ABSTRACT
Of the three great dispositions of modernity/modernization-the nationstate, industrialization, and the urban way of life-one element, the nation-state, is dangerous and potentially anti-modern. Despite its constitutive nature, the nation-state is modern only when it is tightly bound into the mechanisms of the other two elements, which prevent it from realizing the principles upon which it is founded. Distinct from industrialization and urbanization, which are founded upon modern principles of individualism and rationalism, nationalism as the substance of every nation-state feeds itself from entirely different sources: the community and sentiment. Here it is difficult to overlook the similarities with one of the presuppositions that may be of a central and constitutive nature within modernization-the social construction of (the female) gender. The thesis that we are bringing forth is not new. One of the essential contributions of the new social history of the family lies in the realization that the small nuclear family based upon sentiment is not a consequence of the processes of modernization but was, on the contrary, a condition and basis for modernization. But for the family to play its own modern productive role it had to remain anachronistic, that is, pre-modern. The construction and maintenance of the pre-modern elements of the family became the social domain of the female gender. Family privacy together with its spatial dimension became the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real place of women. Women’s ‘goodbye’ to individuality and rationality in favour of a community based on sentiment was in fact a precondition for a politically public and bourgeois civil society. Modern interpolations of women into mothers and wives occur together with the shaping of modern nation-states. The similarity of these parallel processes is therefore double: the ‘national’ and ‘woman’ are foreign to modernity even though they are indispensable and constitutive. Their social function is analogous: with the help of sentiment, they construct the community or at least the image of community. For this reason generalizations of nationalist discourse should be taken extremely seriously. These articulate themselves in forms such as The nation is one big family’ or the concept of ‘the motherland’. Even though those who utter these generalizations do not seem to take them seriously, we must take them word for word to understand their ideological productivity. We take these hypotheses as the cue for our analysis of the outbreak of nationalist passion and conflict in former socialist states.
