Two Theories Of Nationalism

In the late nineteenth century, idea of nationalism emergered as a global phenomenon. People, particularly the scholars, kept arguing about nationalism. Many theories of nationalism were mentioned and discussed. The first theory said that nations emerged a long time ago from earlier communities whose roots in languages, cultures or ethnicites. Nation itseft was a living organism (Bayly, 202). The second theory of nationalism was built by modern historians such as Ernest Geller, Eric Hobsbawn and Benedict Anderson. This theory mentioned that nationalism was a part of globalization, "It was recently constructed by political forces or act of imagination, rather than growing like living organism" (Bayly, 202-204). This paper is going to interpreted …show more content…
Some nations may have immense territories which billions of members but there is no nation can imagine itseft sharing the same territories and numbers of livings as the whole globe (Benedict, 7). This limitation requires a solution, in which boudary a person can imagined herselft as a member of an imagined community. The idea of the states whose membership ties with a given territory. The nation is imagined sovereign because the theory is born in the modern time when ideas of democracy, equality and freedom replace priority of divinely-ordained and hierarchical systems (Benedict, 7). The nation is imagined as a community because "The nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" and people were willing to sacrify themselves to protect that imagined community (Benedict, 7). The idea of devoting for a community has been used by leaders for a long time. When people consider themselve as a part of a community, they become more responsible to their …show more content…
The first difference is in types of society. The religious and dynastic realms in the pre-modern era were hierarchical, vertical society, which authority and power were distributed from the top to the bottom of the society. Population were considered as subjects, not as citizens. For example, the great classical communities such as Chinese and Arabic conceived themselves as the center of the world because of their scared languages. In addition, in those communities, the language was a important and unchangable tool to contact to god and a few of members, usually the elites and the higher classes, were educated to read the scared language of their community Benedict, 13-14). On the other hand, the imagined communities in the modern time is a horizonal society that authority and power of each members either similar or not too different from the other. Besides, the population are viewed as citizens of their community but not subjects as in the previous era. This change from scared communities to imagined communities was helped by the print capitalism and the spread of market of books. As a result of the print captialism, million of books were printed in many languages not only in those scared languages but also in other varnaculars. Moreover, the growth of the market of books added to the increasing of education in those