Bringing History Back into Nationalism?

Abstract

Constructing and controlling the history of the nation is an important weapon in the armoury of nationalism. Nationalist historical writings assume rather than question the existence of the nation as the basis of the history they narrate (national history is usually narrative history). In the nineteenth century professional historical writing and the national perspective developed so closely together as to make their linkage appear natural and not a nationalist construction (Berger et al., 1999). Indeed, they made the nationalist venture appear instead as a natural outgrowth of history. When pioneering historians in the first half of the twentieth century came to write about ‘nationalism’ as a subject in its own right, they worked principally by collecting together and generalizing from various national histories (Hayes, 1931; Kohn, [1944] 2005; Lawrence, 2004). Even for historians hostile to nationalism, this meant incorporating and thus perpetuating the assumption that nationalism was an expression of the nation rather than something to be understood in its own right, even perhaps as a transnational phenomenon which constructed nations, including their histories.1 KeywordsNational IdentityCoercive PowerNational HistoryHistorical WritingNationalist DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.