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Jasper van der Steen, The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600–1815, ed. Lotte Jensen, The English Historical Review, Volume 133, Issue 561, April 2018, Pages 420–422, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey022
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Extract
There are two influential schools of thought about the origin of nationalism. ‘Modernist’ students of nationalism see it primarily as a post-1800 phenomenon, which required modern mass media, state bureaucracies and industrialisation. ‘Traditionalists’, however, observe traces of nationalism, or at least a sense of national identity, in pre-modern Europe. In trying to convince their late-modern colleagues that awareness of national identity existed in the period 1500–1800 too, early modernists often face an uphill battle. In a helpful introduction in which she describes the current state of the traditionalist/modernist dichotomy, this volume’s editor, Lotte Jensen, aims to convince the modernists that there are plenty of manifestations of national identity in early modern Europe and, thereby, to challenge the modernist paradigm.
The volume is divided into five sections and a total of sixteen chapters, covering France, Spain, Iceland, the Low Countries, Russia, Wales and Hungary. The first section (‘the modernist paradigm contested’) gets straight to the point. Azar Gat challenges Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm by calling into question their influential distinction between real/old and ‘imaginary’/‘invented’ social phenomena, and argues persuasively that the one need not exclude the other: identities ‘tend to be both deeply rooted and constructed’ (p. 42). From a long-term and European perspective, he claims that national identities in the form of ‘political ethnicity’ have always existed. His point is well made, but it does give rise to the question of what remains of the analytical value of national identity as a category of historical inquiry. (A small note: his sweeping chapter would have been stronger with more elaborate references, especially in the final sections.) In his programmatic contribution, Andrew Hadfield advocates complementing the use of political arguments with the study of literature to explore the development of national identities. David A. Bell, in a more empirical chapter, revisits his famous monograph The Cult of the Nation in France (2001; rev. ante [2003], 525–6), extending his inquiry to the Napoleonic period. He argues convincingly that the modern nation-state is only one way of organising people and that nationalism, during its nascent period in the French Revolution, was not fuelled exclusively by state authorities but also by the church and opposition groups. With his argument he calls into question the usefulness of yoking nationalism to modernity.
