Introduction

200
Melanie Swiatloch
which supports the assumption that Northern Ireland indeed consists of two nations,
one ethnically Irish the other ethnically English/Scottish.
In 1880 the French philosopher Ernest Renan offered the following description
of a community in his essay “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”:
The nation, even as the individual, is the end product of a long period of
work, sacrifice and devotion. The worship of ancestors is understandably
justifiable, since our ancestors have made us what we are […] To have
common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished
great things together, to wish to do so again, that is the essential
condition for being a nation (Renan 17).
Renan’s point of view of the nation was thus much simpler than Anderson’s. For
him the nation consisted of a “soul, a spiritual principle” (ibid. 17). The only two
terms that were essential for this assumption were the past and the present,
namely what a people had shared together and that they were also inclined to
continue to do so. This concept might have been valid at some point in the past
but it does not seem to be the only adequate source for the present day as most
nations indeed remember their history but do not solely live on it anymore. Still,
some of these aspects are important to understand why people share a common
sense of belonging. Max Weber then in 1948 supposed the idea that nations were
a concept that meant to “exact from certain groups of men a specific sentiment of
solidarity in the face of other groups” (Weber 21-22) In this sense Weber rather
talks about a value system that forms a nation.
Today we speak of nations and nation states as a matter of course. But according
to Anderson, national feelings arose much earlier and can be traced back to
the eighteenth century; to a time when ideas of Enlightenment and rationalist
secularism spread throughout Europe. Religion lost part of its importance; values
and morals changed. Before the term nationalism came up, however, in Anderson’s
opinion the two dominating powers that made up a sense of belonging together
were the religious community and the dynastic realm. Christendom for
instance united people by a sacred language and a written script (Anderson 11ff).
Latin was the language of the church in the European world, thus it was the
only language taught in medieval times and also the only language that books were
published in. In the sixteenth century, however, this gradually changed and Latin
began to lose its ubiquity. On the one hand Great Britain was reaching out for
new territories. The exploration of the non-European world led to a new geographical
but also cultural knowledge. On the other hand publishing in the vernacular
languages instead of Latin had become popular by the seventeenth century
(Anderson 16ff). As Anderson notes, “the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process
in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were
gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized” (18). In a word, the international
community held up by Latin lost its base. Instead, and as a result of that “a