Changes in the political uses of the nation: Continuity or discontinuity?

Power and the Nation in European History

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 67-102

  Breuilly, John ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84890182927     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511614538.003     Document Type: Chapter

References (87)

1. I take these quotations from Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 24-5.
2. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789 (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 17.
3. This is a common and easy approach. Turville-Petre furnishes another favourite ‘nationalist’ quote, John of Gaunt’s speech on ‘this sceptred isle’ in Richard II. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 4, which tells us little about nationalism and nothing about the late fourteenth century.
4. S. Grosby, ‘Religion and nationality in Antiquity’, European Journal of Sociology 33 (1991), 229-65
5. Patrick Wormald, ‘The eternal Angle’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 March 2001, 3-4.
6. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: a Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998)
7. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8. A good recent survey of arguments about English national identity which includes a review of the arguments for the medieval and early modern periods is Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003), chs. 3-5.
9. Different medievalists place the ‘moment’ of emergence of national identity in one or other of these periods, for example Wormald in pre-Conquest England, Gillingham in the Anglo-Norman period, Clanchy and Prestwich in the thirteenth century, Jones and Allmand in the period of the Hundred Years War. Predictably, historians tend to make ‘their’ period the crucial one. For Wormald see his essay in this volume and note 4 above. For the others see
10. John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), esp. the essays in Part 2
11. M. T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers 1066-1272: Foreign Lordship and National Identity (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 241-62
12. Michael Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), ch. 5
13. W. R. Jones, ‘The English church and royal propaganda during the Hundred Years War’, Journal of British Studies 19 (1979), 18-30
14. Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c. 1300-c. 1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. ch. 6.
15. See Wormald, ‘Eternal Angle’, for such an example.
16. For a recent constructionist approach applied generally to early medieval Europe see Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2002).
17. D. Rollason, ‘Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, The Historian 73 (2002), 7.
18. There is no consensus on just how Bede used his key term ‘Angli’. Nicholas Brooks, Bede and the English, Jarrow Lecture ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 1999).
19. Bede wrote extensively on the measurement of time, and the construction of calendars, used a single chronological system in his Ecclesiastical History, and contributed to the debate on how Easter was to be dated.
20. This happened to the only chief David Livingstone ‘converted’. Livingstone subsequently reversed the Bedan approach: make Africans more like the British and Christian conversion could be achieved. Andrew Ross, David Livingstone: Mission and Empire (London: Hambledon, 2002).
21. Brooks, Bede and the English, p. 5. 15 N. Brooks, ‘English Identity from Bede to the Millennium’, Journal of the Haskins Society 14 (2004), 33-51.
22. S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), esp. ch. 8. Nevertheless, I think the claims made by Reynolds for a widespread sense of English identity in late Anglo-Saxon times go beyond what the evidence will reasonably bear.
23. See Sarah Foot, ‘The making of Angelcynn: English identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., 6 (1996), 25-49.
24. The quotation at the end is from Bishop Wulfsige.
25. Brooks, ‘English identity’.
26. The passage merits quoting at length. ‘In… [1087], when the Normans had fulfilled the just will of the Lord upon the English people, and there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English, William, the agent of this vengeance, ended his life. For God had chosen the Normans to wipe out the English nation, because he had seen that they surpassed all other people in their unparalleled savagery’ (emphases added). Diana E. Greenway, Henry of Huntingdon: The History of the English People 1000-1154 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 31.
27. I have not had time to consult Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity, 1066-c. 1220 (Oxford University Press, 2003), but drew much profit from the review of this book by R. R. Davies in English Historical Review 118 (2003), 1308-10.
28. I follow John Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century.
29. Len Scales in his very useful comments on a draft of this essay stressed the importance, throughout the medieval period, of the Old Testament culture of the nation. However, the projects of conversion or expansion make it difficult to equate Bede and Alfred with the self-centred Old Testament focus on one people seeking to survive and to sustain their faith against permanently alien and hostile pagans. It is also difficult to equate with the rhetoric of Roman Christianity, a supra-ethnic faith and institution.
30. James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London: Hambledon, 2000). See the essay by Foot in this volume for a criticism of Campbell’s use of the concept ‘state’ in the term ‘nation-state’. My concern is with the other half of the term.
31. It is not enough to locate texts with names such as ‘English’ to support claims concerning national identity; one must also show that these names play a central role in social practices which produce and transmit national identity. If, for example, one found the name ‘English’ being used at a local level, say in county-level institutions, one would still need to be cautious about claiming that the term indicated a sense of identity above the level of the county. To make that case one would need to show similar usages across a range of such local institutions which also were in communication with each other. There must be tests of this kind or one can make claims for national identity on the basis of any encounter with words like ‘nation’.
32. There is a tendency to equate ‘England’ at any moment with the situation in the south-east of the country. That is not a vice confined to medieval historians.
33. By the seventeenth century there are many more recent developments which could account for such a sense of national identity.
34. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (revised edn, London: Verso, 1991).
35. Gillingham, ‘Beginnings of English imperialism’. Robin Frame, in his essay in this volume, makes a similar point about the ‘Old English’ in Ireland in a way that suggests parallels with white settlers in modern colonies whose ‘national’ identity is as much an assertion against the mother country as it is against the indigenous people of the colony.
36. Greenway, Henry of Huntingdon.
37. Clanchy, England and its Rulers, pp. 241-2. Clanchy’s later accounts of the Battle of Lincoln (1217) and the civil strife of 1258-64 show just how ‘un-English’ was the consciousness of many of those subsequently seen as fighting for national independence or liberty.
38. ‘The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 19-40. I accept that such arguments on their own are too narrow to account fully for the national identity arguments encountered in such texts, but they do draw attention to the importance of particular, changing and contingent influences which shape such arguments.
39. The earlier use of English verse form suggests texts designed to be read aloud to illiterate elite figures who spoke English as their native tongue.
40. It would make more sense to imagine that the Normans used the term ‘English’ in its ethnic sense to refer to those they ruled.
41. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, makes the strong point that a written vernacular is a powerful force for the development of a sense of national identity. It fixes and standardises language; a purely oral language in pre-industrial societies is bound to diverge into a number of dialects, often mutually incomprehensible. Add widespread literacy and the basis for bringing together popular and oral with elite and written language is created. English is the first language where all of this comes together. However, this only starts to happen at the very earliest in the fourteenth century. This makes it all the more puzzling that Hastings argues for any widespread or significant sense of national identity before the fourteenth century.
42. For one transient meaning, see Clanchy, England and its Rulers, ch. 10 on ‘English’ objections to Henry III’s ‘foreign’ brothers. Clanchy notes that the Latin term used for ‘native people’ was viros naturalis, avoiding the word nativus with its connotations of the common or vulgar people. This is a very limited, clique usage.
43. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century; R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093-1343 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
44. Although the stress is usually upon conquest and subjection and the establishment of enclaves of settlers, rather than a civilising mission.
45. The general organisation of society has implications for the manners and morals of the whole of that society, but explicit comparisons remain confined to elite levels. Norbert Elias saw this period as marking the origins of the notion of elite cultural and moral improvement as a civilising process: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: the History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
46. Gillingham, ‘Beginnings of English imperialism’. Davies, First English Empire, argues that the political use of ethnographic categories was strongest when English kings sought control over the British Isles as a whole and faded along with that project.
47. These are tendencies rather than separate discourses. Any political propaganda directed against a foreign enemy is bound to emphasise the enemy’s foreignness. However, in the case of the French the stress was on ‘effeminacy’ (an excess of civilisation) rather than ‘savagery’ (not civilised enough), rather like some of the Scottish images of the English. (The trend continues in recent films like Braveheart where most of the English male characters are portrayed as refined, sadistic and gay.) 42 Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, esp. ch. 8.
48. Allmand, Hundred Years War, p. 103.
49. Allmand, Hundred Years War, p. 115.
50. Shakespeare’s characters make sense only in terms of the proto-nationalism of his time and of which he was the greatest exponent. In Henry V ethnic stereotyping functions to deny links between ethnicity and political loyalty. In the early fifteenth century ethnic stereotypes were terms of abuse applied to enemies, not a positive way of depicting a multi-ethnic nation. These are very different ways of connecting together ethnicity, political allegiance and the common people, both of them in turn unlike modern ethnic nationalist ideology. It is these differences we should explore, not the superficial continuity of using the same names.
51. Allmand, Hundred Years War, pp. 109-10.
52. Henry’s son, Henry VI, was crowned king of France.
53. Thus an impersonal notion of ‘kingdom’ developed in hereditary as well as elective monarchies. See the essay by Robert Frost on elective kingship, this volume.
54. Jones, ‘The English church and royal propaganda’. 50 I elaborate on this point in the next section.
55. Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Len Scales drew my attention to this study.
56. Just one more example. In a major edited work of just over 800 pages, J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350-c. 1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), there are just eight short References to ‘nation’ and cognate terms. All those for the period before 1100 (pp. 137, 141, 163, 176, 244) are concerned to deny the significance of the national. A couple of passages suggest that the rise of stronger territorial polities weakened the role of ethnicity in political identity, by undermining the idea of personal ties between chiefs and their followings which in turn were legitimised by descent myths (p. 244). It is also argued that the term gens should not be seen as ethnic (p. 137). Post-1100 References (pp. 351-2, 479, 481-2) do include References to peoples as divided by race, climate and customs (p. 481), but only to add that this was a polemical argument used to fend off English claims to the French crown. Even in a passage arguing for the crystallisation of national identity around certain polities in the thirteenth century (pp. 351-2), the writer states: ‘In Europe in the period up to 1450 a genuine relationship between the nation and the state can be found only in England, France and Bohemia’ (J. P. Canning, in the essay introducing the section of the book on the period 1150-1450).
57. Black, Political Thought, p. 3, suggests why: political theorists were more interested in what should be than what actually was. Nevertheless, they were interested in ideal versions of what actually existed, such as universal monarchy (an ideal version of the Holy Roman Empire), or an ideal solution to the problem of the relationship between the papacy and secular authority.
58. The actual word ‘state’, used roughly as we use it, was unknown until the late fifteenth century. Civitas, res publica, regnum, all with different and varying meanings, were the main terms used.
59. See Black, Political Thought, p. 65.
60. Len Scales has pointed out to me the ubiquity of assemblies in medieval Europe, down to the hundred court in England, and the centrality of the urban market place as a site where many people came together and discussed matters of common concern and where public pronouncements were made. Nevertheless, market gossip and grumbles and the work of humble courts are not capable of creating a ‘public’ culture. In the territorial monarchy (clearly things were different in zones of city-states or peasant republics) authoritative institutions were formal and closed, places of broader and more open participation lacked authority beyond the locality. It is precisely when this division between central and local power breaks down that the ‘nation’ becomes a significant political category.
61. Davies, First English Empire, pp. 1-3.
62. There may be some examples to the contrary, for example the Hussites, though I think this is the exception which proves the rule. See Frantisek Smahel, ‘The idea of the “nation” in Hussite Bohemia’, Historica 6 (1969), 143-247 and 17 (1970), 93-197
63. Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
64. I do not mean that the nation is not imagined to ‘act’, as indicated in the title of a chronicle which Len Scales has drawn to my attention-God’s Deeds Done by the Franks. But the ‘Franks’ are an elite, led by a chief or king, and assumed to share the ambitions of their leader. Such a concept cannot be transferred to a stable territorial polity and the subject population.
65. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
66. G. R. Elton, ‘Parliament in the sixteenth century: functions and fortunes’, The Historical Journal 22 (1979), 255-78.
67. For the ‘invention’ of this argument, one incidentally which breaks with Bede’s linkage between the English and Roman Christianity, see Edwin Jones, The English Nation: the Great Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 1998).
68. I argue this point at length in the Conclusion to John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (2nd edn, Manchester University Press, 1993).
69. I draw especially upon Patrick Collinson, ‘England’, in R. Scribner et al. (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 80-94.
70. For example, Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, pp. 58-59. The most recent citation of this kind I have encountered is Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 62-3.
71. Since originally writing this paragraph I attended a session on Foxe at the Reformation conference held in Birmingham in April 2004 at which papers were presented by Tom Freeman, Elizabeth Evenden and John Craig. I drew various conclusions from these papers, including the following: after 1570 the regime did not press churches to acquire copies; the reception history is complex and does not support any ‘national’ argument; even from the point of view of its ‘author’ (though Foxe was more a constantly revising editor) the book cannot be construed in ‘national’ terms. This was a central thesis in William Haller, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and the Elect Nation (London: Cape, 1967), on which Hastings and Smith draw. Formany of these recent arguments see Patrick Collinson, ‘John Foxe and national consciousness’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 10-34.
72. Philip S. Gorski, ‘The mosaic moment: An early modernist critique of modernist theories of nationalism’, American Journal of Sociology 105 (2000), 1428-68. Marx, Faith in Nation, only came to my attention as I was finishing this essay. This ambitious comparative study of early modern Spain, France and England argues for the mobilisation of national sentiments, primarily through the exclusionary use of confessional identities. The material on such uses is interesting but I do not find it persuasive to treat measures to enforce unity of belief (not language or custom or assumed descent), such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, as examples of national(ist) sentiment.
73. Gorski, ‘Mosaic moment’, 1433.
74. I use here the term coined by Hobsbawm, another modernist who recognises that aspects of nationalism are to be encountered in Reformation Europe. I argued something similar in Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, pp. 76-81.
75. Ethnicity (Dutch against Spanish) was unimportant compared to a political conception of the nation as those who follow the true God.
76. The Orange case is more like the English medieval identification of nation with dynasty which I have already considered.
77. For a recent study on the language of nation in ancien régime France, see David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing French Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
78. For a more general treatment of post-modernist approaches to nationalism see Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, esp. ch. 9.
79. Len Scales makes the point that this could too easily make monarchs the authors of nations and medieval political cultures into simple representations of monarchical values. I would not seek to argue that every usage of the term nation should be seen in this way; doubtless different writers and interests drawn from the Church, law, the nobility, have their own concerns. However, I do not see these as in any significant way using the nation as a counter to monarchy, or deploying it in oppositional movements.
80. On the modernity of such an intelligentsia see Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960)
81. Bernhard Giessen, Intellectuals and the German Nation: Collective Identity in an Axial Age (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
82. Furthermore, as it becomes politically significant, the discourse of nationalism itself is changed. The development of collective action in pursuit of state power clarifies and institutionally fixes nationalist ideology. 77 I have outlined this argument elsewhere. See, for example, J. Breuilly, ‘Napoleonic Germany and state-formation’, in Michael Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800-1815 (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 121-52.
83. These should not be seen as impositions from above but as part of a broad societal change. Labour movements agitated for factory and other inspectorates; progressive income tax and income redistribution by means of selective benefits require a large amount of reliable information on earnings; compulsory education and universal health care call for massive documentation.
84. See the essay by McBride in this volume.
85. On some occasions the ethnographic and political ideas could be combined, above all when one or other of the parties in an inter-state conflict could draw upon some ethnographic label to apply to their opponents. I sometimes think that much of the medieval case for nationalism consists of taking these infrequent cases and suggesting they were normal.
86. A fine recent study of the mix of ideas in German nationalist discourse in the middle of the nineteenth century which brings out the inadequacy of these distinctions is Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
87. This is another way of making Renan’s point; nationalists have to forget as well as remember much of ‘their’ history. Perennialists and ethno-symbolists forget the need to forget.