Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (review)

Marx has produced a broad-ranging comparative narrative that will contribute to ongoing discussion and debate about the evolution of nationalism, both as an ideology and as a practical system of power. Clearly organized and presented, Marx's work focuses on the development of the state in early modern France, Britain, and Spain. It is essentially polemical, in that his core contentions and conceptualizations are offered in relation to existing models and theories discussed in the introduction and first chapter. According to Marx, contemporary understandings of nationalism, however varied, have tended to idealize their subject by conceiving it as both fundamentally inclusive and rooted in such classical dynamics of Western-style modernization as urbanization, mass literacy, and/or certain forms of economic organization. Marx argues that one of the difficulties that emerges from this historical "idealization" relates to the discontinuity that he and others have noted between the historiography of Western "civic" nationalism and more recent understandings of the "ethnic" or "exclusive" nationalism that has developed outside the West. Another derives from the tendency of scholars to confuse the edifices of nineteenth-century nation building with the materials used to construct them—confusing the end point of solidarity with its waypoints of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and economic cohesions.

To his credit, Marx addresses at the outset that definitions are crucial to framing arguments in studies of nationalism. He proposes that nationalism be understood as "a collective sentiment or identity, bounding and binding together those individuals who share a sense of large-scale political solidarity aimed at creating, legitimating, or challenging states." More efficiently, he also refers to it as "mass sentiment for or against state power" (6–7). Thus is nationalism defined not from the perspective of where it ends up—the powerful expression and political engagement of various forms of mass unity, willing to sacrifice all for country—but from where it began, by interrogating how such unity developed in the first place. Marx's argument might have led to the chicken-and-egg debate about origins that plagues nationalist theory. But, ultimately, Marx rightly turns from semantics toward an analysis of the social and political process responsible for the core solidarities that make nationalism so powerful. He goes back to critical periods before the canonical eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to understand how the unities apparent in those centuries emerged. His willingness to think about nationalism from the perspective of failure, as well as success, proves to be a consistent source of insight.

Nationalism, Marx argues, echoing Hall or Colley to some extent, derived fundamentally from an alliance between state power and exclusive and antagonistic emotions that cut its teeth not on external enemies but on creedal outsiders within territories controlled by state power.¹ It thus emerged (or, in the case of Spain, failed to emerge) directly out of the marriage of sovereignty crisis of post-Reformation Europe and the exclusive, passionate, and desperate religious passions of those years. Ultimately, nationalism was a product of the dynamic between desperate, power-seeking rulers, and (potentially) impassioned and inflamed religious fanatics of all creeds and classes. This nationalism as state project was, at its core, dependent as much on popular as on elite choices and activity.

The structure of Marx's work reflects his fundamental commitment to exploring these notions comparatively. After an introductory chapter, three chronological chapters explore the parallel development of state power in France, England, and Spain during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Two final chapters consider how inclusive national myths came to be superimposed over exclusive and sectarian histories in France and Britain, and discuss potential consequences of what Marx terms "the ugly secret" of the liberal nationalist tradition that was thus invented. This approach, which involves surveying literature from the respective national histories, is limited in its reliance on English- language texts and an almost exclusive focus on secondary materials. At least the sources consulted for British history are broad and representative, even though specialists will find some of...