No. of Recommendations: 6
I'm impressed by your intellectual curiosity and the courtesy you have shown me in reading a book I recommended, and out of respect I would like to respond to some of your observations.
It is my pleasure. I found it interesting.
It would be incumbent upon you to explain what the nation is, and how it has existed across millennium and in vastly different social conditions of existence, if it is not a historical artifact of the rise of bourgeois liberalism and its attempts to organize the state on a new basis?
I'll use this quote as a jumping off point. The "nation" in the sense that I was using is not the modern nation-state - it's a synonym for a People. So if you go back to the 11th century Danes, or the 13th English during the time of the Kingdom of England, you had a group of people that shared a common language, culture, communal observances and rituals, religious beliefs, cuisine and agricultural practices, etc. A People, with a capital P.
Those Peoples were distinct and separate from each other. They would have their own social and societal hierarchies. They would all-too-frequently attack, conquer, enslave and kill other Peoples - differentiating between their People (the "us") and other People (the "them") on the basis of the characteristics I described above. They would form governance structures that were co-extensive with their People-ness, most commonly based on the concept of a "king" and organized as a kingdom. And they did that, in part, because there was something fundamentally different about being "English" than being "French" - even in the 16th century. So when you write:
Is there some essential identity that unifies people around culture, language, and blood and transcends the awesome differences between feudal society in the tenth century and capitalism in the twentieth century?
....the answer is 100% yes!. Individual people belonged to different People, even back then! The countries that existed back then were very different types of states than those that exist today (the "awesome differences" you mention) - but they were still countries. Different Peoples would fight each other for various reasons - to conquer territory, to acquire slaves or material possessions, or just to kill the other guys before they could kill us.
I recognize that the following reasons for going to war are all different:
1) I am willing to join an army because I am motivated to defend what I conceive of as my national homeland;
2) I am willing to join an army because I believe the king of Albabia, ordering me to join, was anointed by God and Jesus and I will go to hell if I don't;
3) I am willing to join an army because the lord to which I am a serf will burn down my hovel and have my head on a pikestaff if I don't;
4) I am willing to join an army because I speak Albanian and worship Albanian gods, and the invading Phools speak Phoolish and worship Phoolish gods and will slaughter anyone who speaks Albabian and worships Albabian gods.
...and that only the modern-nation state elicits the first. But it doesn't matter for the purposes of the conversation we were having. Because while the modern characteristics of a nation-state only inhere to a specific form of political organization that we might agree was born in the 18th century, the relevant characteristics that lead to people self-identifying as distinct Nations have existed for millennia. Those Nations had their own structures and organization that differ significantly from the modern nation-state - but they still existed! The fact that they were different types of things in the 1400's than today might be relevant to what Anderson was interested in - but it doesn't disqualify the existence of Peoples forming Nations around their shared identities, which goes back to the dawn of history.
Which was my point in the other thread. I am not arguing that the English of Henry VIII's time experienced their country the same way they would a modern-nation state - but I am arguing that there were English back then. There was an English Nation, different from the Nation of Denmark or Russia or Japan. Being English was very real.. It had real world consequences. It wasn't just a community that existed because the individuals could imagine in their heads that there were other people fifty miles away that they would never meet but were "like" them - it was a community that existed because those people fifty miles away actually spoke the same language and followed the same religion and shared the same cultural practices and because other people would conquer them collectively based on those shared characteristics if they didn't organize themselves around those shared characteristics.
People have always organized themselves into "us" vs. "them" based on language, religion, culture, common practices or beliefs, etc. In the past, that would have manifested in them organizing themselves into a kingdom based, further structured on a hierarchy of feudal title holders or warlords or what have you. Today, the form of that organization takes the shape of the modern nation-state. But if there wasn't a modern nation-state, the same thing would happen - the various Peoples of the world would still want to organize themselves into structures that served the interest of their People as a People.
The importance of the group - of the People - has always existed. It is not a function of the modern nation-state. It predates it by millennia. The modern nation-state is not the cause of the ills that are associated with conflicts between Peoples. If anything, the modern nation-state helps ameliorate those ills, because it's one of the rare forms of country organization that allows a nation-state to be built around something other than the immutable "People" characteristics that previously predominated.
