Introduction
The word Nation has came out since revolution happened in Europe in 18th and 19th centuries. It means that after World War2 nation state established in western countries, but it has not found its own comprehensive definition till now. It is said that nation referred to the people live in specific borders and have common culture, history and language. It emphasize on homogeneity to be a nation in specific geography. It is a phantom or illusion of human in 21 century. There is not even one country exist all around the world that nation established with or from same culture, history and language.
According to this definition, there should be many small nations (ethnic) within a big nation even in a small country such Afghanistan as a Nation in big Union Europe, but there are many ethnics in a nation state or country of any member of Union Europe, therefore the thing which makes people to be loyal to each other is common interest.
Nation as Benedict Anderson says that is an “Imagined Community” and related to the concepts of Bound and Unbound Serialities is a modern interpretation of word Nation. This text is an answer to the question “Nation is an imagined political community. What do you think are the contours of which it is imagined? Elucidate the idea of ‘bound’ and ‘unbound’ serialities with critical inputs from contemporary debates such as that on cultural nationalism or census and focusing on definition of Nation, symbols of nation, element of nation and view on nation-building and become nation (nationalize) debating on BBC Persian and some Afghanistan’s private TV channels.
What is Nation?
A nation is a group of people who share culture, ethnicity and language, often possessing or seeking its own independent government (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). This definition says that group of people share their culture, ethnicity and language that have or seeking to have their own government; indicates to the boundary that Anderson said in his book the “Imagined Community”.
According to Benedict Anderson, nation arose historically from these three fundamental cultural concepts: great transcontinental solidities of Christendom, Islamic Ummah, and the rest belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centers- monarchs they were the people who were apart from other human beings and ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation and the conception of combination of cosmology and history was indistinguishable (Imagined Community, page 36).
The development and conceptualization of a nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative. Though the idea of nationality and race are often connected, the two are separate concepts, race dealing more with genotypic and phenotypic similarity and clustering and nationality with the sense of belonging to a culture.
A nation is not necessarily equated with country; it can be an important element or a part of a country to a state which is defined as the political entity within defined borders. Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
The concept of a national identity refers both to the distinguishing features of the group and to the individual's sense of belonging to it.
Common components of Nation
Common language: A language is the primary ingredient of the making of a nation. Without a common language a nation cannot evolve. A common culture, a common history is dependent on language. Also to deal with everyday affairs within a group of people living in a specified boundary need a common mean of communication to trade and socialize. Thus even if a group of people sharing common Language, Culture and History may live in different countries, but would still consider themselves attached to their respective nations as long as they share the same language.
Common culture: Many nations are constructed around the idea of a shared culture; the national culture. The national culture can be assumed to be shared with previous generations and includes a cultural heritage from these generations. As with the common ancestry, this identification of past culture with present culture may be largely symbolic. The archaeological site of Stonehenge for instance is owned and managed by English heritage, although no 'English' people or state existed when it was constructed, 4 000 to 5 000 years ago. Other nations have similarly appropriated ancient archaeological sites, literature, art, and even entire civilizations as 'national heritage'(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
Common history: A nation can be constructed around a common history. Chronologically recorded events in the past, their ancestors have gone through.
Common religion: Religion is sometimes used as a defining factor for a nation, although some nationalist movements de-emphasize that it as a divisive factor, such as in Ireland where The Republic of Ireland has a majority of Catholics and Northern Ireland holding a majority of Protestants, de-emphasising religion as a factor of National Identity in Ireland is largely unsuccessful. Zionist movement generally avoided a religious definition of the 'Jewish people' preferring an ethnic and cultural definition. Since Judaism is a religion, people can become a Jew by religious conversion which in turn can facilitate their obtaining Israeli citizenship. Jews in Israel who convert that other religion do not thereby lose Israeli citizenship, although their national identity might then be questioned by others.
Nation as Imagined Political Community
What makes up a nation? It is the question that Benedict Anderson in his thesis “Imagined Communities” published in 1983, answered closer to the truth.
I do agree that the idea of a “nation” is imagined, because Anderson says: “Nation is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their community.”
Anderson’s definition is important, because the imagination does play in creating of community identity and the most controversial aspect of him was Creole community of the new world when it is published at the first time. Creole community of the new world develops the idea of national identity as a basis for the political self-definition. Unlike many European historians who believed, nationalism in 18th and 19th century was language based. In the New World, popular nationalists used language to build communities where none had previously existed.
Sacred languages such as Latin, Arabic and Chinese held to be the sole keys to truth; divine monarchs; and a cosmological sense of past time was the three central elements of the pre-nationalist ancient régime, but the new factors that helped to erode these elements and laid the path for new imagined communities were the invention of print and capitalism. According to Anderson these two forces created the modern languages through which nations are imagined, eclipsing the hold of the older sacral languages. In the 18th century, newspapers created a vernacular readership that often helped to define a nation. They were consumed simultaneously and anonymously by a secular imagined community. Capitalism’s print technology made it possible to imagine large linked communities that previously had no special form of cohesiveness, but Language was always important in creating a sense of community, was not the deciding factor in creating the idea of “nationalism.”
According to Anderson, creation of imagined communities became possible because of "print-capitalism". Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the vernacular (instead of exclusive script languages, such as Latin) in order to maximize circulation. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became able to understand each other and a common discourse emerged. Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their "national print-languages."
An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity-for example, the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympics and World Cup Championship.
Finally, a nation is an imagined community because "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each. The nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."
Anderson falls into the "historicist" or "modernist" school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm in which he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and have been created as means to political and economic ends. This school stands against to the Primordialists who believe that nations, if not nationalism, had existed since early human history. Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social Constructionism which can be same what Edward points on “concept of imagined geographies”.
In contrast to Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism nor does he think that nationalism is obsolete in a globalizing world. Anderson values the utopian element in nationalism. According to his theory of imagined communities, the main causes of the nationalism are the declining importance of privileged access to particular script languages (such as Latin), because of mass vernacular literacy; the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy; and the emergence of printing press capitalism—all phenomena occurring with the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Bound and Unbound Serialities
Common or shared element of nation such as language, history, and culture; people of one country are very similar to the people live in another country, but they are not; or cannot be called a nation. Religion as many historians believed as a divisive factor and some where a common factor of a nation may be very important to become a nation in a specific geography, but this religion is common and shared with other people of geography too. For instance, there are many Islamic countries in all around the world, but they are not called Muslim nation. They are called by their own identity such as Islamic republic of Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia and so on.
In the domain of political sciences, the political nation is the holder of the sovereignty which shapes the fundamental norms governing the functioning of the state.
From the French Revolution up to today, the differences and similarities between the concepts of "political nation" and "people" have been object of hot debates.
"Nation" and "people" were used in 1789 by the abbot Sieyès as synonyms with a socio-economic meaning, but only shortly thereafter he changed the meaning of his words, establishing a fundamental difference for his ideas of sovereignty and the constitutional state. He defined the nation then as emanating from natural law, prior to the state. "People" was determined as following from the concept of nation after the creation of the State. For Sieyès, the nation is the holder of sovereignty.
On the other hand, Eric Hobsbawm argues nations are invented tradition; include invention of education, public ceremonies and mass production of public monuments. The nations are defined by those invented traditions.
Ernest Gellner similarly argues there is strong tie between nationalism and modernization. His words "It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round." is often quoted.
English author, Anglican priest and Cambridge professor William Ralph Inge famously said "A nation is a society that nourishes a common delusion about its ancestry and shares a common hatred for its neighbors."
Anderson talks about nation while the concept of state must be in charged with, because he argues that people obey national laws, pay national taxes and fight to die for the nation because they are surrounded by educational and administrative structures designed to program them accordingly.
There are obviously problems of defining people as groups that are different than other groups and whose cultures and languages are different. Throughout time, it has led to disputes. With the rise of nationalism, the number of wars has been on the rise. Someone identifying themselves strongly with “their” group leads to feelings of pride and sometimes defensiveness. However, while seeing one’s self more as an individual may lead to some of the same feelings, it would be odd to think that an individual would often feel a desire to fight and die for the betterment of him.
These communities are imagined as both limited and sovereign. They are limited in that nations have "finite, if elastic boundaries beyond which lay other nations". They are sovereign insofar as no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them, modern period.
The concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions and the [direct relationship] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. (pp. 6-7)
Human communities tend to be imagined entities. Communities differ, "not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined". Anderson introduces three useful terms to characterize the style in which the modern nation is imagined.
The language of fraternity and comradeship used in the passages just quoted displays (without commenting on) the androcentrism of the modern national imaginings. Indeed, Anderson's three key features of nations (limited, sovereign, fraternal) are metonymically embodied in the finite, sovereign, and fraternal figure of the citizen-soldier. Anderson goes on in the book to discuss cenotaphs and tombs of the Unknown Soldier as some of the "most arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism". Military service and electoral politics, domains originally limited to males, have been obvious central apparatuses for producing the imagined community of the modern nation-state, along with mass print culture, in which women have participated.
Nation-building and Nation as self Consciousness (Debate)
Nation-building refers to the process of constructing or structuring a national identity using the power of the state. This process aims at the unification of the people or people within the state so that it remains politically stable and viable in the long run. Nation-building can involve the use of propaganda or major infrastructure development to foster social harmony and economic growth. Nation-building included the creation of superficial national paraphernalia such as flags, anthems, national days, national stadiums, national airlines, national languages and national myths. At a deeper level, national identity needs to be deliberately constructed by molding different groups into a nation, especially since colonialism had used divide and rule tactics to maintain its domination.
However, many new states were plagued by "tribalism", rivalry between ethnic groups within the nation. This sometimes resulted in their near-disintegration, such as the attempt by Biafra to secede from Nigeria in 1970, or the continuing demand of the Somali people in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia for completing independence. In Asia, the disintegration of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh is another example where ethnic differences, aided by geographic distance, tore apart a post-colonial state. The Rwandan genocide as well as the recurrent problems experienced by the Sudan can also be related to a lack of ethnic, religious, or racial cohesion within the nation. It has often proved difficult to unite states with similar ethnic but different colonial backgrounds. Whereas successful examples like Cameroon do exist, failures like Senegambia Confederation demonstrate the problems of uniting Francophone and Anglophone territories.
Nation and the term Nation-building and becoming a nation or nation a self consciousness are very controversial in Afghanistan, because after ending three decades domestic wars and presence of International Community led by United State of America in Afghanistan, the situation is going on, but with serious quarrel and ethnocentrism.
Critics point out to the government and criticize the activities and strategies in term of nation building, but there are many critics who oppose the term or the word nation building; they believe that it is better to strive to become a nation. One of the most famous critic of this context is Qasem Akhgar, Chief Editor of 8am Newspaper. He argues that nation building is an ideology that imposes the concept to the people. According to him, Marxist did and got bad consequence. He emphasizes on the awareness of being nation must arise from the heart of people who live in Afghanistan. It is mentionable that he has a book in name of Setara haye Dunbaladar discussed on nation and enlightenment movements in Afghanistan.
Nation in Afghanistan was a debate in BBC Persian TV inside Pargar Progarmme on 2010/08/21. Where does Afghanistan go toward and does the contributions of International Community cause national government in Afghanistan?
Rosta Taraki who was a teacher in political studies of Kabul University, he emphasized on homogeneity to build a nation in Afghanistan. He said that England made many people in Britain to leave this country and go to America and Australia. And many Albanians were made to leave Kosovo and replaced Serbian. It was started this process in Afghanistan in 18th and early 19th century and recently Taliban accelerate this process in favor of Pashtun ethnic in Afghanistan. According to Taraki, this process (exile of other ethnic exception Pashtun) erupted by International interference in Afghanistan.
But Mujeburrahman Rahimi, explorer of political science in England, believes that nation building needs many common components such as language, history and religion. He responded to Taraki and said that the process by which Taliban or Pashtuns did in Afghanistan was as same as Nazism fascisms have done in Germany and Italy.
Nation building in Afghanistan has experienced all three model of assimilation, integration and multicultural. Rahimi said that it is turn to experience multicultural model in Afghanistan, because we did not get positive result from two others model in the past. But he believes that Afghanistan was made by colonies not by Afghans.
Relate to the Rahimi, Mohammad Fahim Wardag, said Afghanistan has not been made by colonies but it was made by Afghans through fighting against colonies.
In term of Nation State, Arif Sahar a political explorer student emphasized on legitimating of state in Afghanistan that must come out through nation.
Accordingly, two members of the debate accentuate on homogeneity in term of nation building whilst the two others play up multicultural model and civil rights and modern nation that guarantees all rights of citizens in a state. According to them democracy is the significant system in term of nation building, but not model or system of USA; but the model of Britain is much better in Afghanistan to imply. They discussed on homogeneity (Pashtunism), limitations and Modernization (United ethnics or Nation); boundary and Unboundary in term of Imagined Community, whilst Chaterjee calls it Anderson’s Utopia.
Conclusion
Many academic books indicate common components of nation such as language, history and religion, but cannot exist in reality. Nation defines inside a country that have specific borders and sovereign; whilst the people live in a country have many shared elements like religions, history and language, but they are not a nation.
According to academic books, the above common component of nation is significant and we can call the people with these characterizations, a nation. But also it can be imagined because they do not see and even heard about other people from other countries.
Anderson limits or bound nation beyond common elements with sovereign and target individuals in term of paying tax, devoting for common interest and so on. By another hand, obeying laws and sovereign spontaneously turn the attention to the nation state.
United Nation is a socio- political construction that refers to independent countries. It also can be bound. The serial has limitation; about 200 countries are member of UN. Unbound serialities can be justified with breaking ethnic, workers, bureaucrats and so on stratas and forming bigger one in term of nation and purpose of common interest in a specific geography. And it refers to the age print capitalism in 18th and 19th century.
Distinguish between bound and unbound serialities cannot appearance in mathematics, but it can operate in political modalities. It is empty homogeneous, the Utopian time of Capitalism. It is because that Partha Chatterjee uses term, Anderson Utopia (Anderson’s Utopia, Chatterjee, p128).
Finally, I can claim that the nation could be imagined political community. But if the objective is that to distinguish bound and unbound serialities with integers, it is little hard. From my point of you, the most important element is common interest that one ethnic break their ethnic values and interest and forms bigger is called nation.
References
1. Economic Development & Nation-building in Africa: In Search of a New Paradigm
2. Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa
3. http//www.bbcpersian/pargar.com
4. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Community
5. Free Wikipedia
5. Filed under: Modern European History by gmorgan4982 — 1 Comment May 21, 2010
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