What's wrong with the idea that nations emerged only in the 19th century?

In the mid-20th century, the concept of 'modernism' became entrenched in academic circles, with Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm as its main theorists. Its proponents argue that the nation is an exclusively modern phenomenon, devoid of roots in pre-modern history. They based their approach on linking the emergence of nationalism with industrialization, capitalism, and the state's need for a unified, literate workforce.

Within modernism, two currents emerged: instrumentalism, which views nations as the result of elite political manipulations, and constructivism, which focuses on 'imagined communities' and discursive practices.

This position contrasts with two other approaches: 'primordialism', which views nations as natural and eternal units of humanity, and 'perennialism' (and later ethnosymbolism), which proves the historical continuity of national development.

Gellner formulated this position in a maximally radical, lapidary form, stripping nations of any historical foundation:

«Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist» (Ernest Gellner. Thought and Change, 1964).

The concept completely denies the objective reality of the nation. Eric Hobsbawm introduced the term 'invention of traditions', according to which political and economic elites deliberately manipulate the masses, creating artificial myths and symbols solely to maintain power.

This theory of total social construction faced fierce criticism from ethnosymbolists. British sociologist Anthony D. Smith agrees that elites can indeed distort or adapt existing myths, but they are physically incapable of creating them from scratch. A nation cannot arise without a solid historical foundation – a pre-modern ethnic community (ethnie). In his book 'The Ethnic Origins of Nations', he directly attacks the thesis of the exclusive 'modernity' of nations:

«Put simply, modern nations are not as 'modern' as modernists want us to believe. If they were, they would not have survived... Nations need ethnic cores if they are to survive. If they don't have one, they must 'reinvent' it — find a suitable and convincing past that can be reconstructed» (Anthony D. Smith. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986).

Another target for criticism became the chronology of modernists. Most of them categorically refuse to look for signs of national consciousness earlier than the end of the 18th century — the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. British historian Adrian Hastings considers this chronological limit a fundamental error of researchers.

«The key problem underlying our division lies in the starting date. For modernists... nationalism is a very modern phenomenon... For Hobsbawm, it is 'meaningless' to discuss this topic in terms of before 1780...» (Adrian Hastings. The Construction Of Nationhood, 1997).

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Hastings argues that limiting the history of nations to the industrial era forces scholars to ignore obvious historical facts. He considers Anderson's attempts to date the emergence of the English nation to the end of the 19th century to be absolutely implausible and notes that England serves as a prototype of both a nation and a nation-state in the full sense of the term.

England's identity had already been formed before the Norman invasion of 1066, and later the Normans were forced to assimilate into it, rather than destroy it.

Hastings' and Smith's theses are limited by a Eurocentric perspective. Researcher Azar Gat argues that nation-states emerged millennia before the European Middle Ages, as Europe was one of the latest regions in the global process of state-building. Ancient Egypt represented a large-scale nation-state where, for three millennia, territory, language, and self-awareness coincided. The mobilization of the Egyptian population against foreign invaders, Libyans or Hyksos, proceeded precisely along lines of national affiliation and relied on temple propaganda. Ancient Macedonia during the time of Philip II functioned as a nation-state with an army of citizen-farmers and popular assemblies that had the right to vote in the election of the monarch and the resolution of war issues.

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China, Korea, and Japan demonstrate a continuous coincidence of statehood and ethnicity for centuries prior to the advent of capitalism. The Chinese Han identity formed through the state assimilation of southern tribes and opposition to the northern empires of the Mongols and Manchus.

Hastings proves his position through an analysis of the institutional framework of early England. Unlike continental monarchies, where ties were built vertically, i.e., from monarch to subject, the English nation formed through instruments of horizontal integration: the system of shires, to which representatives from different regions were regularly appointed, common law, which stood above the will of the monarch (the principle of Magna Carta), and regular convocations of Parliament, which united representatives of local communities.

These institutions, reinforced by economic centralization around London, ensured the existence of a political nation centuries before industrialization.

The creation of a powerful English nation-state inevitably provoked nation-building processes on its Celtic periphery. Hastings demonstrates three different trajectories of reactive nationalism. Scotland, possessing its own state institutions and a formed territory, created a territorial nation in the process of repelling English aggression (symbolized by the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320), despite internal division into Celtic and Anglophone parts.

Wales, having lost political independence and its own law, managed to preserve its national identity solely due to the early translation of the Bible into Welsh (1588).

Ireland, deprived of statehood and its language gradually being supplanted by English, formed a nation around a religious concept: Catholicism became the main marker of Irish identity in contrast to English Protestant nationalism.

The firm linkage of the genesis of nations exclusively to capitalist relations overlooks powerful institutions capable of ensuring collective identity centuries before the emergence of factories and mass communication systems.

The Bible: How Translations Created Nations

Modernist theory, linking the genesis of nations exclusively with the development of capitalism and the secularization of society, ignores the role of religion in forming collective identity. Adrian Hastings calls this a fundamental blind spot and argues that the origins of European nations are hidden in the Christian Middle Ages.

The main engine of nation-building, according to his concept, was not industrialization, nor even mass printing, as B. Anderson claimed, but the very act of translating Christian texts into vernaculars and their regular liturgical use.

The very process of translating sacred texts from Latin and Greek stimulated the development of written vernaculars. Even in the era of manuscripts, this fixed and standardized language, as in the case of Bible translations by John Wycliffe's followers in 14th-century England or the use of the Glagolitic liturgy in Croatia. As a result, the reading audience was transformed into a 'chosen people', and local communities were imbued with a new sense of their own sacredness.

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Hastings considers the refusal to analyze this religious-linguistic factor to be the main error of modernist historiography:

«There are serious omissions in the modernist view... The influence of religion in general and the Bible in particular is another of these. I believe it is absolutely impossible to discuss this topic without careful consideration of the Bible as the primary lens through which the nation is imagined by people literate in the Bible, yet I find no reference to this even in Anderson» (Adrian Hastings. The Construction Of Nationhood, 1997).

Hastings proves this thesis through a large-scale comparison of Christianity and Islam. He notes that Christianity, from its very beginning, did not have a single 'sacred' language and was oriented towards translation: into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and later into European vernacular languages.

This inevitably legitimized local languages and created boundaries between linguo-cultural communities, contributing to the emergence of nations.

Islam, in contrast, rigidly tied the sacred text (the Quran) exclusively to the Arabic language. This created a universalist community (umma) that blurred local ethnicities and hindered the development of nationalism.

Accordingly, nation and nationalism are historically Christian phenomena.

Christianity, with its tradition of creating local written cultures, virtually formed pre-modern nations in Europe. It was the biblical text, not the capitalist market, that provided the initial basis for people to perceive themselves as a single community with their own history, territory, and destiny.

«The Bible provided... the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it can be argued that nations and nationalism as we know them would never have existed», — formulates Hastings.

Using England as an example, the researcher demonstrates how this process unfolded. It involved the direct transference of the biblical model of a 'chosen people' to a specific European ethnos. English national consciousness dates back to the time of Bede the Venerable in the 8th century, who in his 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People' first described the disparate warring tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) as a single nation, united by a Christian mission modeled on ancient Israel.

In the 9th century, King Alfred politically solidified this construct by initiating the translation of church texts (including Bede's work) into Old English and creating a unified code of laws. Thanks to this linguo-religious integration, by the 14th-15th centuries, the country already represented a fully-fledged nation-state.

This historical precedent calls into question the notion that the concept of a nation required the ideological impetus of the late 18th-century French Revolution or the emergence of factory production in the 19th century.

The universality of this linguo-religious mechanism is confirmed not only by European history but also by the process of nation-building in Africa in the 19th-20th centuries. Hastings demonstrates that missionaries, aiming to translate the Bible, were forced to choose one specific local dialect, create a grammar for it, and standardize its orthography. This led to a sharp demarcation of previously fluid and related ethnic groups.

For example, the missionaries' decision to create separate translations for the Ronga and Tsonga tribes in southern Africa solidified them as two distinct peoples, depriving them of the possibility of integration.

The translation of the Bible into the Yoruba language by Bishop Samuel Crowther united dozens of disparate city-states in Nigeria into a single Yoruba nation.

This confirms that the creation of a literary standard based on a sacred text is a crucial catalyst for national consciousness, regardless of geography.

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'Mythomotor' and Living Ethnie

Criticism of the modernist approach requires a precise definition of those pre-modern communities that became the historical and cultural substrate for modern nations. British sociologist Anthony D. Smith proposed using the French term 'ethnie' for them, which separates such communities from the modern political construct of the nation, but simultaneously fixes their deep historical durability. In his book 'The Ethnic Origins of Nations', the researcher formulates this concept as follows:

«Ethnies — ethnic communities — can be defined as named human populations with common myths of ancestry, history, and culture, who have a connection to a specific territory and a sense of solidarity» (Anthony D. Smith. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986).

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For a precise operationalization of this concept and the separation of a full-fledged community from an ordinary demographic group (or 'ethnic category'), Smith identifies six mandatory components of an ethnie:

1. a collective proper name (ethnonym);
2. a myth of common ancestry;
3. a common historical memory;
4. one or more distinctive elements of a common culture (language, religion, customs);
5. an association with a specific 'homeland' (even in case of physical detachment from it);
6. a sense of solidarity among a significant part of the population.

The survival of such communities over centuries, and sometimes millennia, depended not on the presence of a bureaucratic apparatus or an industrial economy, but on the viability of their cultural core — a complex of myths and symbols.

Smith calls the formative political myth, or mythomotor, the central element of this complex, which prevents the community from dissolving over time under the influence of external threats or internal divisions.

«Fused and elaborately developed myths provide a common system of meanings for the ethnic community, a mythomotor that 'explains' its experience and defines its 'essence'.

Without a mythomotor, a group cannot define itself either for itself or for others, and cannot inspire or guide collective actions» (Anthony D. Smith, 1986).

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Smith conceptualizes two main types of such political myths. The first is a dynastic mythomotor, which legitimizes exclusively the ruling house and its associated state institutions (characteristic of the Frankish state or Byzantium). The second is a communal (or religious) mythomotor, which focuses on the image of the entire community as a 'chosen people' and unites various social classes around a common mission.

Depending on the dominant mythomotor in historical retrospect, Smith distinguishes two main types of communities themselves — lateral, i.e., aristocratic, and vertical, or demotic.

Lateral ethnies primarily encompassed the upper classes — nobility and clergy; they spread over vast territories but had weak contact with the peasant masses.

Classic examples of such communities were the Polish szlachta or the Hungarian aristocracy, who maintained a monopoly on state myth and culture for centuries.

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Vertical ethnies relied on the urban population, priesthood, and artisans. The cultural distance between elites and lower strata was smaller here, and the community rallied around a strong, often religiously colored identity with a clear division into 'us' and 'them'.

Thanks to a high level of mobilization, groups such as ancient Jews, Greeks, or Irish managed to preserve their identity even under conditions of losing their own statehood.

The existence of demotic communities refutes Gellner's key thesis about the isolation of illiterate peasantry from elite culture.

Pre-modern masses regularly demonstrated clear national self-awareness during external threats. Peasants understood the difference between their own elite and foreign invaders, preferring collective freedom from foreign domination despite social oppression from their own aristocrats.

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The Hussite movement in 15th-century Bohemia had a distinct anti-German character and relied on peasant armies, which used the Czech language as the main marker of loyalty while physically annihilating the foreign-speaking urban population. The mobilization of French peasants around Joan of Arc to expel the English, or the creation of Russian popular militias against Belarusians and Poles in the early 17th century and Swedes during the Great Northern War, prove the ability of pre-modern peasantry to identify with a national state.

Smith introduces the concept of 'social penetration'. He argues that through religious institutions, common liturgy, and mobilization during prolonged wars, elements of elite 'high culture' were effectively transmitted downwards. This formed a collective identity and national pride even in the absence of an industrial economy and mass secular education.

The process of forming modern nations did not create collective identity from scratch. It relied on these pre-modern ethnic cores, democratizing them and transforming former subjects and members of kinship-based or religious communities into full-fledged citizens of a unified territory. Without such a historical foundation, attempts by political elites to construct a viable nation were difficult, resulting in artificial and unstable formations.

In turn, Hastings proposes a clear historical formula for this transition. An ethnos, i.e., a community united by a common oral language, marital rules, and basic culture, is a universal phenomenon. Oral ethnies are mobile and can easily merge with each other or dissolve under the influence of migrations and conquests.

However, when the language of a specific ethnos acquires a written form, primarily for the needs of religion or law, and begins to serve literature, crossing the boundary between oral locality and standardized text, the ethnos acquires political and cultural stability. In combination with external threat and the formation of its own state institutions, such a written ethnos has a great chance to irreversibly transform into a nation.

However, the existence of a pre-modern state or a developed culture did not guarantee the preservation of an ethnie in history.

Researchers cite examples of ancient Assyrians or Phoenicians, who had powerful political entities but completely disappeared after losing statehood. Their dissolution is explained by the weakness of the communal mythomotor and the lack of deep social penetration: religion and culture were rigidly tied exclusively to the state apparatus. Without a state framework, such lateral ethnies proved unable to survive.

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Successor Territory and the Illusory Nature of 'Civic' Nations

Modernist theories often rely on Hans Kohn's classical dichotomy, which contrasted 'Western civic' nations (united by territory, law, and rational institutions) and 'Eastern ethnic' nations (based on irrational ties of origin and culture).

However, empirical analysis of historical material shows that such a division is largely illusory and normatively biased.

Analyzing the continental experience, A. Hastings, relying on the works of Rogers Brubaker, identifies two diametrically opposed models of nation-building: French and German.

France historically built its nation on the basis of the law of the soil (jus soli). A powerful centralized state integrated various ethnic groups (Bretons, Provençals, Alsatians) into a single political community through the administrative apparatus and education system.

Germany, in contrast, existed for centuries under conditions of political fragmentation and the absence of a unified state. The only instrument of integration was the German language, standardized thanks to Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, and the myth of blood kinship. This formed a nation based on the law of blood (jus sanguinis).

While French-style territorial nationalism allows for the integration of foreigners, German-style linguo-ethnic nationalism rigidly excludes other groups, such as Jews, which historically created the ideological basis for ethnic cleansing.

However, it is necessary to consider the analytical fallacy of idealizing the civic model.

The so-called civic nation requires total cultural assimilation of minorities. The French approach historically annihilated any other ethnic identities within the country, including Bretons, Occitans, and Corsicans. Meanwhile, the very Jews lived freely in German states for centuries but were not admitted to France. During the 'Dreyfus affair', Jews were attributed with mass loyalty to Prussia. Only in the 20th century did everything turn upside down.

Asserting the equality of individuals, the French state imbues the nation with specific cultural content through the monopoly of the French language and secularism, which is rooted exclusively in the local Christian historical heritage.

Even immigrant countries like the United States of America historically relied on a powerful Anglo-Protestant, and later European-American, cultural core. Integration was ensured through the adoption of the English language and mixed marriages, which over generations created a sense of blood kinship. Ethno-culturally completely neutral democratic states do not exist. The choice between a civic and an ethnic nation is reduced to a choice between demanding complete cultural assimilation or consenting to the existence of minorities on the periphery of political life under the dominance of one ethnic core.

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Modern science asserts that every nation has a dual nature, combining a rational territorial-political apparatus and genealogical heritage. Even the most inclusive democratic states do not arise in a cultural vacuum and require a historical foundation.

Anthony D. Smith emphasizes that any successful civic project relies on a pre-modern base, which it adapts to modern political realities:

«We must remember that most 'civic' nations rely on an ethnic core — a dominant ethnie around which the state was formed, and whose members still, for the most part, constitute the state elites and dominate its political institutions» (Anthony D. Smith. Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, 2006).

This ethnic core is inextricably linked to a specific landscape, which over time becomes sacralized and transforms from physical geography into an 'ethnolandscape'.

American researcher Steven Grosby introduces the concept of 'successor territory' to explain this phenomenon. It demonstrates how modern states draw their legitimacy and sense of historical depth from ancient boundaries.

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«The category of 'successor territory' refers to the fact that territorial designations tend to persist over time; when the recognition of the territorial boundaries of one society continues across different historical periods as a reference point in the formation of a subsequent society, thereby asserting the temporal depth of this later society» (Steven Grosby. The Successor Territory, 2006).

Modern nations are physically incapable of existing without this dimension of historical depth, tied to a specific land and memory of past 'golden ages'. 

Mass industrialization and state education only provided new tools for mobilization but did not create the meanings themselves. National identity requires the integration of the past into the present.

«Nations do not exist in an atemporal present. They are long-term historical processes, constantly renewed and reconstructed, but within certain limits. Thus, the 'modernity' of any nation is constantly conditioned by its historical roots and its stratifications in each generation» (Anthony D. Smith. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986).

The ultimate conclusion of the ethnosymbolic approach is that the construction of nation-states is not an accidental byproduct of capitalism. It is a logical continuation of the development of pre-modern communities. Modern state institutions unify the population not because the economy demands it, but by relying on existing mythological and territorial matrices.

«No lasting world order can be created if the pervasive aspirations of nations to seek roots in an ethnic past are ignored, and no study of nations and nationalism that completely ignores this past can bear fruit» (Anthony D. Smith, 1986).

The tragic proof of the fallacy of modernist attempts to ignore the historical roots of nations is the collapse of Yugoslavia. After World War I, political elites attempted to construct a single 'Yugoslav nation' from Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, and Macedonians, treating them simply as 'ethnographic material'.

However, by that time, Serbs and Croats already had deeply rooted national identities, which had formed in the pre-modern era through religious division (Orthodoxy versus Catholicism), different written traditions (Cyrillic and Glagolitic), and historical myths (the myth of Kosovo Field for Serbs). The attempt to artificially unite fully formed, though linguistically close, nations within one state led to an inevitable violent disintegration.

This reinforces the central thesis of Hastings and Smith: ethnic cores, solidified through written culture and religion, possess extraordinary historical resilience, and they cannot be destroyed or reassembled solely by modern political instruments.

Nationalism is, in essence, a politicized form of ethnicity that directly arises from the evolutionarily formed human inclination towards solidarity within kinship-cultural communities. Throughout 150,000 years of human evolution, kinship recognition occurred through common culture, traditions, and language or dialect. 

Cultural proximity marked genetic kinship and ensured trust along with effective social cooperation, vital for group survival in a competitive environment. The politicization of ethnicity emerged with the appearance of the first states, which strengthened and unified existing kinship-cultural ties.

Accordingly, ethnocentrism and patriotism are not artificial ideological constructs of the industrial age, but deeply rooted biological patterns of behavior upon which modern states later relied.

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