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SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
by Ronald Grigor Suny, [email protected]
Revues.org
http://ifpo.revues.org/index477.html
May 29 2009
Palestine is a denied country, and Palestinians a denied people. Their
very existence, place on the globe, history, culture, and right to
a homeland remain an open question. Very often in the United States
one hears the rhetorical question - in which the answer is implied -
"doesn't Israel have the right to exist? And, therefore, the right
to defend itself?" But the question is almost never asked - at least
I have never heard it in my own country - "doesn't Palestine have a
right to exist and Palestinians the right to defend themselves?"
2Where does that right to exist come from? From might? Might
is right, say the realists going back to Thucydides. From simple
demography? We are here, and we are a majority of the population, so
say those democratic and socialist defenders of the right of national
self-determination. From having gotten to a piece of the world's real
estate first? So say the primordialist defenders of mythical histories
that argue from ancient texts that we were here first and that gives
us the right to this land no matter who in the intervening millennia
came and went from this territory. Perhaps from the international
community? Or from the struggle to make a nation, and by the making of
that nation, to force upon the world the demand that they recognize
the right of that nation to exist. That powerful claim is the card
that stateless peoples have had to play, many successfully, in the
last several centuries. Once the discourse of the nation became a
principal threat to multinational empires based on conquest, dynasty,
and the divine right to rule over inferior peoples, the claim could
be made that nations had the right to rule themselves - and in order
to do that they needed a place on the earth, a territory of their own,
and a state to guard and guarantee their present and future existence.
3Territory, state, and nation, then, are intimately linked in the
discourse of the nation, and in the fiercely competitive international
environment, a nation would find it hard to exist for very long or
very effectively without territory and state. The dispersed Jews of
Europe discovered that link between nation, territory, and state with
the invention of Zionism, and built their state on land on which for
centuries other peoples had lived. In their search for security they
reaped permanent war and the steady erosion of their more democratic,
socialist, and humanitarian ideals.
4Nations are neither ancient nor permanent. They are the products
of the modern age, though often built on older traditions and
cultures. Nations are communities of people who identify more closely
with one another than with others, who believe they share a culture,
and because of that shared culture they have the right to rule
themselves, live in security on a specific territory (identified as
the homeland), and in the best of situations have a state of their
own. This unique link of culture and politics is what makes the modern
nation different from earlier political communities that had other
forms of justification for government - God willed it or I conquered
you or my father ruled and therefore I should as well (divine rule,
conquest, dynasty).
5Nations are particular forms ofidentification. Therefore, I should
say a few words about identity. Identity is understood here as
"a provisional stabilization of a sense of self or group that is
formed in actual historical time and space, in evolving economies,
polities, and cultures, as a continuous search for some solidity in
a constantly shifting world - but without closure, without forever
naturalizing or essentializing the provisional identities arrived at"
(Suny 1999/2000, p. 144). Yet, at the same time, when people talk about
identity their language excludes a sense of historical construction
or provisionality and instead almost always accepts the present
identity as fixed, singular, bounded, internally harmonious, distinct
from others at its boundaries, and marked by historical longevity,
if not rooted in nature. In other words, instead of seeing identity
as something shifting and situational, people in ordinary language
tend to primordialized and essentialized identities.
6This loss of a processual sense of identification taking place over
time is particularly acute in the rhetoric about national identity,
which has become the universal category for modern political
communities marked by a purportedly shared culture. Like other
identifications, nations can be thought of as arenas in which people
dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or out of the
group, where the "homeland" begins and ends, what the "true" history
of the nation is, what is "authentic" about being national and what
is to be rejected. Nations are articulated through the stories people
tell about themselves. The narrative is most often a tale of origins
and continuity, often of sacrifice and martyrdom, but also of glory
and heroism (Suny 1999/2000, p. 145; Suny 2001, p. 335-358).
7Where do identifications come from? Identities are generated both
internally by actors and externally by elites and states. Post-colonial
studies in particular have contributed enormously to our understanding
of how mapping, naming, census categories, statistical enumeration,
and other practices of the modern state have delineated and fixed the
more fluid distinctions generated by people, turning blurry differences
into more visible, seemingly unalterable differences (Anderson 1991,
p. 163-185, Cohen 1996, Scott 1998).
8More elusive as sources of identification, but perhaps most
influential, are the self-generated subjective identifications that
individuals make spontaneously and that stem from the most local
locations - family relations, birth position in the family, sexual
preferences, etc. Here proximity, distance, and length of time of
relationship are key influences on stable and lasting associations
and networks, whether kinship, friendship, collegial, or national,
and have powerful determining effects on identification with groups,
location, and nation. Self-identification is seldom a simple rational
calculation but is deeply implicated in emotional attachments and
subjective preferences.
1 Brubaker and Cooper dispute the analytical validity of the
term "identity" and propose (...) 9Finally, identifications are
influenced by the discursive context in which people find themselves,
the pervasive narratives that surround them, giving shape to their
perceptions and understandings of the world. Although identification
"invites specification of the agents that do the identifying,"
as Brubaker and Cooper put it, "identification does not require
a specifiable 'identifier'; it can be pervasive and influential
without being accomplished by discrete, specified persons or
institutions. Identification can be carried more or less anonymously
by discourses or public narratives"1 (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 16).
10Narrative - the stories we tell about ourselves and others - is
central to identity formation, as Margaret R. Somers reminds us:
[I]t is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and
make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and
narrativity that we constitute our social identities... [A]ll of us
come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing)
by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in
social narratives rarely of our own making (Somers 1994, p. 606).
11Somers goes on to specify four dimensions of narrativity:
ontological, public, conceptual, and metanarrativities. Ontological
narratives are about who we are and why we do what we do. Public
narratives are those attached to cultural and institutional formations
beyond the single individual, to intersubjective networks of
institutions. Conceptual narrativity is the concepts and explanations
that are constructed by social researchers, such as "society,"
"culture," "structure," and "agency." And, finally, metanarratives
or master narratives are the grand overriding stories in which we
are historically embedded, such as stories of the nation, progress,
decadence, or the end of history (Somers 1994, p. 617-620). Identities,
then, are always formed within broad discourses, universes of available
meanings, and are related to the historic positionings of the subjects
involved, which are themselves constituted and given meaning by the
identity makers.
12Some theorists are already asking: why bother about identity? Why
indulge in so much theorizing about such an abstract and
contested term? The payoff of employing the concept of identity is
threefold. Sensitivity to the fluidity of identities, as well as the
naturalizing tendencies of identity-talk, helps the researcher avoid,
first, essentialism and, second, reification. Essentialism may be
defined as the attribution of behavior or thinking to the intrinsic,
fundamental nature of a person, collectivity, or state. Identity
theory proposes an alternative to essentialist models of people
or social groups by claiming that rather than having a single,
given, relatively stable identity, persons and groups have multiple,
fluid, situational identities that are produced in intersubjective
understandings. Reification "is the apprehension of the products of
human activity as if they were something else than human products -
such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of
divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting
his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the
dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to
consciousness. The reified world is...experienced by man as a strange
facility, and opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as
the opus proprium of his own productive activity" (Berger and Luckman
1966, p. 89). Identity theory instead emphasizes the historical
and contextual generation of both categories and their effects. In
this approach human agency remains central to the production of
identities. Third, identity as a focus of analysis displaces interest
as the unmediated causal explanation for action. Instead of appealing
to a notion of a universal social agent that acts because of inherent
interests in predictable ways in similar circumstances, theories
of identity propose that predictability from interest must consider
the ways in which individuals or groups of people in similar social
positions with similar experiences identify themselves, how stable or
unstable that identity is, and how fractures or multiple commitments
will affect ideas of interest. This is an important move toward
contextualizing, historicizing, and relativizing actions. Interests
themselves should be seen as tied to identities - what we think we
need is linked to who we think we are - and are themselves affected by
historic positions discursively constituted and embedded in narratives.
13Although individual senses of the self may differ radically from
one society or culture to another, it is possible to assert that
there cannot be a group that does not possess some sense of shared
commonality, even if just being in a certain room at ten past twelve,
and a sense of difference with others, those in another room or with
no room of their own. Cohesion of a group may depend on the particular
articulation of the sense of commonality, and here a sense of shared
past experience, that is, history, becomes important as a record of
what binds the group together and distinguishes it from others.
14Nations are particular forms of collectivity that are constituted by
a process of creating histories. Just as there are few groups without a
sense of continuity, so there can be no nations without a sense of its
own history. History contributes in several significant ways. Like
the genealogies of ancient and medieval kings, history provides
ancestry that legitimizes present-day loyalties. The art of "seizing
and recording one's own history," writes Natalie Zemon Davis, not only
contributes "a deepened sense of identity" but "an affective-political
gain in enablement" (Davis 1994, p. 21). National histories followed
religious histories and borrowed modes and modalities from them. Both
were written to advocate a particular sense of fidelity; light and
dark images of the self and other distanced those within the fold
and those outside; a sense of enemies, persecution, sacrifices,
martyrdom, heretics, and true believers passed from the lives of the
saints and the clerical chronicles to the stories of the nation. The
longue durée of the past also gives this particular form of imagined
community a potent claim to territory, the "homeland," which the people
constituted as nation argues that it held first. The national history
is one of continuity, antiquity of origins, heroism and past greatness,
martyrdom and sacrifice, victimization and overcoming of trauma. It is
a story of struggle, the empowerment of the people, the realization of
the ideals of popular sovereignty. While in some cases national history
is seen as development toward realization, in others it is imagined
as decline and degeneration away from proper development. In either
case an interpretation of history with a proper trajectory is implied.
15Beyond the specific narratives of particular nations is the
metanarrative or discourse of the nation, the cluster of ideas
and understandings that came to surround the signifier "nation"
in modern times (roughly post-1750). This available universe
of meanings allowed for the power of nations and nationalism to
constitute collective loyalties, legitimize governments, mobilize
and inspire people to fight, kill, and die for their country. This
cluster of ideas includes the conviction that humanity is naturally
divided into separate and distinct nationalities or nations. Members
of a nation reach full freedom and fulfillment of their essence by
developing their national identity and culture, and their identity
with the nation is superior to all other forms of identity - class,
gender, individual, familial, tribal, regional, imperial, dynastic,
religious, racial, or state patriotic. Though the nation may be divided
or gradated along several axes, it is politically and civilly (under
the law) made up of equals. All national members share common origins,
historical experiences, interests, and culture, which may include
language and religion, and have an equal share in the nation. The
discourse of the nation both acknowledges that each nation is unique,
with its own separate past, present, and destiny, yet recognizes the
developmental process that gives every nation the conviction that
the nation is always present, though often concealed, to be realized
fully over time in a world of states in which the highest form is a
world of nation-states. The national may be in people unconsciously
and may need to be brought forth or willed into consciousness, but in
this discourse the nation is never completely subjective but always
has a base in the real world.
16Like other discourses, talk about and everyday embodiments of the
nation both constitute the felt presence of the national and hide the
fractures, divisions, and relations of power within the nation. But,
then, that is why intellectuals and politicians, military bands and
postage stamps, have so much work to do. Ultimately more fragile
than we usually admit, the nation must constantly be reproduced in
thousands of ways until it becomes as ordinary and quotidian as the
water in which fish swim. Ultimately, ordinary people must join in
that daily plebiscite of which Ernest Renan spoke, or what at times
seemed so evident and permanent can give way to more tangible concerns.
17But if the theorists of nationalism are correct when they say that
the nation is in a real sense an "imagined community," why then
do people persist to think of it as a hard reality, an ancient,
continuous, primordial community that moves through time with its
fundamental essence intact. The disjuncture between the constructivist
convictions of nationalism theorists and the nationalists' belief
in firm, real, essential characteristics of nations is not easily
resolved by a simple exposure of the processes by which national
histories and group distinctions are constructed. Primordial identity
construction cannot be reduced to a mistake, a self-deception, or false
consciousness. Rather theorists need to appreciate the important work
that primordialism and essentialism perform.
18Identification with the nation need not entail a move to
primordialism, though, I hope to show, there is a selective affinity
between nation, essentialism, and primordialism. The nation is an
affective community, a community of shared feeling, and of individual
emotional attachment to the group, one that has an existence
independent of oneself and one's individual mortality. National
identity is an act of subscription to a continuous community with
a past and a future, a shared destiny. Yael Tamir, the theorist
of liberal nationalism, claims that national membership, "unlike
membership in a gender, class, or region, thus enables an individual to
find a place not only in the world in which he or she lives, but also
in an uninterrupted chain of being. Nationhood promotes fraternity
both among fellow members and across generations. It endows human
action with meaning that endures over time, thus carrying a promise
of immortality" (Tamir 1995, p.
437). When they work, nations must feel like a community with powerful
subjective identifications of individuals with the whole. While
nations to some extent depend on free individual choice, as Margaret
Canovan notes, "that choice is nevertheless experienced as a destiny
transcending individuality; it turns political institutions into a
kind of extended family inheritance, although the kinship ties in
question are highly metaphorical" (Canovan 1996, p. 69). Nation works
most powerfully precisely when people are unaware that they have made
contingent choices and feel that they are acting in accord with a
natural order. Calculation is suppressed and feelings are heightened.
19Like the idea of family, so the nation form provides clear
boundaries of a community within which social goods can be properly
distributed. In social science the very process of constituting
a political community in the form of a nation has been seen as a
necessity for democratic politics. Democracies in particular require
a clearly defined, bounded population that then has the right to
be represented (Rustow 1970, p. 337-363). Nation is a convenient
and powerful form of identification that speaks precisely to these
conditions. "Democratic discourse," writes Canovan, "requires not only
trust and common sympathies but the capacity to act as a collective
people, to undertake commitments and to acquire obligations" (Canovan
1996, p. 44). While nationalism (because of its affiliations with
revolution and the Left) was suspect in the minds of many Western
policymakers during the first great decolonization after World War II,
political analysts were even more troubled by tribalism and social
fragmentation than they were with efforts of nationalists to construct
new, coherent communities on the model of Western nations. Political
integration of localities or tribes into coherent nations was part of
the project of modernization, the prerequisite to democratization,
lauded by its theorists (Geertz 1963; Apter 1963; Coleman 1958;
Bendix 1977).
20As sensible as the fluidity of constructivism is for theorists,
in the actual world of group identifications and distinctions, a
belief in sharp and relatively fixed distinctions between groups and
predictable harmonies and homogeneities within groups gives a person
an easy and reliable map of a complex and changing world. This kind of
mental map provides a degree of predictability in an insecure world;
it allows expectations of comfort with some and danger from others;
and it permits different forms of treatment of those one considers
like oneself from those who are considered different. In worse cases it
licenses treatment of "others" in ways that one would not treat one's
own. As the Armenian case demonstrates, essentialist articulations
of identity are more intense paradoxically when identities seem to
be threatened. Even though immutable identities should be the least
threatened, as if unconvinced by their own rhetoric primordialist
nationalists fear the loss of identity and seek actively to intervene
to save it. And they attempt to save it precisely by shoring up the
internal harmonies within the nation and policing the boundaries of
national identity, sharpening the distinctions between those within
and those without.
21But the need for meaning, mental maps, or effective boundaries
and collective commitments for polities only partially explains the
power of the nation form and the turn toward primordialism. National
identity, like others, is seldom purely about what is convenient or
rational. Group or personal identities may be strategic starting
points from which people act but they are also emotionally
generated. Identities are most often a complex combination of
reason and affect, learning and experience from a variety of
sources. Subjectively experienced, they are a starting point for
people's strategic choices. People may act rationally to realize
their preferences, but those preferences are intimately tied to the
identities that people have constructed or that have been constituted
for them.
2 The study of emotions and nationalism is just getting underway. See
for example Petersen 2002.
22National identities are saturated with emotions that have been
created through teaching, repetition, and daily reproduction until
they become common sense. The very rhetoric of nationalism reveals
its affective base. Armenians speak constantly of betrayal, either by
traitors within (like my ancient namesake Vasak Siuni who "betrayed"
the martyr Vartan Mamikonian in 451 C.E.!), or by foreign powers,
or by their own, treacherous imperial overlords. Their history
is replete with invasions and massacres, of near disappearances,
culminating in the Genocide of the early twentieth century. Yet they
have survived! These tropes - betrayal, treachery, threats from others,
and survival - are embedded in familiar emotions - anxiety, fear,
insecurity, and pride. For many post-colonial nations, governments
must construct or reconstruct a national narrative that deals with
the anxieties of cultural loss, the need for national pride, and
the insecurity of a formerly colonized people now free from but in
many cases still dependent on their recent colonizers. For Tamir, the
need for the nation involves a perception of shared fate that becomes
an answer to the neurosis, alienation, and meaninglessness of modern
times. Here again is emotion. The dreads of personal oblivion, the need
for redemption, salvation, eternity are all answered in the nation.2
23The nation need not have been primordialized historically, and
yet over time it was, until primordial ethnonations became the
dominant template for nations. If not in the first generation of
nation-formation (the new revolutionary nations of France and the
Americas), then certainly in the second and subsequent generations,
the nation came to represent a primordial community that passes
continuously through time. The category "nation," like those of
class and race, acquired its own style of imagination, increasingly
over time about deep, essential differences between nations and
fixed, continuous cores within them - whether such distinctions or
harmonies existed or not. Certain "objective" criteria of nation -
language most importantly - provided the clear markers of boundaries,
inclusion and exclusion. As Etienne Balibar puts it, "the illusion is
twofold. It consists in believing that the generations which succeed
one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a
reasonably univocal designation, have handed down to each other an
invariant substance. And it consists in believing that the process
of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as
to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only
one possible, that is, it represented a destiny" (Balibar 1991, p. 86).
24National identity construction has most powerfully been about a
single, unitary identity, not a multiplicity of self-understandings,
embedded in a long history and attached to a specific territory. The
power of that identity lay within the discourse of the nation, which
justified both territorial possession and statehood to those with prior
and exclusive claims, based on language, culture, or race. In a world
of competitors for territory and political power, primordialism was a
practical, even necessary, solution to the difficulty of establishing
such prior or exclusive claims. Since prenational ethnic and religious
communities do not map neatly with modern nations, and nations
themselves are inherently unstable categories, primordialism and
essentialism do the hard work of reifying the nation. Identities might
be fluid but in the real world of politics the players act as if they
are immutable, both for strategic reasons and emotional satisfaction.
25What is not recognized in the rush to nationhood is just how much
work by intellectuals, activists, and state administrators goes into
the forging of new nations. Nationalists often strive to get history
"right." In their "objectivist" reading of the past - showing the
past as "it actually was" they set themselves up as representing the
only true account. This pretension to an untroubled authenticity of
a single reading is a powerful claim to the legitimacy of the nation
and particular claims to territory and statehood. But it does not come
without costs. If the nation is real, ancient, and continuous, then in
its own view (and in the discourse of the nation more generally), its
claims to sovereignty is unique, uncontested, and not to be shared. The
road is open to exclusivist, homogeneous nations that in our ethnically
mixed, fluid, changing world require desperate policies of deportation
and ethnic cleansing to secure. Constructivists propose a more open
view of national history in which human actions and interventions
have made the world the way it is today. If the lines between peoples
are blurred and shifting, if many possible claimants to a particular
piece of the world's real estate are allowed, then we can conceive
of political communities in the future that permit cohabitation with
shared sovereignties in a "national" space.
26No nation in the modern world can survive without a space of its
own, a territory on which to build its state and foster its cultural
connectiveness. But the way the nation is imagined has profound
consequences for the imagination of the territorial homeland as
well. If the homeland is imagined as the exclusive property of one
ethnic or religious group, then it necessarily leads to subordination
of other groups or their assimilation or their physical elimination
from the national territory. It is no accident that ethnic cleansing
and/or genocide have been the foundational moments of many modern
nation states, among them Australia, the United States, Turkey,
Israel, and the list goes on and on. In some parts of the world,
like the former Soviet Union, an internationalist empire left in its
ashes fifteen independent states, each of them clinging to their own
national territories, each defining the state in terms of their own
ethnic nation. Not much sharing is going on in Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, or many other republics.
27But if the nation is imagined as inclusive, as tolerant of difference
- religious and ethnic - then the territory too is open to a diverse
population. The form and style of national imagination, the content of
the national narrative, is central to whether one can share territory
with others. Posing the question that way may seem utopian at the
present time, particularly in the Middle East, where borders drawn
by imperial powers have divided people into states seeking nations,
where the colonizers appear determined to assert their influence long
after their empires have fallen, and where the nation-state form has
not proven very effective in delivering security and prosperity to
most of the peoples of the region. At the moment we seem to be stuck
with one people, one nation, one state. Some day, perhaps coming
from the cradle of ancient civilizations, there will be new ways
to imagine states - states larger and more inclusive than current
nation-states. The task of intellectuals and political actors, then,
in this time of troubles must be to think creatively how history,
identity, and territory might be re-imagined so that nation-form works
less to divide us one from another and more toward living together.
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Notes1 Brubaker and Cooper dispute the analytical validity of the term
"identity" and propose substitute terms, such as identification,
self-understanding, and commonality. They make a persuasive case
for use of the term "identification" as an active processual term,
but my own use of identity preserves the actual ambiguity of the term
"identity" and is directed at investigating the tension between the
analytical and practical uses of the term that they articulate so well.
2 The study of emotions and nationalism is just getting underway. See
for example Petersen 2002.
Pour citer cet articleRéférence papier Ronald Grigor Suny, Â"
Some Theoretical Considerations Â", in Roger Heacock (dir.), Temps
et espaces en Palestine, Beyrouth, Liban, Institut francais du
Proche-Orient (Â" Ã~Itudes contemporaines Â", no25), 2008, p. 31-41.
Référence électronique Ronald Grigor Suny, Â" Some Theoretical
Considerations Â", in Roger Heacock (dir.), Temps et espaces en
Palestine, Beyrouth, Liban, Institut francais du Proche-Orient
(Â" Ã~Itudes contemporaines Â", no25), 2008, [En ligne],
mis en ligne le 28 mai 2009, Consulté le 29 mai 2009. URL :
http://ifpo.revues.org/index477.html
AuteurRona ld Grigor Suny Professor of history, University of
Michigan. Emeritus professor of history and political Science,
University of Chicago.
From: Baghdasarian
by Ronald Grigor Suny, [email protected]
Revues.org
http://ifpo.revues.org/index477.html
May 29 2009
Palestine is a denied country, and Palestinians a denied people. Their
very existence, place on the globe, history, culture, and right to
a homeland remain an open question. Very often in the United States
one hears the rhetorical question - in which the answer is implied -
"doesn't Israel have the right to exist? And, therefore, the right
to defend itself?" But the question is almost never asked - at least
I have never heard it in my own country - "doesn't Palestine have a
right to exist and Palestinians the right to defend themselves?"
2Where does that right to exist come from? From might? Might
is right, say the realists going back to Thucydides. From simple
demography? We are here, and we are a majority of the population, so
say those democratic and socialist defenders of the right of national
self-determination. From having gotten to a piece of the world's real
estate first? So say the primordialist defenders of mythical histories
that argue from ancient texts that we were here first and that gives
us the right to this land no matter who in the intervening millennia
came and went from this territory. Perhaps from the international
community? Or from the struggle to make a nation, and by the making of
that nation, to force upon the world the demand that they recognize
the right of that nation to exist. That powerful claim is the card
that stateless peoples have had to play, many successfully, in the
last several centuries. Once the discourse of the nation became a
principal threat to multinational empires based on conquest, dynasty,
and the divine right to rule over inferior peoples, the claim could
be made that nations had the right to rule themselves - and in order
to do that they needed a place on the earth, a territory of their own,
and a state to guard and guarantee their present and future existence.
3Territory, state, and nation, then, are intimately linked in the
discourse of the nation, and in the fiercely competitive international
environment, a nation would find it hard to exist for very long or
very effectively without territory and state. The dispersed Jews of
Europe discovered that link between nation, territory, and state with
the invention of Zionism, and built their state on land on which for
centuries other peoples had lived. In their search for security they
reaped permanent war and the steady erosion of their more democratic,
socialist, and humanitarian ideals.
4Nations are neither ancient nor permanent. They are the products
of the modern age, though often built on older traditions and
cultures. Nations are communities of people who identify more closely
with one another than with others, who believe they share a culture,
and because of that shared culture they have the right to rule
themselves, live in security on a specific territory (identified as
the homeland), and in the best of situations have a state of their
own. This unique link of culture and politics is what makes the modern
nation different from earlier political communities that had other
forms of justification for government - God willed it or I conquered
you or my father ruled and therefore I should as well (divine rule,
conquest, dynasty).
5Nations are particular forms ofidentification. Therefore, I should
say a few words about identity. Identity is understood here as
"a provisional stabilization of a sense of self or group that is
formed in actual historical time and space, in evolving economies,
polities, and cultures, as a continuous search for some solidity in
a constantly shifting world - but without closure, without forever
naturalizing or essentializing the provisional identities arrived at"
(Suny 1999/2000, p. 144). Yet, at the same time, when people talk about
identity their language excludes a sense of historical construction
or provisionality and instead almost always accepts the present
identity as fixed, singular, bounded, internally harmonious, distinct
from others at its boundaries, and marked by historical longevity,
if not rooted in nature. In other words, instead of seeing identity
as something shifting and situational, people in ordinary language
tend to primordialized and essentialized identities.
6This loss of a processual sense of identification taking place over
time is particularly acute in the rhetoric about national identity,
which has become the universal category for modern political
communities marked by a purportedly shared culture. Like other
identifications, nations can be thought of as arenas in which people
dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or out of the
group, where the "homeland" begins and ends, what the "true" history
of the nation is, what is "authentic" about being national and what
is to be rejected. Nations are articulated through the stories people
tell about themselves. The narrative is most often a tale of origins
and continuity, often of sacrifice and martyrdom, but also of glory
and heroism (Suny 1999/2000, p. 145; Suny 2001, p. 335-358).
7Where do identifications come from? Identities are generated both
internally by actors and externally by elites and states. Post-colonial
studies in particular have contributed enormously to our understanding
of how mapping, naming, census categories, statistical enumeration,
and other practices of the modern state have delineated and fixed the
more fluid distinctions generated by people, turning blurry differences
into more visible, seemingly unalterable differences (Anderson 1991,
p. 163-185, Cohen 1996, Scott 1998).
8More elusive as sources of identification, but perhaps most
influential, are the self-generated subjective identifications that
individuals make spontaneously and that stem from the most local
locations - family relations, birth position in the family, sexual
preferences, etc. Here proximity, distance, and length of time of
relationship are key influences on stable and lasting associations
and networks, whether kinship, friendship, collegial, or national,
and have powerful determining effects on identification with groups,
location, and nation. Self-identification is seldom a simple rational
calculation but is deeply implicated in emotional attachments and
subjective preferences.
1 Brubaker and Cooper dispute the analytical validity of the
term "identity" and propose (...) 9Finally, identifications are
influenced by the discursive context in which people find themselves,
the pervasive narratives that surround them, giving shape to their
perceptions and understandings of the world. Although identification
"invites specification of the agents that do the identifying,"
as Brubaker and Cooper put it, "identification does not require
a specifiable 'identifier'; it can be pervasive and influential
without being accomplished by discrete, specified persons or
institutions. Identification can be carried more or less anonymously
by discourses or public narratives"1 (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, p. 16).
10Narrative - the stories we tell about ourselves and others - is
central to identity formation, as Margaret R. Somers reminds us:
[I]t is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and
make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and
narrativity that we constitute our social identities... [A]ll of us
come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing)
by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in
social narratives rarely of our own making (Somers 1994, p. 606).
11Somers goes on to specify four dimensions of narrativity:
ontological, public, conceptual, and metanarrativities. Ontological
narratives are about who we are and why we do what we do. Public
narratives are those attached to cultural and institutional formations
beyond the single individual, to intersubjective networks of
institutions. Conceptual narrativity is the concepts and explanations
that are constructed by social researchers, such as "society,"
"culture," "structure," and "agency." And, finally, metanarratives
or master narratives are the grand overriding stories in which we
are historically embedded, such as stories of the nation, progress,
decadence, or the end of history (Somers 1994, p. 617-620). Identities,
then, are always formed within broad discourses, universes of available
meanings, and are related to the historic positionings of the subjects
involved, which are themselves constituted and given meaning by the
identity makers.
12Some theorists are already asking: why bother about identity? Why
indulge in so much theorizing about such an abstract and
contested term? The payoff of employing the concept of identity is
threefold. Sensitivity to the fluidity of identities, as well as the
naturalizing tendencies of identity-talk, helps the researcher avoid,
first, essentialism and, second, reification. Essentialism may be
defined as the attribution of behavior or thinking to the intrinsic,
fundamental nature of a person, collectivity, or state. Identity
theory proposes an alternative to essentialist models of people
or social groups by claiming that rather than having a single,
given, relatively stable identity, persons and groups have multiple,
fluid, situational identities that are produced in intersubjective
understandings. Reification "is the apprehension of the products of
human activity as if they were something else than human products -
such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of
divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting
his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the
dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to
consciousness. The reified world is...experienced by man as a strange
facility, and opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as
the opus proprium of his own productive activity" (Berger and Luckman
1966, p. 89). Identity theory instead emphasizes the historical
and contextual generation of both categories and their effects. In
this approach human agency remains central to the production of
identities. Third, identity as a focus of analysis displaces interest
as the unmediated causal explanation for action. Instead of appealing
to a notion of a universal social agent that acts because of inherent
interests in predictable ways in similar circumstances, theories
of identity propose that predictability from interest must consider
the ways in which individuals or groups of people in similar social
positions with similar experiences identify themselves, how stable or
unstable that identity is, and how fractures or multiple commitments
will affect ideas of interest. This is an important move toward
contextualizing, historicizing, and relativizing actions. Interests
themselves should be seen as tied to identities - what we think we
need is linked to who we think we are - and are themselves affected by
historic positions discursively constituted and embedded in narratives.
13Although individual senses of the self may differ radically from
one society or culture to another, it is possible to assert that
there cannot be a group that does not possess some sense of shared
commonality, even if just being in a certain room at ten past twelve,
and a sense of difference with others, those in another room or with
no room of their own. Cohesion of a group may depend on the particular
articulation of the sense of commonality, and here a sense of shared
past experience, that is, history, becomes important as a record of
what binds the group together and distinguishes it from others.
14Nations are particular forms of collectivity that are constituted by
a process of creating histories. Just as there are few groups without a
sense of continuity, so there can be no nations without a sense of its
own history. History contributes in several significant ways. Like
the genealogies of ancient and medieval kings, history provides
ancestry that legitimizes present-day loyalties. The art of "seizing
and recording one's own history," writes Natalie Zemon Davis, not only
contributes "a deepened sense of identity" but "an affective-political
gain in enablement" (Davis 1994, p. 21). National histories followed
religious histories and borrowed modes and modalities from them. Both
were written to advocate a particular sense of fidelity; light and
dark images of the self and other distanced those within the fold
and those outside; a sense of enemies, persecution, sacrifices,
martyrdom, heretics, and true believers passed from the lives of the
saints and the clerical chronicles to the stories of the nation. The
longue durée of the past also gives this particular form of imagined
community a potent claim to territory, the "homeland," which the people
constituted as nation argues that it held first. The national history
is one of continuity, antiquity of origins, heroism and past greatness,
martyrdom and sacrifice, victimization and overcoming of trauma. It is
a story of struggle, the empowerment of the people, the realization of
the ideals of popular sovereignty. While in some cases national history
is seen as development toward realization, in others it is imagined
as decline and degeneration away from proper development. In either
case an interpretation of history with a proper trajectory is implied.
15Beyond the specific narratives of particular nations is the
metanarrative or discourse of the nation, the cluster of ideas
and understandings that came to surround the signifier "nation"
in modern times (roughly post-1750). This available universe
of meanings allowed for the power of nations and nationalism to
constitute collective loyalties, legitimize governments, mobilize
and inspire people to fight, kill, and die for their country. This
cluster of ideas includes the conviction that humanity is naturally
divided into separate and distinct nationalities or nations. Members
of a nation reach full freedom and fulfillment of their essence by
developing their national identity and culture, and their identity
with the nation is superior to all other forms of identity - class,
gender, individual, familial, tribal, regional, imperial, dynastic,
religious, racial, or state patriotic. Though the nation may be divided
or gradated along several axes, it is politically and civilly (under
the law) made up of equals. All national members share common origins,
historical experiences, interests, and culture, which may include
language and religion, and have an equal share in the nation. The
discourse of the nation both acknowledges that each nation is unique,
with its own separate past, present, and destiny, yet recognizes the
developmental process that gives every nation the conviction that
the nation is always present, though often concealed, to be realized
fully over time in a world of states in which the highest form is a
world of nation-states. The national may be in people unconsciously
and may need to be brought forth or willed into consciousness, but in
this discourse the nation is never completely subjective but always
has a base in the real world.
16Like other discourses, talk about and everyday embodiments of the
nation both constitute the felt presence of the national and hide the
fractures, divisions, and relations of power within the nation. But,
then, that is why intellectuals and politicians, military bands and
postage stamps, have so much work to do. Ultimately more fragile
than we usually admit, the nation must constantly be reproduced in
thousands of ways until it becomes as ordinary and quotidian as the
water in which fish swim. Ultimately, ordinary people must join in
that daily plebiscite of which Ernest Renan spoke, or what at times
seemed so evident and permanent can give way to more tangible concerns.
17But if the theorists of nationalism are correct when they say that
the nation is in a real sense an "imagined community," why then
do people persist to think of it as a hard reality, an ancient,
continuous, primordial community that moves through time with its
fundamental essence intact. The disjuncture between the constructivist
convictions of nationalism theorists and the nationalists' belief
in firm, real, essential characteristics of nations is not easily
resolved by a simple exposure of the processes by which national
histories and group distinctions are constructed. Primordial identity
construction cannot be reduced to a mistake, a self-deception, or false
consciousness. Rather theorists need to appreciate the important work
that primordialism and essentialism perform.
18Identification with the nation need not entail a move to
primordialism, though, I hope to show, there is a selective affinity
between nation, essentialism, and primordialism. The nation is an
affective community, a community of shared feeling, and of individual
emotional attachment to the group, one that has an existence
independent of oneself and one's individual mortality. National
identity is an act of subscription to a continuous community with
a past and a future, a shared destiny. Yael Tamir, the theorist
of liberal nationalism, claims that national membership, "unlike
membership in a gender, class, or region, thus enables an individual to
find a place not only in the world in which he or she lives, but also
in an uninterrupted chain of being. Nationhood promotes fraternity
both among fellow members and across generations. It endows human
action with meaning that endures over time, thus carrying a promise
of immortality" (Tamir 1995, p.
437). When they work, nations must feel like a community with powerful
subjective identifications of individuals with the whole. While
nations to some extent depend on free individual choice, as Margaret
Canovan notes, "that choice is nevertheless experienced as a destiny
transcending individuality; it turns political institutions into a
kind of extended family inheritance, although the kinship ties in
question are highly metaphorical" (Canovan 1996, p. 69). Nation works
most powerfully precisely when people are unaware that they have made
contingent choices and feel that they are acting in accord with a
natural order. Calculation is suppressed and feelings are heightened.
19Like the idea of family, so the nation form provides clear
boundaries of a community within which social goods can be properly
distributed. In social science the very process of constituting
a political community in the form of a nation has been seen as a
necessity for democratic politics. Democracies in particular require
a clearly defined, bounded population that then has the right to
be represented (Rustow 1970, p. 337-363). Nation is a convenient
and powerful form of identification that speaks precisely to these
conditions. "Democratic discourse," writes Canovan, "requires not only
trust and common sympathies but the capacity to act as a collective
people, to undertake commitments and to acquire obligations" (Canovan
1996, p. 44). While nationalism (because of its affiliations with
revolution and the Left) was suspect in the minds of many Western
policymakers during the first great decolonization after World War II,
political analysts were even more troubled by tribalism and social
fragmentation than they were with efforts of nationalists to construct
new, coherent communities on the model of Western nations. Political
integration of localities or tribes into coherent nations was part of
the project of modernization, the prerequisite to democratization,
lauded by its theorists (Geertz 1963; Apter 1963; Coleman 1958;
Bendix 1977).
20As sensible as the fluidity of constructivism is for theorists,
in the actual world of group identifications and distinctions, a
belief in sharp and relatively fixed distinctions between groups and
predictable harmonies and homogeneities within groups gives a person
an easy and reliable map of a complex and changing world. This kind of
mental map provides a degree of predictability in an insecure world;
it allows expectations of comfort with some and danger from others;
and it permits different forms of treatment of those one considers
like oneself from those who are considered different. In worse cases it
licenses treatment of "others" in ways that one would not treat one's
own. As the Armenian case demonstrates, essentialist articulations
of identity are more intense paradoxically when identities seem to
be threatened. Even though immutable identities should be the least
threatened, as if unconvinced by their own rhetoric primordialist
nationalists fear the loss of identity and seek actively to intervene
to save it. And they attempt to save it precisely by shoring up the
internal harmonies within the nation and policing the boundaries of
national identity, sharpening the distinctions between those within
and those without.
21But the need for meaning, mental maps, or effective boundaries
and collective commitments for polities only partially explains the
power of the nation form and the turn toward primordialism. National
identity, like others, is seldom purely about what is convenient or
rational. Group or personal identities may be strategic starting
points from which people act but they are also emotionally
generated. Identities are most often a complex combination of
reason and affect, learning and experience from a variety of
sources. Subjectively experienced, they are a starting point for
people's strategic choices. People may act rationally to realize
their preferences, but those preferences are intimately tied to the
identities that people have constructed or that have been constituted
for them.
2 The study of emotions and nationalism is just getting underway. See
for example Petersen 2002.
22National identities are saturated with emotions that have been
created through teaching, repetition, and daily reproduction until
they become common sense. The very rhetoric of nationalism reveals
its affective base. Armenians speak constantly of betrayal, either by
traitors within (like my ancient namesake Vasak Siuni who "betrayed"
the martyr Vartan Mamikonian in 451 C.E.!), or by foreign powers,
or by their own, treacherous imperial overlords. Their history
is replete with invasions and massacres, of near disappearances,
culminating in the Genocide of the early twentieth century. Yet they
have survived! These tropes - betrayal, treachery, threats from others,
and survival - are embedded in familiar emotions - anxiety, fear,
insecurity, and pride. For many post-colonial nations, governments
must construct or reconstruct a national narrative that deals with
the anxieties of cultural loss, the need for national pride, and
the insecurity of a formerly colonized people now free from but in
many cases still dependent on their recent colonizers. For Tamir, the
need for the nation involves a perception of shared fate that becomes
an answer to the neurosis, alienation, and meaninglessness of modern
times. Here again is emotion. The dreads of personal oblivion, the need
for redemption, salvation, eternity are all answered in the nation.2
23The nation need not have been primordialized historically, and
yet over time it was, until primordial ethnonations became the
dominant template for nations. If not in the first generation of
nation-formation (the new revolutionary nations of France and the
Americas), then certainly in the second and subsequent generations,
the nation came to represent a primordial community that passes
continuously through time. The category "nation," like those of
class and race, acquired its own style of imagination, increasingly
over time about deep, essential differences between nations and
fixed, continuous cores within them - whether such distinctions or
harmonies existed or not. Certain "objective" criteria of nation -
language most importantly - provided the clear markers of boundaries,
inclusion and exclusion. As Etienne Balibar puts it, "the illusion is
twofold. It consists in believing that the generations which succeed
one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a
reasonably univocal designation, have handed down to each other an
invariant substance. And it consists in believing that the process
of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as
to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only
one possible, that is, it represented a destiny" (Balibar 1991, p. 86).
24National identity construction has most powerfully been about a
single, unitary identity, not a multiplicity of self-understandings,
embedded in a long history and attached to a specific territory. The
power of that identity lay within the discourse of the nation, which
justified both territorial possession and statehood to those with prior
and exclusive claims, based on language, culture, or race. In a world
of competitors for territory and political power, primordialism was a
practical, even necessary, solution to the difficulty of establishing
such prior or exclusive claims. Since prenational ethnic and religious
communities do not map neatly with modern nations, and nations
themselves are inherently unstable categories, primordialism and
essentialism do the hard work of reifying the nation. Identities might
be fluid but in the real world of politics the players act as if they
are immutable, both for strategic reasons and emotional satisfaction.
25What is not recognized in the rush to nationhood is just how much
work by intellectuals, activists, and state administrators goes into
the forging of new nations. Nationalists often strive to get history
"right." In their "objectivist" reading of the past - showing the
past as "it actually was" they set themselves up as representing the
only true account. This pretension to an untroubled authenticity of
a single reading is a powerful claim to the legitimacy of the nation
and particular claims to territory and statehood. But it does not come
without costs. If the nation is real, ancient, and continuous, then in
its own view (and in the discourse of the nation more generally), its
claims to sovereignty is unique, uncontested, and not to be shared. The
road is open to exclusivist, homogeneous nations that in our ethnically
mixed, fluid, changing world require desperate policies of deportation
and ethnic cleansing to secure. Constructivists propose a more open
view of national history in which human actions and interventions
have made the world the way it is today. If the lines between peoples
are blurred and shifting, if many possible claimants to a particular
piece of the world's real estate are allowed, then we can conceive
of political communities in the future that permit cohabitation with
shared sovereignties in a "national" space.
26No nation in the modern world can survive without a space of its
own, a territory on which to build its state and foster its cultural
connectiveness. But the way the nation is imagined has profound
consequences for the imagination of the territorial homeland as
well. If the homeland is imagined as the exclusive property of one
ethnic or religious group, then it necessarily leads to subordination
of other groups or their assimilation or their physical elimination
from the national territory. It is no accident that ethnic cleansing
and/or genocide have been the foundational moments of many modern
nation states, among them Australia, the United States, Turkey,
Israel, and the list goes on and on. In some parts of the world,
like the former Soviet Union, an internationalist empire left in its
ashes fifteen independent states, each of them clinging to their own
national territories, each defining the state in terms of their own
ethnic nation. Not much sharing is going on in Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, or many other republics.
27But if the nation is imagined as inclusive, as tolerant of difference
- religious and ethnic - then the territory too is open to a diverse
population. The form and style of national imagination, the content of
the national narrative, is central to whether one can share territory
with others. Posing the question that way may seem utopian at the
present time, particularly in the Middle East, where borders drawn
by imperial powers have divided people into states seeking nations,
where the colonizers appear determined to assert their influence long
after their empires have fallen, and where the nation-state form has
not proven very effective in delivering security and prosperity to
most of the peoples of the region. At the moment we seem to be stuck
with one people, one nation, one state. Some day, perhaps coming
from the cradle of ancient civilizations, there will be new ways
to imagine states - states larger and more inclusive than current
nation-states. The task of intellectuals and political actors, then,
in this time of troubles must be to think creatively how history,
identity, and territory might be re-imagined so that nation-form works
less to divide us one from another and more toward living together.
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Notes1 Brubaker and Cooper dispute the analytical validity of the term
"identity" and propose substitute terms, such as identification,
self-understanding, and commonality. They make a persuasive case
for use of the term "identification" as an active processual term,
but my own use of identity preserves the actual ambiguity of the term
"identity" and is directed at investigating the tension between the
analytical and practical uses of the term that they articulate so well.
2 The study of emotions and nationalism is just getting underway. See
for example Petersen 2002.
Pour citer cet articleRéférence papier Ronald Grigor Suny, Â"
Some Theoretical Considerations Â", in Roger Heacock (dir.), Temps
et espaces en Palestine, Beyrouth, Liban, Institut francais du
Proche-Orient (Â" Ã~Itudes contemporaines Â", no25), 2008, p. 31-41.
Référence électronique Ronald Grigor Suny, Â" Some Theoretical
Considerations Â", in Roger Heacock (dir.), Temps et espaces en
Palestine, Beyrouth, Liban, Institut francais du Proche-Orient
(Â" Ã~Itudes contemporaines Â", no25), 2008, [En ligne],
mis en ligne le 28 mai 2009, Consulté le 29 mai 2009. URL :
http://ifpo.revues.org/index477.html
AuteurRona ld Grigor Suny Professor of history, University of
Michigan. Emeritus professor of history and political Science,
University of Chicago.
From: Baghdasarian