Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

40 John Hutchinson
of monarchy, republicans qualified their rationalism by rooting the revolution in a
historic French nation and appropriating traditional ethno-religious symbols and
heroes. By the 1830s Michelet presented the Revolution as the culmination of a
democratic nation, epitomised by the medieval Saint Joan of Arc. Victor Hugo
gave momentum to the romantic cult of Gothic France, as embodied in its great
cathedrals that now exemplified not the glories of Catholicism but rather the
democratic and national genius of its medieval craftsmen and guilds. Counterrevolutionaries
sought to reground the legitimist cause in a period of increasing
democratisation by reclaiming St Joan as a symbol of popular Catholicism and
monarchism. Defeat in the 1870s and the loss of territories at the hands of Germany,
and German invasions in two world wars have all resulted in mass revivals of
St Joan as national liberator (Gildea 1994: 154–65). To republicans and their
opponents, the great cathedrals have been enduring symbols of an indomitable
French nation – the cathedrals of Metz and Strasbourg, poignant reminders
of provinces in captivity after 1870, and the shelled cathedral of Reims, a
representation in 1916 of a suffering people (Vauchez 1992: 64).
Even the exemplary civic nation then rests on an ethnic substratum. As Anthony
Smith (1999) has argued, the core of nationhood is located in its myths, memories
and culture rather than in allegiance to a state. Extreme crises – periods of conquest
– demonstrate that this nationalist ideology has a real resonance. For while it is
possible to overthrow a state and control a territory, it is difficult to expunge and
penetrate (from above), a way of life, particularly when it is embedded by a dense
web of religious institutions, linguistic practices, literatures, legal customs, and
rituals, which then can become sites of collective resistance. The long historical
perspective of nationalists, which includes eras of defeat, enslavement and recovery,
evokes the capacity of communities to overcome disaster by mobilising an inner
world of spiritual energies. Poles under the Soviet yoke rallied under the umbrella
of the Catholic Church, remembering the survival and resurrection of their nation
despite two centuries of division and occupation by empires.
In short, national identities endure even when stripped of their protecting state,
and the legitimacy of nation-states rests ultimately not on just the provision of
economic and social progress but on more deep-seated attachments, sustained by
historical memories, to the defence of a homeland, a unique culture, and independence
of a community.
Nations as fluctuating entities
If the core of the nation lies in the cultural community, is it not the case that its
political carapace, the nation-state, is no longer able in a global world to fulfil
its essential functions, including the defence of the nation from external threat, the
management of the economy, and the provision of basic welfare? Hence the rise of
regional transnational institutions such as the EU.
This perspective is vitiated by the assumption that once upon a time there were
sovereign nation-states. In much nationalist scholarship (Hroch 1985; Hobsbawm
1990) we see a teleology operating in which nations rise from being elite