Of Luigi Morrone

Source: Corriere della Sera
Since the seventies of the last century, we are witnessing a rebirth of interest in the historiographical debate around the idea of ​​"Nation". The essay “The Nation: Story of an idea” by Anthony David Stephen Smith, just published Rubbettino, with an understanding introduction by Alessandro Campi, outlines the current situation of the debate. A debate commonly marked by a banally post-Marxist approach, which tends to confine the "construction" of the idea of ​​the Nation to mythology, according to a refrain repeated as an ossified formula: “It is not the Nation that creates nationalism, but the opposite". According to this paradigm:
1. The concept of Nation was established in the 19th century and any attempt to backdate it is marked by obvious forcing, because only in the modern era were the conditions created for the construction of "nationalist myths";
2. Nationalism "invents" the idea of ​​the Nation starting from these myths to which a shared "identity" can be traced, which was called “Culture-Nation” by nineteenth-century nationalists (Cultural nation), that is, belonging to a community of culture and lineage that precedes its organization into a State. Myths that are completely made up (come Ossian) or which take inspiration from historical figures, transfiguring their reality. He is born, Like this, the epic of the rooster Vercingetorix, of Arminius, prince of the German Cherusci, of the Celtic leader Ambiorix, National hero of Belgium, del Cid Campeador, for Spain, by Alexander Nevsky and Ivan Susanin, for Russia;
3. The idea of ​​"Nation", as a “liquid” idea, it no longer makes sense in the present time, where it is destined to give way to the idea of ​​a trans-national community, daughter of globalization.
In this perspective, pointed out in the 1940s by Hans Kohn, it moves, first of all, the anthropologist Ernest Gellner, but his theories were further refined – among others – by Eric J. Hobsbawn, da Benedict Anderson, there Ottfried Höffe, da William H. McNeill, da Michel Theretschenko. Such theses, prevalent in mainstream literature today, however, they find refutation in scholars such as Adrian Hastings and John Armstrong.
And it is in this last direction that Smith is moving, already a student of Gellner, then became one of his most tenacious refutators, which he notes: «It's difficult to understand why, based on this logic, we should ascribe greater substance and reality to the "State" than the "Nation". Deconstructing the latter, the essence of historical nations is not grasped: their presence so powerfully perceived and desired, the widespread feeling of belonging to an inter-generational community linked by history and destiny. We will not come to reify the Nation if we admit the vivid tangibility and perceived power of its presence, regardless of the way in which the Nation emerged".
Actually, Smith maintains, in the political and academic fields, the distrust towards nationalism is determined, above all, from the fear that the construction of the "Nation" as an "ethnic community" could ultimately lead to racism (Gellner and Theretschenko consider racism to be the inevitable outcome of nationalism). As, Michael Ignatieff distinguishes a “civic” nationalism, harmless, by an aggressive and exclusive “ethnic” nationalism, like the one that prepared the ground for the conflicts between Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. To chauvinistic nationalism, Ignatieff contrasts Canadian and Australian “nationalisms”., who have long since overcome their "ethnic" characterization (in Canada, once divided between the anglophones and the francophones of Quebec), for an acceptance of a “shared memory”, enhancing the contribution made to the Nation by the confluence of heterogeneous cultures.
The criticism of the idea of ​​the Nation as a "construction" is moved by Smith on various levels, but to the writer the underestimation appears most relevant, by the “constructivists”, of the involvement of the masses in this idea. The “constructivist” thesis presupposes, Indeed, that it is a restricted elite that "invents" a myth, but it does not explain how this myth can have such attraction for people. Scrive Smith: «As George Mosse demonstrates by analyzing the mass conscription and the concept of civic religion with its specific liturgy, nationalism was extraordinarily suited to leveraging essential needs. Individuals were strongly attracted to it because, as well as drawing on symbols of the past, it simultaneously responded to the new needs and interests of a secular era".
Smith's position in the controversy between "modernists" is equally clear (those - that is - who consider the "Nation" a "modern invention") and “perennialists” (those - that is - who consider the Nation a meta-historical phenomenon, recurring in different periods and continents). Smith, Indeed, considers it "misleading" to consider the "Nation" as a "modern" concept, as: «The concept of Nation refers to the numerous historical processes that have contributed over time, all together, to form a distinct cultural community more or less similar to the ideal nation".
Getting down to detail, on the specific point of the construction of the State of Israel, Smith si richiama a Adrian Hastings e Steven Grosby, according to which the prototype of the "national state" was constituted by Israel in the 7th century. a.C., as a widespread faith had already been created at the time, at least among the elite, in the “Greater Israel” who lived in their own Holy Land and venerated only one god (Jaweh) in a well-defined center (Jerusalem). However, Smith does not address the central issue of the founding myth of Zionism: the lack of ethnic and territorial continuity between the pre-Hellenistic State of Israel and the current Jewish State. Smith postpones, Instead, over the objections of Zeev Sternhell, Eviatar Zerubavel, Eldar Shafir, Uri Ram but without refuting them, while it doesn't address those, much more radical, by Shlomo Sand.
As he said, the edition proposed by Rubettino is preceded by an introductory essay by Alessandro Campi, already author of the volume La Nazione (The Mill, 2004). Campi recalls the division made by Louis Leo Snyder on the three historical phases of nationalist ideology. The integrative nationalism of the period 1815-1871, which favored the processes of building nineteenth-century nation-states. The dismembering nationalism of the phase 1871-1890, marked by the aspiration to independence of the "minor" nationalities and from which the decline of the Ottoman imperial structures arose, Austro-Hungarian, Russian The aggressive nationalism of the period that includes the two world wars (1914-1945). In the end, the post-colonialist nationalism of the years following 1947, characterized by the affirmation of national independence movements in the Third World. As regards the historiographical debate, Ciampi insists on the difference between primitive nationalism, arising from awareness, by a community, of their identity, contrasted with the others, and ideological nationalism, in which the idea of ​​the Nation, according to Eugen Lemberg's thesis (Nationalism as an ideology of integration) «takes the form of a conception of the world and society, with a system of norms and values, with a high rate of conceptual elaboration".
Campi remembers, also the latest arrivals in the cultural debate on this subject to which other human sciences have given a decisive contribution, such as anthropology and sociology. State of the art, the fundamental alternatives are those between "primordialists" and "instrumentalists", or between “essentialists” and “culturalists”, or even between “perennialists” and “modernists”, or finally between supporters of the "socio-constructivist" approach and supporters of the "ethno-symbolic" perspective.
According to the proponents of the "socio-constructivist" thesis, the "creation" of the Nation during the nineteenth century was essentially due to the work carried out by historians and linguists. You receive them, they developed the myths of origin, the genealogies, identifying symbols, social rites, around which mass political identities within European states were then cemented. The latter coded (e, in some cases, invented from scratch) the standard idioms that through the press, political propaganda and mass education have allowed the feeling of national belonging to take root in the popular consciousness of different countries.
Campi highlights the original flaw of these theses, which refer to the Marxian distinction between "structures" and "superstructures", waves due to "ideological" prejudice, everything that does not concern the economy is "artificial", built by the “ruling classes”, and he makes his own the criticisms that Smith makes of this thesis. And even for this reason alone, Smith's essay, regarding which we also highlight the penetrating analysis by Maurizio Serio which appeared in the volume Nazione e Nazionalismi (Historica Editions, 2018) it should not be missing from the library of anyone who is still capable of wondering about ours, uncertain future. For those who do not disperse the legacy of the past, our history, our memory, our identity. More simply, our way of life, forged with the blood of our fathers on the battlefields and in the trenches of work.