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
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
3
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
4
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
5
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).
6
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
8
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,
11
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
14
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
15
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
17
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
25
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,
29
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
30
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
31
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
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