Natio and ta Ethne Before and Afterthe Rise of Modernity:

A New Development in the Ethnic/Civic Nationalism Debate

Maxim TabachnikUCSC Department of PoliticsIndependent Study

Prof. Megan ThomasMarch 17, 2013

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Out of many political science debates that

address the present and the future of the nation-state in

the age of globalization, the rise of ethnopolitics and the

identitarian conflict stands apart as the liberal-democratic

model is spread further on the wings of global economic

interdependence collapsing empires and dictatorships (Snyder

16). Understanding the processes of identity formation and

transformation is crucial in the task of the resolution of

ethnopolitical conflicts and promoting peace as well as

planning and managing the necessary adjustments to the new

international order that dawns upon us. The lack of

agreement on central concepts of nationalism studies in this

context is disconcerting. One of the most controversial and

disputed academic polemics has been the one surrounding the

concept of the ethnic/civic dichotomy or the tension between

ethnic and civic nationalisms or the ethnic and civic

concepts of the nation. A possibility of a consensus in this

debate may hold the key to understanding the challenges that

the current wave of globalization and its precepts of

capitalism and liberal democracy pose to national identities

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both from the perspective of public opinion and that of the

nation-state or its substate (ethnic minority) challengers.

This debate is also important in understanding immigrant

integration under the conditions of mass migration,

especially in the face of the discredit of the policies of

multiculturalism and the rise of the far right in the West.

While most of this debate has focused on the critique

of the idea of civic nationalism, especially in the context

of the liberal theory, recent historiographical research

(Myhill) rejects the widely-accepted origin story of this

phenomenon initially offered by Hans Kohn in the middle of

the 20th century, who linked it to the Stoic school in

Ancient Greece, Christianity and the liberal thought (Kohn,

The Idea of Nationalism, a Study in Its Origins and Background; Kohn,

Nationalism, Its Meaning and History; Kohn, “Western and Eastern

Nationalisms”). The new perspective suggests that the

origins of this concept were not liberal or egalitarian but

imperialist and suppressive. Myhill’s research points

specifically to the Roman rejection and the Greek acceptance

of ethnic diversity. The Greek concept of ta ethne was

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defined by a common language, culture and ancestry. The

Romans replaced it with a legally-defined natio, which made

no recognition of ethnic variation. This tension made it to

the modern times through the difference between the Roman

Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches (which fits

Kohn’s attempt to classify nationalisms as Western or

Eastern in the European context). Such interpretation

delinks civic nationalism from the liberal tradition

exposing its imperial origins. Its use as a solution of

ethnic conflict resolution proposed by such scholars as

Michael Ignatieff, therefore, becomes more controversial and

less acceptable (Ignatieff). The connection to religion in

the development of ethnic/civic nationalisms, however, seems

to be crucial, especially in the context of the rise of

modernity characterized by capitalism, nationalism,

secularism, individualism and rationalism.

This paper revisits some of the debates surrounding the

concept and then recasts the ethnic/civic dichotomy in the

new light using historiographical and theoretical sources

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from the 1990s and the 2000s as well as the classics of

social thought Weber and Durkheim.

1. The Ethnic/Civic Nationalism Debate

While constructivism has firmly planted itself in the

field of nationalism with Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking

Imagined Communities (Anderson), the longer-standing debate

between modernists (Gellner) who believe that nations are

the product of the modern age of capitalism and

industrialization and primordialists (Van Den Berghe) who

believe them to be an essential characteristic of human

group formation is far from over. The work by Anthony Smith

stands out in this respect by providing a framework for

bridging the modernist and primordialists perspectives. In

his well-received work The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Smith argues

that while nations may be modern, they were constructed upon

the foundation of ancient ethnic cores (Smith).

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Anderson analyzed nationalism from a historical and not

only theoretical perspective. Historical perspective is of

crucial importance in nationalism studies as it provides an

insight into the nature of the phenomenon otherwise

difficult to analyze out of the historic context. It is,

therefore, no surprise that the biggest challenge to his

thesis has arisen from the scholars of history. This paper

focuses on the work by Adrian Hastings and John Myhill as

well as some other authors studying nationalism and

religion.

Many, if not most, nationalism scholars accept that

there are two ideal types of nations, with ethnic being only

one of them (Brown 281). The origins of this duality may be

tracked as far as Karl Marx, who saw it stemming from the

inherent conflict of nationalism of the collision of the

interests of an individual with that of the community (Brown

284). The relationship, classified as a dichotomy, has

received many names. Hans Kohn first described it as

“Western/Eastern nationalisms” (Kohn, “Western and Eastern

Nationalisms” 165). Some called the first type of

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nationalism romantic, tribal, or cultural and the second American-

French, political, territorial or individualistic-libertarian (Franck; Brown;

Guibernau).The most common name for this concept, however,

is the ethnic/civic dichotomy (Calhoun 88).

We may think of this relationship as describing the

nation from two dimensions. The subjective, or ethnic,

dimension centers on common ancestry and common experiences

from the past and the resulting differentiating features

separating one nation from another (ethnic markers). The

objective, or political, dimension is focused on the status

quo of the modern nation-state and the rules of the

membership in the nation that are not linked to the past and

are “culture-blind” (for example, a territory or a common

set of values). Ethnic nationalism, therefore, merges

culture and state and civic nationalism separates them

(Kymlicka 204). Another important distinction is that ethnic

nation is ascriptive and civic one voluntary (Keating 3).

Despite its apparent heuristic lead, the ethnic/civic

dichotomy has been highly contested and even called an

“epistemological obstacle” (Máiz 29). A few scholars have

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called the validity of the dichotomy into question (Kuzio;

Yack). The concept has been criticized from different

aspects but its relationship to liberalism is especially

contested and still has not been resolved despite its long

history possibly originated in the works of Karl Marx (Brown

284). In the present-day literature, civic nationalism is

often named as liberal and progressive in part for its

voluntaristic and rational character (Ignatieff). Ethnic

nationalism, on the other hand, has been labeled illiberal

and reactive because of its more emotional than rational and

ascriptive qualities (Brown; Guibernau; Nairn). The general

theory of nation-state has mostly promoted a civic form of

nationalism while ethnic nationalism has been vilified by

the accusations of exclusiveness and intolerance despite

many modern nationalisms classified as ethnic being peaceful

(Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era 97). Similarly,

nationalism has been defined as harmless as long as the

civic understanding of the nation of citizens is accorded

priority over an ethnocentric interpretation of the nation

but not so when the nation is traced back to the

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prepolitical entity of a quasi-natural people, a

primordialist stand (Habermas 115–6). Many liberals and

Marxists defend the imposition of civic nationalism based on

“high” cultures over “low” ones since the former have higher

value for humanity (Gellner 57).

The contrasting argument shows that nation-state theory

based on civic nationalism legitimizes the eradication of

minority cultures and communities, delegitimizes ethnic

cultures and justifies the arbitrariness of the historical

boundaries of nation-states (Smith 1995:101-2). Brown (1999)

has demonstrated that the liberal/illiberal dichotomy as

applied to nationalism is rather related to the social

stratum supporting nationalism than to the ethnic/civic

dichotomy. He argues that the nationalism-driving class with

its general reactive or constructive identity-forming

qualities determines if the nationalism in question is

liberal or illiberal. Both ethnic and civic nationalisms may

thus be liberal or illiberal.

The alleged connection between civic nationalism and

liberalism has been generally accepted or assumed by most

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authors, possibly stemming from Kohn’s original suggestion

of the origin of the phenomenon. Critiques lament civic

nationalism’s wide acceptance by the non-academic community

allegedly as a result of Michael Ignatieff’s Blood and

Belonging and the accompanying BBC series and try to explain

why the concept has so easily captivated the public

imagination. Yack explains the proliferation of the

terminology by the two ways in which the term “nation” is

used today: a cultural and a political community (103). He

does not, however, explain how this dual meaning translates

into the “ethnic/civic” dichotomy. Instead, Yack criticizes

contemporary liberals who “channel national sentiments” in

the direction of civic nationalism (Yack 103–104). Kymlicka

explains the proliferation by the poor academic research

that “obscures as much as it reveals” -- the academics that

engage in this research “badly misinterpret” the

ethnic/civic distinction (Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding

Nationalism” 132) .

The nature of such criticism focuses almost entirely on

the definition of the nation in a liberal democracy. It,

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therefore, comes as no surprise that after being so

thoroughly focused on the implications of the concept of

civic nationalism for liberal political theory, the critics

do not recognize that the main usefulness of the dichotomy

comes from its portrayal of ethnic inclusivity or

exclusivity in the membership of a nation, a notion

unrelated to liberalism per se. As we will demonstrate

later, such notion existed since ancient times long before

liberalism came into existence. Liberalism prescribes legal

equality of people in a nation, but how is national

membership defined? This is where the ethnic/civic

distinction is helpful. Yack misses the discussion of

membership criteria completely while Kymlicka comes closer

to focusing on membership but emphasizes that membership in

civic nations still “involves participation in a common

culture” (Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism” 133) such

as using English in the United States and knowing American

history. These arguments are valid but do not explain fully

why the US government has been increasingly providing

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government services in Spanish, for example, thus confirming

US denomination as a civic nation, at least legally.

2. Ethnic/Civic Nationalism Before Modernity

The historiographical research in this paper is

critical of the modernist theory of nationalism as proposed

by Gellner and Anderson. The latter suggests that nations

are a product of the modernity and did not exist before. The

historians we are relying on do not reject the modernist

thesis but seek to modify it suggesting that the modern

nation is the latest development in the chain of other

processes of identity formation. They easily demonstrate

that many of nationalism concepts, including the

ethnic/civic relationship, originated in pre-modern times

and cannot be properly understood without analyzing them

from this perspective.

John Myhill’s recent work Language, Religion and National

Identity in Europe and the Middle East: A Historical Study is significant in

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many ways. It effectively describes premodern national

identities in Europe based on ancestral national churches.

These religious identities later translated into separate

national identities during the age of nationalism. Relying

on convincing historiographical material, Myhill describes

the competing development of national consciousness based on

“big” and “small” languages, which were only successful if

they coincided with the boundaries of the established

premodern national churches. Coleman explains that in pre-

modern period nations were separated from polities and

defines nations as a “pre-political unity of a community

with a shared historical origin and destiny” while the

French Revolution, according to him, invented the political

concept of the nation (49–50). In other words, the modernist

thesis describes the rise of the political nation but not

the nation per se. It is modern political developments such

as liberal democracy that united the principle of cohesion

between the nation and the political unit.

Myhill’s work is preceded by Adrian Hastings’s

Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism. This book

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offers another convincing challenge to the modernist thesis.

He uses primary historical sources to prove that national

consciousness was already present in many European polities

in the late Middle Ages. This argument makes the modernist

thesis, which Myhill does not disprove in itself, just a

particular historical development of nationalism adjusting

to liberal democracy and capitalism. Similarly to Anderson,

Hastings makes the development of a written vernacular the

impetus for nation-building, but, in his view, print

capitalism with its mass production of books was not

necessary: mere translations of the Bible into the

vernacular were enough. Furthermore, Hastings provides a

well-documented account of how ethnicities and modern

nationalism interacted. The modern state that arose in the

19th century was indefinitely more intrusive in the lives of

ordinary people while the traditional state was not. Under

those conditions, the ethnic composition of the population

of a state mattered and ethnicities became conscious of

their differences, and those differences may be either let

go or insisted upon depending on a variety of factors such

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as language, custom, history and religious proximity (29–

30). In the latter case, ethnic differences were preserved

as it was done in Switzerland. In the former, they were

erased as it happened in France.

Religion plays a central part in Hastings’s argument.

In his view, Christianity serves as a tool of preventing or

facilitating ethnic fusion (179). The Christian church

overall, however, facilitated nation creation (if not

invented them outright) while Islam prevented them from

arising. While Hastings is clear about his conclusions, it

is less clear what implications they have for today’s

ethnopolitical situation in the world.

The argument about England being the first nation is

also not very well developed. Although it coincides with

some other major nationalism authors (Greenfeld), one is

still not clear what made England so different from other

European contenders. It is true that its position as an

island is unique precipitating a territorially-based group

identity. Other factors suggested by Hastings are less

convincing, be it the centralization of Church

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administration of England into one unit by Rome,

historically-accumulated political unity in the face of

aggressions from outside, the role of London or the shire

system (36–38). There could be possibly other precedents of

these developments in other European polities although the

combination thereof is in fact unique.

The book, however, makes a crucial contribution to our

understanding of ethnicity. Hastings demonstrates its

continuity throughout history thus serving as the main base

for the construction of the nation. He views ethnicity is an

“intermarrying society”, which means that the concept has a

distinct biological meaning that proceeds from a “shared

genetic origin”. Obviously, such origin is likely to become

mythical with time (168–169, 172).

While Hastings does not use the ethnic/civic

terminology per se, he substitutes it for the one based on

the dichotomy jus sanguinis/jus soli. He makes a strong normative

claim for a nationalism based on jus soli and against the one

used on jus sanguinis (34). Hastings, nevertheless, is

interested in the contrast between what others would call

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the civic and the ethnic nation, which he believes to “lie

in the heart of the central tension within nationhood” and

is key to “a sound analysis of nationalism as a whole” (13)

but he does not explain it. He does see the dichotomy as two

different paths of nation-creation: one being territorial

and the other ethnolinguistic. So one path to the nation is

through ethnicity sometimes coupled with religion as it

happened in Holland. At the same time, Hastings admits that

states could create the nation as it happened to Scotland in

the 14th century in resistance of English dominance (28).

But when does the nation development go from state to nation

and when from nation to state? In the case of France and

England, he explains nation-building by the pirating of the

English model (in the case of France) and opposing it (in

the case of Germany) (97–109). His explanation for the

ethnic character of German nation-building is essentially,

the absence of the strong state in the linguistically and

culturally related country. What we can deduce is that where

the state was strong, it was able to unify ethnicity around

it and where it was weak, ethnicity lead the construction of

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the state. The two building blocks of ethnic consciousness

and the state are always present.

For a more convincing explanation of the premodern

history of the ethnic/civic dichotomy we have to refer back

to Myhill’s book, which reveals the central role of religion

in the development of this phenomenon. His well-researched

approach is radically different from Hastings and other

works and is little short of groundbreaking. His book

suggests that the dichotomy’s duality goes back to the Great

Schism between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox

churches in 1054, in itself a reflection of the

irreconcilable differences between the Roman and Greek

concepts of collective identity. These differences came to

light during the administrative split of the Empire into

Western and Eastern – one ruled from Rome and the other one

from Constantinople.

Similarly to Hastings, Myhill starts out his argument

by demonstrating that the tension between an ethnic and a

territorial concept of collective identity goes back into

early history. However, he draws our attention to how it was

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experienced by the ancient Jews whose notion of the nation

was transmitted to the West through the Bible. Myhill

describes a stand-off between an ethnic or ancestral and a

territorial understanding of ancient Jewish identity during

the Babylonian period (29). The ethnic understanding of the

Jewish nation eventually prevailed with the intermixing with

foreigners blamed for God’s displeasure with the Jews and a

strict endogamy was imposed (30). Conversions to Judaism

came to an end with Jews becoming “a strictly ancestral

group” (31). This ethnic understanding of the nation was

copied by the Spanish and eventually by the Germans (Myhill

197).

Myhill’s largest contribution, however, is the

distinction between Roman Europe and non-Roman Europe, which

is satisfactorily explained by the different visions of

group identity between the Romans and the Greeks (37). Greek

sense of group identity was non-polity-based and was based a

“developed sense of ethnicity” – ancestry, language and

rituals – while Romanness was “culturally vague but legally

specific” (ibid). From the very beginning the idea of Roman

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citizenship defined group membership by an individual’s tie

to the polity. Its members could come from a variety of

ancestral backgrounds – “an idea that had no equivalent in

Greek thinking” (ibid). Romans thus “tried to ignore, blur

or erase” ethnic distinctions while Greeks treated ethnic

groups as distinctive. These differences translated into the

schism between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in

the 11th century (Myhill 39, 180). The tension over

ethnicity was already visible during the Photian Schism

during the 9th century between the Roman and the Byzantine

churches where the issue of the authorization of the liturgy

in the Bulgarian language was important. Greek leniency

toward ethnic particularities went along with their belief

in the importance of reading the Bible by laymen, something

prohibited by the Romans (Myhill 44).

It is noteworthy, however, that while Myhill criticizes

the ethnic-civic dichotomy’s alleged connection to the

liberal-illiberal one, he does not make the connection

between civic nationalism and Roman Europe, a conclusion

that is beyond obvious from his historical analysis. Civic

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nationalism is for him “state-based” as opposed to

“territory-based” (21) although those two are, of course,

closely correlated. We have to deduce that civic nationalism

as it has come to influence Western history is an

inheritance of the Roman past, a particular insignificance

that Romans felt toward ethnic identity. Christianity

matched that well with its idea of universality but also

transmitted the Biblical concept of the nation. The

interpretation of that idea was more civic in Roman Europe

where Latin mass was standard and more ethnic in Eastern

Europe where “linguistically reinforced sense of national

identity began to develop far earlier” than in the West

(Myhill 45). Reformation’s push toward ecclesiastical

nationalization then led to the resurgence of the Roman-

Greek attitude toward ethnic identity, and the economic

success of states that embodied one versus the other may

have led to the present-day tension in the West between the

two versions of national membership.

To understand how the Roman Church adopted the non-

ethnic vision of collective identity we can refer back to

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Hastings’s book as well as to the writings of Charles

Taylor. Hastings demonstrates the crucial role of

Christianity in the rise of nationalism in the West. The Old

Testament (which Christianity adopted) presented the

Christian world with a model of the nation, which was “a

unity of people, language, religion, territory and

government”. Consequently, he believes that the most

important impetus for the nation was “the desire of many

Christians, clerical and lay, to translate the Bible”

precisely because the Bible never had a sacred language

despite Anderson’s claim that Latin was sacred to it (22,

194). Islam, on the opposite, precluded the creation of

nations. It was not affected by the Old Testament as

Christianity was, held Arabic as the sacred language and

promoted the universalist idea of umma (200–201).

Hastings underlines that from the very beginning,

Christianity was torn between universality and

particularism, between national and international this

division becoming more pronounced as church canons became

looser. Jesus was committed to universality sending his

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disciples to “all nations” but to preach in local languages

(194). His famous saying justified dual allegiance: to a

political authority (Caesar) and to the spiritual authority

(God). The political authority, according to Hastings, was

grouped into ecclesiastical administrative units (one would

imagine, based on linguistic similarities in order to

facilitate the interaction of the clergy with the largest

possible populations). In England the ecclesiastical unit

harmonized the pre-existing ethnic subdivisions and was

eventually followed by the political unity by the 10th

century. The latter, one may assume, can be legitimized in

the eyes of the population by the ecclesiastically-supported

ethnic identity already in place. Christianity thus

spearheaded the process of nation-creation in England in the

spirit of the Bible (pushed even further by English

Protestantism later, which recovered the Old Testament idea

of the Chosen Nation of Israel). On the other hand, the

Roman Church discouraged excessive nationalization since it

could potentially threaten the church unity (202). A

universal spiritual authority had to prevail over a national

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polity. Hastings consequently gives us various other reasons

of how Christianity shaped the rise of the nation with the

political subdivision of ecclesiastical authority possibly

being the most important one since by merging various

kingdoms together the Church created larger administrative

units (188–189), which eventually assumed an identity of

their own. For example, the Roman Church centralized England

into one unit that comprised a few petty kingdoms (Hastings

37).

3. Ethnic/Civic Nationalism and the Rise of Modernity

The Protestant Reformation was the major impetus for

the rise of modernity. It is helpful to refer back to the

classics of social thought so revisit that connection. At

the first sight, two very different works, Max Weber’s The

Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which focuses on the

origins of the new economic reality in the West, and Emile

Durkheim’s Suicide, A Study in Sociology, which meticulously examines

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the phenomenon of suicide using statistical methods, are

preoccupied with different issues. Nevertheless, they share

the same concern: both authors are disturbed by the rise of

individualism that accompanied the transition to modernity

in the West and its origins in the Protestant Reformation in

Europe. While Weber explores the negative influence of

individualism on economic activity, Durkheim reveals its

tragic impact on the sense of personal well-being. Moreover,

the Protestant belief system and the individualism that

accompanies it may have consequences for the imagining of a

collective (and national) identity and could, in fact, lead

to the establishment of a type of national identity

construction different from that of collective religions.

Weber’s main goal is to reveal the role of religious

beliefs in the rise of capitalism in the West or, as he

calls it, “the rational capitalistic organization of

(formally) free labor” (21). The “peculiar rationalism of

Western culture” is the key to understanding individualism

(26). Protestantism leads to a “deep spiritual isolation”. A

faithful Calvinist thinks of his own salvation only leaving

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even his wife and children behind, his religion tearing the

faithful “away from the closed ties with which he is bound

to this world” (Weber 107–8). Rationality is closely linked

to monasticism and asceticism for Weber, which invaded the

daily life after escaping the monastery making the

individual flee “from the world into solitude” (Weber 154).

Durkheim raises similar points linking Protestantism

and individualism. Compared to Catholicism, Protestantism

“concedes a greater freedom to individual thought” (154). He

observes, however, than England is less individualistic in

religion than other Protestant country despite of its fame

as “land of individual freedom” (163), which can be

explained that the most individualistic version of

Protestantism, according to Weber, was Calvinism, which

rooted itself more in the United States than in England

through the influence of Puritanism. Even more importantly,

Durkheim describes the process by which Reformation produces

individualism: there is first of all a loss of faith in the

habitual system of beliefs and only then the intellectual

conviction that comes from education. Once the old system of

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beliefs is gone, it cannot be “artificially reestablished”

(169) leaving each individual to come to his or her own

peace with the new system. The individual then detaches him

or herself from the society setting his or her life goals

above those of the society with his “personality tending to

surmount the collective personality” (Durkheim 209).

Reformation thus oversees the emergence of two types of

national identity: individualistic and collectivistic

(Greenfeld) based on the notion of the supremacy of the

individual goals over those of the society (or, by

extension, of the collectivity or the nation) or vice versa.

Collectivistic nationalism, while recognizing the importance

of the individual, still maintains that his or her life

goals have to benefit the rest of the society. A

collectivistic belief system stemming from Catholicism, for

example, is much less likely to lose sight of the ties

binding him to the confessional group of which he is part,

because at every moment this group is recalled to him in the

shape of imperative precepts applying to different

circumstances of life” (Durkheim 374–375).

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Another important aspect of this debate is the role of

emotion, which is central for the formation of national

identity. Weber goes into detail how Protestant work ethic

eliminates the role of emotion in one’s life. The enjoyment

of life so characteristic of Catholic faith with its endless

religious feasts and quasi-pagan celebrations is completely

foreign to Protestantism with its “strict avoidance of all

spontaneous enjoyment of life” (53). Moreover, Calvinism,

the strictest and the most influential Protestant

denomination, does not allow any role for the emotion while

Lutheranism “left the spontaneous vitality of impulsive

action and native emotion more nearly unchanged”. Weber

contrasts the typical German quality of “good nature” with

Anglo-American “destruction of the spontaneity”, which he

explains by the a higher degree of penetration of asceticism

in Calvinism than in Lutheranism (126–127). Calvinism is

important not only because it was so influential in the

Netherlands and England (where it “descended as frost on the

life of ‘Merrie old Endland’) but also because it was

imported to the United States as Puritanism and, therefore,

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was very influential in the development of the doctrine of

political liberalism now exported by globalization to the

rest of the world (155, 163). Thanks to the influence of

Calivinism, Puritanism was hostile to “all the sensuous and

emotional elements in culture and in religion” since they

lead to “sentimental illusions”, hence the pessimistic

version of individualism borne forth by Puritanism (105).

Emotion is still allowed in Pietism and Methodism and more

so in Lutheranism (139). It is no surprise that such

unenjoyable life leads to a higher rate of suicides, the

thesis defended by Durkheim.

There are differences in the authors’ approach,

however. While Weber emphasizes Reformation’s substitution

of the lax control exhibited by the Catholic Church by the

rationalization and regulation of the “whole of the conduct”

“infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced” (36),

Durkheim describes a looser connection of the individual to

the rest of the society (214–215). In other words, for

Weber, the Protestant’s behavior was highly regulated and

controlled by the society. The individual had the moral duty

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to educate himself or herself on the precepts of God’s word

as opposed to being a passive receiver of canonical truths

from Catholic priests. For Durkheim, the Protestant is

alienated from his or her fellow comrades and is imprisoned

in the cell of endless existential doubts and searches.

Similar to Max Weber, Charles Taylor, one of the main

voices in political theory of today, sees a connection

between religion and nationalism, in his book A Secular Age,

through the rise of individualism during the Reformation,

which reinforced many Christian beliefs and practices that

were adhered to before but not strictly. Similar to Weber,

Taylor describes the arrival of monasticism to the ordinary

life (266). He views pre-Christian societies as tribal and

organized by religion, which interlinked social life and

language as a means of communication (147). In those

societies individuals in modern sense did not exist, one

could simply not imagine oneself as not part of society

(150). Religious canons were often codified as laws of the

people and thus served as the basis for the group identity,

which surpassed that of the tribe and was centered on

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religion, which defined the group “since time out of mind”

or since the times that any one could effectively remember

(163)In modern times, the relationship between laws and the

group identity was reversed: laws came to be used

instrumentally to organize individual wills as oppose to

define people as a whole (165).

Taylor also notices that the modern group identity that

came out of the Reformation was split: on one hand, we

observe an identity based on the primacy of the individual

as during the Glorious Revolution and the US independence.

On the other hand, another version of group identity

develops, the one based on the primacy of the collective

over the individual as articulated by Rousseau (202). Whie

Taylor does not explicitly describe these two currents as

competing, it can be deduced from his narrative. For

example, Taylor links the collectivist current to Leninist

Communism (207). The first current later picked up by neo-

Stoics and Locke is concerned with the primacy of mind over

heart, of controlling the passions. The second current

resurrected pagan centrality of emotion to the religious

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experience of communion with God through linking with other

people (278–279). Orthodox Christianity was similar to the

second current, it saw the church as a network society where

the group identity is no longer mediated by kinship (282).

Citizenship is based on agape and not on categories of

similarities as prescribed by the first, individualistic,

current. Modernization based on the ideas of taking the

Bible more strictly, reinforced such understanding of group

identity.

Similar to Kohn’s original thesis mentioned earlier,

Taylor supports the connection between ethnically-inclusive

nationalism and Stoic-Judeo-Christian routes. Stoics

envisioned the whole world as one polis (Taylor underlined

that they still had to think in terms of “polis”), human

solidarity was for them “species-wide” (246). Christian

theology continued this tradition through its vision of a

“super-community of all the children of God” (ibid). Taylor

pinpoints where the idea of ethnic inclusion comes from –

the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. By

teaching that one’s ingroup member is not one’s religious

33

leader but a despised foreigner with a kind heart, Jesus

promoted a “mutual fittingness which is not based on

kinship. Modernity propelled by the Reformation and the

return to the Bible reinforced this idea away from tribal

affiliations toward a vision of all of the humanity as one

nation (738–739).

To return to the perspective offered by Hastings and

Myhill, the role of the Reformation is less clear in

Hastings’s account. He writes that the Reformation diffused

the Bible widely by encouraging the translation of it into

vernaculars, so the influence of the Biblical nation on the

imagination of the population became more pronounced. In

Protestant England, the concept of the nation was

unquestionably in “full public consciousness” by the 16th

century(18–19). The main impact of Protestantism was to

merge mass primary education, vernacular culture and

political authority giving birth to the nation-state (25).

It refuted the dualism of national-international clearly

making a choice for the former (203). In other words, the

inherent contradiction between the Old Testament and its

34

chosen nation of Israel and the New Testament and Jesus’s

universalist call became apparent and created a split in the

Protestant mind: spiritually, Protestants were universalist

but politically, nationalist (205). Yet we expected a fuller

account of the role of Protestantism in the rise of modern

nationalism characterized by the nation-state, capitalism

and liberal democracy, and it is absent in this book.

For Myhill, Reformation’s importance is in its idea of

bringing the word of God to the masses and allowing them to

read it in their native language thus going away from Roman

European standard of universality and thus joining with the

long-standing tradition of Eastern churches: both Orthodox

and Protestants preferred “small” languages, which, he

claims, led to successful nationalist movements vs. the ones

based on “big” languages. This leads to the main value of

this book: its explanation of the origins of the

ethnic/civic dichotomy. Other religion and nationalism

scholars have their own theories: Conzemius times their

split to the Enlightenment that distinguished the German

strand as articulated by Herder and Hegel and the French one

35

(18). Schneider points out the theological origins of the

concept of the nation developed by French philosophes –

since the Middle Ages corpus mysticum designated the mystical

community of those who believe in Christ (39). Similarly,

O’Brien describes the rival versions of the modern nation in

France and Germany, which he calls political and cultural

nationalisms (O’Brien 2).

Other nationalism scholars continue the discussion of

the role of religion in the rise of nationalism. In

particular, many authors emphasize the tension between the

universal and the particular, which made Christianity

qualitatively different from its main competitor, the Islam.

The latter offered no particular dimension focusing on the

universal one of umma only, which explains the latent

character of Muslim nationalisms that only developed as

reaction to Christian ones (Sardar 105).

At the core of this difference lies the distinction of

the language. Quran treats Arabic as sacred since it was

dictated by the prophet of God, while Christianity from the

very beginning lacked the sacred language dimension. While

36

Latin replaced Greek by the 4th century in Western Roman

Empire as the language of liturgy (Conzemius 15) vernacular

translations of the Bible started to appear and, as John

Myhill describes, whole national churches were established

in premodern times on the territory of Eastern Roman Empire.

Jesus’s message was universal: he cherished Gentiles as much

as the Jews and taught that God cannot be understood in

particularistic terms (Conzemius 14).

Islam has a three-dimensional view of communal

identity: neighborhood, city and universal. Nations and

tribes are recognized but nationalism and tribalism are not

(Sardar 103). Prophet Muhammad “spent his entire life

eradicating tribalism from the Arabian society of his time”

and the emergence of nationalism in the Muslim world is

connected to the process of modernization, as a response to

the Western concept of modernity (Sardar 104). Secular

nationalism’s failure in the Muslim world is symbolized by

fundamentalism (Sardar 106).

The authors working on the relationship of religion and

nationalism pay a special attention to the particularistic

37

interpretation of the Jewish nation in the Old Testament, a

collection of Jewish writings adopted by the Christian

church. Yet none mention that Judaism was innovative and

stood apart from other religions of the Middle East by its

insistence on monotheism, which may explain the sense of

being a people chosen by God, which permeates the text of

the Old Testament. The New Testament breaks with the

“combination of religion with nationalism” (Coleman 4)but

then Christianity is adopted as the official religion of the

Roman Empire and it becomes “territorialized” (Coleman 11).

Old Testament nationalism is deemphasized because of its

rejection in the New Testament (Coleman 26). The concept of

the holy people reemerges in what Coleman calls “holy

nationalism of France (Coleman 19) as well as Germans,

English and Americans.

The authors are in agreement that Reformation under

Luther and Calvin reignited the Old Testament literal

interpretations of the Bible and with it the sense of the

Chosen Nation (Coleman 26). New England became the new

Promised Land (Coleman 33) soon joined by France inspired by

38

Rousseau who was brought up in Calvinist Geneva (Coleman 50,

63).

4. The Ethnic/Civic Dichotomy and Capitalism

While the rise of capitalism is a part of the modern

development, its connection to the rise of nationalism is

harder to pinpoint from the existing literature. Bruce

Carruthers and Liah Greenfeld explore what are commonly

thought as the first cases of capitalist states: the

Netherlands and England in their respective works City of

Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution and Spirit of

Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (the latter addresses a

plethora of other cases of countries where capitalism spread

to but this analysis uses only the English and Dutch cases

for the purposes of comparison). Carruthers describes the

rise of stock market in England and makes a case for it

being driven by not only economic but also by political

motivations. Greenfeld goes even further by claiming that

39

capitalism emerged as a result of nationalism. Carruthers

focuses on ethnic concepts of collective identity and

Greenfeld on civic.

Both authors recognize the supremacy of the English

case, England being the first country to transition from

feudalism to capitalism (139) but at the same time they

admit that before England, the Netherlands reached financial

supremacy in the world. Carruthers calls the Dutch “the

paragons of indifference” trading with the enemies of their

country (23). Neither religion nor politics interfered with

their trade and the pursuit of profits (Carruthers 171) but

in England a different situation emerged according to

Carruthers where the rise of the political parties of the

Tories and the Whigs made politics come before economics

breaking the Law of Indifference, which states that money is

green and a rational traders trades with anyone who offers

an attractive price (19). At the heart of his thesis is

ethnicity manifested not linguistically but religiously in a

phenomenon he calls “political endogamy” where traders only

trade within a certain group excluding others (Carruthers

40

180). The ethnoreligious minorities of Jews, Huguenots and

Quakers “socialized, married, and worshiped among

themselves” (Carruthers 183). But most importantly, they

also traded among themselves in an effort to support the war

against Catholic France, which these groups of religious

minorities wholeheartedly supported (Carruthers 193). All of

them had suffered from the “militant Catholicism” (ibid).

Greenfeld’s bold thesis puts nationalism first and

capitalism second reversing the common structuralist

explanation for the rise of capitalism, which they believe

to have been the cause for the rise of nationalism (The

spirit of capitalism 4). Nationalism, defined as “a unique form of

social consciousness”, first arose in England, she argues,

by 1600 and from there spread to the Continent and the New

World (The spirit of capitalism 2). Nationalism begot capitalism,

in its turn defined as an economic model oriented toward

growth (she agrees with this definition suggested by Max

Weber) (The spirit of capitalism 4). Her account is, however,

inconsistent and disappointing in many respects leaving one

with many unanswered questions.

41

The biggest question left unanswered is “Why England?”

Why was it in England that individualism reached such

heights? One expects the 900-page volume to answer this

basic and crucial question but it doesn’t. Greenfeld

convincingly draws attention to the role of individualism in

the rise of capitalism and connects it to Protestantism and

Max Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism but unfortunately fails to build

on the role of religion in the rise of nationalism and

capitalism. From her account and her analysis of the debate

on modernization it becomes clear that there came a moment

in history when the mentality of people changed and the new

economic way of looking at life set in some time in the 17th

century (The spirit of capitalism 15). A few concepts became

prominent: individualism, eventual secularism and

“rationalization” or “ordering reality”, emphasis on

economic well-being and equality of all people in a given

collectivity (The spirit of capitalism 13). Greenfeld summarizes

the critiques of Weber and finds that the essence of his

theory -- his claim that the emergence of new economy was

42

brought about by a “new set of motivations and ethics” –

still stands (The spirit of capitalism 16).

But what gave this process its impetus? It is hard to

avoid the conclusion that it was Protestant Reformation that

started it all. We have to remember that at that time

atheism practically didn’t exist. Even most Enlightenment

scholars believed in God. The process that separated the

individual from the community must have been very impactful,

a real “conceptual revolution” (The spirit of capitalism 31).

Beliefs are powerful and are deeply ingrained. They motivate

human behavior. It must have been a tremendous change to

switch the motivation from obedience to God as represented

by the Church and replace it with the pursuit of material

well-being. But what was the actual mechanism that made the

difference in the motivations of people? Tawney’s Religion and

the Rise of Capitalism described by Greenfeld reverses Weber’s

thesis centering it on individualism and “the egoistic

pursuit of one’s material self-interest” (The spirit of capitalism

17). Protestantism, according to him, prepared the way for

the commercial civilization. The collectivist aspect of

43

Puritanism slowly dropped off as secularism came into

prominence (The spirit of capitalism 19).

Unfortunately, Greenfeld provides no satisfactory

reasons for the rise of capitalism in England. She claims it

was individualistic nationalism that arose in the 16th

century that led to capitalism (The spirit of capitalism 26) but

why did individualistic nationalism arise in England?

According to her, the new English nation was eventually

described by Adam Smith who based it on the concept of man

as a rational being in the image of God and, therefore,

equal and free by definition (The spirit of capitalism 32). His

eloquent elaboration of the already existent English

nationalism, supposedly, led to the commercial revolution

that took over the world. While it is theoretically possible

that the ideas of one person made the “conceptual

revolution”, it seems highly unlikely in the case of Adam

Smith but very likely in the case of Martin Luther and Jean

Calvin. Greenfled herself admits that it is not clear why,

according to Smith, competition in Britain was “freer” than

in other places (The spirit of capitalism 33). Yet it all comes

44

down to nationalism, which was “the ethical motive force

behind the modern economy of growth” (The spirit of capitalism 55).

At the end of her analysis of the British case she

returns to the importance of Protestantism, but, again,

fails to capitalize on it (The spirit of capitalism 44).

Thankfully, she gives the Dutch case its justice admitting

that it was the United Provinces and not the United Kingdom

that was the “first world economic hegemon” (The spirit of

capitalism 59), which actually weakens her case of English

nationalism leading to capitalism. Greenfeld points out the

“oppressing and alienating” religious intolerance in the

Netherlands almost from the moment Luther mailed his Ninety-

five These to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg”

but fails to connect Reformation to the economic miracle of

the Dutch Republic, the first officially Protestant state

par excellence if we do not count Henry VII’s England (The

spirit of capitalism 70). It emerged in 1647 as the political

leader and economic miracles closely watched by England (The

spirit of capitalism 73). It was the first entity, confirms

Greenfeld, that experienced the “financial revolution” (The

45

spirit of capitalism 78). Greenfeld mentions the decline of the

Netherlands in the 1650s but again provides no explanation

of it. She refutes the thesis proposed by Pieter Geyl’s The

History of the Dutch Race that nationalism existed in the

Netherlands before the 80-year war in spite of it possibly

helping her own thesis of nationalism leading to capitalism.

In this case, she would have to admit that England was not

the first one to experience nationalism (The spirit of capitalism

90). Her claim that “there was no national consciousness in

the Dutch Republic” seems dubious at best and misleading at

worst (The spirit of capitalism 96). She does admit the centrality

of Protestantism, however, to the emerging Dutch identity,

which was religious at the end of the 17th century when in

England religion was “already dispatched to the dustbin of

history” (The spirit of capitalism 99). The Dutch were defined by

their special relationship to God (The spirit of capitalism 100).

As her final major point on the Dutch case, she admits that

Dutch capitalism was “Tawney’s kind of capitalism” of

individualism “uninhibited by moral scruples and social

concerns” (The spirit of capitalism 104).

46

Other inconsistencies abound in Greenfeld – a good

example is her explanation for the rise of the types of

nationalism. Her account posits that the first nation, the

English, was individualistic (“the society was envisioned as a

collection of individuals”) and civic (“membership in the

nation depends on one’s will to be a member”) as opposed to

later interpretations of the concept that were collectivistic

(the nation is a “collective individual” and takes

precedence over the wills of individuals) and/or ethnic

(national membership is “genetic and transmitted by blood

and independent of one’s will”) (The spirit of capitalism 2–3). But

if “the most common variety of nationalism” is

collectivistic-ethnic, why did individualistic nationalism

arise in Britain and why did it lose its individualism as it

spread elsewhere becoming a minority type (The spirit of capitalism

3)? This one and other questions remain unanswered.

Conclusion

47

The recent historiographical research as well as the

revisiting of the classics of modern political thought

suggest that the ethnic/civic nationalism’s roots are

premodern and firmly connected to the history of

Christianity in the European civilization. The relationship,

together with the concept of the nation, was transformed

with the onset of modernity, which delinked Christianity and

nationalism resulting in two competing ideas of collective

identification, individualistic and collectivistic. It is

the latter that retained its connection to ethnicity while

the former abandoned it altogether. Natio and ta ethne were

once again revised in the Western political development but

the essence of them stayed the same: a collective identity

based on will versus the one based on blood. Liberalism

incorporated the former and shunned the latter as does

liberal democracy but the historical perspective predicts

that the tension is far from being over: ethnicity has much

older history and arouses a much stronger emotional bond.

48

49

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