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Gellner, Nationalism and the Modern State
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Charles Taylor |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What is the connection between culture and nationalism in the modern state? According to Ernest Gellner, a common cultural language accounts for the birth of the nationalist imperative. But, in this extract from his essay "Nationalism and Modernity," Charles Taylor argues that Gellner's account does not give us the full picture, maintaining that the ultimate sources of modern nationalism escape our understanding. |
 modern economy is by definition one undergoing growth and change. As such it requires a mobile population, both occupationally and geographically. People no longer will necessarily stay in the same métier throughout their whole careers; and certainly there cannot be the hereditary handing down of métier from parent to child which characterised many premodern societies.  This flexibility can be attained only by a high level of general education, literacy and numeracy, one unmatched by any previous society in history. The modern division of labour is multiform but shallow. That is, it is taken for granted that people can be retrained, or at least that their children can. Vocations are no longer linked with the standing status divisions which marked many earlier societies, of which the extreme case is the traditional Indian caste system. |
Moreover, this generalised and high level of culture has to be homogeneous. We need people who can communicate with each other, and generally understand each other without having to rely heavily on familiarity with particular contexts of family, clan, locality, provenance, etc. To 'do business' with each other, operate a system of courts, run a bureaucratic state apparatus and the like, we need millions who can communicate without difficulty in a context-free fashion. There has to be a standard language, replacing all the local and class dialects which abounded earlier. |
Homogeneous culture
Society needs in a sense a homogeneous culture, in which people have to be inducted to be able to do business with each other across all the particularities of context and background. But how can they be inducted into this culture? Here is where the modern state takes on a specially important role. |
In earlier 'agro-literate' societies, the high culture was confined to a class, literati and perhaps other top strata. The job of handing on this culture could be assumed by families in some cases, or by special institutions which might take some distance from the state (e.g. the church in premodern Europe). But in the modern context, the task of educating everybody up to scratch is too imposing and too vital to be left to the private sector. Both the scale of the educative enterprise and its essential uniformity dictate that it be assumed by the state. Modern societies/economies are all serviced, inescapably, by a state system of education. |
A homogeneous language and culture is fostered and diffused, and hence also to some degree defined by the state. Modern societies necessarily have official languages, almost official cultures. This is a functional imperative. Ernest Gellner takes issue with Elie Kedourie: it is not so much that nationalism as a sentiment, as a political aspiration, has imposed homogeneity. Rather homogeneity is a requirement of the modern state, and it is this 'inescapable imperative [which] eventually appears on the surface in the form of nationalism' (Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983, p. 39). |
Categorical identities
Now up to this last quote, I think Gellner is basically right. There can be differences in the detailed account, but it seems to me an undeniable feature of modern market, growth-oriented, industrial economies, embedded as they are in bureaucratic polities, that they force a kind of homogeneity of language and culture, both designedly, as through the education system, and by the very way they operate, as through their media. And it seems that this could not very well be otherwise. The demands of this kind of society in trained personnel, above all in retrainable personnel, capable of taking on ever new technologies and operating by ever new methods, the needs for intercommunication across vaster and vaster networks, pushes inevitably to the diffusion of standardised, context-free languages, embedding within themselves a multiplicity of expert 'language games'. As a consequence of this, earlier 'network' identities, linked to family, clan, locality, provenance, tend to decline, and new 'categorical' identities, which link us to a multitude of others nationally or even globally--on the basis of confession, profession, citizenship--take on more and more importance. |
Compared to earlier societies, which tended to be divided between a 'high' culture, the apanage of a restricted class, and a set of partly overlapping 'folk' cultures, this modern form tends to universalise a species of 'high' (literate) culture, putting a larger and larger proportion of its population through tertiary education, inculcating into many of them a 'canon', as 'high' cultures have always tended to do to their initiates. As Gellner puts it, 'a high culture pervades the whole of society, defines it, and needs to be sustained by that polity. That is the secret of nationalism' (Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 18). |
All this seems true, but how does it account for nationalism? This seems evident enough to Gellner. If a modern society has an 'official' language, in the fullest sense of the term, that is, a state-sponsored, state-inculcated, and state-defined language and culture, in which both economy and state function, then it is obviously an immense advantage to anyone if this language and culture is theirs. Speakers of other languages are at a distinct disadvantage. They either must go on functioning in what to them is a second language, or they get on an equal footing with speakers of the official language by assimilating. Or else, faced with this second distasteful prospect, they demand to redraw the boundaries of the state, and set up shop in a new polity/economy where their own language will become official. The nationalist imperative is born. |
People have raised objections to Gellner's theory on a number of grounds, most notably that it seems to have trouble explaining the rise of nationalism in preindustrial contexts, such as nineteenth-century eastern Europe, and twentieth-century Africa. But I don't want to dwell on these difficulties, for which there are probably answers anyway. What concerns me is the incompleteness of the explanation. |
Some peoples assimilate; they go without much protest into the mix-master of school and army, and lose their regional dialects. They enter as peasants, and emerge as Frenchmen (see E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 1979). Why do some put up a fight and create nationalist movements, while others do not? Or again, if there are two languages widely spoken in a given state, why is it so difficult to come to some arrangement around a form of bilingualism. This does happen, of course, but alas, much more rarely than it should; and it is often fraught with strife and difficulty even where it has been adopted. Why should this be so? |
Some people might think that the problematicity of bilingualism needed no explanation. It is so much easier to operate in a single language. The answer is: easier than what? If everyone were willing to agree happily to operate in a single language, we'd be crazy to insist on two. But if the alternative is strife, resentment, separatist movements, perhaps even the dissolution of the state, well, bilingualism isn't really that complicated. In my (admittedly jaundiced) experience of living in a bilingual state, pleas about the trouble and expense of bilingualism are generally technological pretexts for a chauvinism which dare not declare itself openly. |
But if that is so, then the crucial explanatory bit is missing from Gellner's account. The reason why some minorities assimilate and others fight back has to be referred to the nationalism of these latter. The reason bilingual solutions are hard is not because they are so complicated and expensive, but because they are resisted (i.e. under the bad faith pretext that they are complicated and expensive) on fundamentally nationalist grounds. That is, nationalism is still figuring in the account as an explanans, not as a successfully accounted for explanandum. |
Gellner's accomplishments
What Gellner has done, which is very valuable, is define some of the very important stakes of nationalist struggle. Just because the modern state does sustain an official language/culture, it becomes of ultimate significance to those with a strong national identity to get some kind of control of a state. The state focus of so much modern national sentiment and national identity, which Gellner makes a matter of definition, is thereby partly explained, and this is no small matter. But the original energy fuelling these struggles remains to be understood. Unless one takes the cynical view (espoused, for instance, by Pierre Trudeau in relation to Quebec independentism) that the whole thing is powered by the ambition of social elites to establish a monopoly of prestigious and remunerative jobs. The refusal of bilingualism is then easily explained: under this regime, our gang get 50 per cent of the jobs, under unilingualism, we get 100 per cent. |
Once again, this certainly explains something, but far from everything. It can not explain, for instance, why non-elites are so easily recruited into the nationalist enterprise. Nor does it explain the solidarity of the elites themselves. If you are one of those holding down a top job within the 50 per cent allocated to your language group, why should you upset everything so that some as yet unfavoured compatriots can take over the other 50 per cent? Why side with compatriots against fellow top-job-holders? Of course, not everybody does, but it is one of the remarkable things about the moral pressures of nationalism that many feel they should, and lots do. Where does nationalism get its moral thrust? Totally cynical explanations are powerless to illuminate this. |
Lastly, I wonder if we should make the state focus definitional for modern nationalism as Gellner does. Granted, it overwhelmingly takes this form, but not invariably. Thus French-Canadian nationalism, from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, had two forms, of which the dominant one was turned away from the state, and promoted non-state institutions, especially the church. The more familiar, state-centred mode was also there, at least since the rebellion of 1837, but it remained the less powerful strand; that is, until the turn-over of 1960, after which it has taken over the whole field, with the resultant rise of independentism, and the identity switch from 'Canadien-français' to 'Québécois'. Nevertheless, during those many decades before 1960, there were people whom everybody, including themselves, referred to as nationalistes who lacked the state focus. The emotional and moral sources on which they drew were different, but not totally distinct from Quebec nationalists today. We gain nothing by excluding this phenomenon from our purview by definitional fiat. |
So the ultimate sources of modern nationalism still escape us. (Perhaps they always will.) But at least we understand better some of the things at stake in modern nationalist struggles, and hence their focus, thanks to Gellner's account. |
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