STATE-MAKING & NATION-BUILDING

STATE - MAKING & NATION-BUILDING


by Anthony D. Smith

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

In the modern world only one form of political unit is recognized and permitted. This is the form we call the ‘nation-state’.ft is easy enough to discover. Nation-states have frontiers, capitals, flags, anthems, pass­ports, currencies, military parades, national museums, embassies and usually a seat at the United Nations. They also have one government for the territory of the nation-state, a single education system, a single economy and occupational system, and usually one set oflegal rights for all citizens, though there are exceptions. (In some federal systems, there may be citizenship rights for all members of the nation-state, but also communal rights for members of particular communities.) They also subscribe, tacitly or openly, quietly or vociferously, to a single ideology which legitimates the whole enterprise - nationalism. Indeed, the whole system of states is built on its assumptions, even if its practice does not often conform to nationalist precepts. We even call it the ‘international’ system.

At the same time, as has often been pointed out, there are actually very few genuine ‘nation-states’ today. I f we mean by the term ‘nation-state’ that the boundaries of the state’s territories and those of a homogenous ethnic community are coextensive, and that all the inhabitants of a state possess an identical culture, then we will not be able to muster more than about 10 per cent of existing states as candidates for the title of‘nation-state’. Leaving aside tiny minorities, we may perhaps be able to include a few more, apart from states like Portugal, Greece, Poland and Somalia; Holland, Denmark and the two Germanies have small minorities, but are by now otherwise homogeneous, if we leave aside the immigrant workers. In other states - Sweden, Norway and Finland, for example - the Lapp and Karelian minorities do not, perhaps cannot, impair the cultural unity of the state. Yet, this leaves a very considerable number, perhaps over half, with serious ethnic divisions which may spill over into antagonism, and another large group, perhaps a quarter of the total, in which a dominant culture-community must accommodate the demands of ‘peripheral’ ethnie, as in Britain, France and Canada, Romania and Bulgaria. In the 50 per cent with serious cultural cleavages, it has not always been possible to contain the competing demands or meet the claims of rival communities. In India, Sri Lanka, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Cyprus, Spain, Yugoslavia, Corsica’ (France), Ireland, Chad, Nigeria, Came­roons, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia, these divisions have at one time or another since 1914 erupted into overt violence and even warfare.

There is something of a paradox here. In theory, we require our societies to assume a single shape. In practice, we are content with a formal declaration of intent, while our societies assume all manner of shapes. It is, of course, easy to write the whole business off as a case of Western myopia: we have equated the ‘nation’ and the ’state’, because that is the form they took in the two historically influential societies ­England and France - at the very moment when nationalism burst forth. In other words, Eastern Europe and the Third World have all been trying to imitate a rather singular model, whose ethnic homogeneity, like its parliamentary institutions, simply cannot be transplanted. They have been pursuing a Western mirage. To say that the only real state was a ‘nation-state’, and that the only realized nation was a ‘nation-state’, has not only thrown the geopolitical map into turmoil, it has entailed a fruitless and destructive quest for something unattainable outside a few blessed regions of the earth. And even in the West, the much-sought marriage of state and ethnie has not turned out to be all that happy and enduring.
And yet, there is no question of turning back and re-erecting those rambling, polyethnic empires of which some anti-nationalists dream. It may be that the fault is all with nationalism, and that the problems only arise when ethnic homogeneity and cultural coextensiveness become desirable goals in themselves. The fact remains, and it is a central one to the whole of the modern era since the French Revolution, that the majority of educated and politically aware men and women are committed to ‘nationalism’ even if only tacitly, through exclusion and self-differentiation. They are no longer really aware of any other viable mode of culture and political existence. The assumptions of ‘national­ism’ have shaped their political horizons as much as those of’develop­ment’ have furnished their economic agenda. It may be that some of those assumptions were actUally present even before nationalism made them explicit; but there is certainly no possibility of returning to a pre­nationalist era.

That being so, the practical question becomes one of reconciling, in the light of nationalist premisses, the often conflicting demands of state and nation. And the intellectual question becomes one of explaining the often intricate relationships between state and nation which the misleading omnibus term ‘nation-state’ is liable to obscure. This means in turn that we need to distinguish between ’state-making’ and ‘nation­building’, and question those theories that claim that nations created states or the reverse; and ask ourselves whether, as I shall argue, they are formed most enduringly and fruitfully around some third unit of solidarity and community.

The first move away from an exclusively Western and nationalist standpoint was taken in the early 1950s by the communications theorists. Their central idea was that of ‘nation-building’. Unlike the nationalists, they did not hold that the nation was ‘there’ waiting to be discovered by a generation of nationalist Prince Charmings. The ‘nation’ had to be ‘built’, bit by bit. But the blueprint for the building remained firmly of Western origin. The goal was, after all, the ‘national participant society’ of the democratic Western states. And the manner of the building processes was also Western: social mobilization, linguistic assimilation and the use of the mass media and mass education. For Lerner the key was ‘empathy’: the formation of psychologically mobile personalities who had broken with tradition and were able to imagine, and desire, the new kind of participant society. For Karl Deutsch, cultural assimilation, as measured by language absorption, was the process par excellence that ensured the building of national units. While social mobilization uprooted peasants and artisans and propelled them into the larger towns, it was the standardization and inclusion of linguistic assimilation that turned this mobile but disunited mass into an educated ‘public’, who in turn would be bound to one another by the very density and homogeneity of the messages they received. But what neither Deutsch nor Lerner make clear is who sends these messages, in what they consist, to whom they are directed, or why they are sent at all. In other words, what is so patently missing in this approach is any real role for the state and state elites. Their presence is simply assumed throughout.7

There is a reason for this silence about the role of the state and its elites. Communications theorists were reacting to both the nationalist and anti-nationalist accounts of nation-forming. Common to both these accounts was an interventionist and voluntarist view of history, that is, one which attributed to the deliberate actions of human beings the chances of building nations. For ‘modernization’ theorists (of which communications theory was one variant) such human intervention is largely superfluous; the processes of social development will in any case work themselves out and bring to truition the potential for evolution that lies ‘within. Hence the role of the state is simply to act as a handmaid of history, whose goal is a world oflarge-scale nation-states or regions.

This is, in many ways, still the orthodoxy about both state-making and nation-building. It is clearly one that is profoundly Western and fundamentally en_ogenist. The socio-demographic processes which it charts lie within the ’society’ concerned. The analyst is simply concerned to draw the lineaments of the new type of society out of the old, and to describe the ways in which this profound qualitative transition is accomplished by analysing such data as urbanization and literacy rates, indices of linguistic assimilation, the impact of the mass media, the rates of social mobility and the patterns of transport, mass education and voting.

Such data are, of course, useful. They tell us something about the manner and speed of the formation of national units - provided, of course, we have a clear idea of what we mean by a ‘nation’ in the first place. But they tell us nothing about the forces that impel people to seek to belong to ‘nations’ rather than any other type of unit. And, if one looks for a moment outside the West, this question becomes more than just academic. In the West, perhaps, one might concede that ‘nations’ grew up accidentally in the bosom of their respective states. But in the Third World, there are very few nations as yet; and the state is having to work hard at just keeping its various ethnic groups together, let alone ‘build’ a nation. And yet, ‘nation-building’ describes succinctly what Third World elites are trying to do. If anything, ‘nation-building’ is the basic Third World ideology and project, rather than a tool of analysis.

This is very much the conclusion which Marxists and others have reached. The question then becomes one of discovering the forces that make such a quest for nationhood universal in the Third World. For some, like Worsley and Amin, Third World nationalism is really a form of anti-colonialism, and presumably therefore a temporary one. The small native bourgeoisies and intelligentsia have seized the apparatus of the colonial state, not only to use it for the tasks of ‘development’, but also to forge nations out of the many ethnic and regional communities which the colonial state has bequeathed them.9 In this view, the state is first a target and then a base for revolutionary nationalism and the dominant classes who espouse it. Indeed, as Warren argues, Third World state elites drawn from the petite bourgeoisie have adopted a model of’dependency’ that fits well their basically nationalist ideals and goals. The ‘distortions of development’ are as real on the psychological plane (in the form of collective atimia) as they are on the economic level.

But perhaps the most trenchant critique of communications theory comes from one who has adopted the basic framework of’moderniza­tion’. Ernest Gellner argues that it is nationalism that invents nations ‘where they do not exist’, and that the reason for nationalism’s ubiquity lies in the uneven development of modernization and industrialization. He agrees with Deutsch that social mobilization uproots traditional structures and that these are replaced by the forces of cultural assimila­tion, and notably language, in the expanding towns. He even agrees with Lerner about the need for a literate, participant society in an industrial age. Indeed, such a large-scale participant society in which everyone has become a literate and numerate citizen demands a mass, public, standardized and compulsory education system; and that in turn requires something the size of a state to sustain it. So one form of nationalism becomes loyalty to a linguistic homogeneous state.

But there is another kind of nationalism. In the later stages of industrialization, when social communication is at its most intense, newcleavages may appear. These are produced by the acute competition for scarce resources and facilities in the expanding towns, especially between the old-established denizens and the later arrivals. The trouble is that such conflicts may not only revolve around class issues. They may involve cultural differences. The two which cause most division are genetic and religio-cultural differences. Both are salient and both refuse to blur in the new linguistic state. Like ancient but hidden chasms, they open up in the fierce urban competition ofIate industrialization. And, if unchecked, they are likely to result in two new nationalisms on either side of the cultural divide, and hence two new nation-states. So the second, secessionist kind of nationalism is the result of the failure of industrialism to integrate everyone around a single culture, and it is responsible for all the new’mini-states that have sprung up lately.

But, again, we may ask: where does the state figure in all this? Its role seems to be that of a necessary adjunct and support, and in no way an initiator or even catalyst. The same is true of the recent ‘centre­ periphery’ models of Hechter and Nairn, which are so influential today. In Hechter’s analysis, the state, it is true, once possessed an initiating role: the British state, for example, in Tudor times incorporated Wales and later Ireland, and was enlarged by the union with Scotland in 1707. And today’s renascent ethnic nationalisms in the Celtic fringe are again directed at the centralism of the bureaucratic state. But closer inspec­tion reveals that, at least today, the ’state’ is simply the form and agent of another larger force, an unevenly developing capitalist industrialism, which has turned the peripheral backlands into dependent economies and cultures and which, by its very embrace, keeps ethnic ’sectionalism’ alive.The state has a more important role in Nairn’s account. Because the British state has remained ‘patrician’, Britain has not been able to take full advantage of industrial capitalism, and has therefore encour­aged its expanding bourgeoisie since 1800 to seek foreign markets.

Nationalism, therefore, began overseas, in the peripheral colonies seized by the British and French bourgeoisies. It began as a response by elites in the colonies to capitalist imperialism. Since these elites had no other resources to fall back on, they appealed to the only thing they had: their masses, whom they ‘invited into history’. Nationalism is therefore always populist, and it remains so, when it is exported back to Europe in the wake of decolonization to become ‘neo-nationalism’.

Again, however, the much-vaunted ‘autonomy of the state’ soon becomes obscured by the commanding autonomy of an unevenly developing capitalism and its bourgeois agents. This may be more faithful to the spirit of Marx, but it hardly tells us why the state has become so pivotal today, and how its role is related to the widespread appeal of nationalism. Or is this role another mask, this appeal another mirage? If nations can be ‘invented’, cannot states be ‘made’ and unmade, by other and more ‘real’ forces at work beneath the facade of history?

The underlying problem with all the above accounts is that the state has been seen simply as a place or arena in which other ‘real’ forces and processes are locked in combat. But the state is really far more than an arena. It does involve territory, but it cannot be simply reduced to a location. Its spatial quality is integral to its functions and agencies. Generically, the ’state’ comprises a set of differentiated, autonomous and public institutions, which are territorially centralized and claim jurisdiction over a given territory, including the monopoly over coercion and extraction. In the past, it is questionable to what extent ‘the state’ was able to realize its claims beyond the immediate vicinity of the capital (if there was a stable capital); some of the great empires were really no more than loose coalitions of superordinate and subordinate realms, each with its own ruler and local institutions, usually in some form of tributary relationship with an overall monarch. Certainly, this was true of the early Mesopotamian and Chinese empires; and we find the pattern re-emerging whenever the dynasty is weakened and economic disaster undermines the delicate balance of bureaucratic controls over food production and communications.

What are the main functions of any centralized state? First and foremost, defence of the territory from external incursions, physical and cultural; hence some control over demographic movements (colonies, migrants, etc.)and new religious movements originating from beyond the state’s domain. Second, conflict regulation within: the state asarbiter seeks to contain dismptive conflicts, especially between elites,but also between peasants and the towns over prices of crops and food.The kudurrus found in the fields of southern Iraq, and dating back toKassite times, attests a conflict management role of determiningboundaries of individual farms and fields through imperial grants, asdoes the succession of Sumerian and Babylonian law-codes, designed toensure a unified order in and through which social interests could bepursued. IS Third comes the imposition of a territorial order over and above the more usual (certainly in earlier times) kinship order. This involves the marshalling of manpower and resources according to territorial administrative divisions, and the inculcation, often through war over particular territories, of a sense of political community based upon shared and defended space. Of course, a polyethnic and often unwieldy polity like an empire may be hampered in this direction; but even large-scale empires like the Han under Wu-ti (140-87 BC) sought to homogenize originally culturally diverse populations (in this case, under Han Chinese auspices).A fourth function is that of information control and transmission. Here, of course, the state usually has to fallback upon specialist literate classes, which in early times were usuallypriests and scribes. But the latter were early also attached to the bureaucracy, as in Pharonic Egypt of the New Kingdom, and were even trained by special government educational establishments. Finally, there is a ‘cosmic’ function: the mler as head of state also embodies (either as a promise, or in his very person) the essential link with sacred order beyond, from which all power, all fertility, all control over the elements, is deemed to flow. In his person, and in the smooth function­ing of his government, pre-modern societies find the necessary assur­ance of an ultimate harmony with the cosmos, and hence of the minimum prosperity needed to assure food production and survivaI. Whether, in these early days, states and rulers looked beyond this to what we might term economic development and redistribution is a moot point; there are some indications of an early concern with such redistribution, usually to prevent revolution or civil chaos, and perhaps we should add this to the generic functions of the state.

When we come to the ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ state of early modern Europe and later, the scope and effectiveness of the state in performing these functions is immeasurably increased, but it is doubtful whether any really new functions are shouldered. If anything, one function, that of providing a link with the cosmos, is reduced, if not eliminated; or it would seem so. Instead, the other functions are subdivided and given wholly new meanings. Immigration controls become stricter, along with the growth of compact defensible territories, passport controls, currency controls and the like. Conflict regulation has turned into a vast array of law-codes, by-laws and regulations for dealing with every aspect, not just of ‘law and order’ concerns, but of relations between citizens and between the citizen and the bureaucracy. In the process, the numbers, scope, powers and efficacy of the bureaucratic agencies have multiplied.

Similarly, control of information has spawned the rise of state systems of mass education, state-sponsored journalism and mass media, and state ­controlled agencies of surveillance and information technology. The ’state as recorder and transmitter’ has reduced the clergy and church in many societies to a side-show, as professional experts perform the earlier scribal functions in undreamt-of ways. And, quite clearly, the modern state has taken on a new welfare or developmental function as a central facet of its very raison d’etre .

Given this development from what Mann has called the ‘despotic power’ of pre-modern states and empires, to the ‘infrastrucutural power’ of the modern state, we may now ask: how does the emergence of the modern ‘rational’ type of state with its infrastructural powers, affect the growth of nations? Can we not explain the ubiquity of nationalism as a response to, or expression of, this new type of state power?

This is very much the approach adopted by Breuilly and Tilly and his associates, when they search for the forces behind ‘nation-building’ inthe context of Western ’state-making’. Broadly speaking, Tilly adopts a’dualist’ standpoint: there was an original, indigenous process of state­making, and nation-building, in Western Europe, and a derived, designed and externally imposed process outside. Had we asked in 1500 whether the modern state, as defined above, would have won out in theWest over other political rivals like the city-state, feudal principality, theocracy or empire, we would have been thrown back on particular European contingencies for an answer. The fact that this peculiar modern form of rational and infrastructural state won out and became the norm across Europe (and later the world) was the result of several contingent factors like Western Europe’s isolated geopolitical positionat the time (unlike south-eastern Europe which fell within the orbit of ­Ottoman - invasions); its relative cultural homogeneity (Christendom);its wealth through cities and trade; its social divisions of class (landed oligarchs versus peasants) rather than corporate kin groups (as in Asica); a decentralized political structure - and the perceived military and social superiority of the modern, centralized state, once it appeared (for example, in the Italian campaigns of the early Renaissance French kings from Charles VIII onwards). These were all factors that favoured the growth of modern states at the expense of their political rivals. But what turned a probability into a certainty was, first, the external environment, and second, the policies and will of certain elites. By the external environment, Tilly is referring to the inter-state system, both in its economic sense of a nexus of core capitalist states engaged in trade wars, and a system of absolutist states engaged in military warfare and diplomatic rivalries in Europe, especially since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. By elites Tilly means certain absolute monarchs and their chief ministers and generals, who succeeded, often in the face of determined opposition, in crushing rival centres of power within and staving off external interference, to create compact, solidary and fairly homogenous states able to take advantage of the technological revolutions that spread across the continent from the eighteenth century onwards. It was their policies and qualities of will and administrative skills that ensured the victory of the modern European state.

These same two sets of factors, the inter-state system and the policies and skills of certain elites, also shaped the state systems of the Third World. Only here, there was an extra element of design and imposition ­by aliens. After each round of wars, and each treaty, more and more areas of the globe were divided up into ‘compact states’ by a few major European states - at the very moment when imperial greed could be sustained by a growing sense of national mission at home, and a growing acceptance of the efficacy and naturalness of the inter-state system abroad. There really did seem to be no alternative to the modern state. No other type of polity appeared to ‘work’ as well, in the sense of performing those reinterpreted and vastly expanded functions of state which were now, more than ever, felt to be its institutional preserve. Hence, the growth of popular conceptions of the modern state and what it was supposed to do accompanied and assisted the division of the globe into (colonial) ‘replica’ states.Modern states could be, should be, and were, ‘made’.

What about nations? After all, in Europe the presumption became one of national congruence. In the West, every state had its own nation, or so it seemed. So should not every nation have its own state? For the earliest nationalists, Herder and Rousseau, nations could get along quite well without their own states, so long as they kept fast to their cultures and lifestyles (preferably simple and agrarian, as in Corsica). But from Fichte onwards, a possessive theory of nationalism took root: to be a real nation you had to possess your own state (and, in Hegel’s book, to have had your own state at some time). But: ifin Eastern Europe, the nation was seeking for its own state, then what becomes of the theory that it is states that creates nations? And, more serious, what happens to those states that are unfortunate enough not to possess nations of their own? Can they create nations? In a world of invented states and state-making, can states that have no prior national content nevertheless fabricate nations?

This would certainly appear to be the result of the ‘political action’ school of state and nation formation. And it fits nicely with the recent emphasis upon the ‘invented’ quality of traditions and institutions - and of nations.One could even combine the insights of the Gellner and Nairn traditions with those of Breuilly and Tilly’s school: nationalism ‘invents nations’ and state elites create them. If the state elites are also nationalists, as so many of them are in today’s Third World, then nationalism can be said to be creating nations by first making viable states which will form the matrix of the nations-to-be.

Patterns of Nation-Formation

At first sight, this is an attractive and convincing picture. Political mobilization and state-making, nation-building and -invention, all introduce an activist, dynamic element lacking in earlier accounts of state- and nation-formation, and appear to accord with the findings of much modern historiography of early modern Europe and the Third WorW. In contrast, earlier accounts, most of them tinged with nation­alist assumptions, appear wooden, deterministic and even mystical. The nation itself becomes a construct, and nationalism a mode of re­presentation of history, a history that itself is being continually reinter­preted in the light of the constructs of ‘nationalism’. The effect of this approach is to highlight the ‘mythic’ quality of the idea of the nation, and the selective, distorting nature of the lens of nationalism as it seeks to reinterpret ‘history’ in the light of present collective needs.

Unfortunately, these ‘activist’ and ‘political’ portraits of state-making and nation-building are not without problems. Two of these are particularly germane to our problem of the relationship between states and nation-building. The first is that, quite simply, there are more patterns of nation-formation than can be contained in the activist approach. The second is that a major problem, overlooked in these approaches, is the prior formation of ethnic communities which, in varying degrees, influence and condition the success of attempts to ‘make states and build nations’. The two problems, of course, are not unrelated.

Let me start with the diversity of nation-forming patterns. We already saw that Gellner posited a distinction between early-industrializing integrative nationalisms based on mobility within a linguistic unit, and late-industrializing secessionist nationalisms based on ‘counter­entropic traits’ like colour and literate religion; i.e. those which refused to ‘blur’ in the assimilative pressures of industrial culture. Similarly, Tilly pointed to the historian’s distinction, taken up in greater detail by Seton-Watson, between the ‘old, continuous nations’ of Europe and the new, designed or imposed nations of Asia and Africa.28 In fact, we can isolate four main historical patterns or ‘routes’ of state-and-nation ­formation:
1. The Western: where state and nation emerge pari passu, with dynastic
and territorial states being built up around a definite ethnic core, to which other ethnic and regional groups and communities are succes­sively attached by alliance, marriage, coercion and administrative intervention;
2. The immigrant: where small part-ethnie are beneficiaries of a state of
their own, with or without a struggle, and they then seek to absorb and assimilate waves of new immigrants from different cultures into what becomes increasingly a territorial nation and a political community, as in America,Argentina and Australia;
3.The ethnic: where ethnie exists in varying degrees of completenessand self-consciousness prior to the advent of the modern, rational state and of nationalism, which then demands the ‘up-grading’ and trans­formation of these ethnie to fully-fledged nations replete with their ownterritories, economies, legal rights and education systems. This de­mand, in turn, gives rise to a drive for autonomy and statehood, as ameans for creating the nation and giving it a protective shell;
4. The colonial: where a modern, rational state is imposed from aboveon populations which are divided into many different ethnic com­munities and categories, who band together to achieve independent statehood under the aegis of a state-wide nationalism, and then try touse this territorial state and its ‘nationalism’ to create a unified nation out of these divergent ethnie.

Ethnic Cores and Ethnic Pasts

The above is not supposed to provide an exhaustive taxonomy of the historical routes to state_and-nation-formation (for one thing, it omits any reference to a whole group o_ mainly Latin-American countries, where a semi-modern colonial state is imposed onto populations whom it fuses, in varying degrees, culturally and who share their culture with their rulers). Nor are its categories mutually exclusive. Given cases frequently combine elements from different patterns and routes at different periods in their historical trajectories.Nevertheless, this inventory of routes does draw attention to the variety of ways in which states and nations have been created, and to the periods in which one or other mode of state-and-nation-formation was predominant. Thus, prior to 1800, states and nations were created in tandem in limited areas of Europe and]apan, on the basis of prior dominant ethnie.

After 1800 but before 1914, states were created, and later nations, on the basis of prior ethnie which sought to turn themselves into states and then nations. This was the classic era of self-determination, i.e. ethnic self­ transformation, in Eastern Europe. Between 1914 and 1945, we find the apogee of national assimilation of immigrants to states which until the late nineteenth century had been based on fairly small settler communi­ties. In this period, too, the state becomes an instrument for integration and social change on a large scale, rather than simply the patrimonial preserve of a ruling settler oligarchy. Finally, after 1945, the imposed alien state evokes an elite nationalism based on artificially constructed boundaries and territories. At the same time, it rouses a conflicting massThe fact that there are more patterns and routes of state-and-nation ­formation than previous accounts admit suggests in itself a need to amend the ‘activist’ approach, to give more prominence to the order or sequence of processes involved, and not just the static cleavages or the manipulative abilities of elites to influence events and create institu­tions. Nevertheless, these amendments could probably be incorporated without sacrifice of the particular dynamic or ‘constructive’ qualities of the activist approach.

The second problem, however, poses a more serious challenge to the ‘reconstructive’ approach. In all four patterns briefly outlined above, ethnicity not only played a vital part, but provided the point of departure for the first three of the four routes, and the opposition motif in the last. What I want to argue is that the central difficulties of both state-making and nation-building stem from the nature and intensity of ethnic ties and sentiments, and that lack of ethnic foundations and resilience can unmake states and dismantle nations as much as any inept elite activities or geopolitical calculations. While many processes and activities go into the ‘making’ of states and the ‘building’ of nations (both of which are ideological metaphors about large-scale abstractions and constructs) ­economic development, communications, urbanization, linguistic stan­dardization, administration - there are equally important questions ofmeaning, identification and loyalty which ‘make sense’ of, and ‘give purpose’ to, otherwise unpatterned processes. The aspirations for identity, unity and autonomy that form the main ideological dimensions of nationalism undoubtedly confer that ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ on a gamut of modern processes engulfing individuals. But they do so only in virtue of prior meanings and purposes predicated of earlier com­munities of power and culture, i.e. territorial states and popular or aristocratic ethnic communities. All these communities are seen as hav­ing a past and a future, a history and a destiny, which is independent of individual aspirations, and yet subsumes their needs and desires. States can be said to have a ‘history’ and a ‘destiny’ only where the apparatus of state is associated with a particular dynastic line and set of fortunes; and its resonance will be greater if those fortunes and that pedigree can attract a larger following within a particular ethnic community, i.e. where the state becomes associated with a core ethnie which it pro­tects and nurtures. Otherwise, it is the aristocratic and demotic ethnie whose past and future fortunes attract sympathy and solidarity and which are felt to possess a history and a destiny peculiarly their own. Because they have had a particular past, they form an identifiable unity, and hence can be conceived as having a destiny. Conversely, those with­out particular pasts can have no peculiar destinies, and therefore cannot become ‘nations’. The history-less are destiny-less, and this becomes the central dilemma of state-making and nation-building today.3l

If the last sentences paraphrase Hegel’s ‘theory of history-less peoples’, then that is not only because Hegel at this point echoes the common nationalist position, but also because he has identified a crucial precondition of state-and-nation-formation in Europe and elsewhere. Without subscribing to the notorious use made of his views by Marx and Engels, we may say that, if political leaders wish to create states and form nations under the appropriate social and technological conditions, they can only do so if the ethnic conditions are similarly favourable; and the more appropriate those ethnic conditions, the more likely are they to succeed in creating both states and nations. Conversely, the absence of such conditions creates a serious barrier to state-and-nation-formation.

Not only does it remove the basis of cohesion necessary for political unities, it also creates rival bases for alternative unities and the chances of breakdowns of ethnically divided polities.
Applying this argument first to early modern Europe, we must start from a set of factors that Tilly omits when he blandly asserts that Europe in 1500 was culturally homogenous. This might have been truer in the thirteenth century, but by 1500 dynastic states had begun to form around ethnic cores in England, France and Spain, to be followed shortly by Holland and Sweden. Even before, there had been ethnic polities in Hungary, Poland and Orthodox Russia, not to mention the ethnic diversities ofIreland, Wales and Scotland, of Brittany, Catalonia and Switzerland, at least some of which had political repercussions. Indeed, it is difficult to know whether the cultural differences between these ethnic regions was more or less marked in medieval than in early modern Europe.

There were wide differences in ethnic cultures, despite the unifying bond of Catholicism, throughout the medieval era, and this ‘ethnic mosaic’ provided an important base for the subsequent consoli­dation of national states, first in western Europe, and later in central and eastern Europe. England provides one of the earliest and clearest examples of the indispensability of an ethnic core in state-formation. By ethnicity we mean here the sense of common historic culture and lifestyle. Thus an ethnic community becomes a named human population sharing common myths of descent, shared historical memories, a common culture, an association with a recognized territory, and a sense of solid­arity. On this definition, an English ethnic community which hasemerged embryonically in Anglo-Saxon times and was enlarged by successive Danish and Norman cultural and social elements became stabilized and crystallized in the late fourteenth century, under the impact of external wars with Scotland and France and the growth of legal and linguistic unification.36

By the late fifteenth century a myth of British history, first formulated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, had taken root and became the basis for the dynastic and territorial claims of the Tudor state. The myth of Britain as the legacy of Brutus of Troy and his three sons, Locrinus (England), Kamber (Wales) and Albanactus (Scotland), soon provided a basis for claiming seniority and hegemony by England over Wales and Scotland; by the sixteenth century, the issue had provoked a series of polemical histories support­ing or attacking Tudor claims to overlordship on the basis of an English priority over Welsh and ScotS.37

Conversely, Scottish attempts to refute the Brutus myth and the legend of King Arthur’s domain were vital to preserve the independence of the Scottish crown. In both cases, the recovery of ‘history’, i.e. the use of selective memory and myth-making, helped to crystallize and reinforce nascent sentiments of ethnic community, and to prepare the ground for the use of state-making to create two nations under a single crown. As a result, union with Scotland was feasible, not merely for the bargains of interest which were struck to accommodate the Scottish bourgeoisie, but also because by 1707 the Scots and English were sufficiently confident of their sense of individual national identity to bring their fortunes together. In this, the Scots were in quite a different position from. the Welsh or the Irish. For the latter, the recovery of a national identity was long postponed by the lack of a separate political framework within which ethnic sentiments could be articulated and expressed. On the contrary, forceful conquesthad been followed by institutional dissolution and the loss of elites; memories were preserved mainly by itinerant bards or clergy among the peasantry in the more isolated and backward areas. So when the moment of ethnic revival came, it was under the impetus of nationalist ideas and an ideology inspired ‘returning intelligentsia’, and not of insti­tutional elites based on former state agencies, like the judicial and educational systems. In this respect, the state-aspiring nationalisms of late nineteenth-century Ireland and Wales (the latter, more muted) resemble those of Eastern Europe; among Croats, Slovaks and Romanians, selective memories of ethnic polities persisted, but it needed a ‘returning intelligentsia’ to rework them into a mythology of nationality and a basis for acquiring statehood.

In the French case, ethnicity also provided the foundation for effective statehood. The regnum Francorum gradually changed into a Regnum Francie under the later Capetians, at least in the northern and central feudal principalities, a process facilitated not only by the common Catholic heritage expressed in royal coronations and the early Frankish alliance with the papacy, but by the sense of Merovingian and Carolingian political unity. But this sense of earlier political unity was mainly articulated in the north; in Brittany, the Basque country, Languedoc and Provence, as well as Lorraine, quite different ethnic ties and sentiments prevailed up to and beyond the time of Henri IV. In many ways, the regnum Francie was imposed by military and administra­tive power onto the south, west and eastern principalities, where language and culture were quite different from the more puritanical, Frankish north.In other words, the French-speaking dynastic polity proved to be the instrument of modern state-making and nation-building. In their struggles with other feudal principalities and the unruly nobility, the French kings based on the lIe de France were compelled to find ways of cultural integration in order to secure their administrative hold. Hence, Francis I, by the Edict of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, made French the sole official language, cutting such languages as Occitanian and Breton off from any institutional base. Similarly with religious uniformity;
Louis XIV, by the Edict of Nantes in 1685, rescinded the statute of religious toleration shown to the Huguenots; while a century later, his Jacobin heirs proved to be equally intolerant of any regionalism or cultural federalism, suppressed the revolt of the Vendee in the west and promoted linguistic uniformity as a means of national, Le. state-based consolidation. Such a policy would, however, have been doomed if, among the conditions producing a strong, centralized state, there had not been a high degree of ethnic cohesion in the north and centre of the polity, a cohesion that, in turn, was inspired by myths of Gallo­Roman and/or Frankish political origins and statehood.

A similar interplay of state-making and nation-building can be discerned in some of the Mediterranean states. In Spain, memories of Roman and Visigoth unities over ‘Iberia’ were important factors in the goals of the Reconquista, and came to the fore in the late fifteenth­century trends towards state unification and religious purification. Both Reconquista and unification would have been impossible without either these general, if shadowy, political memories, and the stronger ethnic unities of Castile, Aragon and Catalonia. Of course, here the unification was less centralized, being founded on a union of two equal kingdoms, and faced with strong competing ethnie in the Basque country and Catalonia and in Portugal, which managed to secede. It was really only in the course of the sixteenth century with its quest for ethno-religious unity against Moors and Jews, and its new-found great power status, that a sense of Spanish ethnicity, harking back to earlier memories, emerged in the north and centre of the state; and only a prolonged contest with France under Napoleon was able to cement that sense of common ethnicity, albeit without submerging competing identities in Catalonia and Euzkadi.

In Greece, on the other hand, there were no competing ethnie to undermine a sense of Greek ethnicity. Yet the hiatus with classical antiquity engendered by the long-drawn out Slavic immigrations, and the equally long subjugation and fragmentation under the Ottomans, attenuated a lively sense of common ethnicity and ruled out the Western pattern of a state-making matrix of the nation. On the other hand, within the Greek millet trading and clerical elites had survived and prospered; the Phanariots had even succeeded in dominating much of the Ottoman administration, while the Patriarchate at Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in Greece and the Greek-speaking areas of Anatolia had kept alive some sense of religo-ethnic separation and of the great Byzantine past, at least in the towns. It was from the more radical, less privileged sections of these elites and from the westernized, diaspora ‘returning intelligentsia’ that a nation-building ideology arose, which aimed at the capture of state power, at least in a part of the Greek­ speaking, Orthodox world, which could serve as a base from which to ‘rescue’ a fallen Hellas and its downtrodden Hellenic peasantry and revive the former eras of glory. Of course, the recovery of at least one of these pasts, the classical, was greatly enhanced by Western classical scholarship, and by the sentimental philhellenism that swept Western Europe; less obvious, but perhaps more potent for most Greeks, was the selective memory carried by the clergy of the Byzantine past, from which both Phanariots and upper clergy traced an of ten tenuous biological descent and which they opposed to the cultural myth of Hellenic descent fostered by a secular, westernized intelligentsia.43 As a result, Greek history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the conflict between two ideals of national identity and alternative myths of Greek origins and descent, each located in certain social classes and educational strata, and each seeking to capture and then use state power to promote Hellenism or Byzantinism at home and abroad. In law, education, commerce, agriculture and especially foreign policy, the consequences of this conflict of vision of Greek history were evident, and they contributed to the relative weakness of the Greek state and the erratic nature of Greek social development. A divided innersense of ethnicity was one factor that impeded the solidarity necessary for state-making and hence for nation-building; instead, these alterna­tive ethnic interpretations reinforced the class conflicts in modern Greek society.

In modern Israel, too, state-making is impeded by an enveloping but divided sense of common ethnicity. Again, there is a rich set of communal pasts from which to choose for models of a national utopia;but not so many of these have relevance to state power, since Jewry has been divorced from the exercise of power and state-making for the last2,000 years. Again, selective memories aligned to social class and educational stratum can fashion alternative regenerative visions fornation-building; a traditional, rabbinic prescription can draw susten­ance from a genealogical myth of origins and descent traced from the priestly families of ancient Israel through the diaspora sages and scholars to the latter-day Eastern European Orthodox rabbis and their followers, while a secular, modernist myth looks across the two millennia of Jewish exile to the ancient commonwealth of peasants and herdsmen of Israel and Judah under the house of David.But the division between Orthodox and secular images is not the only rent in the fabric of Israeli-Jewish ethnicity; there is also the parallel conflict between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewry, and the gulf between their respective outlooks and aspirations, which has resulted in periodic outbursts against the early vatikim from Eastern Europe In the case of the Ethiopian Jews, the ‘Falashas’, intra-ethnic and religious divisions cross cut each other to some extent, and state authorities had to await religious approval over the vital question of who counts as an ethnic member, and hence a citizen ofIsrael. This is just one of many examples where, despite considerable bureaucratic centralization, ethno-religious factors, instead of providing a simple, ready-made Jewish base on which to form a strong state on the ‘rational’ Western model, as in the West itself, have by their internal fissures and ambiguities helped to weaken and impede centralizing drives towards state expansion and authority. There are, of course, several other impediments to state authority and jurisdiction, including the various legal legacies, the extreme version of proportional representation that produces an equally extreme multi­party system, and the influence of diaspora Jewish communities, especially in the United States. There are also factors that work towards greater state authority like the size of the country, the role of the army and education system, heavy urban concentrations and industrializa­tion, and above all, the security problem and the general Arab-Israel confrontation. But, paradoxically, successive wars, though they may strengthen the military, have not enhanced state power in the same measure; and this may be attributed, in part, to ethno-religious divisions within a common ethnie, which as in the Greek case, find expression in party political conflicts.

In this category, too, we should place a state that is often held up as a model of polyethnic society, Switzerland. In fact, the Swiss case tells us little about modern polyethnic states, since the ethnic core of the Swiss Confederation was for many centuries confined to a single Alemannic category. Moreover, Switzerland was built up in successive stages around the original three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unter­walden; it then attracted the richer city-states of the plains, Lucerne, Bern and Zurich, all German-speaking and Catholic at the time, before encountering in the sixteenth century its first linguistic test in Fribourg, and its first religious schisms in Zurich and Bern.Moreover, therelative weakness of the Swiss state was both structural and deliberately contrived; it arose out of the original ideological impetus against the Habsburg governors and their centralizing interference, and out of the valley-canton system of self-rule, which has been jealously guarded ever since. If more recently some measure of state centralization has seemed unavoidable, this is for economic and security reasons that emerge out of an already well-formed sense of common Swiss ethnic identity, which has integrated the various linguistic and religio-ethnic identities in different cantons and areas, even in the Jura. In fact, the Swiss have been enabled by the very length of their history, and the military successes of the Confederation, to establish and then take largely for granted a sense of common ethnicity in the face of external cultural and political threats; and this has allowed them to separate political representation in the cantons and central government from ethnicity and ethnic differences, which surfaced from time to time (Fri­bourg, Romansch, the Jura).

State-Making in Polyethnic Societies

It is just this failure to separate ethnicity from politics that so bedevils the future of polyethnic states in Africa and Asia. Here, the common pattern was one of colonial conquest in which the alien power tended to categorize and classifY the indigenous population in ethnic terms, and to incorporate different ethnie unequally into a divisive system of colonial power. Having first juxtaposed, and even divided, various ethnie within often artifically bounded colonies, the imperial powers then sought to rank members of different ethnie, not merely in terms of individual attainments or class position, but even more of ethnic origin. Indeed, whole communities were assigned to functional positions in the colonial hierarchy, as the concept of ‘martial races’ demonstrates. As a result, from the outset indigenous territorial elites found it difficult to over-­come their own and others’ sense of ethnic identity, to forge a common identity. For a time, ethnie managed to put aside their rivalries to concentrate on the task of ridding the territory of alien whites and alien rule; but even during the process of opening up and capturing the apparatus of state, rivalries between aspirant members of different ethnie intensified and soon exploded in communal violence or military coups.

Given this general history, it is apparent that the task of both state­making and nation-building is likely to be far more difficult and complex than in Europe. For one thing, many European states had been in place before the advent of nationalism extolled the virtues of national congru­ence and coextensiveness. For another, the European states did not enter the economic race as late-comers, often endowed with poor natural resources and a low level of technical skills. Given the develop­mental nature of contemporary nation-building ideologies, i.e. a dual goal of creating nations and of ensuring self-sufficient growth, which are so heavily intertwined, any failure in performance for one goal is bound to diminish the chances in the other. There is, moreover, a commitment to a state-based and state-made nation. This means that not only will the often artificial colonial boundaries be rigidly retained, but only a nation created within and by the agencies of the state counts as a genuine nation, a conception that is the counterpart of state-based development strategies.

In the light of these aspirations and constraints, the problems of poly­ethnic societies become even more intractable. Here we need to distin­guish between those new states that have an ethnic core, and those that lack any. In the first category come some South-East Asian states and perhaps India; in the second, most African and some Middle Eastern states, apart from Egypt and Somalia.

The polyethnic or ‘plural’ states of South-East Asia - Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia - have a core ethnie, and thus resemble the Western European situation in the late medieval era. However, the time-scale and socio-technological situation is quite different. Incor­porating Welsh, Bretons and Catalans was a long-drawn-out process, and the lack of communications, education and popular expectations, not to mention the much lower level of state power and intervention, made determined ethnic resistance much less likely. [….]

[….?] twentieth century, however, the time scale has contracted and mass communications, transport, education and state intervention have all combined to create a much higher level of popular expectations, fed by the nationalism of competing elites. In such cases, Malay or Burmese national state-making and state attempts to create a Malay or Burman nation, are likely to encounter determined resistance from ethnie for whom the time-span of colonialism and post-colonialism has been insufficient to promote supra-ethnic integration. The absence of common wars against outsiders may also prevent movement towards a state-based national integration and hence a territorial nation. In those cases, such as Vietnam, where such wars have had to be fought, ethnic differences within the state have been more easily submerged.

Perhaps the most complex example of the dominant-ethnie pattern of state-making and nation-building is provided by India. Divided into 16 regions and language groups, and with innumerable ‘tribes’ andjati, as well as different religious communities, India has tended to rest its unity upon the dominant Hindu and Hindi-speaking regions of northern and central India. In the important religio-ethnic divisions, Hinduism has proved a potent, if unstable, unifYing bond, despite com­munal violence between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. But it has also proved tolerant of cleavages along lingtiistic and regional lines, like those between Marathis and Gujeratis, or Assamese and Bengalis. Nevertheless, Indian nationalism from Tilak and Aurobindo onwards, has drawn heavily on Hindu conceptions of Indian history which, though they contain few models of political unity apart from the northern Guptas, have assigned to the conquering Arya and their Vedic and Brahminic religion a unifying social and cultural role, which allows modern state-makers to operate and build the Indian nation out of its otherwise disparate parts. Classical Hindu political models lend them­selves to a federal conception which in turn allows a measure of ethnic flexibility, suited to a country of so many ethnie subdividing the Hindu would-be nation. At the same time, both the centrifugal pressures and the British imperial legacy of unified administration operate, in opposite ways, to counteract the federalism of the constitution. It is significant that the Indian concept of their state is secular, and that Congress seeks to accommodate and represent every religious and regional group. And though more often caste, regional and religious cleavages and constitu­encies make themselves manifest in party factions, there remains a latent strain towards a strengthening of the centralized, bureaucratic state under effective prime ministers and cabinets.

In India, unity is created and preserved, not through the Western route of ’state creating nation’, nor through the East European process of ‘ethnie creating state which in turn moulds the nation’. Instead, a colonial trajectory operated in which a modern, bureaucratic state imposed from outside on diverse ethnic communities, has been captured by the elites in the northern and central Hindi-speaking and Hindu ethnie, who then seek to weld these communities together into a territorial nation by means of an overarching ethnic Hindu mythology and a series of interlocking institutions and cross-cutting allegiances. What makes the operation more feasible is not just the memory and legacy of British rule and an all-India civil service and communications, but the sentiments and ties of solidarity created by this selective Hindu mythology and a relative cultural homogeneity of the Hindi population in some northern and central provinces whose historical fate has been a shared experience for some centuries. Without these common bonds of ethnicity in a core area, ‘India’ would undoubtedly be a more precarious
entity, and its creation even more doubtful. The tradition of strong states resting upon religio-ethnic cores in these northern and central areas contributes an important element to Indian state unity and to the chances offorging an all-India territorial nation.

Several African states lack this ethnic core and religious tradition. True, some like Zimbabwe and Uganda, have (or have had) strong ethnic cores or ethnic polities. In both these cases, their dominance has been contested. In the Ugandan case, it was the British authorities whodemoted the Bagandan kingdom and favoured other ethnic and their polities, especially the northern, Nilotic and Muslim communities and tribes. One cause of the subsequent political instability of the post­colonial state may lie here: in the consequent absence of an ethnic core, each ethnic community or group of communities vying for the dominant and strategic position the Baganda were compelled to vacate. In Zimbabwe, British ‘divide-and-rule’ policies together with settler rule promoted cleavage between the Shona- and Ndebele-speakers, and parallel and rival nationalisms from early on, whose conflict is still unresolved. In both cases, the rise of the territorial state has served to intensify ethnic struggles for control over state policies and personnel; but, because ethnic nationalism was already so advanced and intense, further moves to consolidate and centralize the territorial state have been impeded and resisted, bringing guerrilla terror or a spate of mili­tary coups in their train. In neither case, has it yet been possible to begin the process of unitary ‘nation-building’, the justification and goal of independent statehood and the struggle for political control.

Even greater difficulties attend the attempts of post-colonial states which lack a single ethnic core to ‘make strong states’ and ‘build viable nations’. In 1960 ‘Nigeria’ was a territorial expression for a system of federal, parliamentary rule devised by the British for a series of contiguous geographical areas and ethnic populations, who had never before lived in a unitary polity or shared a single religious or secular culture. Not only was there no pre-existing core ethnic or state; there were a large number of alternative cultures and histories from which models for ‘nation-building’ might be selected. Even the three largest ethnic only accounted for just over 60 per cent of the total population, leaving some fairly large and self-conscious ethnic (Efiks, Tiv, Ibibio, etc.) trapped in an impotent, minority status within the three main regions, and without any hope of their histories and cultures contribut­ing to the creation of the new ‘Nigerian’ nation. The subsequent military coups, the Biafran war of secession and administrative redivisions have done little to improve their lot (the larger ethnic simply ‘amass adminis­trative states’ in order to secure a larger share of federal benefits for themselves), or to solve the problem of an absent ethnic core on which to base a concept of’Nigerianness’.At least in India or Burma, a signifi­cant and strategic proportion of the population belongs to an ancient ethnic culture with its own political traditions, and is able either to dominate or to envelop other ethnic within its cultural orbit. At least in Zimbabwe, and to a much lesser extent in Uganda, there was (and still might be) a basis for a would-be nation in the presence, albeit much challenged, of an ethnic core which could furnish the state-making personnel and institutions. But in Nigeria, Zaire, Ghana and possibly Kenya, where is the remotely acceptable ethnic core around which the institutions and personnel of a strong, bureaucratic state might form?

Perhaps it is this ‘missing factor’, ofthe many that might be cited, that so encourages authoritarian trends in the politics of many African and Asian states (like Pakistan, Iraq and Syria). Such states lacked the ‘ethnic tranquillity’ which comes from knowing that the bulk of one’s (the state’s) population, especially at the political centre, share a single culture and history, which in turn furnishes the myths, values, symbols and memories which the emerging state may ‘take-for-granted’ and promote in the efforts by state elites to maximize their control over the manpower and resources within their territorial domains. If a common ethnicity provides a ‘language’ and symbolism in which to express and spread bureaucratic controls by state elites jostling for power, then its absence threatens the very fabric of state power and the territorial basis ofits jurisdiction. For the large ethnic populations who do not have any part in that language and sybolism, and in the common history from which they spring, the attempt by elites from any ethnic to wield state power and extend state control on the basis of their ethnicity, must appear alien and, given its novelty, illegitimate. In Western Europe this attempt to wield state power on the basis of a particular ethnicity was long-lived and tacit; it predated the era of nationalism and required no elaborations. Today, in Africa and parts of Asia, these attempts are of recent vintage and vociferous; they invite refutation and for the most part receive it, because by now every self-aware ethnic can and is making use of nationalist ideologies to further its ends. The overall result is a profound uncertainty in the very existence of many states, of a type unknown even in Western states threatened by recent ethnic autonomymovements. For, whereas in France or Spain, even the secession of Bretons and Basques, Catalans and Corsicans, would not cast real doubts on the existence of the Spanish and French nations (or their states), an ethnic secession in Africa and Asia (and that is how this uncertainty and refutation becomes manifest, as a problem of territorial boundaries) would immediately call the whole enterprise of nation­building through state-making into question. As yet, there is no ‘Niger­ian’ or ‘Zairian’ ‘nation’; to subtract any part of the population which is to make up this would-be nation would not only encourage other seces­sions, it would undermine the whole idea of such new, composite ‘nations’.

For the central difficulty of ‘nation-building’ in much of Africa and Asia is the lack of any shared historical mythology and memory on which state elites can set about ‘building’ the nation. The ‘nation’ is not, as we see, built up only through the provision of , intra structures’ and ‘institu­tions’, as ‘nation-building’ theories assumed; but from the central fund of culture and symbolism and mythology provided by shared historical experiences. Where, as in Nigeria, we have three or more such funds and histories, the problems of ‘combining’ them to create a ‘Nigerian’ political culture and political community become almost insuperable.

This raises a further question. Does ’state-making’ really require ‘nation-building’, where the latter means creating a unified ‘territorial nation’ out of the diverse ethnie and their homelands? Does Nigeria need nationalism? We could answer, as we argued at the outset: every state needs its nation, and every nation its state. That is to say, the contem­porary world is a ‘world of nations’, and no unit claiming political sovereignty can evade the dictates of nationalism. The trouble is that for a state like ‘Nigeria’, creating the nation without an ethnic core, or with too many ethnic cores, is liable to be a self-defeating exercise. If we cannot completely evade the nationalist agendum, perhaps we can rewrite it?

In fact, this is being done in a number of ways. One is the ‘immigrant’ or United States way, another the ‘autonomist’ or Catalan way, a third the ‘federal-nation’ or Yugoslav solution. All are problematic, because all spring from the need to reconcile, in practice as well as theory, the conflicting demands of ’state-nation’ and’ ethnie-nation’. In the ‘im­migrant’ model, which we touched on earlier, a relatively small or weak ethnic core, which assumed cultural primacy because it was ‘there’ first (where ‘there’ means in political control of the newly independent terri­tory, before the influx of others), begins to build the institutions and norms of the modem state whose higher offices it at first monopolizes. Later, it admits waves of culturally alien immigrants whom it seeks to acculturate and even assimilate, turning what was originally an ethnic would-be nation into a territorial one. In the United States, as later in Canada, Australia and Argentina, the early and strategic English or Spanish creole ethnie transformed themselves into a broader political community in which non-English and non-Spanish white ethnie could achieve equal citizenship rights and social mobility.64 Clearly, this is a solution that, though it still leaves problems about the relationship between ethnic cultures and the territorial political culture, could help to broaden the horizons of African and Asian ‘plural states’ by encourag­ing them to strive for the creation of political communities based on a larger ‘political culture’. Unfortunately, it has two drawbacks in the African or Asian situation. The first is that none of the ethnic can advance an acceptable historical claim to cultural primacy, and so pro­vide the basic ingredients of symbolism and mythology needed in any territorial nation. The second is that, unlike most immigrant societies, ethnic in African and Asian states are already territorialized and concen­trated. They do not therefore mix physically or morally as do American or Argentinian ethnie and they continue to draw separate ethnic susten­ance from their ethnic homelands, both in manpower and in ethnic cul­ture. For these reasons, the immigrant model is likely to prove oflimited value in Africa and Asia.

The ‘autonomist’ or Catalan model is also unlikely to appeal, since it presupposes the growth of a dual identity - Catalan and Spanish, Corsi­can and French, Scots and British. What Catalans, Corsicans and Scots have in the main wanted was maximum autonomy in the framework ofthe larger historical state into which they had long ago been incorpor­ated. At a deeper level, Catalans, Corsicans and Scots want to find a &amework in which they can reconcile two historic identities, one within the other like concentric circles of allegiance, both of which they deeply value. In former eras, such duality of allegiance posed few problems. In an age of possessive nationalism, it clearly must, and does, as the issue of conscription in the two world wars illustrated in the case of Quebecois, Flemish, Bretons and even Welshmen.65 In ‘normal’ circumstances, the twin loyalties need not conflict in practice; ethnicity is treated as ’situational’, that is, ethnic perceptions of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we aspire to’ change according to changing circumstances and perceptions of others - thus ‘we’ are Scots in England, and British when we go to France. But in situations of endemic conflict over scarce resources and decision-making, such as exists in most new states of Africa and Asia, this sort of concentric dual allegiance is fraught with difficulties. It is always on trial. There is always the pressure from state elites onto ‘one’s’ ethnie through the allocation of resources, posts and services. There is always the competition for urban facilities and jobs which is viewed in terms of ethnic classifications inherited from the colonial powers (if not earlier). There is always the ‘ethnic arithmetic’ practised by governments who have accepted such criteria as the basic relevant ones for welfare and economic redistribution. Besides, once again, none of the larger circles of state/territorial allegiance is old enough to have attracted the devotion of more than a handful of the edu­cated elites. Quite simply, ‘Nigeria’ cannot yet have the emotional attraction and symbolic potency of a ‘France’ or ‘Spain’. Autonomism, therefore, while it too suggests a way forward for state-nations without ethnic cores in an age of nationalism, must await the growth of larger territorial loyalties which will effectively compete with ethnic ties.

This leaves the ‘federal-nation’ or Yugoslav way. In Yugoslavia, the ethnie (all six of them) have been promoted to national status; or rather, their claims to constitute nations in virtue of an historic culture, territory and polity, have been accepted and turned into the comer-stone of the Yugoslav constitutional and ideological edifice. Contrary to African fears of , Balkanization’, the Yugoslavs themselves have made a virtue of national individuality and used it to build up a ‘Yugoslavism’ in which national self-determination, like self-management, becomes the hall­mark of the Yugoslav way of political existence. Of course, here too there is something present in the Yugoslav context for which there is no parallel in Africa or much of Asia: a common ideological-political system (non-aligned communism) and common memories of a loose ethnic kinship among the Yugoslav tribes (with the exception of the Muslim community which is now asserting a separate status) that have lived in a single area of south-east Europe, the old Roman province of Illyria, for centuries, have boasted glorious kingdoms and fallen under lengthy foreign rule, so that, despite deep conflicts and differences, especially between Croats and Serbs, their histories have fallen within a common orbit and common problems, which have thrown them together.
In the African context, no such common orbit can be said to exist, and certainly no interrelationship of histories. True, there was a common, if varied, experience of Western colonialism and slavery and racism; and a corresponding sentiment of the dignity of Blackness and the ‘African personality’. But the lives and horizons of Nigerians can in no sense be said to have interacted with those of Tanzanians until very recently. Within Tanzania or Nigeria, too, the ethnic categories and communities now incorported in the British-carved states often had little relationship to each other in pre-colonial days; so that there is not even any over­lapping characteristic, be it in family system or language or religion or institutions, which marks these communities off from neighbouring ones.

And yet, the Yugoslav model of recognizing ethnie as nations in a federal constitutional context offers real hope for the consolidation of the state and the authority of its institutions. It solves, at a blow, the problem of primacy, and assures each community of potential equality of treatment. Of course, the Yugoslav experiment was born out of a war of resistance which overrode ethnic differences; and there have since been considerable tensions between Serbs and Croats, in particular. Yet, there has been broad acceptance of the principle of national equality, and of a Yugoslavia composed of equal nations, which might well provide a model for the more intractable ’state-nation’ conflicts in Africa and Asia, even if the minimal unity of Yugoslavs is lacking in the new states.

As these last ‘polyethnic’ cases make clear, the absence of an ethnic core around which state elites can unite populations and build nations makes even the persistence and unity of the state uncertain. There are, it is true, a number of forces, both inter-state and domestic, which contri­bute to the maintenance of state power in general in Africa and Asia, and of these particular states in their present boundaries. There have, in fact, been few successful secessions or forcible revisions of post-colonial boundaries: one thinks of Bangladesh, Singapore, the divisions of Germany and Korea, the Indonesian incorporation of East Timor and the secession of Anguilla. There have been other failed movements of secession, especially Biafra, and some current ones like those of the Tigre and Eritrea, the MilOS and Shan. Yet, the state system and state boundaries since 1945 have held remarkably firm, despite continual pressures from ethnic movements.

At the same time, nationalism too has proved remarkably tenacious. Hence the ever-present problem of ‘ national congruence’, making states and ethnic nations coextensive. Without an ethnic core, there is no place from which to start the process of ‘nation-formation’. The state has nothing to work on. With an ethnic core, there remain severe problems in reconciling other ethnic identities with that formed around an ethnic core as it has been transmuted into a territorial nation. Without an ethnic core, there is the much more intractable difficulty of creating an identity in the first place out of quite disparate ethnic materials. The polyethnic states of Africa, in particular, reveal the inner contradictions of the nation-state system most acutely, and the theoretical and practical shortcomings of our approaches to state-making and nation-building.

To summarize our main conclusions:

In, the past, successful states have been built up around a dominant ethnic core, especially in early modern Europe;
In the past, ethnie aspiring to become full ‘nations’ have found it necessary to seek autonomy and independent statehood, and then use the state apparatus to transform themselves into citizen nations; In the modern era, an era of nationalism, statehood can only be legitimized in terms of the ‘nation’ and nationalism, and states must therefore be seen to be ‘nation-building’; In an era of nationalism, states which have a divided ethnic core and rival ethnic pasts are generally weaker and less well-developed than their ethnically secure counterparts;

In an era of nationalism, states which lack clear-cut ethnic cores (or have a multiplicity of contenders) are severely handicapped in their chances of both effective state-making and nation-building; In an era of nationalism, the length and manner of ethnic incorpora­tion by a modern state is crucial for ethnic tranquillity and concen­tric loyalties; if independent statehood coincides with ethnic arousal, ‘immigrant’ or ‘autonomist’ solutions are of limited relevance for polyethnic states; Because state institutions can only be effective for nation-building where their homogenizing, territorializing and mobilizing trends do not stir up ethnic antagonisms (which, in an era of nationalism, is very unlikely), the prospects for effective state-making and nation­building in plural states are bleak, and perhaps the only hope is a ‘federal-nation’ model which turns ethnie into equal nations and reduces state power correspondingly, and hence the chances of a political community and ‘territorial’ nation;

As long as the nation is accepted as the sole norm of government and statehood, and as long as ‘national congruence’ is part of the nation­alism’s agenda, states without ethnic cores will tend to resort to authoritarian regimes to mask the disunity consequent on the absence of ethnic identity and history.