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collective self-determination.9 To Anthony D. Smith, however, the nation is more than merely a tool for the collective self-determination of sovereign individuals. He sees it not only as its members’ extended family and locality, but as insuring them against mortality through absorption into a ‘community of fate’ with the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.10 While dismissing the claim that ethnicity as such is constructed, Donald L. Horowitz does agree that ethnic group boundaries are constructed and re-constructed over time. Still, he refuses the conscious actions of individuals in constructing ethnic or national identities and claims that this happens organically as information is processed by the group.11 Seeking the middle ground, Calhoun argues that national identity should be viewed as a mixture of inherited and invented traditions.12 While rejecting the existence of the cynical ethno-political entrepreneur, he acknowledges the innovative character of national cultural continuity. Robert J. Kaiser highlights this innovative aspect of nationalism when he claims that its primary purpose is the construction and maintenance of the image of the nation and the homeland — past, present, and future. To Kaiser, the political programme of nationalism seeks to create a nation and a homeland that is seen as being both ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’. Limiting the nation to a particular homeland is critical to nation-building as it excludes those who are not of the ‘blood’ and the ‘soil’ as intrinsic ‘others’.13 As pointed out by Rogers Brubaker and David Laitin, the mere act of drawing boundaries can have catastrophic consequences for society since ‘group-making projects within ethnic groups are almost always central to violent conflicts between groups’.14 The resulting conflagration can then be ‘framed in ethnic terms’, i.e. as being between two internally homogeneous ethnic groups,15 resulting in the wilful sacrifice of their members’ lives. Arguing that individual identity, as well as that of nations, is a mental construct, Dana Rus points out that not only are identities subjective and individual but they are also subject to change. Framing an individual or a community as an outsider may, therefore, affect a realignment of identification. Indeed, just as an individual’s identification is affected by inter-personal interaction so is a national identity conditioned by inter-national interactions.16 If Rus’s argument is taken further it would suggest that it might be possible for elites to label their own communities as outsiders themselves in order to strengthen in-group attachment and identity, and thus strengthen their power base. 9
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W. Connor, ‘Nationalism and Political Illegitimacy’, in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. by D. Conversi (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 24–50 (p. 29); C. Calhoun, ‘Nationalism and Cultures of Democracy’, Public Culture, 19 (2006), 151–174 (p. 169). A. D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 130 and p. 140. D. L. Horowitz, ‘The Primordialists’, in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. by D. Conversi (London and New York: Routledge 2002), pp. 72–82 (p. 78). Calhoun, ‘Nationalism and Cultures of Democracy’, p. 162. R. J. Kaiser, ‘Homeland Making and the Territorialization of National Identity’, in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. by D. Conversi (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 229–247 (p. 232). R. Brubaker, & D. D. Laitin, ‘Ethnic and Nationalist Violence’, p. 438 (emphasis in original). Ibid., p. 425. D. Rus, ‘A Theoretical Approach’, p. 264.