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The late Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) formulated one of the most widely known and influential theories of the nation and nationalism. His concept has become very popular, mainly because of his thesis that nations are products of nationalism, and not vice versa. It concurs with the current "constructivist" perspective which claims that nations are not anything real, objective, or indispensable; they are only "constructs," contingent and artificial, deliberately created by various elites. Thus we cannot speak of the process of "awakening" nations to conscious life, as such an approach is defined as "preconstructivist simplemindedness" which presumes that nations did exist in the objective sense and just waited to be "awakened."
The opponents of "constructivism" are usually referred to as "primordialists" or "essentialists." It is, however, evident that although the term makes argument much easier, it largely distorts the essence of the dispute. In order to oppose "constructivism," one does not have to go so far as to claim that nations are "perennial" and possess "invariable essence"; it is enough to recognize that they have a sociological reality as permanent products of objective and spontaneous historical processes.
In order to understand the specific nature of Gellner's views, as well as the intellectual climate in which his views have been received, it is worthwhile to examine contructivism in its consistent and extreme form. It is well exemplified in an article by the American author Rogers Brubaker, "Nation as Institutionalized Form, Practical Category, Contingent Event."1
According to Brubaker, nations are not by any means "enduring components of social structure"; they are constructed, contingent and fluctuating, they are "illusory or spurious communities," and an "ideological smoke-screen." The very question "What is a nation?" is not innocent, as it assumes, quite mistakenly, "substantialist belief in the existence of nations. What is real is nationalism, but it is not a product or function of nations.2 If it proved to be a powerful force in the period of the collapse of the USSR, it was not because nations had survived on its territory. The reason was that the communist regime had provided ready-made forms for nationalism by having divided the state into national republics and introduced nationality as a category in identity papers for its citizens.
I would not claim that Brubaker's...