Adrian Hastings - The construction of nationhood. ethnicity, religion, and nationalism

The Construction of Nationhood

The 1996 Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast

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This is a thorough re-analysis of both nationalism and nations. It challenges the current 'modernist' orthodoxies of such writers as Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, and it offers a systematic critique of Hobsbawm's best-selling Nations and nationalism since 1780.

In opposition to books which limit nations and nationalism to the eighteenth century and after, as an aspect of 'modernisation', Professor Hastings argues for a medieval origin to both, dependent upon biblical religion and the development of vernacular literatures. While theorists of nationhood have paid mostly scant attention to England, the development of the nation-state is seen here as central to the subject, but the analysis is carried forward to embrace many other examples, including Ireland, the South Slavs and modern Africa, before concluding with an overview of the impact of religion, contrasting Islam with Christianity.

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The Construction of Nationhood

Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism

Adrian Hastings

University of Leeds

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PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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© Cambridge University Press 1997

This edition © Cambridge University Press (Virtual Publishing) 2001

This book is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1997

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Bembo

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Hastings, Adrian

The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism / Adrian Hastings. p. cm. (The Wiles lectures given at the Queen's University of Belfast)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 59391 3 (hardcover)

1. Nationalism History. 2. Nationalism Religious aspects.

3. Hobsbawm, E.J. (Eric.), 1917 . Nations and nationalism since 1780. I. Title. II. Series: Wiles lectures.

JC311.H346 1997 320.54-dc21 97-7039 CIP

ISBN 0 521 59391 3 hardback

ISBN 0 521 62544 0 paperback

eISBN 0511003765 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

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For

Janet Boyd

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Contents

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Preface

This book is based on the Wiles Lectures which I had the honour to give at The Queen's University of Belfast in May 1996. I have first to thank the ViceChancellor and the Wiles Trustees, in particular Professor David Hempton, head of the Queen's School of History, Professor Terence Ranger, Professor Ian Kershaw and Trevor Boyd for the invitation to deliver them. It is the particular attraction of the Wiles Lectures that a group of distinguished historians from other universities are invited to Belfast for the week in which they are given, to discuss each lecture after dinner that evening with the Trustees and selected members of Queen's academic staff. The guests for 1996 were Professor Tom Bartlett, Dr Kim Knott, Professor Hugh McLeod, Professor John Peel, Dr Eamon Duffy, Dr Scott Thomas, Professor Sean Connolly and Professor Mark Noll. Discussing nationalism in Belfast, especially if one is an Englishman, might be compared, I remarked at the beginning of my second lecture, with the situation of Daniel in the den of lions, but, as I added, the point of the Daniel story was that the lions proved wonderfully friendly and so did the academics of Belfast. Their discussion was no less stimulating for that.

I am most grateful to Dr Ian Green and Professor Peel for subsequently letting me read chapters from forthcoming works. I must also express my most sincere thanks for comments, advice and information provided by Branka Magas, Noel Malcolm, Tudor Griffiths, Brigid Allen, Lesley Johnson, Frank Felsenstein and Martin Butler. I owe a very great deal to Ann, my wife, for listening over the preceding months, suppertime after suppertime, to my rehearsing the developing argument of the lectures. Ingrid Lawrie, once again, has typed and retyped versions of both lectures and book with a

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precision, a promptitude and an eye for small mistakes which make it her book as well as mine.

Janet Boyd established the Wiles Lectures forty years ago in memory of her father, Thomas Shires Wiles of Albany, New York, an inventor of genius, to whom we owe the washing machine. They have ever since proved a wonderful enrichment of the culture both of Belfast and of the world. It is a huge privilege to have been brought into the truly ecumenical circle created by this annual series ever since the first were given by Herbert Butterfield in 1954 on Man and his Past. If the frontiers of the present book may seem absurdly wide to the eye of the modern specialist historian, I can only plead both that the subject chosen requires this sort of range of comparison across centuries and continents, and that the Wiles Lectures have as an essential purpose the discussion of broad issues relating to the general history of civilisation. Butterfield dedicated Man and his Past to Janet Boyd. Since then she has attended every series and for me it added greatly to the occasion to see her, at each lecture, now in her nineties, listening attentively in the front row. Seldom can a patron of modern scholarship have found so continuously creative a manner of furthering the cause, yet the Wiles Lectures are only one of many ways in which her Quaker conscience has contributed to the furtherance of understanding and peace. It is a very great pleasure and honour to be able to dedicate this book to Janet Boyd.

Most of what is here printed was written before the lectures were given, though only parts could be presented in the time. The whole has since been thoroughly revised. Chapter 1 represents the core of Lecture 1; chapters 2 and 3, Lecture 2; chapters 6 and 7, Lecture 3; and chapter 8, Lecture 4.

Only when the revision was finally complete did Lesley Johnson draw my attention to the recent work of Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 12901340 (Clarendon Press, 1996), whose profound and subtle learning supports the main thrust of the argument of chapters 1 and 2. While I have altered nothing in my own text, I am very happy to signal here the appearance of this important book.

LEEDS

DECEMBER 1996

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Chapter One

The Nation and Nationalism

I

Nation, ethnicity, nationalism and religion are four distinct and determinative elements within European and world history. Not one of these can be safely marginalised by either the historian or the politician concerned to understand the shaping of modern society. These four are, moreover, so intimately linked that it is impossible, I would maintain, to write the history of any of them at all adequately without at least a fair amount of discussion of the other three. That is a central contention of this book and it stands in some disagreement with much modern writing both about nationalism and about religion. The aim of this first chapter is sixfold: to set out my own position, to provide a review of recent literature, to establish the sense of an emerging schism in this field between what we may call, for simplicity's sake, modernists and revisionists, to explore the history of the word 'nation' and to lead on from there, through an analysis of the relationship between language and society, to a larger discussion of the nature of both the nation and nationalism.

When I chose this subject I thought that in developing my theme I would be able to begin by largely adopting the viewpoint of recent studies of nationalism and go on from there to insert within it the somewhat neglected dimension of religion. In particular, I naturally intended to take as a starting point Eric Hobsbawm's Wiles Lectures of 1985 on Nations and Nationalism since 1780 1 as probably the most influential explicitly historical discussion of nationalism in recent years.

However I quickly realised that my own understanding of nationalism differed too profoundly from that of Hobsbawm to make this possible in the way I had hoped. Moreover the very parameters