In seminar rooms in Vienna, we learned about the concept of nations as “imagined communities,” a theory developed by Benedict Anderson in the 1980s — a shared identity that allows millions of disparate people to feel connected despite not knowing each other personally. Creating those communities based on shared traditions and national myths — the basis for a nation — became increasingly possible during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of mass media. Political leaders, who saw the value a unified population could have for consolidating power, helped facilitate this process and brought about the proliferation of the modern nation-state.
Nowhere was that creation of a national myth and shared traditions and values more powerful than in the United States, where a population without a common history came together in the late 18th century under a new American identity to overthrow British rule and found their own country. Many of the Americans in the program, like me, hadn’t recognized the nationalistic purpose of many of the traditions we grew up with, from the pledge of allegiance to the ubiquity of American flags.
But nationalism, in addition to being a powerful force in nation-building, has a dark side. Scholars in the field have also looked at how nationalism, when taken to extremes, led to fascism, totalitarianism and the conflicts that shaped geopolitics throughout the 20th century. In 1930s Germany, the belief in an ethnic German nation that extended far beyond the geographical boundaries of 1930s Germany — and the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were not and could not be part of that German nation — plunged the world into war and served as the rationale for the Holocaust.
These were some of the big questions and developments Gellner hoped to explore with his center in Prague. After his death in 1995, other scholars of nationalism came together to establish a full-time degree program at CEU’s Budapest campus to honor his work and his memory. “The idea wasn’t that we were only going to study these classic works which are looking at these macro-historical, great transformations,” Brubaker, one of those involved at the time, told me in his office in Los Angeles this summer. “We have transformations happening right now … and so it seemed like a very much alive question and a crucial question.”
Rather than looking at nationalism as a historical phenomenon, the program wanted to help students understand what present-day nationalism looked like. The fierce conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which pitted the predominantly Orthodox Christian Serbs against Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Croatia in a years-long war that left tens of thousands dead, served as a reminder to those studying the phenomenon that it was constantly evolving and showing up in new places and contexts.
“There was this hope that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, nationalism would not be a big thing,” said Szabolcs Pogonyi, current director of the Nationalism Studies Program, who joined the department a few years after its founding. With more and more countries democratizing and more and more economies globalizing, some thought that the era of nation-on-nation conflict was on the wane. “Then you had nationalist wars raging very close to us in Yugoslavia … and since then, we also see that it’s not going to go away.”