“It (nation) presupposes a past: however, it is epitomized in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire that the common life should continue….The desire of nations to be together is the only real criterion that must always be taken into account,” Ernest Renan.
Ernest Renan also says that a nation cannot be formed by retaining a country against its will. According to him, a province means its inhabitants and the inhabitants have the right to be consulted. The existence of a nation is like a daily plebiscite, that is, the cohesion of the people in the nation is not forged once and for all and this cohesion is tested by objective conditions all the time. That means that a nation may break up in the absence of those cohesive factors that in the first place brought about the consciousness amongst the inhabitants of a region to belong together as against the others who are excluded.
Earnest Gellner, one of the most important theorists on Nationalism, says that nationalism is not something that was already there unconsciously amongst a people and ‘it is not the awakening of the nation to self-consciousness; it invents nation where they do not exist.” He further says that Nationalism is the invention of the post-industrial society. The peasant society based on the principles of clan and community did not have this awareness. The historian Hobsbawm felt that nationalism was a phenomenon that arose from Modernity. He said, “Nationalism is a recent political philosophy while ethnicity expresses primordial group identity.”
While Hobsbawm distinguishes between ethnicity and nationalism, not everyone accepts his view when it comes to the question of what is a nation. Many stress the ethnic origin of a nation. For instance, as late as 1998, J.W.Von Goethe, a German thinker (not the same as the poet Goethe) claimed that there was a ‘national core’ in the character of a people that could not be destroyed by conquest or subjugation by another country or nation.
This primordial view is particularly expressed by Anthony Smith. According to him the members of an ethnic category may not be aware of their ethnic character and yet they may still be part of the group. This view is quite different from the views of Ernest Renan or Gellner, for whom, the nation is a conscious grouping based on consent and its glorious past is an invention. Benedict Anderson’s idea of a nation as an imagined community also does not support the primordial views.
Though historically it can be observed that nation as a political idea is of recent origin emerging during the phase of modernity in post-industrial states with the stress on the liberty and equality of its members, it is not easy to dismiss the primordial view of ‘the national core’, because even if the nation is politically invented in course of modernity it has to be based on some commonality of the people concerned, which was formed as a result of sharing land, culture, language, economic life, etc to make their members develop a consciousness of being one people as a nation.
What is then this ‘national core?
Anthony Smith in his ‘Ethnic Origin of Nations’, published in 1986, identified six necessary ethnic attributes:
1. a collective name
2. a common myth of descent
3. a shared history
4. a distinctive shared culture (religion/language/institutions etc)
5. an association with a specific territory
6. a sense of ethnic solidarity.
We may retain the attributes at 1,3, and 5 and rephrase the 6th calling it a sense of national solidarity instead of ethnic solidarity as some of the essential attributes of a nation. It is not that all these features are present together in a nation. If we look at the present-day nations, some of these key attributes seem to be present. But what is most important is that there has to be a strong sense of solidarity among the members of the people who constitute a nation.
Thus it appears that the nation appropriates some of the attributes of ethnic grouping in a larger frame and invents itself as a nation through the conscious solidarity of a people belonging to a common territory. This territorial claim leads to the emergence of a nation-state. In such an emergence, smaller ethnic groups may decide to ignore their separate ethnic identity ( may be temporary) to become members of a larger political frame in the course of sharing life with others living in the same territory and having a remembered history of socio-political intercourse as well as forgetfulness of their past strife.
This appears to be a particular characteristic of post-colonial nations. This nation-making necessarily excludes those with whom the members of the nation do not feel solidarity, particularly the immigrants and the citizens of the other nation-states. Birth in the territory is therefore an important criterion in this consciousness as a nation.