With the fundamental terminology defined and placed in a conceptual context, we now turn to examine the relevant literature. This literature can be divided between four separate understandings of nationalism: the sociological, culturalist, political-historical, and
ethno-symbolist approaches. After considering the secondary literature relevant to each approach, this section briefly discusses key studies that apply the assumptions of each approach to Chinese nationalism. Ultimately, this study aims to synthesize the insights of each approach into an operational typology that can be used to interpret the implications of differing contents and orientations in Chinese nationalism.
First, Gellner’s sociological approach views nationalism as the creation of industrial society, in which economic specialization meets state-sponsored education, manufacturing a shared culture at the national scale that allows for, and demands, “context-free” “social
communication” among all co-nationals. By arguing that the nation is modern and a product of nationalism, and by developing the concept of social communication in relation to nationhood, Gellner’s approach justifies this study’s use of textbooks as a source material and provides a foundational underpinning to the logic of studying nationalism in order to understand the likely future of the nation.
Next, Anderson’s culturalist approach views the advent of nations in the context of the decline of multiethnic empires and sacred script, understanding nationalism as a construction – though not a delusion – related to a population’s concept of experiencing time, as well as history and death, together. This approach has interesting commonalities with the moral world view found in the writings of Emile Durkheim, a point that is explored below. Elements of the culturalist approach are applied to Chinese nationalism in Levenson, Pye, and Chow et al..
These works justify the inclusion of cultural nationalism in the typology applied in this study.
Third, the political-historical perspective developed by Breuilly views nationalism instrumentally, as a form of mass politics with no inherent connection to the cultural and sociological characteristics discussed in the above to approaches. Breuilly’s approach is
mirrored in Zhao’s authoritative treatment of Chinese nationalism, and both works justify the use of a typology in analyzing the content of nationalism.
The sociological, cultural, and political-historical approaches each share a view of the
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nation as a product of modernity. In the famous “Warwick Debate” between Gellner and Smith, the former humorously states, “modernists like myself believe that the world was created round about the end of the eighteenth century.”87 Although the explanations for the advent and spread of the nation in the 18th century differ among various theorists, they nonetheless maintain a general consensus that enlightenment-secularism, industrialization, mass literacy, and the consumption of vernacular media have transformed the way populations imagine themselves.
For the modernists, then, the world of nations is starkly modern, and peering back into the pre-modern world gives us little new information on the nature of nations.
On the contrary, the perennialist perspective concedes that some nations are wholly modern, but argues that all nations contain an ethno-symbolist core, and thus bear some similarity to earlier proto-national communities in history. Since those communities are logically and historically antecedent to the nation and continue to inform the character of
nationalism, perennialists stress the importance of a variety of primordial factors that modernists tend to dismiss. Represented here by Smith, the ethno-symbolist perspective develops the concept of ethnie and gives us a lens through which to examine ethnic nationalism.
Before examining each of these four approaches in detail, we must develop a working understanding of primordial and constructed elements that relate to the nation. If we understand
“constructed” (socialized) and “given” (bestowed by chance; primordial) to be opposite ends of a spectrum upon which individual and group characteristics may be placed, we see that Dittmer’s concept of identity covers much of the spectrum. While group-level characteristics such as role in society, mythologized founding and narrative history are largely constructed, Dittmer’s individual level characteristics, especially language, ethnicity, and – to some degree – culture, are bestowed upon the individual by “accidents of geography,” which is to say, chance. These elements are therefore “given,” and their relationship to nationalism functions according to the logic of primordialism. Geertz discusses how “givenness” gives rises to primordial attachments as follows:
Being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbor, one’s
87 Ernest Gellner, “The Warwick Debates,”
http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/gellner/Warwick2.html.
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fellow believer, ipso facto: as the result not merely of personal affection, common practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself.88
If nationhood is mutually imagined by co-nationals who share a partly constructed, partly
“given” identity, then it stands to reason that both scholars who emphasize the nation’s modern, constructed nature and those who see it as a continuation of “perennial” ethno-symbolist
communities each have a valuable perspective on the nation. In the primordialist sense, we can concur with Sluga, “man cannot in fact exist apart from his fellow men, the nation is just the society by which the individual is involuntarily determined – it is a larger self”.89 However, not all elements of identity are involuntarily determined, and not all models of nationhood
subordinate the individual to the collective. In considering the following four approaches to nationalism, we can gain a clearer understanding of the breadth and diversity of theory in nationalism studies and begin to piece together a methodology that makes use of past work.
2.1: Sociological Approach
Developed in Gellner’s Thought and Change and Nations and Nationalism, the
sociological perspective argues that nationhood grew out of the socioeconomic transformation inherent in industrialization. Gellner draws heavily on Deutsch’s broad concept of “social communication.” Deutsch wrote, “the essential aspect of the unity of a people … is the
complementarity or relative efficiency of communication among individuals… people are held together ‘from within’ by this communicative efficiency, the complementarity of the
communicative facilities acquired by their members.”90 Deutsch theorized that social
communication, “both from the past to the present and between contemporaries,” allows for “the relatively coherent and stable structure of memories, habits and values” which give rise to nationhood.91 Thus for Deutsch, as for modernist theories of the nation in general, mass literacy
88 Clifford Geertz, New Societies, Old States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (London, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 109. Quoted in 高格孚, 《 風和日暖: 台灣外省人與國家認同的轉變》 (臺北: 充晨文化, 2004 年), 61.
89 Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics: 1870-1919 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 14.
90 Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Political Communication and Control (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1966), 98. See also Philip Schlesinger, “Communication Theories of Nationalism,” in Encyclopedia of Nationalism, ed. Athena S. Leoussi (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), 26.
91 Deutsch, Nerves of Government, 75.
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in a vernacular language is a necessary prerequisite to nationhood. More than literacy in a common tongue, however, Deutsch’s theory emphasizes a cultural commonality that allows for genuine understanding beyond simply communicability. Isaiah Berlin famously wrote that among members of his “own group… they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me the sense of being somebody in the world.''92 By that logic, national cohesion, whether at the formative stage or as an enduring social reality, depends upon substantive interaction among members belonging to a shared national culture and a shared national dialogue.
Gellner argues that the social effects of industrialization and the advent of
state-sponsored education allowed, for the first time, Deutsch’s “context-free” social communication at the national level. Before industrialization, Gellner argues, agricultural empires witnessed social consciousness and loyalty structured and localized along vertical lines; the notion of an all-encompassing “society,” as we tend to understand it today, would have seemed entirely foreign in the pre-industrial world. The organizing social bonds existed between ruler and subject, not among the agricultural masses. Literacy and most of what we now call “culture”
was limited to political and religious elites. Industrialization transformed that world by incentivizing specialization, and in a specialized society, “social communication” is a
prerequisite to participation. As a result, populations became self-aware; linguistic and cultural boundaries became politicized as national boundaries, and the populations within those
boundaries became nations.93 Below, Figure 2.1 shows the author’s understanding of Gellner’s model of industrial transformation:
92 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 23, https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigungen/Berlin_
twoconceptsofliberty.pdf.
93 This is but a brief summary of the detailed and influential argument made by Gellner in Nations and Nationalism.
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Pre-Industrial “society”: Industrialized society:
Illiterate Peasants
Illiterate Peasants
Illiterate Peasants
Illiterate Peasants
Figure 2.1: Social Communication in Pre-Industrial “Society” and Industrial Society
As the figure depicts, pre-industrial “society” is really no society at all. Social
communication (represented by the bi-direction arrows) occurs among the literate political and religious elite, but the illiterate and comparatively immobile population has neither the means nor incentive to engage in the communicative processes that constitute a true society. After industrialization has transformed economic and social life – especially through the introduction of universal basic education and specialization – social communication, the prerequisite to participation in society becomes accessible to the entire population. There are powerful political implications to this sociological transformation. Gellner writes that in an industrial society “in which everyone is a specialist… one’s prime loyalty is to the medium of our literacy, and to its political protector.”94 Perpetuating the societal basis for industrial capitalism, with its “mobile division of labor, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers” requires a state-run education system which, for Gellner, is central to the nation.95 “The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important,” he writes, “more central than the monopoly of legitimate violence.”96
94 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 136.
95 Ibid., 33
96 Ibid.
(Literacy) (Literacy)
Political and Religious Elites elites (literate)
Industrialization
(Social Communication) (Literacy)
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Crucially, Gellner maintains that nationalism precedes the nation. He argues vigorously that “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”97 Interestingly, scholars such as James Townsend, who follow in Deutsch’s understanding of social communication and Gellner’s concept of industrial modernity, estimate that genuine national consciousness likely did not spread through most of China until the 1950’s.98
Following the logic of Gellner and Deutsch, some studies have examined the content of education pertaining to civic values and responsibilities on opposite sides of the Taiwan strait.
Lien points to a widening gap in how civic values are taught within the two societies, especially since Taiwan’s 2001 introduction of a curriculum that sought to explicitly link citizenship to democratic values. The curriculum is said to stress “the essence of democracy… participation in the democratic process, the right of dissent, checks and balances, and democratic
decision-making” as well as “individualism, social diversity… minority rights” and “the distinctiveness of Taiwan.”99 Later in this study we will consider the possibility that a very different kind of civic nation has been and is being engendering in authoritarian China.
2.2: Culturalist Approach
Anderson’s Imagined Communities offers what Breuilly has termed a “culturalist approach” to the origin of the nation.100 Anderson views the arrival of nationalism onto humanity’s consciousness in the context of the disappearance of previous cultural conceptions including sacred script, the divine right of kings, and multi-ethnic religious communities.101 Anderson argues that as these cultural values receded, humanity found nationalism amidst the search for “a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together.”102 As such,
97 Gellner, Thought and Change, 169.
98 James Townsend, “Chinese Nationalism,” in Chinese Nationalism, ed. Jonathan Unger (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 20.
99 Pei-te Lien, “Comparing Political Socialization in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan: Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Citizenship,” Taiwan Journal of Democracy 11, no. 2 (2015): 121.
100 Don H. Doyle, “H-Nationalism Interview with John Breuilly,” H-Nationalism, March 29, 2006, https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/pages/5917/h-nationalism-interview-john-breuilly.
101 The enduring appeal of a pan-Islamic Caliphate as a political-religious ideal for some Muslims is a counterpoint, demonstrating that some communities remain committed to systems of organization that Anderson ascribes to the past. Yet Anderson’s broader argument holds true, as nationalism has clearly been more influential than pan-Islamism in shaping the state boundaries and state politics of the contemporary Muslim world.
102 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 236.
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Anderson presents the compelling perspective that the “nation has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that
preceded it, out of which – as well as against it – it came into being.”103 These cultural systems include “the great sacral cultures” such as Roman Catholic Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and the Middle Kingdom, all of which claimed universality and possessed a sacred script.104
For Anderson, a market of print media, especially newspapers with their unique capacity to narrate a mutual, language-bound experience of time and place, revolutionized political consciousness in Europe and the New World at a time when multi-linguistic empires and High Church religiosity lost their expansive, binding influence. Thus while nationhood is implicitly a product of industrialization, as Gellner convincincly argues, Anderson’s causal link has to do with vernacular print media in a capitalist market as opposed to state-sponsored education.
Anderson’s account also endows the nation with considerable psychological gravity. The nation, after all, appeals to humanity’s deepest moral sentiments, generating something like
“sacredness” as described by Durkheim.105 Following Durkheim, Nisbet defines “the sacred” as including “the mores, the non-rational, the religious and ritualistic ways of behavior that are valued beyond whatever utility they may possess.”106 Tetlock renders “the sacred” as “any value that a moral community implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance.”107 Thus whereas the community described by Deutsch is made possible by an objective sociological phenomenon – the degree of intercommunicability among a population – a Durkheimian community is enabled by a common morality, in which the moral domain
embodies “everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to… regulate his
103 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12.
104 Ibid., 12-13.
105 Durkheim’s sociology focused in part on the duality between “the sacred” and “the profane.” One can experientially relate to Durkheim’s notion of sacredness by visiting a war memorial, participating in a religious ritual, or simply being in a location of tremendous natural beauty. In the soul-arresting sense of collectiveness, the temporary loss of one’s individuality in the face of something greater, one finds a kind of ecstasy. The underlying psychological and sociological realities that account for this experience are, for Durkheim, the foundation of a distinct type of morality, which, as I argue here, is implicit within Anderson’s account of the rise of nationhood in our world.
106 Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), 6. Quoted in Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, “Planet of the Durkheimians: Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,” December 11, 2006, http://ssrn.com/abstract=980844.
107 Quoted in Lisa Tessman, Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 94.
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actions by something other than… his own egoism.”108 Durkheimian morality, then, functions to preserve the collective, to maintain authority and protect ‘culture,’ that gravitational force which keeps individuals in orbit around the common values that have been endowed with sacredness.
Understood as a cultural-psychological phenomenon, the nation is indeed not far from religion in this respect.
Things that are sacred surpass utilitarian consideration and allow for Gemeinschaft, a form of community in which individuals are subordinated to the collective.109 Sacred values and institutions, such as loyalty and nationhood, justify non-rational individual self-sacrifice, or even acts that would otherwise be positively immoral, such as killing. Though Anderson does not address Durkheim in his text, Imagined Communities begins with a reference that begs a
comparison to Durkheim’s view of sacredness. The book begins by discussing tombs dedicated to the Unknown Soldier, which, empty of any human remains, we fill with “ghostly national imaginings… what else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians…?”110 The viewer of these tombs has no rationally or “profanely” explicable relationship to the Unknown Soldier – nor can the viewer know for certain that the deceased, those intended to be honored, saw
themselves as participants in the same imagined nation as that imagined by the viewer in the present. But the image evokes in all of us the overwhelming consciousness of subordination to a distinctly national collective, one that stretches both forward to the grave and backward into immemorial time. Nationalists, indeed, inject such transcendent value into their nation that they must project their current nation into the past, as though “Taiwan” or “Indonesia” were present as a historical subject to experience colonization, for example. The same trick of nationalist imaginings allows present day Chinese nationalists to a-historically project nationhood back upon the millennia of Chinese civilization.
Though Anderson’s account is sometimes carelessly cited as a liberal critique of
nationalism, in fact he places the phenomenon in the context of “‘kinship’ and ‘religion’” (social and cultural realities) as opposed to ideologies such as “‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’”111 Indeed,
108 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984/1893), 331. Quoted in Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 270.
109 Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3.
110 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9-10.
111 Ibid., 5.
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nationalism easily transcends materialism, perhaps helping to explain why Marx, a philosophical materialist, largely ignored the nation.112
Understood in terms of its cultural roots, it is easy to understand how pervasive nationalism is in the modern world. Even Barack Obama, who was repeatedly criticized by American right-wing commentators for supposedly being insufficiently patriotic, nonetheless appealed directly to a Durkheimian sense of nationalism when, at the climax of the 2004
Democratic National Convention speech that began his political celebrity, he shouted, “I am my brother’s keeper! I am my sister’s keeper!”113 A Durkheimian worship of the collective is so evident in nationalism, that even in a society as individualistic as 21st century America,
candidates for the Presidency must constantly reaffirm that they, too, take part in the worship.
The culturalist approach likewise emphasizes nationalism’s dynamism. Croucher asserts
“that if nations are constructs, then they are by definition malleable, contextual, and capable of persistence and reconfiguration amidst socioeconomic and political change.”114 Thus the
national image is subject to generational change, at the very least, and may in fact evolve in even less time. Finally, a given narration or imposition of a particular interpretation of the nation is, by necessity, repressive of other national possibilities. Duara explains how “a specific
national image is subject to generational change, at the very least, and may in fact evolve in even less time. Finally, a given narration or imposition of a particular interpretation of the nation is, by necessity, repressive of other national possibilities. Duara explains how “a specific