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Оглавление2 The Democratic Origin of Nations
It has been suggested that the nationalist imaginary must be understood as a particular democratic imaginary. More precisely, nationalism is a response to the question of democracy par excellence: Who are ‘the people’ in whom sovereignty is vested? This relationship between the nation and the democratic imaginary is easily overlooked if the nation is conceived of as, above all, a cultural artefact; worse, if culture is opposed to the political. This is what happens in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee’s (1993) discussion of post-colonial nationalism in Asia. His argument is that anti-colonial nationalism is unlike European nationalism, precisely because it does not imagine the space of the nation as a political domain. This is an important claim that needs to be addressed.
Chatterjee starts by acknowledging the importance of Benedict Anderson’s influential book, Imagined Communities (1991) for animating fresh discussion about nationalism. ‘I have one central objection to Anderson’s argument,’ Chatterjee writes. ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5). He is worried that Anderson, in a long tradition of European orientalism, denies agency to non-Europeans and/or non-Americans. ‘History, it would seem,’ he writes sarcastically,
has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized (Chatterjee, 1993: 5).
Might Michel Foucault not have, in all seriousness, replied, ‘Yes, as a postcolonial subject, you are indeed a perpetual consumer of modernity’? Let us recall Foucault’s argument about disciplinary apparatuses, at least in Discipline and Punish (1979) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1998): that the very things such apparatuses seek to discipline and control are already their effects. We are told over and over again, for example, that during the nineteenth century, efforts to control and discipline sexuality resulted in its proliferation. Slavoj Zizek extends the logic of this argument to the field of colonialism. Somewhat playfully, he writes: ‘One is tempted to say that the will to gain political independence from the colonizer in the guise of a new independent nation-state is the ultimate proof that the colonized ethnic group is thoroughly integrated into the ideological universe of the colonizer’ (Zizek, 2000: 255). Why? Because it is precisely colonialist oppression that ‘brings about the … eminently modern will to assert one’s … identity in the form of a nation-state’ (Zizek, 2000: 255).1 Zizek is being playful, precisely because he wants to disagree with such arguments for foreclosing on the possibility of real resistance: a resistance, that is, that exceeds the terms of the coloniser. In this regard, we might anticipate Zizek’s possible critique of Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony.
In the postcolony, Mbembe writes, the ‘commandement’ (the term he uses to refer to an authoritarian mode of power) institutionalises itself, and achieves legitimation and hegemony by inventing signs officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable, and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge (Mbembe, 2001: 103):
To ensure that no such challenge takes place the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; but they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain (p. 103).
Turning Bakhtin on his head, Mbembe finds two of these ideas in that of the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘obscene’. No longer strategies of ordinary people to parody officials, they become the characteristics of occasions that ‘state power organizes for dramatizing its own magnificence’ (p. 103). The state is necessarily extravagant, needing to ‘furnish proof of its prestige and glory by a sumptuous (yet burdensome) presentation of its symbols of status, displaying the heights of luxury in dress and lifestyle, turning acts of generosity into grand theatre’ (p. 109). Yet the ‘ordinary people’ do not resist these grotesque spectacles. Rather, ‘the popular world borrows the ideological repertoire of officialdom, along with its idioms and forms; conversely, the official world mimics popular vulgarity, inserting it at the core of the procedures by which it takes on grandeur’ (p. 110). This leads Mbembe to his conclusion:
It is unnecessary, then, to insist … on oppositions or, as does conventional analysis, on the purported logic of resistance, disengagement, or disjunction. Instead, the emphasis should be on the logic of ‘conviviality’, on the dynamics of domesticity and familiarity, inscribing the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme (p. 110; emphasis added).
Has Mbembe not slipped into a type of theoretical formalism, positing a society that is hermetically closed in on itself? There is no (radical) outside (to borrow a term from Ernesto Laclau), no possibility of resistance that can break the terms of post-colonial power. Dominant and dominated merely mimic each other, producing what Mbembe calls a mutual ‘zombification’ that robs each of their vitality and leaves them both impotent (p. 104).2 Is this not another way of saying that the post-colonial subject’s imagination has indeed been colonised?
What Chatterjee finds in post-colonial nationalism is precisely a ‘difference’ with the colonial discourse: ‘The most powerful as well as creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa’, he writes, ‘are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the “modular” forms of the national society propagated by the modern West’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5; original emphasis). ‘By my reading,’ he continues,
anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with Imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains – the material and the spiritual. … [N]ationalism declares the domain of the spiritual its sovereign territory and refuses to allow the colonial power to intervene in that domain (p. 6).
Hence, if Western nationalism is a state project, anti-colonial nationalism is a cultural one. It seeks to ‘fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’ (p. 6).
One wonders, however, if Chatterjee has not moved too quickly. We get a sense of this from his style of writing. In the passage referred to above, he invokes a ‘we’ (post-colonial subjects) and a ‘them’ (the West): ‘History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, [are] the only true subjects of history’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5; emphasis added). The argument of this book is that the proper domain of nationalism is in the emergence of this ‘we’. The individual that refers to himself or herself in the name of a people – this nation – is already a national subject, whether this naming takes place in the field of art, culture, theatre or political battle. What has to be explained, in other words, is the emergence of such a collective pronoun in the first place.
The problem with Anderson’s account is not that he locates the origins of the nationalist imagination in Europe – the fact that something originates somewhere tells us virtually nothing about how it is appropriated, developed, elaborated and transformed. The trouble is that his account of nationalism is not political enough: he does not sufficiently explore its origins in the democratic imagination of the eighteenth century. Let us dwell for a moment on his argument.
Political communities, Anderson suggests, are to be distinguished ‘by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson, 1991: 6). In contrast to dynastic and religious communities that conceived their unities, not in terms of causality or dependence, but, rather, of prefiguring and fulfilment – what Walter Benjamin described as ‘messianic’ time – the nation was imagined in homogenous time. The conditions of the nation idea, Anderson tells us, were prepared when certain cultural conceptions lost their axiomatic grip. ‘The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth’ (Hebrew or Latin, for example) (p. 36). The second was
the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centers – monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the rule, like the sacred script, was a node of access to being and inherent in it (p. 36).
The third was a ‘conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical’ (p. 36).
How do these cultural axioms combine to give the form of religious and dynastic communities? On their own terms, Anderson explains, religious communities have no history other than the schema of God: their events, trials and happenings are merely moments of some otherworldly logic. The time of society is the time of God, since the social totality, being merely an epiphenomenon of the divine will, develops according to His plan. The rise and fall of civilisations, the elliptical circuit of the moon, the setting of the sun, war, poverty, peace and abundance all happen according to some great design. Hence the radical distance between these communities and modern ones: the meaning of things was given uniquely by their place in the scheme of God, revealed through certain privileged texts or miracles. The limits of the community are fixed by divine, symbolic referents that are either announced or revealed. Hence the empirical boundaries of the Christian, Islamic and Buddhist communities, for example, were given by the limits of their sacred languages (Latin, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese) – which were solely capable of expressing divine intentions – so that literate priesthoods were the privileged savants of Godly purpose.
Dynastic communities, on the other hand, Anderson continues, produced and reproduced their unities through marriage and intermarriage – the community, given corporality in the body of the sovereign (as the site of God on earth), expanded or contracted according to his/her marital liaisons. Hence the form of dynastic and religious communities: they encompassed diverse linguistic and cultural groups, and they were not territorially fixed. The community did not receive its coherence or its consistency from the subjects that belonged to it, but merely from the monarchical figure that embodied it. Therefore, its reproduction coincided exactly with his/her fortune: expanding or contracting through war (displacement of or by another monarch) or through marriage (the joining of communities).
What replaced this mode of apprehension, we are told, was an ‘idea’ of homogenous time. Anderson approaches a description of this idea through the example of the modern novel. Characters that never meet and whose existence is unknown to each other are nonetheless connected in the story through a double movement: (1) they are ‘embedded’ in particular ‘societies’ (Hardyesque landscapes of the mind such as Wessex, Lübeck, Los Angeles); and (2) they are ‘embedded’ in the reader’s mind, so that despite their simultaneous and parallel actions, they nonetheless constitute a community of characters in the book.
To give to Anderson’s analysis the full force of homogenous time as intended by Walter Benjamin, we should add that the parallel and simultaneous lives of all the characters are embedded in a single movement evolving towards a climax. Past, present and future are stages in an evolving teleology. This, Anderson tells us, is analogous to the idea of the nation: a community of individuals mostly anonymous to each other (we do not have personal relations with all our compatriots) who steadily and simultaneously go about their affairs in a common space, content in the belief that they share with each other something or other in common.
This leads Anderson to his well-known definition of the nation: ‘it is an imagined political community – and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 1991: 6). It is ‘limited’ because it always has finite boundaries beyond which lie other nations. It is ‘sovereign’ because it emerges at a time when the ‘gage and emblem of … freedom is the sovereign state’ (p. 7). It is a ‘community’ because whatever real inequalities and exploitation prevail, it is imagined as a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (p. 7).
Our first problem arises when we ask: Why did the weakening of religious and dynastic cultures produce the ‘idea’ of the nation? It is worth dwelling on Anderson’s answer.
Faced with the arbitrary character of ‘man’s’ (sic) mortality, the ineluctability of his particular genetic heritage, gender, ‘life-era’, physical capabilities and so on, he seeks meaning for his life. ‘The great merit of traditional religious world-views’, Anderson argues, has been their ability to give sense to the ‘overwhelming burden of human suffering – disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death’ (Anderson, 1991: 9). With the ebbing of religious belief, Anderson continues, death and deliverance seemed arbitrary and ridiculous. The ‘disintegration of paradise’ and the ‘absurdity of salvation’ required, in their place, a new ‘style of continuity’: a secular transformation of fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning. ‘Few things’, he continues, ‘were better placed to achieve this than an idea of the nation’, since nations always loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a limitless future (pp. 12–13). Anderson is saying that the nation ‘idea’ is an Enlightenment response to the ‘death of God’. Apparently, we all seek meaning and continuity where this takes the form of a will to immortality. The nation fulfils such needs because it is seemingly eternal.
Yet Anderson’s explanation begs more questions than it answers. Is the will to immortality not itself a religious idea, rather than a state of ‘man’s’ nature? If nations emerge from the eclipse of the religious imagination, then Anderson cannot account for them. Why are they imagined as quasi-religious objects? If they do not, then he also cannot account for them. If nations are consubstantial with religion, then, on their own terms, they cannot be products of a radically new style of imagining.3 This is the substance of Adrian Hastings’ critique of what he calls the ‘modernist school’, including Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and John Breuilly. They have, he suggests, understated the importance of religious thinking to nationalism. He argues: ‘The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed’ (Hasting, 1997: 4; emphasis added).
What is at stake in this disagreement is before the periodisation of the origins of nations. Unlike the modernist school, for whom the nation does not exist prior to the 1780s – that is before the American and French Revolutions – Hastings is sure that ‘the sense of “nation” was already found in the fourteenth century’ (Hastings, 1997: 18). Starting with the English Bible, Hastings finds the term ‘nacion’ – a translation of the Vulgate text, which used the Latin ‘natio’ – employed as early as the mid-1340s. Thus Psalm 107.4 is translated by Richard Rolle of Hampole, who died in 1349, as ‘I sall singe til the in nacyuns’ (cited in Hastings, 1997: 16). This is not simply a coincidence of a term: ‘What is clear’, claims Hastings, ‘is that there has been a surprisingly firm continuity in usage across more than six hundred years’ (Hastings, 1997: 18). He is suggesting that the medieval term ‘nacyun’ or ‘nacion’, like the contemporary term ‘nation’, referred to a
historico-cultural community with a territory it regards as its own and over which it claims some sort of sovereignty so that the cultural community sees itself with a measure of self-awareness as also a territorial and political community, held together horizontally by its shared character rather than vertically by reason of the authority of the state (Hastings, 1997: 25).
Hastings is, ironically, drawing on Anderson’s own definition of a nation as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’. Hastings’ point is that both the word and concept, ‘nation’, were already at the heart of the English linguistic, cultural and religious tradition from the Middle Ages, though they became more widespread with the Reformation and the diffusion of knowledge of the Bible achieved by Protestantism (Hastings, 1997: 18). What Hastings does is make clear a contradiction at the heart of Imagined Communities. If the nation is chiefly a cultural artefact, then its form precedes the Enlightenment.
Anthony Smith, for his part, finds the origin of national communities in pre-modern ethnic sentiments (Smith, 1986: 5), even finding an analogue for modern systems of nation states in the fourteenth century BC (Smith, 1986: 11). In this view, the nation as defined by Anderson and Hastings resembles what Smith calls an ethnic community (‘ethnie’) in that it is a community with ‘shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory and a sense of solidarity’ (Smith, 2003: 27). Yet if this is how we construe the nation, then, according to Smith, ‘such communities have been widespread in all eras of history, at least since the onset of the Bronze Age in the Middle East and Aegean’ (Smith, 2003: 27). Seyoum Hameso, for example, in his study of Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa, simply substitutes for Smith’s term ethnie the word nation. Hence, where Smith suggests that ethnie is the basic force and process of the modern as well the pre-modern epochs (Smith, 1995: 57), Hameso simply renders this as: nations are the basic units of the modern and pre-modern periods (Hameso, 1997: 33).
What all these accounts have in common is that they elevate the cultural dimensions of the nation – its basic anthropology – and reduce its significance as a political community. In this regard, there is no sharp division between the modernist and pre-modernist accounts of the nation.
Ernest Gellner, someone for whom the nation is a modern phenomenon, for example, sees in it a functional response to the ‘Great Transformation’ – the emergence of industrial societies from agrarian ones. Accompanying this movement, he suggests, was a radical change in the nature of work. Physical labour (the ‘application of human muscle to matter’ [Gellner, 1999: 106]) was replaced by ‘controlling, managing and maintaining a machine’ and more usually by the ‘rapid manipulation of meanings and people through computers ... telephones and typewriters and faxes … and so on’ (p. 106). Industrial production presupposed that the system of symbols in use were immediately legible: that meaning, as Gellner puts it, ‘was carried by the message alone’ (p. 107). Rapid communication between sometimes-distant interlocutors, who were selected more and more on the basis of merit rather than rank (and, therefore, of different ranks), required an orderly, standardised system of ideas and rules for formulating and decoding messages (p. 107). This is what Gellner calls a ‘high culture’ (p. 107). With industrialisation, Gellner concludes, ‘the entire society must be pervaded by one standardised high culture, if it is to work at all’ (p. 107), i.e.
Society can no longer tolerate a wild proliferation of internal subcultures, all of them context-bound and severely inhibited in their mutual inter-communication. Access to the appropriate high culture, and acceptability within it, is a person’s most important and valued possession: it institutes a pre-condition of access not merely to employment, but to legal and moral citizenship, to all kinds of social participation. So a person identifies with his or her high culture, and is eager that he or she inhabits a political unit where various bureaucracies function in that same cultural idiom. … In other words, he or she is a nationalist (Gellner, 1999: 107–8).
Why does it follow, however, that a high culture is necessarily a national culture? This is the gist of the question that Miroslav Hroch addresses to Gellner. Hroch observes that most national movements had, for the most part, already acquired a mass character by 1800 (Hroch, 1985) – prior, that is, to the industrial epoch. In other words, someone with a national consciousness was not necessarily a member of a high culture.
Gellner’s treatment of the nation is subject to an even more important critique. On his terms, an agro-literate society is necessarily a heterogeneous culture – it ‘secretes, engenders, elaborates cultural differentiations within itself’ (Gellner, 1999: 103) – whereas industrial societies are attendant on cultural homogenisation. Gellner adduces this from the technical requirements of an advanced industrial economy: (a) the need for communication among people irrespective of social position or rank, and (b) the decomposition of stable, ascribed roles in favour of occupational effectiveness and hence social mobility.
One of the key features of South Africa, however, was that apartheid society engendered, elaborated, produced and reproduced social heterogeneity as a condition of industrialisation. This was the centrepiece, for example, of the theory of ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’. It suggested that, on the one hand, ‘white South Africa’ resembled an advanced capitalist state and industrial society; while on the other hand, ‘non-white South Africa’ had all the features of a colony. Famously, it concluded that ‘non-white South Africa is the colony of white South Africa itself’ (SACP [1962], cited in Wolpe, 1989: 62). Relying on an analysis of migrant labour and its centrality to the profitability of the gold-mining sector, Marxist historians and sociologists argued that industrialisation happened by tying black South Africans to an oppressive and poverty-stricken agricultural society. Rather than create a homogenous culture, industrialisation in South Africa reproduced an agro-tribal society in its midst.
Immanuel Wallerstein, for his part, goes so far as to suggest that this is the normal state of affairs for capitalist industrialisation. Capitalists, he proposes, benefit by having the cost level of labour subsidised by an income or subsistence from agricultural production. Capitalism does not necessarily presuppose the dissolution of extended or clan societies and hence the homogenisation of culture (Wallerstein, 1991: 109; 130–31). Hence, the nation qua homogenous high culture cannot be read from the logic of (capitalist) industrialisation.
The age of revolution
There is an important intuition behind the periodisation of the nation to the late eighteenth century. Something happens to the nation qua cultural community during this period. At stake is the advent of democracy as a principle of government and political community. For the first time, the political community refers to ‘the people’, in whom political sovereignty resides. If the people are the nation and democracy refers to a system of government of and by ‘the people’, then the nation is the logical home for democratic government.
Jurgen Habermas, for example, sees in the nation a revolutionary attempt at democratisation. Where democracies on the Western model appeared, he argues, they did so in the form of the nation state (Habermas, 2001: 62). This is because the nation state fulfilled the preconditions for democratic self-control: self-governance, the demos, consent, representation and popular sovereignty (p. 61). The sovereign will was taken to be the will of the nation.
Benedict Anderson hints obliquely at this rupture, though he does not integrate it into his own analysis. Hence, he situates his discussion of nations in accounts of either popular movements for democracy (in France, America, Hungary and Spain) or dynastic responses to them. He defines the nation as a political community, and generates one of its key features – that it is sovereign – from a time when the ‘gage and emblem of … freedom is the sovereign state’ (Anderson, 1991: 7). Yet, for all that, Anderson does not reflect on the idea of the nation in relation to the idea of democracy – this despite their historical contemporaneity. Eric Hobsbawm (1999), in contrast, wants the modern concept of the nation to be understood in relation to the ‘Age of Revolution’ – to the period, that is, of revolutionary democrats. Hobsbawm’s analysis is curious, however, for not drawing its own logical conclusions.
He traces the genealogy of the term nation and concludes that in its peculiarly modern sense three elements were related: people, territory and state. These terms were articulated quite differently by nationalists, on the one hand, and by revolutionary democrats, on the other. The results were distinct concepts of the nation. In the first case, nationalists appealed to a pre-existing community seeking sovereignty in its own state. This community spoke the same language and/or shared the same customs, but was generally endowed with certain moral qualities that distinguished it from other groups. In the other case, revolutionary democrats conceived the sovereign people simply as comprising those citizens who governed themselves. Therefore, relative to the state, ‘the people’ were nothing more than a congress of citizens, but relative to humanity they constituted a specific demos, i.e. a nation. Hobsbawm discusses the nation of nationalists as an ‘ethnic’ community, and that of revolutionary democratics as a ‘body of citizens’. ‘There was no logical connection’, he argues, however, ‘between the body of citizens of a territorial state on the one hand, and the identification of a “nation” on ethnic, linguistic or other grounds or of other characteristics which allowed collective recognition of group membership’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 19; emphasis added).
In other words, Hobsbawm argues that the nation, defined as an ethnic community, was logically unrelated to the nation qua body of citizens (bearers of political rights). In this respect, Hobsbawm echoes a distinction that has become commonplace today between ethnic and civic nationalism. Yet even on his own terms, Hobsbawm cannot really account for the tenacity of the ethnic variable in the constitution of the body of citizens. If the nation of revolutionary democrats had anything in common with that of their nationalist counterparts, he suggests, it was not the element of ethnicity or language. What characterised the nation was that it was a community of common interest rather than being linguistically or otherwise homogenous. He notes, for example, that the French Republic had no difficulty electing an Anglo-American, Thomas Paine, to its National Convention. Moreover, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars added to the French nation territories and peoples that could not on any ethnic criteria be deemed French. ‘We cannot, therefore, read into the revolutionary “nation”’, he tells us, ‘anything like the later nationalist programme of establishing nation states for bodies defined in terms of … ethnicity, common language, religion, territory and common historical memories’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 20).
Yet Hobsbawm concedes that for most Jacobins ‘a Frenchman who did not speak French was suspect’ and, moreover, that the ‘ethno-linguistic criterion of nationality was often accepted’ (Hobsbawm, 1999: 21). He states in this regard – and the remark is important – that:
it was not the native use of the French language that made a person French – how could it be when the Revolution itself spent so much of its time proving how few people in France actually used it? – but the willingness to acquire this, among the other liberties, laws and common characteristics of the free people of France (p. 21; emphasis added).
We can leave Hobsbawm here. He has, ironically, given us all the elements needed to continue with our argument. In particular, he introduces a new variable that completes the logical relation between nationalism and democracy. What he says above is that willingness to acquire French was deemed a condition of being ‘free’. Or, rather, free citizens were those that spoke French. Now, if the body of citizens is the nation, and those citizens that are free are French, then the nation is free when it is French. Even more simply: if freedom is included in the definition of being a citizen, and speaking French is a condition of freedom, then the body of citizens is also the body of the French nation. Here the linguistic/ethnic criterion is not logically unrelated to citizenship: it is the logical condition of it.
When we consider the nation qua imagined community in the light of the age of democracy, then its peculiarly modern features become apparent. Firstly and most importantly, the nation is a democratic community, which is its abstract form. As such, it refers to a community of citizens. Modern political theorists understand by this term a political subject having civic rights (equality before the law; personal liberty; freedom of speech, belief and opinion; the right to property; and the right to contract with another), political rights (the right to elect and to be elected, and the right to participate in government), and even socio-economic rights (equal access to health care and the regulation of work), where these rights are deemed to announce themselves from human nature (Gaille, 1998: 21–22).4 At first glance, therefore, to qualify for citizenship, one need only be human. Our first difficulty arises when we ask: On what basis are these fundamental human rights recognised in this or that particular demos? The moment the Citizen (the universal bearer of rights) becomes a citizen (the bearer of rights in a specific community), he/she is necessarily distinguished from other citizens. In other words, something happens to make his/her rights admissible in this or that community and not in others. Our second difficulty arises when we ask if these rights apply to the mad and the mentally handicapped. Living apart and judged incapable of autonomously expressing their opinions, such people are said only to have partial political rights. Combined, we might conclude with Marie Gaille that: ‘This makes one suspect that citizenship is not granted to this or that individual on the basis of the rights of man, but, rather, as a status, conferred according to relative criteria’ (p. 23; my translation).
To take this point further, we can firstly say that if citizenship is a status and not a right, then it implies that duties and obligations issue not from nature, but from the political community itself. Even when judged a feature of birth, citizenship only reveals itself in relations between people and the state. Rights only appear in the light of the sovereign law; hence the disassociation possible between the ‘natural rights of Man’ and the civic and especially political rights of the citizen. To the extent, therefore, that rights are conferred by the law, they can be granted in degrees, and they are susceptible to political claims by those who do not enjoy them. Citizenship is thus produced in the relations between individuals or collectivities and the state. What is at stake in defining the limits of the political community, therefore, is the measure according to which rights are conferred and distributed in the polis. This brings us to the particular form of the nation.
Secondly, citizenship is contingent on a particular culture – what can be called a quality of population – which distinguishes one community of citizens from another. In other words, a nation is a community of citizens with a common imagined culture.
Understood in this way, the question is not whether the nation is modern or not. More apt is to ask: When does modernity start? Does it begin with the American and French Revolutions? For those historians for whom the first nation is that of England, modernity starts two hundred years earlier. Leah Greenfeld, for example, argues that in England as early as the sixteenth century, the term ‘nation’ became synonymous with ‘the people’ to mean the bearer of sovereignty (Greenfeld, 1992: 7). This is what was at stake in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. By the time of the accession of Charles I in 1625, the principle that political sovereignty resided with Parliament, as representative of the nation, had long been established. Charles reasserted the divine right of kings in a context where this right was long deemed to have passed to the nation. The documents of Parliament, states Greenfeld, ‘are characterized by an unequivocally nationalist position in the interpretation of the polity, which was this time unambiguously defined as a nation’ (p. 40). This language was most clear in the documents of 1649 that abolished the House of Lords, abolished kingship, established a republic (which was called a Commonwealth) and established a court to try Charles I. The law providing for the prosecution of the king claimed that he,
not content with those many encroachments which his predecessors had made upon the people in their rights and freedoms, has had a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation … [and] levied and maintained a cruel war in the land against Parliament and Kingdom (cited in Greenfeld, 1992: 41).
