Nationalism and Modernity

Is Nationalism the offspring of Modernity?

In Nationalism and Modernism^[1] Anthony Smith identifies the “modernist paradigm,” which defines  nationalism as a product of modernity, as the “dominant orthodoxy”, yet one which is challenged by competing paradigms, such as perenialism and primordialism, and his own paradigm, ethno-symbolism.  If there are alternative and competing paradigms, in other words little consensus on this subject between historians, then clearly we are not dealing with a paradigm in the Khunian sense. This is not surprising since although nationalism, as a political and social movement, has had a powerful impact in shaping the political geography of our planet, at least since the late 18th century, much earlier for some historians - a period which has been justifiably labeled the Age of Nationalism, the fact that it covers such a long historical period and spans the globe has made attempts to find universal laws to explain it not very productive. Even the dominant paradigm fragments as further instances of nationalisms are investigated, or re-visited. Moreover, as Smith has done, it is always possible to find at least one or more cases that contradict the assumptions of a given paradigm and to argue that this therefore “refutes” the paradigm.^[2]  For instance, to make the case against the thesis that nationalism is the consequence of industrialisation, as put forward by Ernest Gellner, Smith offers the following empirical evidence to the contrary: “In Serbia, Finland, Mexico, West Africa and Japan, to take a few cases at random, there was no significant industrial developments, or even its beginnings, at the time of the emergence of nationalism.”^[3]  Smith considers these counter examples to be sufficient to disprove the causality between industrialisation and nationalism in general. There is however more to modernity than industrialisation.

The so-called “modernist paradigm” is also questioned by some of its later adherents. For Tom Nairn, “The reason why the dispute between modernists and primordialists is not resolved in contemporary debates is because it is irresolvable.” ^[4] Other historians have suggested that “modernization theory should be employed descriptively, not normatively,”^[5] just to “tell it as it was” using Ranke’s oft repeated words. Still others have tried to dissect the problem, Hans Kohn has classified nationalism as of the eastern and western varieties, Andre Gunther Frank has differentiated between “centre” and “periphery.”^[6]  Evidently, both of the elements in the question posed, nationalism and modernity, are open to differing explanations, sometimes quite contradictory ones, so that finding a satisfactory answer to the question which can be claimed to be universally true over three centuries may not be possible. To reduce the complexity inherent in the question I propose  to i) limit the period where nationalism is analysed to within a relatively short historical window, from the middle of the 18th century to the end of the First World War, and ii) to focus on continental Europe and near periphery, which is where nationalism found its first footholds. Naturally, modernity will also be considered for the same period and in the same geography. 

The historical raison d'être of nationalism, as an ideology and as a political movement, has been the creation of modern nation-states. Kohn, one of the “founding fathers” of the academic study of nationalism as Hobsbawm ^[7] alludes to, puts this forcefully: “Nationalism demands the nation-state.”^[8] In instances where nationalism was not the ideological primer in the creation of a nation-state, as may have been the case of Germany and Italy, nationalism was nonetheless harnessed for the purpose of unification, a process that strengthened the nation-state. ^[9]  As a nation-state building paradigm nationalism has been immensely successful.  The League of Nations formed in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War had already 42 founding member states, and the Unites Nations today boasts 193 member states. The empirically evident success of nationalism since the beginning with the nineteenth century amply deserves for this period to be viewed as Age of Nationalism. ^[10] The explosive growth of nation-states occurred in a period of epochal economic and political changes that witnessed on one hand the spread of the industrial revolution, on the other the demise of dynastic and multi-national empires in the wake of the First World War. The period on which we focus in this essay was followed by the wave of liberation and anti-colonial national movements after the Second World War. Nor is the process of nation-state formation exhausted today, as many nations or ethnic minorities aspire and struggle for nationhood in the Near East, Asia and Africa. Nationalism remains a strong factor in world politics and maintains its full potential to be exploited in national conflicts.

Discussing first the origins of nationalism, the focus will be on the when and why it emerged, and not necessarily on what it is. Attempting to pin down what is common with all the different shades of nationalism, even within the relatively short span of history considered, is a daunting task on which much debate and controversy exists. Yet one aspect of nationalism is in my view the key when thinking about nationalism and attempting to place it in a political and historical context. This is the common thread that runs across all forms of nationalisms: the goal of creating a  nation-state. This is the only firm ground on which nationalism can be placed in a universal historical context. The goal of nationalist movements does not imply that all nationalist movements achieve their goal, and clearly many have not. Otto Bauer, as he developed the theory for ‘national autonomy’ within multinational states, a theory which would become known as “cultural autonomy”^[11], was well aware of the enormous human cost that would be the outcome of nationalist struggles for sovereign nation-states.  Could the political ideals of ‘modernity‘  have made such a proposition feasible; this  we will never know as the wave of nationalisms in Europe resulted in the carving of national states and the displacement of minority populations from what used to be multi-ethnic empires, and led to two consecutive world wars.  

Nationalism has been referred to as “first and foremost a state of mind and an act of consciousness”^[12], or that “nationalism is an idea.”^[13] For Kellas, “Nationalism is an ideology which builds on the idea of the nation and makes it the basis for action.”^[14] Kedourie brands it as a “doctrine.” Whether an ideology, a set of principles, wishes, desires or doctrines, all variants of nationalisms is in our minds, ‘imagined’, reflected or idealised. The interesting question is, following Marx’s well known argument against Hegelian philosophy in the German Ideology,  if  “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness,”^[15] then what were the historical circumstances that led to the germination and spread of the ideas of nationalism.

There is widespread consensus that nationalism is a modern phenomenon. Kohn observes that nationalism became manifest “at the end of the eighteenth century, almost simultaneously in a number of widely separated European countries.”^[16]  Hobsbawm notes that nationalism “in the modern sense of the word is no older than the eighteenth century.” ^[17] Kedourie, in the opening line of Nationalism defines it as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”^[18] There is a school of thought however that considers both nations and nationalism to have much deeper historical roots. For Hastings, “the Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed.”^[19] It was England, Hastings claims, which pioneered the nation-state and nationalism beginning from the 16th century, if not from earlier times, a view which finds support with Greenfield who writes that “The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation, it was the birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism.”^[20] Hastings argues quite convincingly that England as a unified nation with a powerful and highly successful state apparatus provided a model for the rest of Europe to emulate. Indeed many Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu, admired the political liberty that existed in England and viewed England as a better system than that which existed elsewhere in Europe. But even if we were to accept that England was the first nation-state, the birth place of nationalism and equipped with a better system of government, it still would not answer the question of why nationalism and nation-building became such a powerful political force in continental Europe from the end of the eighteenth century, and common currency throughout the world by the end of the nineteenth century.

I don’t believe that this question can be brushed off as a quirk of history as Hastings seems to do: “Nation-formation and nationalism have in themselves almost nothing to do with modernity. Only when modernisation was itself already in the air did the almost accidentally become part of it, particularly from the eighteenth century when the political and economic success of England made it a model to imitate.”^[21] [my italics] In fact as models go there was another one in the making during the second half of the 18th century: The American Revolution was not only the first successful war of independence, but the newly formed United States rejected an aristocracy based form of government in favour of a republican federated state based on a Constitution. This was Enlightenment ideals come to life ; the “New World” was now projecting an image that was in stark contrast to the ‘Old’, where the rule by aristocracies and political dynasties was absolute. The American Revolution was widely reported and debated in intellectual circles, but does not appear to have had a direct impact on the politics of continental Europe, ^[22] except possibly in France.  The French were directly involved in the American Revolution having joined the war on the American’s side, although the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1776 with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”^[23] must have seemed ominous to King Louis XVI of France. It was more than the roll of the historical dice that made the French Revolution the vehicle with which the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, reinforced with American colours, would be driven into continental Europe. After all, as it was the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Montesquieu which were incorporated in the forms of government adopted by the United States, it was natural that the American Revolution would reverberate strongest in France, and find its echo in the French Revolution.

The French Revolution of 1789 was a critical element in providing the impetus for the spread of nationalism. What the French Revolution showed, with the battle cry of  Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, which found its constitutional expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen^[24], was firstly that the ideas of the Enlightenment were politically significant in creating a universal  framework for national sovereignty: the modern nation-state could accommodate the modern classes (the Third Estate) in its political and administrative structures to match the changing socio-economic realities of France.  Secondly, that this modern nation-state, with its emphasis on centralisation and the creation of a citizens army imbued with patriotism, had produced a very efficient war machine. Yet, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars to extend the revolution into Europe were short lived and continental Europe was back under aristocratic or dynastic rule by 1815, following the Treaty of Versailles. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Italy, Hungary and Germany gave further respite to dynastic regimes. Nonetheless the nationalist fuse had been lit and by the end of the First World War nationalist movements had emerged and nation-states created throughout continental Europe, with many newly formed nation-states demonstrating their indebtedness to the French Revolution by adopting the tricolours of the French Revolution.

In 1831 the Belgium Revolution achieved independence form the Netherlands.  Belgium of course was the country where the advances of the industrial revolution was second only to England’s and where nationalism was tempered by the fact that the nation-state created was a multi-ethnic one, comprised of the Walloons and Flemish people. The nationalist movements in Italy and Germany were primarily directed at unification: Italy was unified in 1870 after the capture of Rome by nationalists, Germany was unified in 1871. In Poland, occupied by the Prussians, the Russian Empire and the Hapsburg Empire, nationalist risings during 1831, 1846 and 1863 were defeated and Poland gained independence only after the First World War. This was also the case for Magyar nationalists whose lands were under Hapsburg and Serbian control and who put up the strongest fight against the Hapsburg during the 1848 Revolutions but were defeated by imperial Russian troops. Czech national independence was achieved only following the defeat of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918.  Rumanians under the Ottoman Empire formed a nation-state in 1881, and an enlarged Rumania was created at the end of the First World War. The Greek state was established in 1830 having won its independence form the Ottoman Empire.  Further to the east, the radical Armenian nationalist movement in the Ottoman Empire was crushed by the government of the Young Turks (the Party of Union and Progress) in 1915 through the genocide of the Armenian population.  Turkey emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire as a nation-state. Arab nationalists decided to declare the independence of Syria at the Damascus congress in 1877, but the weakness of Arab Nationalism, divided as it was between allegiance to the Caliphate, in the person of the Ottoman Sultan, and independence, meant that the successor states to the Ottoman Empire in the Near East were established mainly by the Entente powers post First World War. This is a by no means exhaustive list of the emergence of nationalist movements in Europe during the nineteenth century.  Between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War the majority of the Europe was already structured in nation-states. The right of peoples to self-determination figures in Woodraw Wilson’s Fourteen Points ^[25] and the creation of the League of Nations was based on the principle of the association of nations.  In this sense, the impact of the League was to write in stone the principle that the political map of the world would henceforth be based on nation-states.

But is there a generally valid explanation for the rise of these nationalist movements in this period? Why was the nineteenth century the ‘age of nationalism’ and nation-state building? The fact that there were successful ‘models’  like England and the American Revolution did not necessarily imply that they could or would be emulated elsewhere. Moreover, the march of the French Revolution, which could have helped establish modern nation-states in the lands it occupied, was reversed, and European states were back under dynastic regimes by 1815. Can the answer be found in the fact that the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were a period that witnessed colossal socio-economic changes, especially in Western Europe, as the industrial revolution spread from England to the continent? Max Weber, analysing ‘modern capitalism’ in Europe observed in 1905: "This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine  the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism,…with irresistible force, and will probably continue to do so until the last ton of fossilised coal is burned.”^[26]   The world was being transformed at a rate and in a direction never witnessed before (or arguably since) in the history of mankind. For Max Weber the structures arising were modern developments. They included “the modern State,’ ‘modern economic life’, ‘modern industrial organisations’, modern financial capitalism’, ‘modern life’, ‘modern culture’, ‘modern languages’, ‘modern book-keeping methods’, etc. These now constituted the ‘modern European civilisation’.  Half a century before Weber, Marx had in the Communist Manifesto outlined the transforming role of the class arising on the basis of capitalist industrialisation, tearing down the established social institutions and taking hold the new emerging state: the bourgeoisie had "since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.”^[27] Marxism viewed nationalism and the establishment of nation-states as a direct outcome of the emerging economic and class society, the purpose of which was to serve the ascendant class, the bourgeoisie. The modern nation-state, with its centralised structure, public education for a work force that was required to operate and run the modern factories, combined with a protected market for national industries appeared to fit like a glove the needs of the modern capitalist class. The new state would be served by a modern army indoctrinated with patriotism for the defence of the national interest.

The nationalist movements that emerged in the nineteenth century however, have painted rather a different picture.  Nationalism, with the aim to form a nation-state, was embraced by elites of varying types as the best way to protect or advance their interests. Ruling elites in countries dominated by empires, made up mostly of the clergy and the nobility, were the main proponents of the nation-state where this would defend or extend their interests.  For example, in Transylvania, it was the church that would encourage the rise a nationalist movement. Breuilly traces the beginnings of the Romanian nationalist movement to the “famous petition of 1792” where the church leaders identified Romanians as a nation and asked for equal rights to be granted to them at a national level.^[28] In Hungary the strength of the revolutionary movement in 1848 was because it was constituted by the Magyar nobility.^[29] In Poland the movement for the formation or restoration of Poland was primarily that of  “privileged nobles seeking, through restoration, to reassert their political position.”^[30] In the Ottoman Empire it was the military and state bureaucracy that in the revolution of 1908 echoed the battle cry of the French Revolution with their call for Hürriyet, Müsavaat, Adalet (Liberty, Equality, Justice). The emergence of Arab nationalism, initially in northern Syria, was in defence of privileges and jobs of Arab local administrators as the Ottomans veered increasingly to a policy of Turkification, especially in the Young Turk era.^[31] Further east still, in Kurdistan, Sheikh Ubaydallah, a feudal lord, wrote in 1880 to the British Vice-Consul Clayton explaining that “The Kurdish nation is a people apart”, upon which Clayton commented that the Sheikh had a “comprehensive plan for uniting all the Kurds in an independent state under himself.”^[32] Based on these examples of nationalist movements at the fringes of Western Europe, one would be tempted to disregard any linkage between nationalism and modernity, given that in many of these instances modernity was by no means predominant.

‘Modernity,’ a term that came to be used widely since the 1960s^[33], summarises the changes that resulted from the economic and social transformations which took place initially in Western Europe.  Giddens writes in The Consequences of Modernity that modernity “refers to modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence."^[34]  There are two main aspects to modernity as a paradigm for change. One is to do directly with industrialisation and the growth of capitalism. Wagner summarises this aspect of modernity as “Capitalism is currently the predominant mode of economic modernity.”^[35]  The consequences of industrialisation and capitalism changed the social fabric of countries through urbanisation, the creation of modern classes and the increasing role of the state in the administration of public life and public education. The second aspect of modernity is its ideological or political aspect, described by Wagner as “democracy is the dominant interpretation of political modernity.”^[36]  An instrumentalist reading of nationalism could conclude that the political aspect of modernity was by itself sufficient to fuel nationalism, especially as nationalism was seen by ruling elites to be a proven recipe to find popular support for achieving political power and statehood.  In practice however, political modernity was far from taking on board everything that was dear to Enlightenment thought, such as liberty, equality and secularism.  Wagner shows that actually between 1800 and the end of the First World War “capitalism flourished under conditions of extremely restricted democracy.” ^[37] Concretely, the political aspect of modernity was aimed at state-power, ^[38]  democratic demands taking second place in the nation-building process. There is always a danger of reading back into historical periods developments of our own era, and this is especially the case with a noun as elastic as “modern,” with its implicit relativity. We have to take care not to gauge nineteenth century modernity with the norms in the political and social spheres of our times. If today modernity may be summed up as capitalism + the European Court of Human Rights, this was not the case in the nineteenth century. Capitalism was a geographically expanding economic force with all the transformations it entailed and Enlightenment thoughts and those of the French Revolution were recognised by most of the intellectual elites of Europe and beyond. However, on the ground modernity was still at its infancy and spread unevenly across Europe, at a tempo and with provisos dictated by the economic and political circumstances of each country and its regions. In Belgium, where conditions of modernity were advanced even by core European standards, independence was gained and a modern nation-state created with little conflict. Germany had experienced of the full effects modernity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, agrarian reforms had been achieved, society was increasingly mobile, and although industrialisation developed unevenly, it was the main force for change, so that  “by the 1840s Prussia had emerged as the powerhouse of German economic development.”^[39] For example, “by the late 1840s hundreds of thousands of workers were employed in the construction of railroads.” ^[40] In the lesser developed regions of Europe the struggle for nationhood was more convoluted. Greece was home to one of the first successful wars of independence from the Ottomans, where Greek elites were well versed in the ideals of the Enlightenment thanks to the ideas of the Hellenic civilisation, yet they proved unable to form a united movement and had to rely on Western powers to maintain their unity and independence. Czech towns saw the growth of capitalist manufacturing and there were liberal land reforms, yet sovereignty could only be achieved after the First World War. In Hungary, reform attempts of Joseph II (1780-90) in favour of the peasantry and for educational reforms raised expectations, and the promise of agrarian reform provided the basis of popular support to the nationalist movement, while economic changes created new elites. ^[41] The same reforms aided the development of a national movement in Rumania, where issues of religious equality and the promise of agrarian reform provided the basis of popular support. Similar developments applied to the Slavs. ^[42] In the Arab Near East, the entry of Syria into the world trading market in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in a process of economic transformation and the adoption by the Arab elite of Arab nationalism as a political ideology. ^[43] Modernity played a key role in the development of nationalist movements, although in differing ways and with different results: where economic modernity was weak this reflected on the strength of the emerging nation-state which relied primarily on the political demands of modernity for independence from foreign rule. In regions where we are not able to speak of modernity in any sense of the word, such as the example of Kurdistan above, then neither can we speak of a nascent nationalism, unless we equate the interest of a Sheikh to protect his fiefdom with nationalism^[44].

A criticism that can be raised against considering the political/ideological aspects of modernity as a basis for the emergence of nationalism is that modernity itself is being interpreted as an ideology, in which case nationalism as an ideology is constructed on another ideology, that of modernity. Is political modernity, separated from its economic aspects just another ideology?  The question of whether “modernity is conveyed by its own specific ideology” is posed in a recent article by Conversi, where the author defends that “nationalism cannot be conceived outside modernity, but only to identify modernity itself as embedded in its own ideology, modernism.”^[45] Implied by Conversi is that while nationalism is the dominant operative ideology of modernity, modernity has its own ideology like other ‘ism’s. Accordingly, modernism, like globalism today, are construed and used as ideologies. When defining modernity, however, we need to be aware that the two aspects of modernity, the material or economic and the ideological or political are the two parts of an integrated historical process. As we have discussed, the balance between the material and political thrusts of modernity has been different from one country to another, and to the extent that the material aspect showed a latent development this reflected on the nature of the nation-state that emerged, often requiring external powers to create or support it, as in the case of Greece, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia as well as countries of the Near East. In Italy, Massimo d’Azeglio was well aware of the weakness of the call of nationalism when he remarked in the well known phrase: “L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani”, which translates roughly to  “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.”^[46]

The industrial revolution and the stable political structures in England, together with the American War of Independence and French Revolutions produced the first prototypes for modernity. The achievements of the French Revolution, albeit short lived, showed concretely the political possibility of creating sovereign nation-states through nationalism. These events were instrumental in the historical bonding of nationalism with modernity. Viewed as a process, modernity provided the material and ideological basis for the transformations from traditional societies defined by feudalism, agrarianism and dynastic systems, to modern nation-states with a democratic system of government based on industrialisation and capitalism. That was the model on which nation-states were built, although the model was rarely confirmed in its fullness until the late twentieth century, that is if at all, depending on how one views current democracies and globalisation. Throughout this process, nationalism has been the political ideology of modernity.

Dario Navaro, London, 20/2/201

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^[1] Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London, Routledge, 1998), p.5.

^[2] “Of nearly every theory it may be said that it agrees with many facts: this is one of the reasons why a theory can be said to be corroborated only if we are unable to find refuting facts rather than if we are able to find supporting facts.” Karl Popper - The Poverty of Historicism (London, Routledge, 1961), p.111.

^[3] Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, p. 36.

^[4] Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism - Janus Revisited (London, Verso, 1997)

^[5] Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany 1779-1850 (London, 1998), p.4.

^[6] Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, (New York 1969)

^[7] E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, University Press, 2012),   p. 3.

^[8] Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, Harper, 1945), p. 19

^[9] Breuilly argues in Nationalism and the State that historians have overemphasized the role of “radical nationalism leading the way to unity in Germany and Italy,” but that in both cases nationalism had brought the modern elites together to run the newly created states. John Breuilly (Manchester, University Press, 1993), p.114-5.

^[10] For example, Kohn in The Idea of Nationalism (New York,1945) and Gellner in Nations and Nationalism (p. 55). Also in Kohn, The Age of Nationalism, (1965)

^[11] Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy (Minneapolis, 2000)

^[12] Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, p.10.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] James Kellas, The Politics of Nationalism and Ethnicity (New York, 1998), p. 4

^[15] Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,’ Selected Works, p.509. Although first expressed in The German Ideology in 1846, this formulation of Marx’s materialist conception of history is found in the “Preface” to his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy from which the quote is taken.

^[16] Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, p.3.

^[17] Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, p.3. To explain how “national patriotism” could become such a powerful political force in the creation of modern states and nations,  Hobsbawm develops the concept of “proto-national” bonds that may have existed in the communities which fitted in the modern nation. p. 46.

^[18] Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford, Blackwell 1994),  p.1

^[19] Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 4.

^[20] Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five roads to Modernity (Harvard 1992), p.23.

^[21] Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, p. 205.

^[22] Frank Becker, The American Revolution as a European Media Event (2011), Original in German, displayed online in English.

^[23] In Gerard Chaland, Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation-States (London, Pluto, 1989), p.2.

^[24] The system of the rights of man was based on the principle of national sovereignty of a people, as defined in Article 3 of the Declaration: The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.

^[25] The right to self-determination as nation-states also figures in the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling Masses (Moscow, January 1918).

^[26] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (London, 1930) p. 181

^[27] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works Volume 1 (Moscow, Progress, 1983), p. 110

^[28] John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993), p.135-7.

^[29] Ibid. p. 129.

^[30] Ibid. p.117

^[31] Mahmoud Haddad, The Rise of Arab Nationalism Reconsidered (United States, 1994).

^[32] Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion 1880-1925, (Texas, University of Texas Press, 1989), p.2.

^[33] The concept of modernity is traced by many to Max Weber, for instance by Simms in The Struggle for Mastery in Germany 1779-1850, p.5.

^[34] Anthony Giddens,  The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1

^[35] Peter Wagner, Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 2012), p.8.

^[36] Ibid. p 9.

^[37] Ibid. p 89.

^[38] For John Breuilly the fundamental point of nationalism is “above and beyond all else, about politics, and that politics is about power. Power, in the modern world, is principally about the control of the state.” Nationalism and the State, p. 1

^[39] Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779-1850 ( London, McMillan, 1998), 146

^[40] Ibid.

^[41] Breuilly, Nationalism and the State p. 136-8.

^[42] Ibid. p. 136-8.

^[43] Abdelaziz A. Ayyad, Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians 1850-1939(Jerusalem, 1999)

^[44] “Kurdish nationalism as a programme for the construction of a Kurdish state emerges only during the years of 1928-19.” Abbas Vali, Kurdish Nationalism (California, Mazda , 2003), p.15.

^[45] Daniele Conversi, Modernism and Nationalism, Journal of Political Ideologies 17(1) (February 2012), pp. 28.

^[46] Translation in Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p.44,