The Mythical Motherland
Benedict Anderson’s seminal “Imagined Communities” adds a great deal of depth to the continuously revised story of where the nation comes from. In it, Anderson argues that a nation is “ultimately an imagined community, imagined as sovereign and limited.” For a group of people to conceive of themselves as, first and foremost, members of a “nation” before any other category of identification requires a precise set of historical processes. While Anderson articulates the means by which the imagination of a nation became possible on the large scale observable today, he forgoes analysis of one major factor to the success of any imagined nation - a compelling national “myth” rooted in a newfound politicization of language, history, race, and sets of “values.” Two key processes underlie the success, or lack thereof, in synthesizing the imagined community of a nation: the creation of an emotive myth by a national intelligentsia, and the effective, consistent proliferation of that myth throughout a given populace.
The process of creating the myth of a nation is an extremely calculated negotiation of what constitutes “national identity.” The elements of a national myth can include language, race, religion, historical events, and perhaps even abstract values. National intelligentsia then pick and choose which among these categories to politicize and make essential to the constitution of a new nation. This process of picking and choosing explains the variety in global national discourses, of which two broad and mutually inclusive categories can be formed: civic and ethnic nations. For instance, French philosopher Ernest Renan believes that the nation excludes race, language, religion, and geography. Instead, he believes a nation to be “a soul, a spiritual principle” that functions as a result of a collection of shared memories and the consent of its members to live amongst one another. This national myth of Revolutionary France is clearly a more civic one, rooted in two key principles: consenting to equality under citizenship, and the collective negative memory of an hierarchical pre-Revolutionary France. The 19th-century German national myth, on the other hand, constitutes a clear case of an ethnic nation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte argues for a primordial German national identity rooted in German language, ethnicity, and geography, the appeal of which is easily found in the ashes of premodern Prussian divisions. Ultimately despite their different ideologies and historical circumstances, the makeups of “German” and “French” national identities consist of elements put together meticulously by a group of intellectuals in hopes of imagining a new community for the populace.
Equally crucial to the synthesis of a national myth is the effective proliferation of that myth. After all, the creation of a myth is completely useless if it does not resonate on a large enough scale to start a mass nationalist movement. For that reason, it is important to conceptualize national movements as a process of proliferation. To examine this process, Miroslav Hroch combines history and empirical social science in his studies of Eastern European nationalist movements. His examination results in the division of national development into three stages: phase A is the aforementioned elaboration of national ideology by the intelligentsia, phase B is the development of a nationalist network, and phase C is the phase of serious nationalist mobilization. The means by which phase A progresses into phases B and C is the primary concern of this second stage of national mythmaking. Benedict Anderson argues that print capitalism plays a crucial role here, as the proliferation of newspapers and literature make possible the grasping of the national community. For example, reading about a robbery that occurs in another city within the nation reinforces to a reader the existence of members of the nation despite the reader’s inability to see them. To further spread the mythos of the nation, Uffe Østergaard argues for the essential existence of public schooling systems that reinforce populistic national myths. He cites the example of popularizing Danish national identity via public schooling systems that heavily incorporate NFS Grundtvig, widely seen as the father of Danish nationalism, in their curricula. Ultimately, what both print capitalism and Grundtvigian schools have in common is the mobility of the national myth. If the proliferation of national mythos fails to occur, the intelligentsia might as well had not gone through the trouble of creating a national myth to begin with.
To illustrate how crucial both of these stages are to successfully constructing a national identity, it may help to look at an example of a failed national myth: Reza Shah’s modern Iran. There are perhaps no more dramatic examples of a rupture of national identity than the Islamic Revolution of 1979, cited among the French and Russian revolutions as one of the most popular mass movements in modernity. While many factors underlie the ascendancy of the revolution, it must be noted that it would have been impossible if not for the failure of the Pahlavi Dynasty to both synthesize and promulgate a national myth. For one, Reza Shah’s conception of the Iranian identity exists as an idealized Zoroastrian Iran set against the backdrop of negative Arab influence of the Muslim conquests. While this myth perpetuated itself for four decades, its initial success should not necessarily be accredited to its populistic hold as much as it should be to autocratic repression stifling a cascading mass movement. This mass movement finds its roots in the cultural hegemony of Shia Islam in Iran, of which over 90% of the population was affiliated with. The Shah’s myth of secular “modern” Iran was simply far outpaced in creation and proliferation by the competing myth of an Islamic Iran, led by prominent cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. Not only do mosques throughout Iran make the proliferation of the Islamic model highly effective, but Khomeini’s narrative simply holds far more populistic appeal. More importantly, Khomeini effectively exploited the failure of the Shah’s narrative due to popular disillusionment with rampant corruption and the “Westernizing” nature of the Pahlavi dynasty. Therefore, by 1979, Reza Shah’s brand of Iranian nationalism collapsed entirely. Case in point: an effectively created and proliferated national myth must be able perpetuate itself against all competing imagined communities if it is to stand the test of time.
The nation simply cannot exist without its mythos. Whether that mythos includes a homeland, collective consciousness of certain dates and times, a central ethnicity, or an overemphasis on certain values, its existence is crucial for the national community to be imagined. However, for the story of a nation to exist is for it to appear outside the inner circles of intellectuals and elites; national stories must proliferate to allow for a collective conception of an “imagined community.” Because of the populistic nature that these stories must hold, they tend to create the emotional weight of nationalism. After all, without an existential national myth that explains away identity and community, the zealous patriot would be utterly confounded and confused. It is for this reason that modern scholarship has rightfully found reason to be wary of the power of nationalist discourse. Such myths carry more than enough emotional fervor to make the imagined nation carry the cultural and political hegemony that it does today.
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1983.
Axworthy, Michael. Revolutionary Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Fichte, Johann G. “Thirteenth Address.” In Addresses to the German Nation, ed. George A. Kelly. New York: Harper Torch Books, 1968
Hroch, Miroslav. “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 60-78. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
Østergård, Uffe. “Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 179-202. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 42-56. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
Suny, Ronald. “Theoretical Approaches to Nationalism.” Lecture given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, September 2018.
