Gellner's theory of nationalism

Characteristics

Gellner defined nationalism as "primarily a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent" and as

the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually sustainable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves.

Gellner analyzed nationalism by a historical perspective. He saw the history of humanity culminating in the discovery of modernity, nationalism being a key functional element. Modernity, by changes in political and economic system, is tied to the popularization of education, which, in turn, is tied to the unification of language. However, as modernization spread around the world, it did so slowly, and in numerous places, cultural elites were able to resist cultural assimilation and defend their own culture and language successfully.

For Gellner, nationalism was a sociological condition and a likely but not guaranteed (he noted exceptions in multilingual states like Switzerland, Belgium and Canada) result of modernisation, the transition from agrarian to industrial society. His theory focused on the political and cultural aspects of that transition. In particular, he focused on the unifying and culturally homogenising roles of the educational systems, national labour markets and improved communication and mobility in the context of urbanisation. He thus argued that nationalism was highly compatible with industrialisation and served the purpose of replacing the ideological void left by both the disappearance of the prior agrarian society culture and the political and economical system of feudalism, which it legitimised.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen lists these as "some of the central features of nationalism" in Gellner's theory:

• Shared, formal educational system
• Cultural homogenisation and "Social entropy"
• Central monitoring of polity, with extensive bureaucratic control
• Linguistic standardisation
• National identification as abstract community
• Cultural similarity as a basis for political legitimacy
• Anonymity, single-stranded social relationships

Gellner also provided a typology of "nationalism-inducing and nationalism-thwarting situations".

Gellner criticised a number of other theoretical explanations of nationalism, including the "naturality theory", which states that it is "natural, self-evident and self-generating" and a basic quality of human being, and a neutral or a positive quality; its dark version, the "Dark Gods theory", which sees nationalism as an inevitable expression of basic human atavistic, irrational passions; and Elie Kedourie's idealist argument that it was an accidental development, an intellectual error of disseminating unhelpful ideas, and not related to industrialisation and the Marxist theory in which nations appropriated the leading role of social classes. On October 24, 1995, at Warwick University, Gellner debated one of his former students, Anthony D. Smith, in what became known as the Warwick Debates. Smith presented an ethnosymbolist view; Gellner a modernist one. The debate has been described as epitomizing their positions.