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5464973 No.5464973[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Why is nationalism a typical invention of the modern times? Why didn't the romans for instance see the benefits of creating a nation state?
Why didn't the feudal kings of europe see the benefits of a unified national identity?
Pic unrelated

>> No.5464991

>>5464973
It is because of the printing press, pamphlets, books, newspapers, the radio, television, etc. that nationalism can even exist.

>> No.5464995

>>5464973
nationalism needs the industrial/bourgeois mode of production to exist

>> No.5464999

>>5464973
>>the Romans weren't nationalists
Pardon?

>> No.5465003

>>5464973
Also, kings didn't have to bother with peasants opinion

>> No.5465004

>>5464973
Read Imagined Communities.

>> No.5465006

nationalism existed since the first tribes of paleolithic age if not earlier

>> No.5465010

>>5464973
> Why didn't the romans for instance see the benefits of creating a nation state?
Because the lack of infrastructure, transportation and communication led to small, somewhat secluded communities all with their own dialects, customs and so on - hardly a nation.

>> No.5465017

>>5464991
This implies that you need modern forms of communication to create identification. I don't agree with this, because people were able to have an identity before mass communication became possible. People saw themselves as christians for instance without many of these communication tools.

>>5464995
Care to elaborate a bit more?

>> No.5465018

>>5465006
That is tribe-ism rather than nationalism, isn't it?

>> No.5465019

Mirá, Jorge, y que María no se entere que andás viniendo por acá.
Nations as a means to coerce a group of people depend heavily in being surrounded by otehr nations. If your guys come and go and no one gives a fuck, there's no other to separate the national from the outsider.

>> No.5465022

>>5465017
Christianity spreads over national barriers.

>> No.5465028

Nationalism may be an invention of modern times, but wasn't there still a sort of 'political pride' amongst the Greeks and Romans? They all valued community above the individual, and you were often defined by what empire or polis you were from.

>> No.5465034

>>5464973
>Why didn't the feudal kings of europe see the benefits of a unified national identity?
Arguably because many of them didn't share the ethnicity of (all of) the peoples they ruled. The Norman kings of England were hardly likely to promote English nationalism, for example. The Romans too ruled over a multi-ethnic empire.

>> No.5465035

>>5464999
No they were not nationalists. The romans(as in the original people from central Italy) saw themselves as the roman people, not the roman nation. Likewise the conquered egyptians saw themselves as egyptians, not as a part of the roman nation.

>> No.5465036

pride in identifying with your community is as old as monkeys with fire

>> No.5465038

>>5465006

protip: that is tribalism. not nationalism

you literally included the demarcation "tribes" in your post. how could you not know this.

>> No.5465039

>>5465028
> They all valued community above the individual
Average Polis has 5000 to 10 000 inhabitants. Its not feasible to compare it to nation states. In the former, you might know everyone, in the latter you can't.

>> No.5465040

>>5465028
Yes they had, but as I already stated in >>5465035, they didn't identify themselves with the nation, but with the people.

>> No.5465045

>>5465028
Yeah, I'd say the ancient Greeks are the best place to look for 'premodern nationalism'. The Israelites too.

The early Muslims would be an interesting case- they were trying to create a unified political and religious order in which everyone shared essentially the same culture, but it was anti-nationalist in that its aims were universal.

>> No.5465046

>>5465017
>People saw themselves as christians for instance without many of these communication tools.
Are you saying christianity had no particular tools to expand it's ideas in terms of human worker that would be replaced or augmented through mass media like the printing press?

>> No.5465055

>>5464973
>Why is nationalism a typical invention of the modern times?
Because the modern concept of the nation is, and so is the modern nation. The word 'nationes' existed, but it meant something else.

>> No.5465056

>>5465046
No. Christianity indeed had these tools too, but that only confirms my point that people were able to identificate themselves with something without the use of mass media.

>> No.5465062

>>5465040
>>5465039
So the main distinction in passing from old classical pride to nationalistic pride is the passing from identification with a known community to identification with an ideal? Sounds like pure ideology.

>> No.5465065

>>5465062
Well... yes.

>> No.5465066

>>5464973
You seem to be under the assumption that being a nation state is something you can just will even if no such thing had previously existed up until that point.

asking "Why didn't they just be a nation state?" is equivalent to asking why people from the 1800s didn't just dress in t-shirts and jeans.

There are complex social and cultural factors that all coalesced to produce national identities during the early modern period. I mean, you do realize that trends develop over time. It's not like all ideas are just apparent to everyone at all times and they just need to realize which one is right.

>> No.5465072
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5465072

>>5465062

>> No.5465077

>>5465056
But priests are the mass media of their time. A significant amount of europe's population listened to their official interpretation of the bible.
That's like saying that horses aren't transportation because they don't use fuel.

>> No.5465080

>>5465062
Of course it is pure ideology, I would never contest that it is ideology. But hence my question is: why didn't people see the use of this ideological concept earlier? I understand that the real separation between ideology and science wasn't possible until traditional aristotelian metaphysics were kill, but still...

>> No.5465088

>>5465066
Yes mr.Hegel, I know. But then I ask why? Why was it Herder or Renan to say:'Hey guise, there is this concept 'nation', don't y'all agree?'. What were the factors to make this possible for them to say, and not (for instance) for Charlemagne?

>> No.5465091

>>>/pol/

>> No.5465092

>>5465088
*to say this

>> No.5465098

>>5465091
I see this as a philosophical/ intellectual history discussion, and thus justified to be here.

>> No.5465104

>>5465080
Because you need the means to expand your ideas for that to work, hence the religious preachers.

>> No.5465111

>>5465080
The spread of ideologies is achieved much more easily through the use of large and effective communication/media networks, I'll wager that early civilizations lack thereof may have contributed to their lack of nationalistic spirit. .

>> No.5465115

>>5465098
Keep political shit on >>>/pol/

>> No.5465128
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5465128

>>5465115

>he polices boards on 4chan

>> No.5465133

>>5465115
Every philosophical discussion is political

>> No.5465137

>>5465128
for free

>> No.5465142

>>5465088
>Herder
>Renan
>19th century
>National identities well established

It has to do with identity. No one aside from perhaps the English would have identified themselves as distinctly French, German, or Italian until the early modern period or later. There was no national mythos because Europe was largely seen as warring family dominions rather than integrated states by all classes of society. You would be more likely to identify with either your specific region or, if a noble, with with your noble family. The wars were Valois vs Hapsburg rather than France vs Germany. It becomes even less centralized the further you go back in the history of Europe.

>> No.5465164

>>5465142
Fair enough, but how then do you explain the ancient state of Israel, which seems to fit this identity requirement ( at least in the eye of the modern jew).

>> No.5465178

>>5465164
I don't know any reputable historian that would seriously call the Kingdom of Israel a Nation State and especially not in the modern sense.

>> No.5465182

>>5465066
>You seem to be under the assumption that being a nation state is something you can just will even if no such thing had previously existed up until that point
It arguably had, though. The Greek polis was certainly close, and does raise the question of why people didn't say 'let's run this place more like a polis'. Actually, I suspect that's exactly what the Italian city-states did say.

>> No.5465193

>>5464973
>Why didn't the feudal kings of europe see the benefits of a unified national identity?
There's arguably something inherently democratic/egalitarian about nationalism. At the very least it requires that the rulers be part of the same community as the ruled, and I don't think that was the case for most (any?) of the kings of Europe.

>> No.5465197

Ok I'm not OP. I read anon's explanation about how they weren't nations cause they saw themselves as warring families and I'm pretty satisfied with that. But what about the ROmans? Did they identify as families too or did they have a national identity?

>> No.5465215

>>5465197
It is already explained in the tread, but the romans saw themselves as the roman people, not the roman nation.

>> No.5465216

>>5465182
Woah, you need to understand the differences both from a political and logistical standpoint that differentiate running a city-state and attempting to run a nation state. It is one thing for Italian cities to emulate Greek city states as autonomous cities and quite another to unify Germany under a national spirit. At least everyone in a city will likely identify with that city or one of a few noble families within the city. The difference largely comes down to how much easier homogeneity makes administration of a state. On such a small scale, especially if you only allow land owners a say, it is much easier to control everything as opposed to a nation for which you may have hundreds or thousands of different interests and political operators all competing at the same time on a much larger scale.

>> No.5465218

>>5465197
Depends which Romans you're talking about. I'd guess the patricians and maybe even the plebs of Rome had a degree of common identity, but if you were born anywhere outside of Rome I'd expect that to be mixed in with a sense of local identity. Just guessing, though.

No idea what the Emperors thought of themselves and their relation to the Roman people.

>> No.5465222

>>5465215
What's the fucking difference mate? Nation means people, doesn't it?

>> No.5465229

>>5465216
True, of course, the scale makes a big difference. Just saying that the notion of a unified political identity bound to a territory wouldn't be unheard of if you have the prior example of the Greeks.

>> No.5465239

>>5465222
No it does not. Look it up.

>> No.5465244

>>5465222
No, that's not the same. A roman senator didn't identify himself with an inhabitant of Palmyra. OR another example: the differences that the romans made between romans and greeks, even though they were part of the same state.

>> No.5465251

>>5465244
Ok so they were a state of multiple nations, not just one nation. Neat.

>> No.5465254

>>5465251
No. They did't know the concept of a 'nation' in the modern sense. They saw themselves as people, not a nation.

>> No.5465255

>>5465197
Romans, as with everyone in antiquity, had an ethno-linguistic identity as well as a legal identity.

>> No.5465259

>>5465244
Aside from your dubs, you just contradicted yourself shithead. You said the Romans weren't a nation, then you described the Greeks as a single autonomous group. So were they a nation?

>> No.5465261

>>5465222
Normally 'nation' has an added political connotation. A 'nation' is a unified group of people which either is or should be represented by a single sovereign government. A 'people' doesn't carry this political demand.

>> No.5465264

>>5465229
It's just important to understand that while it may have been some noble's pipe dream to make such a state, it was so far from realization until well into the early modern period that it would generally have been considered impossible on that scale.

>> No.5465269

All of this is a bunch of semantic bullshit. Nation actually mean the exact same thing. Some historian just came along in the 20th century and had to peddle some bullshit to keep his crappy university chair so he decided to call a large group of "peoples" a "nation." Glad I could clear that up.

>> No.5465270

>>5465259
No. Again: they were talking about the greek PEOPLE, not the greek nation.

>> No.5465274

>>5465270
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE MOTHERFUCKER??????????????????????????????????????????????????? PEOPLE AND NATION, WHAT DO THEY MEAN??????

>> No.5465275

>>5465264
Yeah, makes sense. I wonder how many medieval monarchs saw themselves as having the same ethnicity as the people they ruled, anyway?

>> No.5465282

Nationalism is a social bound for those who find other people a bit icky.

>> No.5465283

>>5465274
>>5465261
A modern example: gypsies indetify themselves as people. There isn't a gypsy nation.

>> No.5465289

>>5465275
Medieval monarchs were thinking in a completely different paradigm. They saw the world divided into different estates, all part of a divine order in which they , as monarchs, were destined to rule.

>> No.5465291

>>5465283
Why not? What makes a nation special and different from a group of people? Gypsies have a common identity the same as the English nation. Is language and ethnicity the key? If so why didn't you say that ages ago?

>> No.5465294

>>5465269
>A monkey wrench is just anotehr wrench that someone ivnented to get some bucks, you can do the exact same things with any wrench.

>> No.5465297

>>5465289
hahahahaha
And Obama really thinks the best course of action for the freedom of the world is to attack the middle east. Why do you have to bite into the propaganda so hard? You're gonna break a tooth.

>> No.5465302

>>5465291
In essence it is something spiritual. The people by themselves have decided to forge a bond between themselves. This bond isn't defined by things as language, geography, etnicity etc. It's purely spiritual ( and thus it is never constant, the existence of a nation is a daily referendum).
For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_a_Nation%3F

>> No.5465305

>>5465289
But they also saw themselves as part of a descent group with an ancestral homeland, language, etc. They didn't consider themselves to be parachuted in from Mars.

>> No.5465309

>>5465291
See >>5465261. 'Gypsy nationalism' is not a sufficiently big thing for a Gypsy nation to exist.

>> No.5465314

>>5465305
No. Those things are modern concepts. Things like a common language or etnicity didn't exist in medieval nation. The linguistic and etnical differences between inhabitants of the langue d'oc and langued' oil were huge. But that, and that's the essence, wasn't important to medieval monarchs.

>> No.5465318

>>5465309
>>5465291
Another good example could be Northern Ireland. Northern Irish people assuredly exist. They have a really nasty harsh-sounding version of the Irish accent to prove it. But there is AFAIK no such thing as the 'Northern Irish nation', because the nationalists there both believe Northern Ireland should be only a part of a bigger nation- either Ireland or the United Kingdom, depending on who you talk to.

>> No.5465323

>>5464973
>Why is nationalism a typical invention of the modern times
Because it's a concept from the Enlightenment, despite what issiah Berlin says.

>> No.5465332

>>5465323
A bit later than the enlightenment though.

>> No.5465337
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5465337

>>5464973
Every statement in your question is utterly wrong, so there's no way to answer it. Nationalism an invention of modern times? WTF do you think the Iliad is about? Or the Arthurian legends? Or almost any other epic? Christ.

>> No.5465339

>>5465314
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying they saw themselves as sharing an ethnicity with the rest of their kingdom (which woud be modern nationalism). I'm saying that, say, a given noble group or royal family would have a sense of common language, descent, etc, among themselves.

>> No.5465343

>>5465337
Read the thread please. Nationalism is a modern invention. The Illiad was definitely not written from a nationalistic perspective.

>> No.5465344

>>5465088
>and not (for instance) for Charlemagne?
One is based on divine rule of the kingdom and changed borders every week. Nationalism means the nation and it's government(monarchy in the early variant) is representing the people.

>> No.5465346

>>5465337
I can only surmise that you've never read a single book on nationalism. Hell, even the primordialists have to spend a lot of time/pages addressing modernist arguments.

>> No.5465347

A lot of people in this thread is ignoring the post-colonial process of inventing nations for the people reunited under controlled governments. Stuff like flags, anthems and patriotic symbols are created to educate the idea of a common nation even when they don't represent the actual majority, in Bolivia's case most of the population is either aboriginal or half-blood but the official language is spanish because of the spanish occupation.

>> No.5465349

>>5465178
>I don't know any reputable historian
Anthony Smith. The jews had more of the modern traits of nationalism than the other countries in their time.

>> No.5465352

>>5465344
>and changed borders every week
Good point. A hypothetical nationalist medieval king would have a harder time justifying enlarging the kingdom.

>> No.5465354

>>5465349
Smith specifically avoids saying pre-modern nations existed, though. He normally says 'ethnie' or at most 'proto-nation'.

>> No.5465355

>>5465332
Basically the whole German Enlightenment + machiavelli and the Jean-Jack were the operators of nationalism. The French and English Enlightenment on the other hand were more akin to favor their Empires and sciences.

>> No.5465359

>>5465339
Ok then, but I still stand by my point: they didn't care about a common language or etnicity in their family ( though I dare to say that this wasn't often the case, nobility fucked throughout whole western europe), because those concepts were not imporant for them.

>> No.5465361

>>5465337
You are one of the few people that might even benefit from reading reactionary writers.

>> No.5465372

>>5465355
Those are indeed the most important originators, but the actual development of nationalism wasn't possible until the departure of Napoleon, because the French revolution killed the old traditional metaphysics and after that there was the Napoleonistic danger.

>> No.5465380

>>5465359
>they didn't care about a common language or etnicity in their family
I'm not sure, but I have my doubts on that. Certainly the Manchu rulers of China were generally extremely keen on preserving the cultural distinction between Manchus and Chinese (no Chinese people were allowed to settle in Manchuria until the late 19th century, for example), and so I think were the Mongols. I'm not sure about Europe, but I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly deliberate efforts to keep the ruling group culturally pure. Surely back then everyone attached great importance to who their ancestors were.

>> No.5465401

>>5465380
Just take a look at the family tree of an important noble family, and be amazed by the enormous diversity you will find in their ranks.

I agree with you on asia, but then we're talking about a completely different world, where they did't know the notion of nationalism until they imported it from Europe.

>> No.5465507

Hmm, I see. I guess I'd have a primordialist perspective, then, as I see no difference but scale and efficiency between ancient and modern times. Regardless of why it was written, the Iliad certainly became a document that defined a Greek identity, as the Aeneid for Romans, and both Chaucer and Dante chose to write in vernacular as a way of asserting a common identity to unite provinces and city-states into countries and giving value to that bond, and Arthur's legend is that of the unifier of the kingdoms of Britain. To argue that the spirit of nationalism fundamentally changed seems absurd, but I haven't done any study of it. This idea that a unification ideology is something new is bizarre to me.

>> No.5465528

>>5465507
>Regardless of why it was written, the Iliad certainly became a document that defined a Greek identity
>a unification ideology
Greece is a good example of the limits of pre-nationalist identities, though. Yes, it seems true that there was a common Greek identity, with a shared language and the Iliad as a foundational story about what it means to be Greek. But was it actually a 'unification ideology'? If so, why was Greece divided into separate city states, and why wasn't there more of an effort to unite them into a single polity? Modern nationalism would insist that all the Greeks, with all they had in common, should have a single government, but AFAIK that didn't happen even in the face of the Persian threat (and you'd expect an external enemy to be an excellent unifier). The actual unifier of the Greeks wasn't even Greek, and his son was famously interested in ruling a whole lot more than just Greece.

>> No.5465542

>>5465507
>Chaucer and Dante chose to write in vernacular as a way of asserting a common identity to unite provinces and city-states into countries
That's an argument about the political intentions of the authors that requires a whole lot of proof. What do we know about Chaucer's intentions? Do the Canterbury Tales make a particular point of emphasising English identity?

>> No.5465549

>>5465528
>an external enemy to be an excellent unifier
Only if you are the attacker, defenders scramble even worse; it was really easy to amass an empire back in the day since you just had to take village by village and at most a city-state at the time.

>> No.5465558

>>5465542
You could also consider that those particular texts were popularized with that intention even if it wasn't on the author's part.

>> No.5465567

>>5465528
Yes, definitely ethnic guidelines and tribalism had to give way to whoever wielded enough military power, but that's a new forging of identity in itself. The Roman Empire overextended itself, but China, Germany, etc., owe their dubious cultural identity in part to great conquerors, don't they? I suppose there must be more fundamental differences than ability and vision, but thinking of (for instance) the way the Catholic and orthodox churches tried for centuries to build "empires" defined by faith and some tenants of law and culture, and the other examples I mentioned earlier, it seems like the concept was always there, it was just hampered by the usual endless power struggles and technology limits (low literacy, slow communication, etc). Banning the indigenous languages of the conquered, for example, is a very old practice, and modifying their holidays and customs in an attempt at cohesion is also ancient. Ancient Egypt was united as a fairly monolithic political entity under their first Pharaoh, for instance. But I've already demonstrated my ignorance of modern nationalism as a theoretical subject.

>> No.5465576

>>5465558
Yes, that's closer to what I meant, but in Dante's case and Chaucer's, the political implications of their choice of languages is fairly well-researched and accepted (that stuff is more in my field). Virgil is I think much more subversive in intent, and about "Homer" we can say little with certainty, but the popular use of those epics was my point.

>> No.5465575

>>5465558
True. Modern nationalism certainly made 'national classics' a necessary thing to have (to the point that a few fake ones appeared). But again, you'd need proof of that process happening earlier.

>> No.5465673

Nationalism has always existed, but not modern nationalism. Modern nationalism is a product of the shortening gulf between elite and serf, and of rising political sophistication. In the Middle Ages, "states" are not really properly defined as states. They are patrimonies and bureaucratic apparati around individuals and families. With the Late Middle Ages and the (so-called) Early Modern period, you get these STATES as entities unto themselves. Over time they are associated with ethnic or historic identities and proto-nationalist imagery and propaganda start to crop up.

But with the dawn of modern history, the French Revolution, you basically get the apex of historical political sophistication AND the very important element that the French Revolution mobilised the " "French people" as a people. The French elan was legendary and used for explicit inspiration by fascists and proto-fascists. The ancien regime was swept away and now the idea was created that a people had a political identity, a political destiny, and a peculiar claim to control the political machinery of their homeland, which was for the first time actually possible in an age when the "society is 95% semi-retard farm labourers, 5% educated dudes" dichotomy had finally worn away significantly.

At the same time, these ideas filter into oppressed "nationalities" whose identities were rising, an excellent example of which would be the "Poles", because they were intertwined with the French Revolution, "their" state had been dissolved between three ethnically pluralistic imperial powers, and their actual ethnic composition was spotty and vague as fuck, which didn't stop them from creating it (and others) basically from whole cloth. The Poles after the Partitions mostly did what was historically normal for conquered states to do - each little region and locale continued to see itself as that locale, except now its taxes went to the Prussian king or Austrian emperor. Big deal. But the nationalism of the Romantic era was specifically backward looking and past-distorting, and it gradually created an image of Poland contrary to its actual composition as a pluralistic empire of 945934 different ethnicities and languages itself, but as a great people, a great race. That is why Pilsudski, the Polish patriot hero born in Lithuanian Wilno, ruled Ruthenian/Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian and German citizens with an iron fist to prevent "insurrection" against the "legitimate" Polish state, while these people claimed and developed their OWN Romantic nationalist self-conception. Napoleon used the Poles and promised them "reconstitution" - a meaningless promise to a dead state of vanished aristocratic interests that *couldn't* reconstitute. He promised to create Poland in the way the Revolution had created France. Same thing was happening everywhere else in Europe. What finally settled the dispute between pan-Islamic and pluralistic Ottoman statesmen? Romantic Turkish ethno-nationalism. Etc.

>> No.5465717

>>5465673
The tldr being the nationalistic zeal was simply not accessible to most people in a meaningful way until modern history, because they were fucking broke-ass villagers, and states were too vague or too specialised in their administration to meaningfully incorporate the people anyway. The Roman Senate ran Rome as a perpetual war-profiteering enterprise after the Lex Hortensia in 287 not (entirely) because they were evil bourgeois fags who wanted to oppress the people, but because how the fuck you gonna meaningfully incorporate democratic decision-making when WE can't even do it as moderns? We still do the same thing - we groom political elites to run shit so we can go about farming coins from our 9-5's. States require specialised political classes. Only with the rise of citizen armies and widespread civil service, and the corresponding rise of the capital-s State, do you get meaningful reflexive conceptions of dying for one's country. Look at Hitler denouncing old-guard, aristocratic, outdated "Habsburg nationalism" (the ancient loyalty to the royal house) in favour of the Volkisch Pangermanist movements then rising everywhere in Austria and Germany. Same process.

There are interesting exceptions, like the Athenians maybe:
>Thus Athens went from strength to strength, and proved, if proof were needed, how noble a thing equality before the law is, not in one respect only, but in all; for while they were oppressed under tyrants, they had no better success in war than any of their neighbours, yet, once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world. This clearly shows that, so long as they were held down by authority, they deliberately shirked their duty in the field, as slaves shirk working for their masters; but when freedom was won, then every man amongst them was interested in his own cause.
>Hdt. V.78
..but remember that the Athenians themselves basically turned themselves into permanent overlords (i.e., a specialised ruling class and army) of an Aegean empire, in the same way the Spartans had done to their Helots, and the same way the Spartans would do when they took over the Athenian Empire. They would have pride in their city the same way Roman aristocrats would have pride in Rome, which is to say in a manner mostly inaccessible to the dregs.