General Introduction: Writing the Mass into a Mass Phenomenon

Abstract

By the end of the 1990s, it seemed that virtually everything had been said about the history of nations and nationalism.1 When the dust settled from the fierce disputes between modernists and primordialists, an interpretive consensus seemed to emerge. On the one hand, scholars no longer contested the fundamentally constructed character of nations; yet, on the other, they acknowledged certain limits of such constructivist views. Accordingly, nineteenth-century states and nationalist movements did not invent nations at will and worked with protonational and ethnic identities. Further, nations had histories; indeed, they underwent processes of construction earlier and in a more complex way than die-hard modernists had previously maintained. To use the words of John Breuilly, the genesis of nations relied on a ‘relative construction’ at best (Breuilly, 2002). In a similar vein, the classic dichotomy between ethnic and civic varieties of nationalism turned out to be less clear-cut than formerly posited. Each and every nationalism contained both ethnic — or ethno-cultural — and civic elements, albeit in varying proportions (Dieckhoff, 1996).