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  • Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism by Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson
  • Jack Snyder
Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. By Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013) 441 pp. $27.99

Gat’s motivation for writing this important book was his “deep dissatisfaction” with the portrayal of nations and nationalism in much scholarly literature as “recent and superficial” results of modern “processes of social integration and political mobilization, which have welded together large populations hitherto scattered among parochial and loosely connected small rural communities” (1). While acknowledging modernity’s huge impact on the political expression of ethnic and national identity, Gat begs to differ in important respects with the modernist consensus. Drawing extensively on ethnonational histories and on theories ranging from evolutionary biology to the social organization of kinship relations, Gat shows convincingly that the nation as a kin-and-culture-based unit of mass political allegiance appeared early and frequently in history, certainly well before the emergence of the economic and institutional arrangements that characterize modernity (2–3). In Gat’s view, ethnicity, defined as “a population of shared kinship (real or perceived) and culture,” played a major role in all forms of the state, including premodern city-states and multiethnic empires (3). “Desperate” popular resistance to alien rule was the norm (13–14).

Gat straddles the positions of two other important scholars who have emphasized the premodern roots of the nation and of politicized ethnicity. On one hand, Connor emphasizes the ties of descent that underpin the political solidarity of ethnic groups, modern or otherwise.1 But Gat points out that evolutionary biology per se cannot support a hypothesis based solely on literal kinship of a large, genetically diverse nation (5–6). On the other hand, Smith argues in a more socialconstructivist vein that premodern “ethnie” often developed a sense of political solidarity based on myths of promised lands, golden ages, distinctive virtues, and great battles against perennial foes (9).2 But Gat also notes that solidarity was not built by cultural meanings out of thin air; such ideas were anchored in nested alliances of lineages, clans, and tribes that underpinned early states (3, 21, 44–66). Gat produces a highly plausible synthesis of these two perspectives, showing the interaction of the social organization of extended kin ties and the development of national culture in many, if not all, proto-nations. In stressing the historically dominant role of kin-based patrimonial organization, Gat echoes a broader argument in Fukuyama’s excellent, The Origins of Political Order.3 [End Page 527]

Why does it matter whether Gat succeeds in putting what he calls the traditionalist argument on a firmer footing against the modernists? Gat says so because hypermodernist theories of nationalism tend to overemphasize the role of elite manipulators in stimulating ethnic conflict (15), to place false hopes in the easy creation of national loyalties based on civic principles rather than ethnic roots (7), to overestimate the likelihood of weakly literate cultures assimilating to a dominant identity (12), and, in general, to disregard the staying power of political loyalties with deeply historical kin-culture roots (326).

As Fukuyama’s book reveals, however, the full victory of modern forms of social and economic organization, together with the liberal ideas that animate them, destroyed the patrimonial and tribal forms of social organization that dominated the premodern era. Countries with weak states and changing societies are nowadays in turmoil precisely because these older personalistic forms of social order and political identity are being disrupted by newer impersonal ones. In the modernists’ view, the possibility that the political units called “France,” “Germany,” and “China” harken back to anciently politicized mass identities does not matter if the political content of those identities has become thoroughly modernized. Gat disagrees. Hence, a good test of his argument is not just whether it is correct about the dynamics of identity in the past but whether it applies equally to the present legacies of long-standing identity formations.

Jack Snyder
Columbia University

Footnotes

1. See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism (Princeton, 1993).

2. See, for example, Anthony Smith, Ethno-symbolism and...

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