Modernist Theories of Nations and Nationalism

In their book on theories of nationalism, Ichijo and Uzelac (Reference Ichijo and Uzelac2005) identify modernism as the dominant analytical approach to the academic study of nations and nationalism. For them, the core shared content of this school of thinking is “that nations and nationalism have appeared as consequences of processes that mark the modern period of social development” (Ichijo and Uzelac Reference Ichijo and Uzelac2005, 9). These modernists differed on which processes of modernization or industrialization they emphasized on the formation of nations and nationalisms, but often included analyses of the expansion of literacy, standardization of vernacular languages and associated expansion of printed works, the expansion of state-sponsored education, the transition away from feudal or agrarian social formations, the impact of economic transitions to capitalism or industrialism, technological advances in communication and transport technologies, and the erosion of the legitimacy of institutions of power such as divinely sanctioned monarchy, to name a few. Crucially, modernists reject primordialist ideas of the nation. These primordialist concepts are frequently traced as far back as the 18^th century to writers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and gained significant popular adherence in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They may include a combination of factors such as the eternal or at least ancient nature of the nation, a genetic or racialized understanding of the nation being held through shared blood ties, or general romantic notions of the nation as the natural form of human collectivity. Indeed, it is precisely to understand or even combat hegemonic notions of the primordial character of nations and the often violent or intolerant regimes associated with them that modernist thinkers often framed their works.Footnote ² The emergence of developed modernization theories of nationalism is most commonly traced to the early 1980s and associated with writers such as Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly, and Ernest Gellner.Footnote ³ It is hard to overstate the impact of these works and their associated modernization theories of nationalism on academia, evidenced by the fact that four decades after its publication, Imagined Communities is still one of the most cited social science works of all time (Green Reference Green2016).

What might be called “pure” modernist theories of nationalism are often juxtaposed with a small body of writings from the same period that are labeled as “ethno-symbolist” understandings of nationalism and nation formation, epitomized by thinkers like Anthony D Smith and John A. Armstrong. These thinkers agree with pure modernists that nationalism and contemporary forms of nations are distinctly modern and tied to modernization processes but argue that most modern nations developed out of pre-existing ethnicities and that it therefore often requires a longue durée examination of processes of socio-cultural development to understand the particular form that nations take in the modern era. Smith explicitly states that he accepts the modernization theories of thinkers such as Anderson and Gellner (his academic mentor) and adds that “it is not that I find this account wrong, only that it tells half the story” (Gellner and Smith “Warwick Debates” Reference Gellner and Smith1995). Adding to the core theories of the pure modernists, Smith argues that “nations and nationalisms are also the products of preexisting traditions and heritages which have coalesced over the generations” (ibid.). Furthermore, he explicitly defines his analysis of nations and nationalism not as a rival theory to modernism but simply as an analytical approach stressing a longer-term historical socio-cultural view. Despite the current tendency in academia to treat these modernists and ethno-symbolist thinkers as separate schools of thought (Ichijo and Uzelac Reference Ichijo and Uzelac2005, 89), ethno-symbolists fit within the larger modernist criteria outlined in this work (rejection of primordialism and acceptance of modernization processes as key to the emergence of nationalism and the modern shape of national groupings). Therefore, for the purposes of this examination, they will be considered a part of the modernization theories of nations and nationalism and thus the intellectual wave of modernist theories and analyses in the 1980s can be addressed collectively.

Perhaps it was inevitable that works on modernization theories of nationalism would spend energy to criticize romantic or racist primordialist ideas of the nation which stand fundamentally in conflict with their theories. It is more surprising that the most influential works from this period – Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism – also go out of their way to severely criticize Marxist thinkers for their supposed intellectual poverty on the issue of nations and nationalism.Footnote ⁴ Anderson quotes Tom Nairn’s earlier criticism that “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failing,” and refines it by writing that “It would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted” (2006, 3). Gellner even more consistently and often forcefully criticizes Marxism, pointing out how Marxists are supposedly incorrect at least ten separate times in his very brief work.Footnote ⁵ He characterizes Marxists’ alleged misunderstanding or general oversight of the phenomenon of nationalism as “The Wrong Address Theory,” writing that “Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations” (Reference Gellner1983, 129).

Background to Marxist Theories on the National Question

Was nationalism “largely elided, rather than confronted” by Marxist thinkers as Anderson and Gellner suggest? A similar criticism was leveled by the Marxist writer Vladimir Medem in the opening paragraphs of his article “Social Democracy and the National Question.” Medem states that “In the field of the national question, Social Democracy has undoubtedly given less than in any other major political issue.” (1906, 3). He continues that Marxists have created “only a very limited number of works that thoroughly and seriously try to understand it; these few works are far from exhausting the complex and difficult task” (ibid.). For Medem, elements of “bourgeois nationalist” thinking – meaning romantic or biological primordialist ideas of the nation – had contaminated some Marxists, while many others “were inclined to see in the national question exclusively a question of different tribal groups of the bourgeoisie squabbling among themselves, a question of a duel in which the proletariat, as a third, independent party, is not interested in the slightest, and should not take any part” (ibid., 4). Although these comments by a prominent Marxist thinker and political leader echo the arguments made by Anderson and Gellner, there is a major catch: Medem wrote this 79 years before Anderson and Gellner, and he proceeded to attempt to correct these short-comings.

During Medem’s time, a substantial body of works on nations and nationalism – usually under the title of “the national question” – were written by high profile Marxist thinkers. In the decade leading up to World War One alone these included, but were not limited to, Medem’s 1904 Social Democracy and the National Question, Otto Bauer’s similarly titled 1907 book, Social Democracy and the Nationalities Question, Karl Kautsky’s 1907/1908 Nationality and Internationality, Rosa Luxemburg’s 1909 The Nationalities Question, Lenin’s 1913 Theses on the National Question, and Stalin’s 1913 The National Question and the Social Democracy (later reprinted under its more commonly known title: Marxism and the National Question). And this is to say nothing of the post-WWI theoretical debates on nations and nationalism within policy circles of Soviet leaders, world-wide members of the Communist International (Comintern), Yugoslav communist theorists such as Kardelj and Tito, Chinese Communist Party policy makers, or Marxists of the Ethiopian student movements (all of whose writing is largely outside the scope of this work) just to name a few post-WWI Marxist theoretical engagements with nationalism. Although the accusation that Marxist thinkers avoided comprehensively confronting questions of nations and nationalism may be true when applied to early theorists such as Marx and Engels, it was far out of date by the time Anderson and Gellner made these points.Footnote ⁶ Although the existence and sheer volume of Marxist works on nations and nationalism from the early 20^th century strongly suggests that some major Marxist figures engaged theoretically with these issues, this alone does not give us an indication of the content, quality, or originality of these ideas.

Before diving into the works of Marxist thinkers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it is important to understand some of the differences between these writings and those of the 1980s theorists. The world before WWI in which these thinkers were based was in many significant ways very different than that of the 1980s. Anderson and Gellner wrote at a time when nations, national sovereignty, and nationalism more generally had achieved a hegemonic status in the geo-political world order. As Anderson puts it “in the modern world everyone can, should, will ’have’ a nationality” (Anderson Reference Anderson2006, 5). They were writing against highly entrenched popular romantic notions of nations. By contrast, the writers of the Second International lived in a world where large, multi-ethnic empires still covered the vast majority of the earth’s land mass and contained most of its people. Most of these large states had not yet fragmented along “national” lines and the mass nationalist violence that would kill tens of millions and displace tens of millions more from 1914-1945 had not yet occurred. Although the 19^th century is often viewed as the period of the growing ascendency of nationalism, the actual reach of this can easily be over-exaggerated. Although concepts of nation and associated nationalism are evident in varying degrees in the revolutionary movements in the Americas and Europe in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, it is important to acknowledge that revolutions, reforms, or governance strategies are never purely “national.” They contend or sometimes coincide with other socioeconomic and political motivations. For example, new scholarship on what is usually considered one of the first “nationalist” revolts in Europe – the Greek revolution of 1821 – tends to see it as more anti-Ottoman (such as opposition to predatory tax farming, incompetent governance, and rule by what were viewed as increasingly chauvinist Muslim elites) than pro-nationalist (Mazower Reference Mazower2022). Yes, some nationalists existed, especially among the tiny Greek bourgeoisie, but regionalism and religious identities (it is likely that a majority of “Greeks” at this time considered Greek to mean Greek Orthodox, not some ethno-national category in the modern sense) motivated most participants. In this way, many movements (especially early ones) and the subsequent governments they created should often be viewed as national-ish, rather than national-ist. In this light, most “national” opposition movements of the mid and late 19^th century, especially the 1848-1849 revolts of the “springtime of nations,” should be seen as a marker of the continued expansion of national consciousness among some segments of society in Europe, not proof of its full diffusion to most members of society or its uncontested hegemony vis-à-vis other identities (e.g. region, empire, or religion) or socio-political groupings (e.g. class, status, or profession). Marxists writing before WWI were writing at a time when national consciousness and nationalism were rising but had not yet completely reshaped the geo-political order and still had to contend with existing imperial and rising class based political formations and conceptions.

Given the very different contexts of these two periods of writing, as well as the very different occupations of these two groups of theorists (Marxist political activists vs academic theorists), their works unsurprisingly have different characters and purposes. Earlier Marxist thinkers were mostly concerned with what to do – or what concrete policy steps should be taken – about a rising and potentially opposing political consciousness whose future success was still very far from certain.Footnote ⁷ From the point of view of political agitation, explaining the processes by which nations formed and what brought about national consciousness may have seemed unnecessary or peripheral to their immediate political goals. As a result, most of the works of socialists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries skip theorization of the nation and nationalism to focus on specifically what to do about ethno-linguistic minorities in large states. For example, in Rosa Luxemburg’s numerous writings on “the national question” written from 1896 to 1918Footnote ⁸ – including “The Polish Question at the International Congress in London” (1896), “The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement” (1905), the five articles of “The National Question and Autonomy” (1908-1909), and “The Nationalities Question” from her larger work on the Russian Revolution (1918) – she is strongly focused on specific governance questions. These include what should be done with the Polish-speaking territories divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, what kind of representation should minorities of these empires receive and on what basis (i.e. national, territorial, or class criteria), and whether or not nations had the right of self-determination. Out of hundreds of pages of writing, larger theories of nations and nationalism receive only occasional, scattered, and almost incidental – though quite powerful – discussion. Even the much more theoretical works, such as Otto Bauer’s The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, are explicitly interested in how governments should manage nations and nationalism and devote considerable time to policy recommendations. By contrast, the modernists of the 1980s were all institutional academics whose work is purely theoretical and explanatory and eschews questions of how to respond to the phenomena of nations and nationalisms.

Another complication is that while later theorists are more consistent in their use of terms, many Marxists of the period of the second international tend to use the terms “nation” and “national” in a fairly broad sense, occasionally making it difficult to understand their specific meaning without context. This is compounded by the fact that these terms often had further differences in connotation across the authors’ different languages. Although most of the writers identified here clearly differentiate between “modern” nations or nationalisms and earlier pre-capitalist forms of ethnic communities, use of the terms is not consistent between authors. For example, Kautsky differentiates between modern nations and earlier forms of the nation while Bauer refuses to call ethnic groups in the feudal era “nations” given their extreme spatial and hierarchical divisions. Bauer does, however, label earlier tribal groupings as nations due to the greater social connectivity of these groups while simultaneously stressing that these units have very little in common with modern national communities. These are often more semantic issues rather than conceptual ones and therefore this work focuses on the conceptual arguments more than the specific vocabulary used.

A final note on context concerns the geo-political realities that shaped early socialist writers of the period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most prominent socialists writing about the national question came from highly multi-ethnic contiguous land empires where rising nationalism posed the biggest threat to the continued existence of a united state, chiefly the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Three of the writers whose works are analyzed here (Kautsky, Renner, and Bauer) were born in Austro-Hungary, while the other three (Medem, Luxemburg, and Stalin) were born in the Russian Empire. As such, their examples and analyses tend to draw frequently from these empires.

Marxists and the National Question: 1898 – 1913

As early as 1898 in Karl Kautsky’s “The Struggle of Nationalities and Constitutional Law in Austria” one can find a clear modernist explanation for the rise of nationalism. In commenting on the dramatic disruption of the Austrian ReichsratFootnote ⁹ that emerged over issues of national language use by government officials in Bohemia, Kautsky – perhaps the most prominent mainstream Marxist at that time – cited three primary factors at work in the recent rise of nationalism across Europe in the development of “the modern national idea.” The first is the growing power of the bourgeoisie with the development of capitalism, who find that their pursuit of market interests coincides with the consolidation of nations as political forces (Kautsky Reference Kautsky1898, 517).Footnote ¹⁰ The second is “the striving for political freedom, for democracy… [which] means the striving for complete sovereignty of the people, who want to freely determine their destinies and resist any external coercion, whether exerted by a person, a class or another nation” (ibid.). Kautsky identifies the third factor as “the spread of literary national education among the masses… essentially a phenomenon peculiar to the nineteenth century” (ibid.). Although his brief examination lacks detailed explanations and fails to broach many issues addressed by later thinkers, we see a clear theoretical formulation for the rise of nationalism rooted in processes of modernization.

In the year following Kautsky’s article, Karl Renner, one of the most prominent socialist politicians of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and future Chancellor and President of Austria, published an article outlining a plan to confront and govern nations through a social-democratic framework. In this 1899 article titled “State and Nation” (Renner Reference Renner2010, published under the pen name Synopticus), he astutely identifies the dangers of the rise of what we might call ethno-national states for national minorities. Given that almost no territory is ethnically homogeneous, he explains the dynamic of oppression that develops in these situations between national minorities and majorities and how this intersects with issues of class. His prescription is an abandonment of “the territorial principle” (trying to create territories for each nation) in favor of a “national personal autonomy.” This was to be a non-territorial autonomy whereby nations would be legal corporate groupings within the state and members of a national group would have a say in issues specific to their nation (such as on schooling, language, or cultural issues) regardless of their physical location in a multi-national state. Although this is the only work in this examination that does not attempt to present a theoretical explanation for nations or nationalism, it is included because its prescription of policy to address the issue of nations and nationalism shows clear engagement with the issue of nations by a prominent Marxist and this work would have a significant impact on key theorists such as Medem and Bauer and provide a framework for the Bolsheviks to attack.

Vladimir Medem’s 1904 work “Social Democracy and the National Question” in some ways represents a blending of Kautsky’s basic modernization theory and Renner’s policy prescriptions and is one of the earliest works to engage on a comprehensive theoretical level with nations and nationalism. Medem was a member of the Jewish Labor Bund, a prominent socialist organization in the Russian Empire that contributed to the founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and eventually followed the Mensheviks after their 1912 split with the Bolsheviks. Although Medem was never a formal leader of the Bund, he had significant weight in the organization and was one of its most prominent theorists. Medem viewed industrial modernization during the capitalist era as creating multiple currents of identity. In tearing down the social structures and institutional barriers of feudal society (including legal inequities between groups) and promoting democratization in order to atomize people into individualized economic units, capitalism opened the possibility for “the abstract ‘citizen and man’… [to be] the main cell of the social organism” (Medem Reference Medem1906, 6). This could lead to openings (or pressures) to leave behind one’s socio-cultural particularisms and assimilate into an expanded society (whether that be a larger “national” group or into a broader humanist cosmopolitanism). However, as he puts it:

While increasing connectivity within groups that shared social, cultural, and linguistic traits forms the basis for modern national groupings and provides a modernist interpretation of the creation of modern nations, for Medem this alone did not explain the phenomenon of nationalism.

Although Medem hints that nationalism takes a variety of forms, he, in a line of reasoning similar to Kautsky, viewed its primary variant arising from the desire of the bourgeoisie to monopolize markets. Medem believed that cultural and linguistic borders of nations could act as impediments to commerce with impacts similar to those of customs duties. This could cut both ways: frustrating the ambitions of a national bourgeoisie to access “foreign” markets, but also acting as a potential defensive bulwark against foreign commerce. This, combined with the chauvinist “us versus them” psychology of petty bourgeois nationalism created incentives for the powerful bourgeoisie to attempt to both expand and defend the borders of its national group, often through use of government institutions to enforce dominance.Footnote ¹¹ Crucially for Medem, the borders between nationalities were permeable which implicitly rejected biological or blood-based ideas of the nation and allowed for the possibility of assimilation or hybridity and therefore the expansion or disappearance of national groups. Additionally, Medem strongly rejected the notion that nations had eternal natures and instead viewed them as constantly evolving and in flux. For this reason (and the fact that most nationalism had a distinctly bourgeois character), he advised socialists to support neither nationalism nor assimilationism and maintain their focus on class-based internationalism. This “neutralism” however, needed some active management beyond simply granting of equal rights and removal of discriminatory legislation. He acknowledged the reality of national oppression of minority groups as a serious concern and believed they needed special protections. Similar to Renner, he viewed nation-based territories as impractical since no territory was ethnically homogeneous and national-territorialism would inevitably lead to oppression of minority cultures. He instead suggested a form of Renner’s national personal autonomy, with a focus on cultural and linguistic autonomy in state institutions such as schools.

Although it is unclear if Otto Bauer was aware of Medem’s 1904 piece when he wrote his 1907 book, he was certainly influenced by Kautsky and fellow Austrian Social Democrat Renner and cited both. Like Renner, Bauer was an extremely influential figure in Austrian politics – he led the leftwing of the SDAP and served as Foreign Minister of Austria – and he too was deeply concerned about finding a socialist solution to the national question in multi-ethnic states such as Austro-Hungary. Bauer’s work, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, is unique among socialist writings on nations and nationalism from this period in its size (a full, large book on the topic), scope, depth, and nuance. Bauer’s first chapter on “The Nation” alone is longer than Gellner’s entire book Nations and Nationalism. Given the fact that Bauer’s socio-historical analysis of the formation of nations and the phenomenon of nationalism and state interactions with the nation is so highly nuanced and avoids easily distilled theoretical generalizations, it is very challenging to provide an overview of his work and arguments. As Ephraim J. Nimni writes in his introduction to the English translation of the work “Refusing to accept any essentialist principle in his conceptualization of the national question, Bauer opened the way for a multidimensional understanding of the national community. This is perhaps another important reason why Bauer’s theory has been so consistently misinterpreted. A superficial reading of the theoretical chapter of his voluminous work is not enough to allow one to understand the intellectual aim of his analysis” (Bauer Reference Bauer2000, xlii). For this reason and the sheer volume of material covered in his work, only a few limited elements from the work will be examined here.

Bauer thoroughly rejected biological and romantic conceptions of the nation (what he called national materialism and national spiritualism respectively). Although he acknowledged the budding field of evolutionary biology and its insights around heredity, admitted that some nations tended to have shared genetic descent, and accepted the possibility that some inherited traits may affect conditions of life behavior that shape culture and identity, he strongly rejected that shared descent was a necessary condition of the formation of a nation. He wrote “persons of common descent who are not united by a cultural community do not form a nation. A nation can exist only where fellow nationals exercise a mutual influence on one another, and this is made possible only by the tool of a common language and the transmission of the same cultural elements. A mere community of nature without a community of culture may as a race be of interest to anthropologists, but it does not form a nation. The conditions of the human struggle for existence can also produce the nation via the means of the community of nature, but they must always do so via the means of the community of culture” (ibid., 106). While Bauer at least recognized genetic descent as a real phenomenon, he entirely rejected romantic national spiritualism as a groundless post-hoc explanation for the existence of historically created national communities, summarizing that “the ‘spirit of the people’ is not an explanation of the national community of character, but a metaphysical reinterpretation of it that is based on the replacement of a causal relationship by a tautology” (ibid., 27).

Instead, Bauer saw modern nations as the culmination of historical processes of community interaction shaped by changing socio-economic conditions. Perhaps anticipating the approaches of the ethno-symbolist thinkers of the 1980s, Bauer provides longue durée analyses to understand nation formation. Using the Germans as an example he charts social history from tribal formations, through settled agriculture, and high feudalism, to early capitalism and industrialization; essentially adding analysis of ethnic and national social formation to Marx’s theory of stages of development. His historical analyses of these processes are too long, detailed and nuanced to begin to address here, but a few key points stand out for our understanding of nation formation. Bauer argues that during the age of feudalism, the Germans did not constitute a nation. A relative lack of mobility and interaction by the masses of peasants tied to the land meant that shared linguistic and cultural connections of tribes in pre-feudal times trended toward further differentiation during this time. Furthermore, hierarchies of power during this period dramatically separated peasant culture from that of the knights and lords. Indeed, Bauer argues that if a form of “nation” existed during this period, it resided in the cultural community of shared interaction found in the knighthood. Like other socialist theorists of the nation during this time, Bauer viewed the modern nation as emerging from the socio-economic changes resulting from the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Among many factors, his detailed account looks at the changing needs of the modern state and its need for standardized languages of administration to interface with subject populations, the need for more educated government officials and the resulting expansion of education and literacy, the role of communication and transportation innovations, and the expansion of democratic suffrage and military service. For Bauer, the German nation at his time still did not yet encompass all potential Germans since social and economic stratification still proved a barrier to cultural interaction, writing that “the nation is constituted by the knighthood in the Middle Ages and by the educated classes in the modern era… but the broad masses whose labor maintains the nation – peasants, artisans, workers – are nothing more than the tenants of the nation” (ibid., 107). He predicted that increased cultural interaction conducted through the medium of shared language would increase membership in the nation as capitalism progressed, and that under socialism, the nation would come to fully incorporate people into national communities. It is important to note here that although Bauer thought that modernization processes were leading to the formation of modern nations, this path was not the same for all groups, adding further complexity to his theory. For example, some groups that would become nations in the modern era did not have an ethnic ruling class during feudal times (such as Slovene peasants ruled by German lords) and would thus have a slightly different path to nation formation (he borrowed Engels’ term “non-historical nations” to describe these groups).

Seeing nations as historically constructed through processes of social interaction, Bauer arrived at a definition of the nation as “the totality of human beings bound together through a community of fate into a community of character” (ibid., 117). He contrasts this with peoples who have shared a “similarity of fate,” such as proletariats in different countries that have experienced similar socio-economic conditions but had not been bound together by a shared culture of interaction (ibid., 100-101). Bauer’s definition of the nation like Anderson’s description of the nation as an “imagined community” does not lend itself to identification of nations based on characteristic elements. Bauer argues that definitions of the nation that try to identify core constitutive elements that determine a nation (such as common area of habitation, common descent, common language, common mores and customs, common experiences, a common historical past, and common laws and common religion) quickly become problematic. Not only do not all nations possess the same types of shared characteristics, but these kinds of constitutive definitions also do not accurately predict which peoples become nations and which do not, and this is why a historically rooted multidimensional analysis is required. Furthermore, in what might be viewed as an anticipation and preemptive criticism of Anderson’s future arguments, Bauer acknowledges the power of shared national consciousness, but cautions against what he calls “psychological theories” of the nation that find the nation as solely the result of shared orientation. He writes that psychological theories alone are “unsatisfactory because, even supposing it were correct that the nation is formed by those conscious of their affinity with one another, the question would remain: why is it that I feel myself to be connected with these rather than with those people? What are the “indissoluble ties” by which I know myself to be linked to the other members of my nation? If I am conscious of my nationality, of what am I actually conscious?” (ibid., 120-121). For Bauer, it is still the community of character socially constructed through historical processes that forms the base on which this national consciousness is rooted.

Given Bauer’s understanding of the formation of the nation, he leaves open the possibility for permeability of national groups. Complete assimilation to a new nation or even hybridity of living as a member of multiple national groups is possible for Bauer. Although Bauer sees language as the crucial medium for interaction and socialization, he stresses that becoming a member of a nation is much more than simply learning another language. One must be socially and culturally incorporated into the nation, a process that is possible in later life, but much easier at a young age (ibid., 103). Although nations are socio-historically constructed entities that are in a constant state of change and development and humans have the capacity (though not easily) to change nations, Bauer took nations and their unique socio-cultural development seriouslyFootnote ¹² and, similar to Renner and Medem, thought that national personal autonomy was the correct governance policy.

Within a year of the publication of Bauer’s book, Kautsky responded to these theories in his article “Nationality and Internationality.”Footnote ¹³ Although he praised Bauer’s work as the “first detailed discussion of this question from a Marxist standpoint” and agreed that the nation is a “product of social development,” Kautsky disagreed not only with some key elements of Bauer’s analysis but also his core definition, writing that “Bauer’s specific definition of the nation is either so vague that it does not show how and why the nation is different to any other social formation, or it is wrong.” (Kautsky and Lewis Reference Kautsky and Lewis2009, 372-374) Resembling later critics of Anderson’s definition who would point out that nations were not the only kind of “imagined communities,” Kautsky points out that nations are not the only kind of “community of fate” that produce a “community of character.” Furthermore, Kautsky particularly objected to Bauer’s argument that marginalized segments of society are excluded from the nation and that (at the time of writing) the nation resided only among educated segments of society and he therefore proposed a key element of the nation that binds all segments together.Footnote ¹⁴ Here Kautsky turns to the issue of language calling it “the most powerful of the threads uniting the nation” (ibid., 397).Footnote ¹⁵ At this point Kautsky arrives at the main purpose of his article: to discuss language, its role in facilitating communities of interaction, and the future trajectory of national communities. Although he stands by his argument from 1898 that developing capitalist markets, expansion of democracy, and increased literacy contribute to the formation of modern nationalism, he also contends that as people learn multiple languages and international commerce facilitates greater interaction, larger overlapping cultural communities will form. He (fairly accurately) predicts that as the commercial and cultural benefits of knowing common languages that link large numbers of people grow, many smaller languages would die out, that some languages will be newly elevated to languages of international communication (he suggests Russian) and that there might emerge a single main international language (he predicts English) (ibid., 386). While Bauer predicted a socialist future of distinct nations, Kautsky predicts consolidation, writing that “Once we have come so far that the mass of the population of our cultural states has mastered one or several other languages alongside their own, then the basis has been created for the gradual decline and the disappearance, initially of the languages of the smaller nations, and for the eventual fusion of the whole of the culture of humanity into one language and nationality” (ibid., 388). Although Kautsky’s brief article lacks Bauer’s detail and nuance, provokes many questions, and leaves itself open to potential charges of inconsistency, it importantly anticipates economic and cultural globalization and provides a theory for the interaction of localized nationalism with international forces.

Shortly after the publication of Kautsky’s article, the highly influential socialist philosopher and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg published a series of key articles on nations and nationalism. In terms of modernization theory, very little in her work was novel, but rather reinforced the trend in high profile socialist writers of the period of the Second International to view modern nations and nationalisms as constructed by socio-economic forces tied to modernization. In arguing against using the nation as the basis on which to bestow political rights in her first article in the 1908-1909 series of works “The National Question”, Luxemburg strongly refutes the notion that nations and national rights are eternal and unchanging, writing that “Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these ‘eternal’ truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch… Marxism regards and treats them only as expressions of certain definite historical conditions, as categories which, in terms of their material content and therefore their political value, are subject to constant change, which is the only ‘eternal’ truth” (Luxemburg Reference Luxemburg1976, 111). Luxemburg directly reiterates Kautsky’s basic formulation of three factors that “make up the ‘roots of the modern national idea,’ as found in the rise of the modern nation state in all of Europe. These factors are: the desire of the bourgeoisie to assure for itself an internal or domestic market for its own commodity production; second, the desire for political freedom – democracy; and finally, expansion of the national literature and culture to the populace” (ibid., 159). Luxemburg attempts to separate the modern national phenomenon from what we might now commonly describe as ethnicity. She writes “Naturally, we are not speaking here of a nationality as a specific ethnic or cultural group. Such nationality is, of course, separate and distinct from the bourgeois aspect; national peculiarities had already existed for centuries. But here we are concerned with national movements as an element of political life, with the aspirations of establishing a so-called nation-state; then the connection between those movements and the bourgeois era is unquestionable” (ibid., 160). But the main goal of her writing was not to theorize about the nature and process of formation of the nation. Luxemburg’s main contributions here were policy oriented. She argued against using the nation as the basis on which to bestow political rights, either through the national personal autonomy of Renner, Medem, and Bauer, or through the as yet still vague promises of national self-determination emanating from Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Although Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was a prolific writer in terms of the number of articles he wrote on the national question, his work is mostly focused on direct policies or general political agitation rather than theory.Footnote ¹⁶ A much more detailed analysis of the formation of nations and nationalism is found in the writings of his future Commissar of Nationalities and eventual successor as leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Researching and writing from the Austrian capital of Vienna, Stalin defined a nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (Stalin Reference Stalin1954, 16). He specifically differentiated his definition from Bauer’s by putting emphasis on the need for shared language and territory and downplaying the importance of the “community of character.” Additionally, he dismissed primordial blood descent-based criteria, noting that “a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people” and that some nations share descendants from a wide range of historically distinct peoples (ibid., 11).

Stalin explicitly tied the formation of the nation to the modern period, specifically in the socio-economic transition of peoples from feudalism to capitalism. He wrote that “A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism is at the same time a process of the constitution of people into nations. Such, for instance, was the case in Western Europe. The British, French, Germans, Italians, and others were formed into nations at the time of the victorious advance of capitalism and its triumph over feudal disunity” (ibid., 24). Stalin used the Georgians as a case study to illustrate this modernist processFootnote ¹⁷ of nation formation:

Stalin’s analysis of the nation was not confined to its formation in the transition to capitalism. He looked to the path ahead for nations in the socialist era. Similar to Kautsky, Stalin differed from Bauer on the future trajectory of nations. He appeared to see the future era of socialism as one in which national identities become less salient, as opposed to Bauer’s vision of nations coming to full development under socialism. He claims that “Bauer’s prophecy regarding ‘the division of humanity into nationally delimited communities’ is refuted by the whole course of development of modern society. National barriers are being demolished and are falling, rather than becoming firmer” (ibid., 59).

Stalin spent much of his work arguing against the implementation of national personal autonomy, whether that proposed by Bauer and Renner, by Medem and the Jewish Bund, or by certain Caucasian Social-Democrats, namely the prominent Menshevik and future leader of an independent Georgia during the Russian Civil War, Noe Zhordania. Stalin saw it as the responsibility of socialists “to put an end to the policy of national oppression, to render it impossible, and thereby to remove the grounds of strife between nations, to take the edge off that strife and reduce it to a minimum” (ibid., 34) and he worried that national personal autonomy would reinforce rather than reduce divisions between peoples. He believed national personal autonomy “stimulates nationalism, because it leads to the viewpoint in favour of the ‘demarcation’ of people according to national curiae, the ‘organization’ of nations, the ‘preservation’ and cultivation of ‘national peculiarities’ – all of which are entirely incompatible with Social-Democracy” (ibid., 100-101). He wrote that this would “prepare the ground not only for the segregation of nations, but also for breaking up the united labour movement. The idea of national autonomy creates the psychological conditions for the division of the united workers’ party into separate parties built on national lines. The breakup of the party is followed by the breakup of the trade unions, and complete segregation is the result. In this way the united class movement is broken up into separate national rivulets” (ibid., 61). Importantly, in his arguments against national personal autonomy, we find further details for his understanding of nations and peoples as changing or evolving social formations. Turning to the extremely diverse ethnic groups of the Caucasus, he argues that most had not reached levels of development to constitute nations due to their lack of literature and shared economic ties. Furthermore, many of these groups were unlikely to ever form independent nations, instead combining or assimilating with neighboring groups. In a slightly different vein of thinking, he also argued that Jews did not constitute a nation since they were extremely fragmented both linguistically and geographically (here we see the implications of Stalin’s emphasis on language and territory in his definition of nation).

Somewhat ironically, given that he would be the only one of the writers here that would be given the power to implement his solution to the “national question,” his work does not provide a clear picture of his policies.Footnote ¹⁸ And indeed, many of the suggested policies appear completely at odds with those actually implemented in the USSR. He advocated for the elimination of minority discontent through the “complete democratization” of society, including guarantees on “liberty of conscience” and “liberty of movement” as well as the right to education in one’s native language. This would be coupled with regional autonomy:

These policies would be combined with a commitment to the right of nations to self-determination (something strongly opposed by Luxemburg and Kautsky). The implication here is that nations (or at least the working classes of nations) would have the theoretical right to secede from a state but that the very fact that this freedom removed the element of compulsion to be part of the state, coupled with the beneficial policies mentioned above, would remove the desire to separate.