Essay on an Influential Book

International Relations The book Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner provided me with a good background on where the concept of the nation-state came from, how it arose to prominence, and the nationalism that drives it. I wanted to learn more about this subject, because nations are such a critical component in international relations (by definition, I suppose). For most of human history, there were different states, and international politics, but the nation-state is a relatively modern construct.

Given that we are also moving away from the nation-state in some respects, with international bodies and multinational trade agreements, global corporations shifting the balance of power, and growing calls for subnational groups to be better represented, the role of the nation within this larger context is well worth exploring and understanding.

I feel that the nation is just one component of the international system, and but as a central component it is essential to understand precisely what a nation is, in order to better understand how all of these other elements of the international system interrelate. Gellner argues that the nation-state emerged as a reorganization of society given the Industrial Revolution. I was searching for background nations specifically because the new neoliberal globalization is shifting the power structures of the world to a different paradigm.

There has been this question of whether the nation-state is irrelevant. I don't think so, but there is room for a significant re-organization of the concept of the nation. We face global challenges -- climate change is far bigger than economic expansion -- and it is inherently futile to deal with these at the national level.

The book was valuable to my understanding of the roots of nations and nationalism, something that I had to know in order to start thinking about what comes next, in a world that is potentially post-national. The subject of nationalism is an interesting one as well, because of how it ties into the nation-state. Nationalism was an essential component justifying the nation, and was a means by which people could be brought together.

I look at the situation in Europe, where the nation is tied in with ethnic identity, and what that means with respect to the refugee situation, and compare that with the response of an immigrant nation like Canada, where the sense of nationalism is not tied to ethnicity but to culture. Critics of his modernist definition of nationalism has argued that nations are inherently ethnic (Kakei, 2012), but I am not sure that holds up.

To me this explationation of nationalism fails to appreciate the complexity of interactions on a national scale -- the concept is clearly different in different countries today, let alone in the past. In some cases, nationalism has an ethnic component, and in some cases it does not. The interesting thing about nationalism, as tied to the nation-state, is that with the nation-state potentially in decline, where does this leave nationalism? People identify strongly with their nation, and many generations of humans have been raised with these ideas.

It can be hard to let go of the zero-sum game that is international relations and start.