique meaning and purpose. At the core of national identity is a concern for
identity, and meaning.
Of course, modern state-formation and industrialisation are significant factors in
the rise of nations. But, as John Armstrong (1982) and Anthony Smith (1986) have
argued, the ethnic building blocks of nations formed out of processes that began well
before the modern period and included: administrative centralisation round a state
capital; recurring interstate warfare; a sense of religious election; and experiences
of colonisation and settlement. The rise of Paris and London as capitals facilitated
the growth of strong administrations and the diffusion of a unifying culture through
the kingdoms of France and England. Protracted conflicts such as the Hundred
Years War between France and England created the lineaments of later national
identities – historical legends and heroes, territorial identifications and canonical
literatures. The differentiation of Christianity first into Latin Catholicism and
Orthodoxy, and again with the Reformation, resulted in the Serbs, Dutch, Poles
and Russians claiming a distinctive ethno-religious mission. Large-scale colonisation
and settlement created an ethnic consciousness among the Spanish engaged
in Reconquista against the Moors and the Irish against the English. It is out of such
experiences that the ethnic components of the nation emerged: a sense of unique
origins, an identification with a bounded territory as the homeland, a repertoire of
historical periods and heroic models by which to guide change, a sense of cultural
individuality through possession of distinctive religious, vernacular-cultural or legal
institutions, and an identification with political constitutions.
Modernists argue that a new world has formed from a combination of the administrative,
ideological and economic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and that
modern nations legitimate themselves as vehicles of mass economic and social
progress, central to which is the possession of an independent state. But in many