"Nationalism: A Short History"

Yet another Christmas gift read. This one, Nationalism: A Short History (Brookings Press 2019) by Liah Greenfeld was a gift from Attilio and Lisa. Although published four years ago, this short (134 pages of text plus six more of notes) was originally written as of 2008. Nationalism serves two purposes: to bring Greenfeld's magnum opus (Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992)) up to more recent times, and to distill it into something that could be assigned to the contemporary sort of undergraduate student.

Greenfeld is a sociological sort of historian so it's with her typology of nationalisms that I will begin. All nationalisms fall into one of four kinds: individualistic-civic (England, thence to America), collectivistic-civic (France), collectivist-ethnic (Germany of the Second and Third Reichs as well as Russia), and individualistic-ethnic (seemingly a null set). Common among all nationalisms is the notion of an entire (thus equalized, dignitized, and, in some sense, sovereign) people unified from top to bottom. Whether an entire people is equalized in terms of liberties, the volonté générale, or the volk, the nation became central to one's identity. Feudal classes weakened and frayed as both king and subjects alike were transformed into citizens. Nations could be organized politically in terms of liberalism (if of the civic sorts) or authoritarianism (for ethnic-centric nations). Thus, on Greenfeld's account political liberalism is downstream of nationalism. Ditto for science, secularism, capitalism, and socialism.

Greenfeld's historical accountings in Nationalism are insightful and plausible but not entirely persuasive. Nationalism in Greenfeld's telling was the creation of the early Tudor monarchs. During the fifteenth century War of the Roses, the Plantagenet line of William and those of his barons were nearly extinguished. Henry VII and his long-reigning son thus had something of a free hand to create the nation of England. Friends of the early Tudors replaced the older feudal lords and even commoners could move up the social hierarchy. The execution of Charles I for treason a century later added an exclamation point to reduction of royal status to citizenship.

While I have been critical of reducing history to little more than a succession of ideas, Greenfeld's sociological bent goes to the other extreme. Greenfeld gives some props to the Protestant Reformation and the democratizing effects of the doctrine of the priesthood of believers. Yet she omits any references to the feudal-destroying effects of the 14th century Black Death and the nationalizing tendencies of the 15th century Conciliar Movement, both ably explained by Heiko Oberman in The Two Reformations. Similarly, Greenfeld omits the nationalism-reinforcing effects of what Philip Gorski describes in The Disciplinary Revolution. In short, she needs more Charles Taylor.

I don't know enough about French, German, or Russian history to evaluate Greenfeld's argument for the forms that nationalism took in those nations. I found her distinction between the civic collectivism of France and the ethnic nationalisms of German and Russia to be insightful. The former also characterized fascist Spain and Italy, which prompts her to decry the successful efforts of the Left to conflate fascism and Naziism.

Greenfeld's discussion of the spread of nationalism to non-Western cultures is provocative but only with respect to Japan does she attempt to fill in the historical dots. And even though she assigns a place to monotheistic religions in the deep background of nationalism, Nationalism has nothing to say about the subject in the Islamic world.

In short, Nationalism is engaging and provocative. While I am not fully persuaded by Greenfeld's historical arguments, they helped me appreciate more clearly the absurdity of America's continuing efforts to export "American values" to nations whose imaginaries of nationalism share little with our own.