BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

evolutionary cognizance of national identity. In Gellner’s view nations and national identities
appeared as the “political shadows” of their respective national cultures during the Romantic
period and have since reflected cultural currents, Nietzsche having articulated the Social
Darwinist ideology of ruthless national competition. 58 In sum, Gellner agrees with Smith on the
cultural foundation of nations, but he discounts proto-national religious identities and deems
truly national cultures only those that sprang from structural changes accompanying the
development of modern states and economies. 59
Gellner’s concentration on structural instrumentalities, and not on the psychological
dimension of what he considers the important yet wholly fabricated content of nationalist
ideology, has prompted some to look closer at social and cultural mentalities in the construction
of national identity. 60 Seeing Gellner’s reductionist linkage of nationalism to industrialization as
too one-sided, Ross Poole argues the importance of pre-industrial capitalism and commercial
markets in opening up a “public sphere” for rational discourse and an expanded idea of
citizenship through print media and coffee shops. While not differing too radically from Gellner
in his assessment of external factors driving national identity, Poole accepts the possibility of
pre-modern national identity by tying it specifically to membership in and allegiance to a political
community as well as to exclusion of and reaction to an alien other. 61 Further exploring the
58 Ibid., 69-70.
59 Ibid., 77.
60 Gellner credits Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960) for revealing to
him the artificiality of nationalism, a view which Gellner endorses only insofar as nationalism
“sees itself” but not how it “really is.” See Gellner, 7-12.
61 Nation and Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 22, 27, 32-34. Poole offers an
56