What is a nation?
Who are you and what have you done with Rebecca?
It was fantastic to get discussion on last week’s newsletter (thank you for the emails!). I want to pick up on one of those conversations here because it speaks to one of my favourite subjects:
What is a nation?
For context, last week, talking about the systemic, longterm and profound erosion of social relations among colonised people in the Pacific in recent centuries, I wrote,
I have not seen evidence for the total disregard for, and intentional annihilation of, basic social relationships, from families and romantic couples to communities and nations, and across such wide swathes of time and space.
A friend with whom I’ve been having conversations about history, and medieval history especially, for many years (like… many years) messaged me to say,
Who are you and what have you done with Rebecca?
There is a long history to this question and some of it overlaps with my own history in the subject.
Back when I first began studying history, and especially medieval history, in the early 2000s, I remember being told something that blew my mind…
There was a time before nation states existed.
How could that be? In the school history curriculum, nation states were treated as facts of life, like trees and gravity. In history shows on television, the story was the same. In everyday conversation, museums and pretty much anywhere else you might come across history as an eighteen-year-old, it was the same: what happened in medieval England? What were houses like in ancient China? Learn about Russia (or Germany, or Spain…) from the earliest times…
Of course we learned a bit in school about decolonisation, so we knew that some places had become independent in fairly recent history, but even that subtly reinforced the idea that there had always been nations.
‘India (or Ghana, or Argentina) (re-)gained its independence.’
The obvious inference was that India (or Ghana, or Argentina) had been taken over by outside forces, then had become independent again, indicating that the country itself had existed throughout this process.
Perhaps one exception was the United States. We all knew that the United States had not always existed, because the declaration of independence is so famous in popular culture, and because it declares itself to be something new. But one exception does not necessarily make you question a whole system, until somebody points it out.
That was what happened when I began studying history university. It wasn’t just that I was excited about this. The people teaching me were also excited about it. It was fairly new.
(Aside: it wasn’t ‘Breaking News!’ new - that doesn’t really happen in historical scholarship because the aim is to have detailed, nuanced conversations that take time to develop. Instead, ‘new’ usually means something that is actively driving those conversations at a particular time. This was, by that definition, pretty new.)
Two landmark studies that I remember coming up in lectures were:
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (Verso, 1983).
Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2002).
Both of them are brilliant books, which I would still strongly recommend reading (for Anderson, the 1991 revised edition contains valuable extras).
Both of them, and many other works, were making the same point from different angles. Nation states are a particular kind of political organisation. They have not always existed. They were created out of historical processes which explain things about how they work in the present.
It was, and remains, one of the most powerful and important insights from my undergraduate studies. It is so important because one of the things nation states do is generate histories about how they have always existed. (Even the United States, while presenting itself as doing something wholly new, very quickly generated histories which linked it to a deeper past, such as ancient democratic systems in the Aegean.)
What is a nation state? They are all different but they have some features in common:
They are geographically defined: a nation state has borders which define where it begins and ends. These are usually seen as permanent, even eternal. (Territory can still be contested, but this is usually done on the basis that such-and-such an area always should have been part of the state.)
There is a close relationship between the land a nation state has (or claims it should have), the people it says are its citizens and the values/culture/lifestyle it publicly identifies with. This is usually the culture/identity of the majority of the people living in the specific territory. The legitimacy of the government is often associated with the claim that it represents the majority of the people in a particular area.
That majority identity is usually presented as the story of a historical collective, often presented as the product of biological or familial connections and shared language(s). In other words, nation states usually claim, with different emphasis from one case to another, that they are the expression of the natural will of a community of people, who share a language and (often) a common origin, and who have lived forever, or for a very long time, on the land that the nation state claims as its own.
You can definitely find some of these qualities in other kinds of political systems, from empires to kingdoms to war bands (or hordes) to tribes to city states...
There are lots of ways that people have organised themselves to work out how to share resources and regulate behaviour. Things like needing to decide who is part of a system and who is outside it and finding ways to explain why some people, or ideas, have precedence, lead to some broadly similar outcomes. Still, the combination of these three characteristics is quite distinctive of modern nation states and, because they are now how global politics is organised, it can be easy to take them for granted as the only way politics has ever worked, especially because that is what modern nation states actively present as the truth.
Learning that it wasn’t so helped me to think differently about… almost everything.
It is not necessary for people who speak a common language to organise themselves into a shared political unit. It is not inevitable for political leaders to justify claims to the land they call their own because of the kinds of people who live in it. It has not always been the case that a political identity overlaps with expectations about how people identify culturally.
Perhaps most importantly, the assumption that this is how politics is usually done is really, really recent: maybe two or three hundred years, at the most, and, at a global scale, more like one hundred or less.
Whether any of this should be the case, or whether nation states are better or worse than other kinds of political organisation is a completely different set of questions and not what I’m talking about here. But if you want to understand how people have worked in the past, it really helps to take off as many blinkers as possible that stop you seeing how now has not been always.
Seeing past nations opened up medieval history enormously and I could feel the excitement of the people teaching me and I could understand it. A curtain had fallen.
Since then - and this is what my friend was reacting to when he read last week’s newsletter - I have been very careful about the word nation (state). I don’t use it in my published work unless I really mean ‘nation state’ (defined as above and referring to the quite recent past). If you give me an excuse, I will tell you about how nations have not always existed, how they are quite new.
And although moral judgements are not part of the historical analysis, they often are part of the wider discussion about states, and in particular, part of how scholars of the Middle Ages present the importance of our field to the wider world.
This is mainly a reaction, I think, to the way that the Middle Ages is often treated in popular culture (which is itself a product of how modern nation states have created a suitable past for themselves, but that is definitely for another time). As a medievalist, you get used to people caricaturing the times and places you study as dark (literally and metaphorically), violent, superstitious, depressing…
Pushback becomes a way we fight for space for the people we study - for respect for their humanity, their dignity, the importance of understanding their lives and worlds on their own terms because they were not less than.
Nation states provide lots of material for pushback, because some of what they do is pretty nasty. Defining some people as ‘belonging’ in a particular place because of their language or culture has very often meant labelling other people as not belonging, even on land or in communities their ancestors had lived in for centuries. Claiming that land is owned exclusively by one group of people not another has led to wars and occupations. Saying that the laws of a nation should defend and support the choices of one group (usually the majority) often means that those laws undermine and attack the choices of other (usually minority) groups.
I could go on.
It isn’t that nation states are uniquely evil. All political systems are a set of compromises, with winners and losers. All political systems that people have so far come up with are capable of doing some pretty nasty things. We are in a constant state of negotiation, as a species, over the relative benefits and costs of different scales and kinds of social organisation.
But for a lot of medieval studies, nation states were an obvious way in which we could point out that the regular narrative that everything in the period we study was terrible and everything since then has been better was nonsense.
Dismantling the ‘myth of nations’ also gives us valuable insight into things that really mattered in the early 2000s and still really matter now. Medievalists have often been right in the middle of debates about the status of marginalised or persecuted groups, independence movements or contested territorial claims by big countries. Because we study a world (more or less) without nations, we are well-placed to see the ways in which nation states misuse the past to justify their own present.
So that, in a nutshell, is why my friend wondered if the brain-stealers had come for me when I referred to nations as ‘basic social organisations.’ I’d been telling him for literally decades at this point that there is nothing basic or inevitable about nations.
I thought hard about that word before I wrote it last week, for all of the reasons above. I went with it for three reasons, which have all changed how I now think about nations (and which do not mean that I think Anderson or Geary or anybody else who has worked on the history of nations is wrong: historical research isn’t a pendulum that just goes back and forth. We do make progress.)
In the early writing about how nations had not been around for very long, the priority was taking apart and examining all of the fictions and distortions used by modern nation states to make it look as if they have existed forever. There was plenty of work to do. Over time, though, some examples have been more resistant to dismantling than others. It always depends on how you define your terms, but some communities do look as if they have had many of the characteristics of nation states for longer than others. Both Sri Lanka and England, for example, have quite long documentary traditions (stretching way back into the Middle Ages) telling the kinds of stories that nation states are built on, about the connections between land, people, culture and political identity. The Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire shows a lot of these characteristics in its later centuries (again, still well before the conventional modern ‘origin point’ for nation states) and some scholars of the late empire have argued that it was more like a nation state than not. Each of these cases can be (and has been, and continues to be) argued on its own terms, but collectively, they indicate that it is all more complicated. Nation states have not existed forever, but they were not invented from scratch some time c. 1700-1800 either. This isn’t surprising. Everything is more complicated. Still, it takes time in any debate to lay out the core hypotheses then to test their limits.
The second reason I used the word was that I’m still learning. Writing ‘Coffee with Clio’ is part of that learning journey. Scholarly publications are a very particular style of writing. The style has a purpose and is very effective for that purpose, and I’ve learned to be pretty good at it because that is my job. Writing ‘Coffee with Clio’ is something different and exactly what that means is something I’m really interested in. The point of last week’s newsletter was not to talk about the history of the use of the word ‘nation’ and, as you can see, even doing that as a summary here is pretty involved. I’m learning not to get hung up on every word that, in other parts of my writing, would need a large footnote or a whole separate discussion. Moving between different kinds of wiring is useful but not always easy. Which words really do need a whole post of their own? (This one, obviously!) And how do you do that? (If you have views, let me know!)
The third reason I wrote what I did was because, even if I am very careful about how I use the term ‘nation (state)’, precisely because of the way that nation states have appropriated it so that it nearly doesn’t mean anything else, ‘nation’ actually did exist as a concept long before any kind of nation state. That is what I want to finish by talking about.
The origin of the term ‘nation’ is the Latin verb ‘nasco’ (= I am born). In its past participle it becomes ‘natus’ (= having been born). A ‘natio’ (plural: nationes), therefore, is related to the concept of a community that considers itself to come from a common ancestor, a community linked by birth.
This could always be understood more or less literally: genealogies have always been powerful ways for communities to change, evolve and include or exclude people. ‘Discovering’ an ancient ancestor who means that this group of people are actually distant cousins of that group of people is a very old technique. Legends describing people the descendants of extremely promiscuous deities are particularly useful for this flexible approach to community building. Quite apart from any notion of ‘provable’ biological relationship in modern genetic terms, being able to say ‘we are all related’ is one way in which humans have organised themselves into groups for a very, very long time.
When I was writing last week’s newsletter, the thing I wanted to communicate was that politicised, scientific racism, in the Pacific and elsewhere, attacked every bond between indigenous people. It attacked ‘basic’ bonds in the sense of bonds that humans seem to form everywhere. These are a combination of one-to-one relationships, (nuclear) family groups, extended family networks, communities (meaning things about the size of a village), and…
I could have left it there. It was tempting. Wasn’t that enough? The attack on those bonds was already horrifically destructive. But stopping there would have continued one of the most insidious attacks that European colonialism launched around the world. That attack took the form of suggesting that millions of people, all over the globe, had not formed (because they could not form) ‘real’ political communities. They could only form families and village-level societies because anything else was too complicated.
This reasoning was used by colonial administrations in Africa, the Americas and Asia, as well as the Pacific, to justify taking over regions because they didn’t have any ‘genuine’ pre-existing government.
The basis of this justification was exactly the universalisation of the nation state that this newsletter began with: because the governments or political structures in large parts of the world did not look like modern nation states, it became convenient to argue that they were not important or did not even exist. The nation state had constituted itself as the only state.
In fact, travellers around the world, including many who travelled on European colonial service, as well as oral narratives, objects, buildings, use of landscape and, in some places, texts from within indigenous communities, demonstrate that people, pretty much everywhere and always (that we can see), have understood themselves as parts of groups bigger than their own family or village-scale unit.
We, as human beings, see the world in terms of people ‘like us’ and ‘different from us’. We can be infinitely complex and flexible and scalable about how we do that, but we do it. And across the world, larger groupings of ‘like us’ and ‘different from us’, very often described or imagined in terms of shared ancestry, had political functions, even if they were not ‘states’ in the modern sense. they could also co-exist with states, which were justified in different ways.
These big groupings of ‘like us’, based on ideas of shared identity and culture, and with political functions, were perhaps the thing that European colonial powers most wanted to undermine. It was these big groupings that I meant when I wrote about nations as a basic social structure.
Twenty years ago, maybe ten years ago, perhaps even five, I would not have done that. The weight of work pointing out that ‘nation’ is a complex term would have felt too heavy. I would not have been writing this newsletter (which is still scary as well as exciting). Above all, I was caught up in what now looks like a defensive reflex of the ‘myth of nations’, exactly at the point we began to understand it better.
ff the word ‘nation’ does not mean ‘nation state,’ says this defensive reflex, it cannot mean anything useful at all. This is already a game the nation state has played with states: the sense of revelation felt by my undergraduate self was because it had seemed obvious to me, until it wasn’t, that the word ‘state’ could only mean ‘nation state’. That turned out not to be the case.
So, too, I think there is a place for the discussion of nations that are not states. I think that matters as a recognition of ways in which people have understood and shaped the world. Maybe in five or ten or twenty years I will have a better word or think differently about the whole concept of social organisation. That isn’t a problem. It’s the point. And one of the things I’m most enjoying about writing here is the chance to look at the past differently by writing about it differently. Thank you for reading, and commenting, and thereby making it possible!