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In what may prove to be the final work in a prolific career over four decades, Anthony Smith has condensed the key conclusions of a lifetime into this brief review of theories of nationalism, with a focus on his approach of "historical ethno-symbolism." Since he is thoroughly right in the main thrust of his argument, one hopes his brevity here will attract readers who are unfamiliar with his previous works.
Smith's main goal is to define a middle ground among three competing understandings of nations and nationalism: modernism, neo-perennialism, and postmodern constructivism. According to the modernist view, nations and nationalism are the product of modernization, emerging as a result of the combined forces of urbanization, industrialization, and mass secular education. Only in the context of modernity, modernists argue, did it become possible and indispensible for linguistic communities to emerge as political communities demanding autonomy and, preferably, sovereignty. Thus modernization enabled--and, ultimately, required--elites to create nations that did not previously exist. Neo-perennialists object to this argument by pointing out that at least some nations, such as the English and the French, can be identified as having existed already in the fourteenth century, while some others (such as the Armenian and Jewish peoples) are even older. Postmodern constructivists protest that both of these schools of thought give too much credence to the claims of the nationalists; the nation is "ultimately a fiction engineered by elites using 'invented traditions' for purposes of social control" (p. 11). What scholars need to do, in this view, is to dissect the on-the-ground discursive practices that accomplish this work.
Smith's ethno-symbolism sees value in all three approaches. Thus along with the modernists, ethno-symbolism sees the nation as a real sociological community embedded in a particular historical context, resulting from material conditions and constructed in...