Looking at the work of Gellner, namely “Nations and Nationalism”, we see the idea which can be considered as complemantary to Hobsbawm’s.

            Gellner mentions the same thing that Hobsbawm does about nationalism: “… nationalism emerges only in milieux in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for granted.”[1] According to this statement we can make our explanation that, without a state it cannot be possible to talk about the “nationalist sentiment”. Here, the question appears as, if the existence of state is important for the emergence of nationalism which force or forces did affect the emergence of the state? For us, the important point of Gellner’s work is the explanation of this question.

            Before the Industrial Revolution, at the age of agrarian societies, people were living as small groups. As Gellner insists that, there were “cultural differentiation rather than on homogeneity”[2]. For state, there was no need to construct a cultural homogeneity among its subject members; state was there to collect taxes and maintaining the peace. These small groups adopted an inward oriented lives and had little communication with other small groups, usually for trade purposes. At that time clerisy was the sole agent who wanted to create a sort of commonality in terms of cultural forms among its members to serve the unification purpose in the face of the state.

            With the transition period from the agrarian society to the industiralized one, we observe the occurance of migration

of masses from farms to factories; from rural areas to urban areas. Here, in big cities, people met from the different parts of the country under the same big roof and began to work. This new working environment gave birth to content-free dialogues among workers. As a simple example we can say that a supervisor felt for the first time that he needed a common language to explain his workers how to operate a specific kind of machine which indeed cuts woods. As a result of this situation the “central dominant authority [which] co-exists with semi-autonomous local units”[3] began to leave its place to a much more centralized authority.

            “Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement. Not surprisingly, it was the first society to invent the concept and ideal of progress, of continuous improvement.”[4] Gellner uses the concept of “division of labor” of Adam Smith. Smith insisted that high productivity “requires a complex and refined division of labor.”[5] Since the industrial society have a larger population which is also needed for this complex division of labor, it brings what it requires within it. Comparing with the agricultural one, industrial society needs a common language among its members not only for their communication but also for the mobilization of labors and specialization of them.

            In an agricultural society, sub-communities were responsible for the reproduction of jobs. It means that, they showed to new generations how to conduct a specific job. As a result of this, a person became the responsible of one specific task since it took almost a whole life of this person to be specialized on it. However, with the transition period from that time to an industrialized one, generic education gained importance within the modern society. This generic education is so important within the context of sustainable and perpetual growth because the members of the society should be “mobile, and ready to shift form one activity to another, and must possess that generic training which enables them to follow the manuals and instructions of a new activity or occupation.”[6]. Although this statement mostly relies on the assumption of perfect mobilization of labor and capital, in most cases trained lobor cannot move from one job to another one easily. Ongoing debates still exist in the field of economics; however, this not the right place to discuss them. But, we should mention that Keynes, after 1929’s Great Depression, rejected classicals’ (like Adam Smith and David Ricardo) perfect mobilization theory. He said that market will be in equilibrium not in the case of full employment but lack of full employment. And this statement of J.M. Keynes highlighted that there is no such thing like perfect mobilization of labor. But here, the truth is that, the education that is provided by central authority –state- is a generic education. Except some specialized persons, like professors of specific areas whose job is reproduction of the jobs, no one can be ir-re-placable with someone else. This issue is addressing one of the fundemantal characteristics of capitalist society in which the maximization of profit is the main purpose.

            Gellner’s discussion about the path of nation-building process appears as a natural outcome of all these transformation of production relations which are mentioned above. According to the needs of the industrialized society, first, states were identified with an identified borders, a population who live within these borders and with a ruling government within it. Secondly, the sentiment of nationalism was created with a common language, a common history and a common culture. This commonality was maintained with the rise of a low-culture among the society’s varied low-cultures. During the realization process of this imagination invention of print machine played a very important role.

            One another important point that he talks about in his book is that the unification effect of clerisy. As we state at the beginning of our paper, clerisy tried to maintain some sort of commonality among its members in the face of the power of state. As we all know that, the period that we are talking about was 18th and 19th century at where the power of church was obvious. To play an important role as a ruler and as a result of their aim –becoming a regional power- they used language –Latin- as a tool. In their closed society, they were a separate class, at the top, as the reflection of God on the earth.

            Here, Gellner emphasized something interesting; he said that “It [Islamic society] possessed within itself both a high and low culture… Islam had no church perhaps, but the church it did not have was a broad one.”[7] He made this point to show that although some low-cultures were eliminated during some of them were rose and used as a tool to complete the missing part of the nationalism sentiment. He argued that “pure unitarianism of Islam”[8] and its “trans-ethnic and even trans-political”[9] features made Islam one of the important factor within this context. The answer to the question why nationalism is defined with ethnic or religious frames can be this unique feature of Islam (?).

  

05.11.2009

Pınar ARPACI