BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

communications, mass education and mass politics. 4 Yet even those who dispute a strictly
modern constructionist view agree with these contextual arguments. One of the strongest
critiques of the modernist position, however, centers around the question of “affective
continuity”: how did populations so easily transfer loyalties to a new conception of nationality,
and why did they so readily accept invented traditions? Anthony D. Smith, a foremost scholar of
national identity and self-proclaimed ethnosymbolist, answers this question with the observation
that much modern “invented” tradition really should be considered a “reinterpretation of
pre-existing cultural motifs” and a “reconstruction of earlier ethnic ties and sentiments.” 5 In
recognition of the “shared myths, memories, symbols, values and traditions” that identify a
historic homeland, Smith has emphasized the role of ethnoreligious symbolism and linkages
between the formation of national identity and ethnic community that preceded the rise of
ideological or political nationalism. 6
The argument for precursors of modern nationalism has also prompted Tom Garvin to
criticize Gellner’s modernist thesis for giving short shrift to older traditions of collective identity
“still ‘knocking around’ in our modern cultures.” These “ancestral cultural ghosts,” he
admonished, while pointing to the close ties between Islamic tradition and Iranian nationalism,
4 Key works include: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, New Perspectives on the
Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds., The
Invention of Tradition, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), in which Hugh Trevor-Roper exposes the literally fabricated tradition of
Scottish clan tartans (pp. 23, 30); and John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1982).
5 Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, Key Concepts, 83, (italics in the original).
6 The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and Republic (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2008), 19-20.
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