Time Heals All Wounds: Resisting the Authority of History in the Concepts of Nation and Nationalism
Introduction Nations, in contrast with states, are generally recognized within the intellectual community as more or less artificially created entities. And while this view seems to contradict the way in which many people actually think about their own particular nations—perceiving them as natural units, somewhat like families, to which they often feel deep ties—the arguments supporting the view of nations as “invented” are compelling and long-standing. As early as 1882, for example, Ernest Renan—rejecting the claims of race, language, economic interest, religious affinities, geography and military necessity—declared in his lecture “Qu’est qu’une nation” (“What is a Nation?”), delivered at the Sorbonne, that “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.”  People are members of a nation, he asserted, largely because—at least in theory—they want to be; and the very existence of a nation, he stated, is “an everyday plebiscite” ([1882] 1996 : 240 & 241). 1 In La Tentation de l’Occident ( The Temptation of the West ), published in 1926, Andre Malraux expressed a similar conception of the nation: “The mind creates the idea of a nation, but what gives it its sentimental force is a community of dreams. Our brothers are those whose childhood was played out to the rhythm of the same epics and legends that dominated our own” ([1926] 1984 : 97). 2 The reality of a nation, thus, is, to a great extent—and indeed somewhat ironically—in