Nations the Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism Review

Though military machine historian Azar Gat wrote Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, he gives extensive credit to swain historian Alexander Yakobson for his comments and advice contributed throughout the book. Yakobson also authored the final chapter. I read this book at the recommendation of my sometime colleague Alex Nowrasteh.

Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism has become the standard defense of nationalism. The trouble is that Hazony's defense is not very coherent. In a sense, Hazony wrote a volume-length version of "it'south not about race." Hazony also struggles to say what nationalism might be about instead. Hazony also argues that nationalism is a recent phenomenon. After all, nations equally nosotros know them today accept only been around for a few centuries.

Gat's ii primary arguments cause problems for Yazony-mode thinkers. One, nationalism is ancient. In fact, the impulses backside it predate our species. They are an inescapable function of the human condition. 2, nationalism is generally virtually race. More precisely, it is more often than not about ethnicity. Not exclusively, but mostly. Gat uses a broader, boutique definition of ethnicity for the purposes of his discussion, near which more below. But race is an important part of his use of the term. Unlike Hazony, he does not dodge the question.

Gat also does not defend nationalism. Nor is he interested in attacking it, though he is clearly put off by the cultural chauvinism and belligerence that often back-trail nationalism, fifty-fifty in relatively peaceful places such every bit French republic. Gat instead seeks agreement. What makes nationalists tick? Why do they concur their beliefs? This 2013 book came out before nationalism regained its electric current voguishness in populist movements around the earth. Nations may exist a better volume for that reason. It provides light without the heat that electric current events can inspire.

Nationalism predates the concept of nation, which is one reason why Gat focuses on ethnicity. To Gat, nationalism is just one possible way of expressing a deeper impulse. Gat doesn't cite Adam Smith'southward circle of concern theory from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but his thinking is similar. Basically, people care more about people close to them than they practise about people who are socially distant. People care almost nigh themselves. They intendance very much about close relatives such as children and siblings, though a bit less than about themselves. They care a flake less than that most cousins, aunts, and uncles, still less about 2nd cousins, so on.

The circle of concern is non an ironclad rule that applies in every single case, equally Richard Dawkins convincingly argues in The Selfish Gene—forth with whatever parents who have fabricated sacrifices for their children. Merely equally a guide to understanding human behavior, the circle of concern is a universal tendency.

As Adam Smith put it, a person in England volition lose more sleep over losing his piffling finger than over a hundred grand people dying in a natural disaster in Cathay. This might audio common cold or callous, and it is. Smith himself disapproved of this tendency. Only Smith was writing nearly "is," not "should." Those are separate questions, similar to the difference between fact and opinion. The reason Smith made that point, even though he did non similar it, is that it is truthful.

In fact, growing the circumvolve of concern was one of Smith'due south greatest hopes for humanity. In a way, the whole project of modernity and the mail-1800 Great Enrichment has consisted of people growing their circles of concern en masse. This moral vision, far more than material gain, was the foundation of Adam Smith's case for free trade. It is the moral foundation for liberalism equally a whole—liberalism in the original, and correct sense of the word.

Where does nationalism enter this picture? Humans have more than sophisticated social arrangements than other animals, so our Smithian circle of business organisation naturally tends to exist wider than in other species. For 95 per centum of our 200,000-year history as a species, we lived in mostly-related clans of l to 150 people or so. But these bands would often slightly overlap with other nearby clans. While these encounters were often far from friendly, they provided a chance for groups to trade and to substitution members through intermarriage. This prevented inbreeding and created opportunities for trade, or for depleted groups to furnish their numbers.

There was an evolutionary advantage to having some social ties between clans betwixt these clans, even if not at the same level as within-clan ties—again, remember the selfish gene. Often these next clans would encounter for seasonal feasts, holidays, or religious ceremonies—a class of social development that helped to strengthen survival-enhancing bonds.

Prove from surviving classical sources such equally Herodotus, Caesar, and Tacitus, as well as mod anthropologists studying today'due south tribal peoples, have all found surprisingly similar pre-national social structures around the world, despite all the local cultural differences.

These networks of 500 to 1,000 people or and then are nearly the outer limit of the number of personal relationships a human is able to maintain. Beyond that, everyone is a stranger. And strangers with no binding ties were as likely to steal food or kidnap mates equally they were to trade peacefully. That is why people accept an instinct to affirm their in-group and vilify their out-groups—back in the day, information technology was a survival machinery.

Natural choice processes chose people whose circle of concern was wide plenty to include adjacent groups, not just their everyday in-group. We are their descendants. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, there was no such pressure level for the circle of business to extend wider than this, to perfect strangers—until very recently. As well recently for evolution to catch upwardly to our new social circumstances.

As human being societies scaled up into urban center-states, regional empires, and eventually nation-states, all the unlike facets of Gat's concept of ethnicity come up into play to progressively greater degrees. Having something in mutual, such as a language, faith, or a shared hometown or king gave people something in common. It made for an like shooting fish in a barrel mental shortcut to make up one's mind if a stranger could be trusted.

Gat argues that language is usually the nearly of import ethnic identifier. If someone does not speak your language, or does and then with a noticeable accent, they are clearly other. Religion is another ethnic identifier. Someone who prays to foreign gods probably isn't from around here. Wearing apparel and advent matter for the aforementioned reason. The European divide of beer and butter in the North, versus wine and olive oil in the Due south, is another indicate of division. Jews and Muslims took their dietary community with them throughout their travels, keeping them ethnically autonomously—in Gat'due south sense of the term—from pork-eating peoples regardless of where they settled down. As the comedian George Carlin observed, people will always find excuses not to get along. Merely inquire sports fans at a Packers-Bears game.

While the genetic view of race is a adequately contempo miracle, people have too always marked themselves autonomously by racial appearances. And ironically, the reason we do this is genetic. That means Gat's argument about ethnicity and nationalism both is and is not genetically based. Race is literally merely skin deep. Just the reason why people and so often fight and so fiercely near race and ethnicity has genetic roots that are universal to our species. And race is only 1 of approximately a million and 1 means to express that larger inborn tendency. That is where nationalism comes from—human nature'due south in-group-out-group instinct.

Gat combines many of these factors in a very wide concept of ethnicity that varies from identify to place and changes over time. Sometime around the invention of agronomics, out of this evolving mush eventually came the concept of fixed political boundaries. These too came most organically, unremarkably in line with ethnic boundaries.

Merely because dissimilar facets of ethnicity have different boundaries, a unmarried geographic line can never accurately reflect ethnic lines. It is literally impossible. Maybe two people with common genetics, language, and territory accept a different religion, as in Serbia and Croatia. It is impossible to fix a national boundary that fits every facet of ethnic identity, so war ensued. In many places, 2 or more dissimilar ethnicities alive enmeshed together in the same cities and neighborhoods. If each wants its own state, how does i create a fair boundary?

These types of questions are difficult, and mayhap impossible to answer. And that is one reason why war volition likely always be with us. And then will other, usually less lethal forms of social division.

This attribute of Gat's thesis reminds this reader of the virtues of a cultural-national version of Ostrom-way polycentrism. Typical regime services such as schools, parks, roads, and law are very different from each other. They each serve different constituencies with different needs and different boundaries. And the urban center workers providing those services all have their own varying needs. So why are nearly all of these wildly different services administered at just a few fixed levels—urban center, state, and federal?

This kind of shoehorning oft has adverse effects on the quality of those services. But every bit more flexible scaling of government services tin can brand them more effective, maybe the same is true of nations. One size clearly does not fit all, every bit whatsoever history volume will tell you lot. Maybe allowing for multiple concurrent sizes of "nation" that conform over time would allow dissimilar people to live together more peacefully.

That, in a nutshell, is Gat'due south thesis, plus a few outside applications of information technology. To illustrate his arguments, Gat spends the last 2 thirds or so of the volume on a survey of globe history. He briefly visits nigh every time menstruation on every continent in at least enough particular to show how ethnicity and national sentiments have intertwined, peacefully and non. The aforementioned ethnic dynamics were about e'er in play before, during, and after modern nation-states emerged as we know them today. Yakobson's concluding chapter applies his and Gat'due south framework to present-day (in 2013) politics around the earth.

Nations is the rare book that makes the reader see the world differently, permanently. It provides a magnifying lens that, when properly held, can bring into focus important details on world history; modern history; why countries exist in the offset identify; why larger structures such as the European Union (EU) are controversial despite being peaceful; why the EU's faults are not necessarily random; and on today's in-progress worldwide political realignment, which is increasingly based effectually a nationalism-versus-liberalism axis, rather than a socialism-versus-liberalism axis.

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Source: https://cei.org/blog/retro-reviews-azar-gat-with-alexander-yakobson-nations-the-long-history-and-deep-roots-of-political-ethnicity-and-nationalism-2013/