ABSTRACT
The construction of national identities is clearly a modern phenomenon. It started in Europe in the late 18th century and gained social and political importance on a global scale in the centuries which followed. According to Shmuel N.Eisenstadt, the construction of national identities has to be seen as an attempt to produce a collective identity on the basis of primordial symbols (historical, territorial, linguistic, ethnic) and political boundaries. Since there is no fixed cluster of primordial symbols and no natural identity such as language or ethnicity which guarantees the emergence of modern nation-states, national identity is usually manufactured and shaped by particular social groups (Trägergruppen), including, especially, the cultural ‘intelligentsia’ and political ‘entrepreneurs’.1 For Eisenstadt, it is important to note that the development of new collective identities was embedded in a more extensive cultural and civilisational context and that the various ways in which national identities were produced depended to a great extent on how the relationship between primordial-particularistic and the more general religious-universalistic elements were shaped and maintained. He argues that a tension between these two aspects is unavoidable and that this tension acquired an especially decisive form in the European case. In Europe the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane led, first, to the emergence of a hierarchical relationship between the higher ethical and the political order and, second, to the development of a way of overcoming this tension, namely a worldview of the type that Max Weber has called a religion of salvation (Erlösungsreligion). The pressure which grew out of the intellectual enterprise to make the mundane political order correspond to the appropriate transcendental vision created, in Eisenstadt’s view, a missionary style of universalism that is a salient characteristic of all ‘Axial civilisations’.2 By Axial civilisations’ (a concept introduced by Karl Jaspers) Eisenstadt means those civilisations that crystallised in the period extending from 500 BC to the first century of the Christian era or even to the rise of Islam, within which new types of ontological visionsconceptions of a basic tension between the transcendental and the mundane
orders-emerged and were institutionalised.3 The core of Eisenstadt’s s argument lies in main taining that the universalism of these civilisations helped them to succeed in creating institutional frameworks that dominated and marginalised those of the non-Axial civilisations.
