ABSTRACT
Nationalism in recent years has attracted the attention of many social scientists. Among them, the social anthropologists Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, both with experience of field work in extra-European contexts, have offered important and very different approaches to the conditions that explain why individuals become nationalist. John Breuilly, author of a wide-ranging work on Nationalism and the State, outlines and offers his critical reflections on their views and his own contribution about the role of power and the state in this important debate. Nationalism is the most important political ideology of the modern era. It is also the one on which there is the least agreement. There is a gulf between ideological commitment and theoretical reflection. No one would consider the nationalist writers Mazzini, or Heinrich von Treitschke, or Palacky important theorists of nationalism in the way one would consider Karl Marx on socialism, or John Stuart Mill on liberalism, or Edmund Burke on conservatism. There is a gulf between those who regard nationalism as the product, in however exaggerated or distorted a form, of an underlying national reality, and those who regard it as myth, the cause rather than the product of nationality. There is a tension between those who see the nation as a political association and those who regard it as a cultural community. There are further differences concerning the type of political association or cultural community which is envisaged as the aim of nationalism.
