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Nationalism and Ethnic Demands: Some Speculations on a Congenial Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Robert Drummond
Affiliation:
York University

Abstract

In an interesting and insightful article published in 1969, James Lightbody has attempted an improvement of the theoretical basis for the study of nationalism among political scientists. He suggests that the historical perspective which has characterized most previous treatments of the subject should be abandoned, and that its replacement should be a model which perceives nationalism as the result of ethnic group demands upon a functioning political system. Lightbody argues that the adoption of this sort of model would permit political scientists to determine the characteristics which distinguish “nationalist” movements from similarly configured “non-nationalist” groups. Further-more one could look beyond the “collective enumeration of the various demands that have been made by various nation-seeking groups and their self-appointed spokesmen” which serve as the focus of concern for those who see nationalism as ideology. One could examine ethnic group demands without rejecting them a priori as unnaturally disruptive, and one could make comparisons between majority and minority expressions of nationalist views. The model is an “ideal-type” model, bordering on formalism, since it abstracts the demands of ethnic groups from other similar group demands made on the political system, but it has been constructed with a view to the selection of data which could provide empirical tests of its usefulness.

Type
Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1977

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References

1 Lightbody, James, “A Note on the Theory of Nationalism as a Function of Ethnic Demands,” this Journal 2 (1969), 327–37.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 328.

3 Ibid., 328–29.

4 Ibid., 329.

5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). See especially the Introduction by Gary Teeple and “Ideologies in Quebec” by Gilles Bourque and Nicole Laurin-Frenette.

6 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974), esp. chap. 6.

7 Lightbody, “A Note on the Theory of Nationalism,” 335.

8 Hayes, C. J. H., Essays on Nationalism (1926; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1941).Google Scholar

9 There are certainly competing interpretations of that historical process and of the various views of nationalism which developed. Elie Kedourie, for example, distinguishes nationalism from tribalism, patriotism, and xenophobia and argues that nation-states and nationalism did not genuinely develop until the nineteenth century (Nationalism [London: Hutchinson and Co., 1960, 1961, and 1966]). For the purposes of accommodating the historical record to Lightbody's conception of nationalism as ethnic demands, however, it is necessary to recognize the fundamental similarities among these various expressions of ethnic consciousness, rather than their undoubted differences. Kedourie's view (esp. in Nationalism, 73–79) is antipathetic to this analysis principally because of its insistence that nineteenth-century nationalism is, ideologically, a phenomenon different in kind from tribalism, etc. While recognizing that there can be a variety of contentions about the appropriate relationship between an ethnic group and the apparatus of a particular state, this note (like Lightbody's) suggests that all such contentions are in some sense “nationalisms” and can therefore be examined as differing examples of the same phenomenon.

10 Lightbody, “A Note on the Theory of Nationalism,” 336–37.

11 For a much more detailed review of this process, see Shafer, Boyd C., Nationalism: Myth and Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).Google Scholar Some other explanations of the rise of nationalism are less readily applicable in support of the argument of this essay. Nonetheless, the known events are not, I believe, incompatible with this analysis, and other interpretations differ principally by virtue of differences in emphasis (e.g., Kedourie's concern with national self-determination) or in degree of detail explored.

12 Shafer, Nationalism, 102. It should be noted that this limited conception of the nation did not originate with the bourgeoisie, although it may have had a particular character with them that it did not possess when employed by the aristocracy. Kedourie notes in relation to the Peace of Szatmar in 1711 for example: “… in such a context ‘nation’ did not mean the generality of the people inhabiting the territory of Hungary, but the ‘barons, prelates, and nobles of Hungary,’ an extremely small part of the population, who nevertheless constituted to use Guizot's fruitful distinction, at once the pays légal and the pays réel. Such is the sense in which Montesquieu uses the term in The Spirit of the Laws, when he says that ‘under the first two dynasties [in France] the nation was often called together, that is the lords and the bishops’” (Kedourie, Nationalism, 14). He goes on to note that when revolutionaries stated that the principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, they were presumably asserting that the nation was something more than the King and the aristocracy. What is likely, however, is that bourgeois revolutionaries nonetheless believed the nation was something less than the generality of the people.

13 The terms “dominant” and “subordinate” here are used to distinguish groups in terms of relative power, wealth, and prestige; they are somewhat less confusing than the more common “majority” and “minority” since numbers (which these terms sometimes imply) are merely one source of potential power. There will normally be only one dominant ethnic group in a polity; there may be several subordinate groups. Each contact situation will be definable in terms of relations of dominance and subordination or in terms of symmetry of power, wealth, and prestige. In the latter situations, the outcomes of contact will be more difficult to specify. One would have to determine them empirically, looking at the nationalist views held, as well as at the social and physical factors which Lightbody cites.

14 See Prebble, John, Culloden (London: Penguin, 1967)Google Scholar, and Careless, J. M. S. (ed.), Colonists and Canadiens (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971)Google Scholar, for treatments of these events.

15 See Davis, Morris and Krauter, Joseph F., The Other Canadians (Toronto: Methuen, 1971), 1214 and 6465.Google Scholar

16 See Vallee, F. G., “Multi-Ethnic Societies: The Issues of Identity and Inequality,” in Forcese, Dennis and Richer, Stepher (eds.), Issues in Canadian Society (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 174.Google Scholar

17 See, for example, Costigan, Giovanni, A History of Modern Ireland (New York: Pegasus, 1969 and 1970)Google Scholar, esp. chaps.6 and 7; also Fitzgibbon, Constantine, Red Hand: The Ulster Colony (New York: Warner, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 7.

18 Some readers will object that the Doukhobors and Hutterites are religious, rather than national, groups. For the purposes of analysis of interethnic relations, however, it is reasonable to see them as religiously defined ethnic groups with clear and relatively impermeable boundaries.