Nations and Nationalism since 1780

If nations follow nationalism, the obvious question is: who was doing the making, and why? A large part of Hobsbawm's answer is the modern state itself. As governments in the nineteenth century grew more ambitious — collecting taxes, conscripting armies, running schools, laying railways — they needed populations that were legible, loyal, and able to talk to one another. A patchwork of local dialects and local loyalties was, from the state's point of view, an administrative problem to be solved.

So the state set about solving it. Take language. In 1861, at Italian unification, only a small fraction of people on the peninsula actually spoke Italian in daily life — estimates put it at a few percent. The rest spoke regional tongues often unintelligible to one another. The famous line attributed to the era's politicians — we have made Italy, now we must make Italians — captures the whole logic. The state existed before the nation, and then had to produce the nation to justify the state.

A weakness in any top-down story is that it can make nations sound like a trick played on a passive population. Hobsbawm is too good a historian for that. He devotes real attention to the question that keeps his argument honest: when did ordinary people actually start to feel national, and why did the feeling take hold so hard? A project run by elites explains the supply of nationalism. It does not, on its own, explain the demand.

He sketches a rough sequence, borrowing a scheme from the historian Miroslav Hroch. First a small circle of scholars and enthusiasts take a cultural interest in a people — its songs, its grammar, its past. Then a wider group of activists turns that interest into a political campaign. Only in a third phase does the idea reach the mass of the population and become something people will vote for, march for, and fight for. Most of the nineteenth century, in his telling, is spent in the first two phases; the mass phase comes late, often only around 1900 and after.

Step back from the nineteenth-century detail and a stranger fact comes into view. If the nation is this recent, this assembled, this dependent on schools and censuses and invented anthems, why does it feel so completely natural to almost everyone who lives inside one? Hobsbawm's answer is that the feeling of antiquity is not a bug in nationalism. It is the mechanism. A nation only works if its members forget it was made — if the manufactured past is experienced as simply the past, and the border as simply where the world was always divided.

This is why he returns, near the end, to Renan's uncomfortable line about getting your history wrong. Forgetting is load-bearing. A nation has to misremember its own origins, smoothing over the conquests, the coercions, and the sheer contingency that produced it, because remembering too clearly would expose the joins. The sense of a people stretching back into the mists is precisely the illusion the whole apparatus exists to sustain, and it sustains it remarkably well.

Hobsbawm set out to reverse a story we tell ourselves without noticing. Nations do not precede nationalism and then awaken to claim their rights; the movement, the state, and the historical uncertainties of the modern world come first, and the nation is what they produce. Language academies, schoolrooms, conscription, censuses, and freshly minted traditions did the assembling, mostly within the last two centuries. That an identity so young should feel so old is not a failure of memory but the very condition on which the whole thing rests.