The Value of the Nation-State

September/October 2005 · Historically Speaking 37 tive studies, it is likely that the reshaping of the social, cultural, and ideological history of Spain that has derived from modern inquisitorial scholarship will continue well into the 21st century. Helen Rowlings is lecturer and director ofstudies in Spanish at the University of Leicester. Her most recent book is The Spanish Inquisition (Blackwell, 2005). 1 Henry Charles Lea, A History ofthe Inquisition ofSpain, 4 vols. (Macmillan, 1922). 2 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, "Les quatres temps de l'Inquisition," in Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L 'Inquisition Espagnole (Hachette, 1979). 3 William Monter, Frontiers ofHeresy: The Spanish Inquisitionfrom the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4 William Hickling Prescott, History ofthe Reign ofFerdinand and Isabella the Catholic (R. Bentley, 1854). 5 Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, "44,000 Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (15401700 ): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank," in Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, eds., in association with Charles Amiel, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Sources and Methods (Northern Illinois University Press, 1986). 6 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, "The Inquisition and Popular Culture in New Castile," in Stephen Haliczer, ed., Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (Croom Helm, 1987). 7 Gustav Henningsen, The Witches 'Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition,1609-1614 (University of Nevada Press, 1981). 8 José Martínez-Millán, La Hacienda de la Inquisición, 1478-1 700 (CSIC, 1984). 9 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, L 'Administration de la Foi. L 'Inquisition de Tolède, xvie-viiie siècle (Casa de Velazquez, 1989); Werner Thomas, La represión delprotestantismo en España, 1517-1648 (Leuven University Press, 2001). 10Sara T. Nalle, Madfar God: Bartolomé Sánchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardene (University Press ofVirginia, 2001). 11John Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition (Tempus, 1999). 12Jaime Contreras, Sotos contra Riquelmes (Arco Libros, 1992). 13Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (Yale University Press, 1997). The Value of the Nation-State Diana Muir The nation-state is under assault by academics rightfully appalled by nationalism's tendency to get out of hand in a blut und boden way. Disgust with Germany's behavior in World War II has led Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawn, and other scholars not merely to condemn the excesses of political states organized around ethnicity-based nationality, but to persuade themselves that "nations" do not exist. The prevailing academic fashion is to believe and to teach that the national state is an "imagined community," invented out of whole cloth in the 19th century. Social scientists like Anderson and Hobsbawm claim that an individual's identification with larger groups is so complex, overlapping, fragmented, and changeable that the categorization ofhuman beings by nationality is absurd. They do not deny that selfdescribed nation-states exist; but they contend that this is so only because it is often useful for ambitious politicians to invent nations and to persuade susceptible individuals that they belong to one. It has become stylish to believe that nations, like Frankenstein, could not have come into being except by the deliberate creation of misguided or malevolent actors and that neighboring populations will ultimately bear the burden for that act of hubris. This approach ignores a wealth of evidence from several parts of the world that national consciousness grew from ethnicity by natural progression, and that nation-states existed long before the alleged "invention" of the nation in the 19th century. In his 1996 Wiles Lectures, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Adrian Hastings defines a nation as an ethnicity that has become a self-conscious community and "possesses or claims the right to political identity and autonomy as a people , together with control over specific territory ." In practice, Hastings continues, "ethnicities naturally turn into nations ... at the point when their specific vernacular moves from an oral to a written usage . . . being regularly employed for the production of a literature ." Ethnicities that feel themselves to be nations express this feeling by establishing or attempting to establish sovereign national states. Hastings demonstrates that national consciousness was already found in England by the time ofthe Venerable Bede (ca. 730) and that an English national state based on the model of biblical Israel...