The Pitfall of Primordialism
Due to how endemic nations and nationalism have become to the modern world, contemporary historians have made a great effort to investigate where nations originate. These historians have overthrown primordial understandings of an “eternal” nation with the newfound constructivist framework. Rather than viewing nationalism as a historical given, constructivists advocate for the understanding of nationalism as a process of creating an “imagined community” rooted in a mythological collective past. However, on the fringes of this growing academic community of constructivists lies the perennialist Anthony Smith. Smith’s framework attempts to add some nuance to the constructivist viewpoint by compromising it with certain elements of primordialism. Nevertheless, by overlooking the inherent arbitrariness of national myth-making and asserting a primordial “ethnie” at the center of national identity, Smith effectively stifles the historian’s crucial role as a deconstructor of dangerous national myths.
According to Smith, one of the core requirements of a nation is its ownership of an “ethnic past,” a process he traces back to what he calls “ethnies” or “ethnic cores” found in medieval times. For a community to be deemed an “ethnie” by Smith is for it to possess six primary characteristics: a common name, a myth of common origin, common historical memories, a “homeland,” an element of common culture (language, customs, or religion), and a sense of solidarity among members of the community. Smith makes a very cogent argument about how modern nations cannot exist without rooting themselves in one of these communities, and that the modern constructivist viewpoint eschews the importance of that community by describing nationalism as entirely “imagined.” However, Smith does not go as far as to say that nations are primordial, eternal categories because of these premodern ethnies. He argues that an ethnie only becomes a nation through one of two processes: either via bureaucratic incorporation, or through the “rediscovery” of the “ethnic past.” The former refers to the process of grafting a peripheral identity onto the dominant ethnic core by state administrative processes; Smith brings up the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Wessex incorporating conquered populations in the Norman Conquest as an example. On the other hand, the “rediscovery” of the “ethnic past” refers to the responsibility of intelligentsia to “rediscover” a compelling “fund of cultural myths, symbols, memories and values” found in ethnies and create a national identity out of that “fund.” He cites the Jewish Zionist project as an example of “rediscovering an ethnic past” due to the dispersion of its community and the responsibility laid on its intelligentsia to synthesize a national identity out of the Jewish “ethnie.” In both of these processes, Smith’s perennialist position is a compromise between pure constructivism and primordialism in understanding the history of the nation.
However, by attempting to compromise between the competing models of constructivism and primordialism, Smith’s theory crucially diminishes the extent of fabrication present in nationalist discourse. Much of Smith’s description of “continuity” with an “ethnic core” parallels the reductionist history of a nationalist narrative. To that point, the more constructivist Etienne Balibar argues that making the ethnic “prehistory” the introduction to the story of nations and nationalism overlooks key differences between pre-national society and post-national society. Many of the events that Smith uses as origins of the nation would more appropriately belong to competing forms of conceptualizing community, such as empire or kinship relations. For the “ethnie” to become a continuous part of “national history,” it would take a highly calculated form of appropriation from nationalists. Because of how deliberate and methodical this retrospective construction of continuity is, Balibar argues that national continuity with an “ethnie” is just as imagined as the existence of that community. However, this is not to say that Smith fails to acknowledge the existence of national mythmaking; he does after all propose the earlier processes of transition from “ethnie” to “nation.” He just critically undervalues how mythological the link between “ethnie” and “nation” really is in his retrospective legitimization of the “ethnie” as the starting point of the history of the nation.
Smith’s theory becomes truly problematic when weighed against the crucial role a historian plays in disintegrating national myths used to rationalize state-sponsored violence and genocide. The myth of a primordial nation is based on the fundamental contrast between “us” and “them”: the members of “our” nation and those “on the other side.” At its worst, this primordial nation yields dehumanizing, fascist nationalism. After all, the age of nations is also the age of two World Wars accompanied with no shortage of ethnic cleansings, genocides, and war crimes. It is in this age where Smith’s slight sin of underselling of the mythological nation becomes a grave one. Consider how Smith’s perennialist vision of the origins of the nation could affect fascist nationalism as opposed to how the constructivist vision could. To any subscriber of the primordial history of the nation, Smith would legitimize that dichotomy of “us” and “them” by claiming that, in fact, the nation is not entirely constructed and is rooted in some authentic “ethnie.” On the other hand, the constructivist historical endeavor could easily lead to greater understanding between conflicting national narratives. In the case of the Armenian Genocide for example, Turkish denialism and the traumatic Armenian narrative could seem entirely irreconcilable. A constructivist dive into the roots of Turkish and Armenian identity and conflict comes far closer to bringing about a mutually reconcilable, but more importantly true, narrative. On the other hand, the perennialist perspective could justify stereotypes associated with primordial Turkish and Armenian nationhood, the Turks depicted as “inherently evil” and Armenians depicted as “subversive rebels” who “got what they deserved.”
Regardless of the framework one uses to understand where nations come from, it is impossible to deny the emotional power that national stories yield. At a time where politicians wield the myth of a primordial nation to justify hatred and violence, historians hold a highly crucial role as deconstructors of these myths. By proliferating stories that break down the power held by the primordial nation, historians have the potential to bring communities closer to empathy and mutual understanding. However, perhaps entirely inadvertently, Anthony Smith stands in the way of that goal. What begins as a simple shift of focus in his story of where the nation comes from descends into yielding dangerous ramifications in terms of human lives.
Bibliography
Balibar, Etienne. “The Nation Form: History and Ideology.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 132-150. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
Smith, Anthony D. “The Origins of Nations.” In Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley & Ron Suny, 106-131. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
Suny, Ronald. “Truth in Telling: Reconciling Realities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians.” American Historical Review Forum, 2009.
