ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century commentators on the national question-Lord Acton, Ernest Renan, John Stuart Mill-have nothing like the authority of (say) Marx for political economy or Peirce for semiology. In the nineteenth century the question of nation ‘never produced its own grand thinkers’ (Anderson 1991, p. 5) because it was not then a crucial political issue. In the last decade of the twentieth century we are better placedbeyond the great epoch of European nations, after two World Wars fought largely around the principle of the nation-state, followed, in the period from 1945, by a world-wide anti-colonial movement whose liberationary struggles were powerfully nationalist in inspiration. The owl of Minerva flies only in the dusk, after the event; Charles Tilly points out, ‘as is so often the case, we only begin to understand this momentous historical process-the formation of national states-when it begins to lose its universal significance’ (1994, p. 254). Care needs to be taken here, however; it may not be the nation-state as such but only the formation of nations and the period of their triumphalist self-acclamation which, having passed, permit us a retrospective understanding. Currently, books on nation appear at the rate of almost one a week (see, for example, Hutchinson and Smith 1994, Balakrishnan 1996). And yet, for reasons anticipated in Chapter 1, these generally do not-or do not satisfactorily-address what seems to me the inescapable question: the passion and desire which lie at the heart of nation (the word ‘desire’ itself is enough to strike terror into the heart of any decent-minded sociologist or historian). Yet historical study would be failing in its task of affording historical understanding if it cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of the causes, meanings and effects of atext such as the following, Stendhal writing of the year 1794 in his Life of Napoleon:
In our eyes, the inhabitants of the rest of Europe who fought to keep their chains were pitiable imbeciles, or rascals in the pay of the despots who attacked us. Pitt and Coburg, whose names are still heard repeated in the old echo of the Revolution, seemed to us the leaders of those scoundrels and the personification of everything that was treacherous and stupid in the world. Everything was then dominated by a deep feeling of which I can no longer see any trace. If he is less than 50, let the reader imagine to himself, according to the books, that in 1794 we had no sort of religion at all; our deep and inner feelings were compounded in this one idea: being useful to our country.
