WARFARE AND NATIONS: ANOMALY OR CONSTITUTING FRAMEWORK
Dr John Hutchinson,Associate, LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics
(email: J.Hutchinson1@lse.ac.uk)
Scholars have neglected at a theoretical level the structuring role of warfare in the rise of nations and states. War is often regarded as the great exception, as an interruption to or even deviation from ‘normal’ processes of social change. Charles Tilly, however, charted how organisational processes initiated in the wars of the early modern period survived beyond the conflicts to institutionalise the modern state. Although the frequency of wars in modernity has declined, their transformative consequences, both domestic and international, for political communities have increased given the depth of popular mobilisation and their global scale.
What is true for the constitution of states is also true of national communities, emerging from the early modern period during a period of recurring military conflicts and threats. I argue that war-making has been a constitutive force in the emergence and persistence of many national identities in four ways. First, they can act as a ‘critical junctures’ and in the perception of national populations can operate as foundational moments of collective triumph or suffering. Second, they can create popular we-they stereotypes against significant others that helped socially institutionalise national identities and geo-political relations. Third, they have generated commemorative rituals devoted to immortalising the national dead that prescribe national sacrifice after a return to peace . Finally, at war’s end such sacrifice could also produce utopian hopes for the peace or mobilise peoples in long-range campaigns to overcome defeat.
All four factors have contributed to the embedding of war myths in public life and social intercourse that lend themselves to use as resources for interpreting, debating and giving meaning to politics and everyday life.
Such sacrificial national identities retain resonance from a sense of vulnerability generated by the unpredictability of the modern world. This can come from geopolitical shifts especially when tied to major ideological, demographic or economic changes. Dividing time into distinctive periods of peace and war, therefore, is problematic since they bleed into each other. The linear, ‘homogeneous empty time’ that Anderson argued characterised modernising societies co-exists alongside a conception of the nation as an enaction of recurring myths of collective sacrifice.