Just how rooted is Grounded Nationalisms?

Grounded Nationalisms provides its readers with a clear, cogent, and comprehensive theory for understanding nationalism in its many evolving forms. This is quite an accomplishment: a grand theory, if there ever was one, but one that at the same time presents itself quite modestly, matter-of-factly. Grounded Nationalisms’ power lies in its economical distillation of nationalism into its core parts and essential workings, thereby unmasking the underlying the key processes, practices, and structures that explain its emergence, reproduction, and perpetuation. Maleševič’s analysis gives us the structures of nationalism, the institutional edifices upon which nations are built and the organisational routines through which they’re reproduced; it gives us the ideas of nationalism, the ideologies, cultures, symbols, and myths through which nationalism is expressed and nations enter our lives as common sense; and it gives us the agency of nationalism, the micro-interactional processes and practices through which the people in whose name nationalism speaks become complicit in the production and reproduction of their nations. Whilst other approaches to nationalism remain locked in debates that have defined the field for more than a generation, Maleševič somehow stands above the fray, engaging with the debates without being beholden to them. Rather, the existing scholarship on nationalism, and the debates it contains, provide Maleševič with a springboard for elaborating his own original approach to nationalism.

Maleševič is aided in this pursuit by also looking beyond the scholarship on nationalism for further inspiration, branching out to the foundations of sociological theory to explain the foundations of nationalism. The subtitle of the book, ‘A Sociological Analysis’, is no mere afterthought. Grounded Nationalisms is grounded in sociological theory. This is useful in reminding us that organisations, ideologies, and interactions are not intrinsically national; rather, under specific historical circumstances, they converge to produce national content. These are the extrinsic forces of nationalism at work and play, congealing into myriad national forms to respond to ever-changing historical circumstances. This sociological turn in Maleševič’s approach to nationalism affords him a bit more analytical distance from his subject, shifting the focus instead to the social, economic, political, and cultural underpinnings, intricacies, and workings of nationalism in all its myriad forms.

This is a flexible yet durable nationalism, a nationalism that can and does assume multiple forms precisely because it’s grounded in its more stable organisations, ideologies, and interactions. Maleševič outfits his students with the nuts and bolts, the gears and levers of nationalism. His is a theory for the mechanics of nationalism, its machinery – the processes and practices, ideas and structures that drive nationalism and churn out nations in different bespoke forms. This moves us away from some of the more essentialist leanings of ethno-symbolism, where the content – the myths, memories, values, and symbols (Smith, 1986) – drive the form of nationalism. In Maleševič’s equation, it’s the social, political, and economic forms that drive the (national) content. This doesn’t give us a single, national monolith, ruling the world in perpetuity. To the contrary, Maleševič’s nuts and bolts approach allows us to appreciate nationalism’s flexibility, adaptability, and modularity, for multiple contexts and varied purposes. It’s a toolkit that gives us an elastic, shape-shifting nationalism. The same forms – organisations, ideologies, and interactions – can be and are used to produce different national content. The durability of these mechanical forms gives rise to, and indeed explains, the elasticity of its nationalism’s shifting empirical content. There are no new nationalisms, Maleševič pointedly reminds us, only old ones reinvented and creatively adapted to new circumstances.

Maleševič thus presents us with a theory not just for the workings of nationalism, but also for its power and persistence. This is an elastic, accommodating nationalism that works in concert with, and not against, the forces of globalisation and individualisation. It allies itself with empires and imperialisms only to subsume these organising principles and ideologies into its national fold. We can find it in Trump and in Brexit, in populism and the far right. It insinuates itself into modernisation and finds synergies with capitalism. It’s everywhere, making nations the dominant form of social organisation in the world.

But: this thing we made, can it be unmade? What are the limits of nationalism’s elasticity? How far can it be stretched, conceptually, structurally, ideationally, and temporally before it ceases to be something we can convincingly call ‘nationalism’? Perhaps the only weakness of Maleševič’s approach is that it has no weakness – no weakness built into the model for predicting nationalism’s demise, no escape hatch for jettisoning nationalism, no flaw in the system for unravelling nationalism. In developing such a compelling theory for nationalism’s strength, Maleševič has inadvertently revealed his theory’s weakness: Grounded Nationalisms has no exit strategy. Nationalism is being asked to do a lot of work here. Has Maleševič stretched it to thin?

Maleševič has shown us how nations are made and remade through the ages, but he has not shown us how they’re unmade. There’s almost an inexorability to Grounded Nationalisms. Its foes – empires, globalisation, capitalism, and individualism – are either vanquished or befriended by nationalism. Pre-national empires are national works-in-progress, laying the foundations for – ‘grounding’ – the organisational capacities, the nascent ideologies, and micro-interactional lifeworlds that will one day be fully refitted as nations. And even after nation-states leave empires behind as the dominant form of political organisation in the world, nationalism has its way with the symbols, myths, and memories of imperialism to do its post-imperial ideological work. Globalisation and individualisation, nationalism’s sworn enemies, in fact, in Maleševič’s account, work in concert with nationalism to find shared purpose in the redoubling of specifically national subjectivities. And capitalism, rather than dispensing with nationalism as an unwanted relic of the past, finds its imagery and symbolism, its solidarities and attachments useful for selling us things that in turn reinforce our national sensibilities. Even private military and security contractors – today’s for-profit mercenaries – cannot escape nationalism’s grasp. Profit motive or not, these mercenaries are a product of the inescapable organisational structures that socialised them with national ideologies. Their caging in nation-states propels them to do national military work, even when acting ostensibly as soldiers for hire. As Maleševič ominously concludes his book (2019: 279), ‘one simply cannot avoid nationalism.’

That’s a very powerful nationalism. Not only does Maleševič supply us with a cogent and deceptively simple and accessible theoretical framework for understanding the power of nationalism, he goes to the additional trouble of backing it up with solid empirical evidence. Whilst he doesn’t emphasise it, his Grounded Nationalisms is also empirically grounded in the rich evidence he has marshalled to substantiate the conceptual argument of the book. This makes it all the more difficult, however, to imagine where it all might end. Maleševič’s nationalism is unflappable, omniscient. But if we created this nationalism, then when – and how – do we uncreate it, dismantle its gears and levers, or at least refit them for new, non-nationalist purposes? Maleševič is correct that nationalism is self-sustaining, but that doesn’t mean it’s in perpetual motion. Nationalism hasn’t been around forever and won’t be around forever. Under what conditions, then, does it cease re-inventing itself?

This depends in part on how we define the nation. The aim of Grounded Nationalisms, however, is to give us a theory of how nationalism works, not a definition for what a nation is. The closest thing I can find in the book is Maleševič’s definition for nation-states, buried in chapter 3 (2019: 74, quoting Maleševič, 2013: 66): ‘a nation-state is … [a] “secularized social organisation[] with fixed and stable territory and a centralized political authority underpinned by intensive ideological particularism and the promotion of moral egalitarianism, social solidarity and cultural homogeneity among its populace.’ This definition clearly echoes the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional ‘groundings’ of Maleševič’s nationalism, but it still doesn’t allow us to pin down whether all this empirical variation produced by organisations, ideologies, and interactions is, and forever will be, national. If pinning down the features of the nation is what we’re after, then perhaps we should consider Joseph Stalin’s definition ([1913] 2015: 9) of a nation: ‘A nation is an historically constituted, stable community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make up manifested in a common culture.’ Such a definition gives us a convenient laundry list we can check against what we observe in the world so that we can decide whether what we’re seeing are nations. Unfortunately, it also objectifies otherwise historically contingent and empirically specific subjective understandings of the nation, thereby uprooting most of the ‘grounded nationalisms’ appearing in Maleševič’s book. That leaves us with a definition of the nation that emphasises instead the subjective way in which nations are understood. My favourite from this category comes from Hugh Seton-Watson (1977: 5) who arrived at it after meticulously combing through scores of historical cases and modern types of nations from all around the world. ‘All that I can find to say’, he concludes, with just a hint of defeatism, ‘is that a nation exits when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.’ In effect, then, if people imagine themselves as a national community (Anderson, 1991), if they use the language of nations to account for what they’re seeing, doing, and imagining in the world, ‘bring[ing] about what [they] assert[] in the very act of asserting it’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 223; see also Calhoun, 1997: 5), then we, as scholars of nationalism, should take notice. Whilst such a definition is capable of capturing the varied empirical phenomena contained in Maleševič’s book – provided the people he’s talking about regard themselves as nations – it’s also capable of capturing loads of other stuff that similarly stretches our understandings of nations. The problem is that people are imprecise. Their talk about ‘nations’ can, and sometimes does, move outside of the container of the state and venture into supra-state, transnational spaces. Their ideologies of racist exclusion – putatively in the name of their nations – call forth and replace national boundaries with racial ones. And their versions of the nation circulating in everyday talk and interaction are typically attached more to football and food than politics and the state. Here again, just about anything can be a nation, provided someone’s calling it a nation. We come full circle: how far can nationalism be stretched before we should begin turning to other analytical concepts that might be more appropriate for capturing all these varied phenomena?

These are questions I’m asking myself. At a recent symposium at the University of Graz, I had both the pleasure and honour of sharing the floor with Professor Maleševič. When presenting a paper I’m working on with Cynthia Miller-Idriss on how everyday nationalism is changing in the world today (yet another stretching exercise), I quipped that the purpose of our paper was to further our professional careers. Professor Maleševič obligingly smiled, as did a few others. But like all (bad) jokes, there’s a kernel of truth in it, and that is that I – we – do have a professional interest in the future of nationalism, and with that maybe even a proclivity to ‘see’ nationalism where others might not see it. Are we in danger of becoming Seton-Watson’s last surviving seers of nations, who keep banging on about nations and nationalisms, long after everyone else has gone silent? Or, are we the last remaining visionaries, the ones still capable of seeing nations for what they really are, pulling back the veil of obfuscating discourses to expose the nations and nationalism they conceal? For the time being, at least, I for one haven’t given up on nationalism, and am still committed to seeing what it can tell us about our changing world. But one day, nationalism will inevitably lose its elasticity, stretched one too many times, and we will need to turn to new a new conceptual vocabulary for understanding the work being done by organisations, ideologies, and interactions. Until that day, Grounded Nationalisms will help me – and likely many others – with a bit more stretching.