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CHAPTER 2 State and Nation The issue of the relations between the state and the nation is one of the most significant ones in the nation definition. According to Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Anderson, a “state” is practically a synonym of the nation and simultaneously the main objective and aspiration of the nationalists; the state is the basis of a nation and an instrument for its promoting and creating. As David McCrone noted, “So successfully have these two ideas (the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’) been grafted on to each other, that our vocabulary struggles to distinguish between them.”1 John Breuilly says that nationalism as a political force is an exclusively modern, and a firmly political argument and movement, which became a spurious solution to the alienation brought on by the split between the absolutist state and civil society.2 Anthony Giddens defines the nation as a “bordered power-container .” According to Giddens, a nation “only exists when a state has a unified administrative reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed,”3 and a “nation-state” is “a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining and administrating monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence.”4 It was not by accident that Smith characterizes the theories of Breuilly and Giddens as “narrowly defined, state-centered modernism […] which suffers from excessive emphasis on the role of political institutions, and is too dismissive of the legacies of pre-modern ethnic and cultural ties.”5 In Smith’s definition, a nation is inscribed into the cultural-historical context and may or may not have its own homeland or state.6 This is where nationalism differs from 1 David McCrone, Sociology of Nationalism. Tomorrow’s Ancestors (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 7. 2 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). Cited in Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 7. 3 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (London: Routledge, 1985), 119. 4 Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 121. 5 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 7. 6 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 102. patriotism, which is directly connected with the state, because it is, as Smith defines it, “a sense of attachment to a country or state.”7 The reality in which the national unity is formed, refers to the level of symbolic culture, and in this sense the importance of the state is subsidiary and in no way predetermines the nation. The state’s role in the nation formation has become a basis for distinction between the two types of nationalism, described by H. Kohn.8 He wrote about the Western and the Eastern types of nationalism. In Kohn’s description, the Western type of nationalism—which applied to such countries as England, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—was largely political and territorial, the nation coincided with the political territory governed by the state, and people were defined as citizens. The Eastern type of nationalism applies to Central and Eastern Europe and Asia, where the frontiers of the existing states and ethnic communities rarely coincided. An “Eastern” version of nationalism is organic and mystical, the nation here is seen as a seamless, organic unity with a mystical “soul” and “mission.” People here were defined as “the folk.” In the case of Western nationalism, the ideology of nationalism was largely a product of the middle classes who came to power in these states at the end of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, in the case of Eastern nationalism, there was no developed significant middle class, therefore a few intellectuals took a role of the major actors in nationalist movements. This typology underlies the distinction between the “civic” and the “ethnic” nationalism, which became a working typology of nationalism in the works of many authors.9 Civic nationalism defines nationhood in terms of citizenship and political participation. It can only exist within the context of a territorial state; it is the bond formed through the enterprise of statehood. The ethnic nationalism defines nationhood in terms of lineage. The attributes that members of an ethnically defined national grouping share include physical characteristics , culture, language, religion, and common ancestry. In Smith’s opinion, the distinction between the rational and the mystical (organic) types of nationalism is actually useful, though the idea of a precise...

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