ernest gellner nations and nationalism summary

This wary eye is also due to the understandable postwar disaffection and unease of many academics towards belief in nationalism (Posen 1993: 80), as well as the dominance over the past half century of more economistic approaches to the study of politics, which readily jell with the modernist approach. Much of the skepticism of theories positing the existence of pre-modern nations centers on the undeniable impact of modern social, economic, and political institutions. Although the fields of history, sociology, and anthropology continue to have vibrant and, in most cases, productive debates concerning the historical origins of nations and nationalism, contemporary IR scholars tend to rely on a relatively thin slice of a very diverse literature and generally accept the perspective of the “modernist” paradigm on the origins of nationalism. The position of each as to the pre-modern or modern etiology of nationalism has been one of the bases for paradigmatic organization. The chapter outlines the interdisciplinary lineage of much contemporary International Relations (IR) work as connected to primordialist, modernist, and ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism.

This review essay surveys scholarly work from the nineteenth century to the present concerning the relationship between modernity and nationalism and its effects on how scholars view the constitutive and causal significance of nationalism for international politics.

Ernest gellner nations and nationalism summary