In social sciences, the representations of space depend largely on “images of break, rupture and disjunction” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 6). In this sense, nations are separated in terms of fragmented spaces, divided by different colors, names and other symbols which are designed to indicate what distinguishes selfness from otherness. This representation evokes some important issues that are going to be discussed in this article. The first issue relates to space and the division of nations into imaginary territorial boundaries. Different from what we see in the maps, boarders are not fixed edges that separate peoples from different states, but rather areas of intense exchange and confluence of peoples to whom the meaning of the territorial division is not as clear as the maps demonstrate.
The second issue discusses the question of unity within a state. Through the association of material and symbolic dimensions (Gregory 1994), we assume that each State represent a national unity and we read these representations as such. In this sense, we assume that France is the homeland of French people and French culture; Poland of the Polish, Argentina of the Argentinian and so on. Nevertheless, this “assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture” takes for granted the cultural diversity within each State (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 7).
The fact that nation-states are based on the presumption of cultural unity, political and institutional autonomy, and legitimate monopoly of a territory (Smith 2010), obscures the actual representation of the division of nations in the world scale. The inherently hybridity of the human agency and social organization will be the main concern of this article. The main objective is to discuss the nation-state, not as an cultural unity representative of a nation, but the nations within the institutional and political representation of an unifying state. But before getting into this discussion, it is necessary to present some definitions of the terms that will be used throughout this article.
1 - CONCEPTS
In this section, I will present the definition of four terms I identify as being paramount to the understanding of the main issue discussed in this article, they are: nation, state, community or ethnie and national identity. Some of these terms’ definitions overlap and are used interchangeably in the studies analyzed for this article. Therefore, the intention of this section is not to distinguish one term from the other or adopt the most suitable one for the examination of the issue under discussion, but to offer a better understanding of the concepts that will be used henceforth.
1.1 - Community or Ethnie
Pain (2001) points out that community is a poorly defined term. The Dictionary of Human Geography defines community as a “social network of interacting individuals, usually concentrated into a defined territory” (Johnston 2000: 101). However, other concepts understand communities as a form of human association that can be spatial or non-spatial. In this sense, community is a highly flexible and rarely coherent entity that can exist without conflict and speak with one voice (Pain 2001).
Therefore, communities are social constructions and they can represent several different types of groups at the same time (Pain 2001), such as: clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties and so on (Gellner 2006). For the purpose of this article, I want to narrow down the definition of community to a single factor that will be relevant to the discussion of the topic at issue. This definition is presented by Smith (2010) in terms of ethnie or ethnic community. According to the author, ethnic community “usually has no political referent, and in many cases lack a public culture and even a territorial dimension, since it is not necessary for an ethnic community to be in physical possession of its historical territory” (Smith 2010: 12-3).
Hence, communities are not human groups concentrated in a territory, rather they are imagined communities (Anderson 2010). In this sense, communities are abstract notions to which a group of people share the same sense of belonging based on their ethnicity and origin in the homeland, although this homeland may not represent a physical space. Therefore, the notion of community is based on the representation of space, the indication of a real space and its characteristics, or on space representations, the idea or idealization of a place in terms of a desired space with no specific physical reference.
1.2 - Nation
According to the Dictionary of Human Geography, nation is “a product of nationalism” (Johnston 2000: 486). It is the foundation of a national community and it “uses geography or imaginative geographies of place and landscape, to create and consolidate conceptions of primordial nationhood” (Johnston 2000: 487). The formalization of a nation is the nation-state, which will be discussed in the following subsection.
The difference between a community and a nation is based on two main traits: the political unity (Gellner 2006) and the spatial linkage (Smith 2010). According to Smith, a nation “must reside in a perceived homeland of its own, at least for a long period of time, in order to constitute itself as a nation” (Smith 2010: 13). For this author, a nation has a space referential, even if they don’t reside in the territory anymore and the link between community and space is created through cultural and historical values.
This definition relates to Anderson’s (2006) concept of imagined communities, where people identify more with a nation through their shared culture, ethnic unity and certain symbolic representations of space, than with physical space itself. For Gellner the major trait that defines a nation is the political unity achieved through “in terms of will and of culture” (2006: 54). Gellner (2006) does not include the term territory in the definition of nation. This author recognizes that many nations do not have a homeland, but share the same territory with other nations of the same nation-state. For this reason, he perceives political unity as the main defining characteristic of nations.
1.3 - State or Nation-State
The difference between nation and nation-state or state is based on two major characteristics, the territory and political institutions. Whereas the nation has political unity and shared cultural values, myths and history, the state is a formalization of these traits under political institutions and norms that legitimize the monopoly of a nation over a certain physical space. In this sense, states are perceived as unifying entities with a unique set of traits symbolically represented in venues such as: national anthem, flag, sport, official religion, language, territory, political regiments and institutions. In short, is the formalization of the legal establishment of a nation.
According to the Dictionary of Human Geography, nation-state is “the combination of national governance and national governamentality that emerged as the norm of European state-making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Johnston 2000: 489). For Gellner, the State is “that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order” (2006: 4). For Smith, states are defined as “a set of autonomous institutions, differentiated from other institutions, possessing a legitimate monopoly of coercion and extraction in a given territory” (2010: 12). From an objective perspective, the main traits of a State is the legitimate use of force and the monopoly of a certain territory.
A State is the formalization of a nation, in other words the legitimization of a nationhood through the establishment of a jurisdiction. Smith (2010) and Gellner (2006) agree that the State can emerge without the nation and vice-versa. However, both authors also agree that nationalism usually is the driving force for the emergence of States. In this sense, nations desire to some degree self-determination, autonomy and sovereignty, therefore, they seek to possess a sovereign state of their own. In Gellner’s words, every nation seeks its “own political roof” (2006: 2).
1.4 - National Identity
National identity is the sentiment of belonging, solidarity and identification to a nation. According to Smith (2010), national identity is different from nationalism, because nationalism is usually defined as patriotism, which entails citizenship, loyalty to the larger territorial state and its institutions. This term became widely used in the eighteenth century, perhaps because of the widespread concern with identity and individualism of the modern society (Smith 2010).
In Smith’s view national identity is the
continuous reproduction and interpretation by the members of a national community of a pattern of symbols, values, myths, memories and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and variable identification of individual members of that community with that heritage and its cultural elements (2010: 20).
Mavroudi (2010) argues that this notion promotes the sentiment of nation-ness or us-ness in relation to otherness. It is through national identity that individuals and communities distinguish themselves from others and create the sense of uniqueness and autonomy necessary to legitimate a nation and a state. However, as pointed out by Anderson (2006), this process embodies many subjective notion and the most important of all notion raises a simple question posed by Gupta and Ferguson, that is, “what does us stands for?” (1992: 14).
2 - NATIONAL UNITY
Ernest Gellner (2006) argues that nationality is not, in fact, an innate attribute of humanity. And Anderson’s (2010) insightful argument is that a nation is a symbolic community. Hence, it’s a narrative of a people’s history, literature, traditions that gives meaning and importance to their monotonous existence and creates sort of a destiny to the community, as form of guaranty of continuity (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In this sense, nations and states are social constructs and, therefore, they are socially contested (Gupta and Ferguson 1992).
As discussed in the previous section, states emerge presumably as ‘homogenous’ communities, through the establishment of norms such as “societal behavior, culture, ethnicity and history” (Shapiro 200). However, this is a very simplistic and purist conception that overlooks the diverse nature of human behavior (Laraia 1986). According to Gregory, this need to form concepts of nation through unity and homogeneity is shaped by the “intensified bureaucratization through space, which involves the installation of juridico-political grids by means of which social life is subject to systematic surveillance and regulation by the state” (1994: 401).
This bureaucratization through space is a form of imposing discipline and power maintaining a symbolic order and stability in terms of space. Therefore, the states control and manipulate belonging within defined boundaries. In this sense, being a migrant, cross-boarder or an immigrant might be a vulnerable position, since the political structure of a state is based on the presumption of unity and homogeneity (Mavroudi 2010).
This is a very sensitive issue, since there are more nations in the world than states (Gellner 2006). First, because of the assumption that there is a natural relation among people, place and culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The fact that a community belong to a specific territory or that certain territory belongs to a community defies the fluidity and changeability of the human agency. Furthermore, it creates tension between minority groups that recognized themselves as a distinct ethnical groups, such as a diaspora, or migrant and immigrants.
This notion also overlooks the stateless nations, such as the Kurdish, who are not related to any physical territory and, therefore, suffer the pressure of certain nations that see them as outsides. The legitimacy of the state control over a territory is a major issue in a culturally diverse global village, where the flux of individuals have been increasingly intensified by globalization process. The need to control a certain territory to secure self-determination and autonomy is one of the most contradictory and remarkable traits of a state.
Anderson (2006) discusses the reification of a state as legitimate representation of a nation and the place of birth or place of origin as an attribute of belonging. As a social construction, states are imagined communities based on the perceptions of the nations of the abstract representations the physical space has. The division of spaces among groups of people is a very fluid and uncertain process, by all means contested. As people move around the globe forming polarized or sparse human communities, the motivations for this movement and change can only be traced by states in terms of political grids to control and manipulate the entrance and permanence (Gregory 1994).
This control of the state can be easily observed in term of migration and immigration processes where certain groups of people are authorized or denied access to a certain territory. There are other factors that implicate the legitimacy of a state, that is the nations within the same territory that feel they have been excluded or repressed by the nation-state, where they start promoting nationalist movements to vindicate their own territory, given their representativity and ethnic unity within the state. In this sense, because states compress a number of nations in the same territory, the nations that feel overlooked or repressed somehow defy the unity of the state and demand their own share of the territory.
3 - NATIONAL TERRITORY
Gellner (2006) explains the compression of several different ethnic communities as part of the same ‘state’ on the basis of a mathematical equation, where there are more nations in the world than viable states to accommodate them. For this reason, nations that feel excluded of a society demand through nationalist movements and disputes or struggles it’s own ‘political roof’. The main issue here is the diversity of the states that are formed under the myth of national unity.
Mavroudi (2010) argues that national identity and nations have created an illusions of homogeneity, which is necessary for the establishment of a nation and a state. In other words, they create the illusion of a natural and essential connection among people, place and culture to justify the demand for a territory and political institutions. Nonetheless, Anderson (2006) points out that nations or states were never homogenous. As imagined communities, states have elements that are shared by groups of individuals in different levels and scales, furthermore they are interpreted in different ways. Gregory (1994) has presented the notion of representation of space and space representation, where individuals read spaces based on their subjective understanding of their ‘space value’, which involves its material and symbolic dimension. In this sense, conceptions of space, demarcation of territory and grids or property are representations of certain claims.
In other words, the fact that states demarcate the space is an abstract notion of what the territorial space should be, but it is very different from what the concrete space is in fact. That is, the space of everyday life, a space that is not only “enframed, constrained, and colonized by economy and by the state” (Gregory 1994: 402), but also re-signified by groups of people who related to those spaces and occupy them in a daily basis. In this sense, the boundaries of a city or a state can be clear cut in a map, but in fact the fluidity and permeability of human agency is much different in the concrete space.
Furthermore, the interpretation of space can be limited to some iconic attributes that are shared by groups of people, for instance the Eiffel Tower is a clear representation of the French nation for most people, as the Statue of Liberty is for the American nation, the Redemption Christ is for the Brazilian nation and so on. These are mere local symbolic items of a culture, that represents a very narrow view of the diversity of the national culture of each country. However, they are also important representation of the imagined community that can be interpret by any group of people, nationals or internationals based on their knowledge of the physical territory.
In short, the spatial division of the states have different interpretation depending on perspective through which they are being overviewed. The monopoly of the state over a national territory can cause tension among nations within this state, specially if they feel they are being repressed or overlooked within a certain state. Nonetheless, if a nation desire to establish their own state and vindicate a monopoly of a territory, usually they replicate the same unity myth the states they are going against to justify the legitimacy of their pledge and their right for self-determination.
NATIONAL IDENTITY - SPACE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Nation is a discourse - a way to build order and organize meanings in a way individual can identify and build their own identity. It’s an imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson term. It is an invented tradition that stands for a number of practices, symbolic or ritualistic that aim at creating values and norms of behavior through repetition, which results automatically in continuity with a suitable historical past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Tradition, therefore, is another symbolic form to impose order and discipline creating this illusionary perspective of stability to society.
It is the functional myth, maintained by the manipulation of territorial boundaries and political unity. Ernest Renan said that three things constitute the spiritual principle of a nations unity: “the shared possession of a rich legacy of memories.., the desire to live together and the desire to persevere” (cited in Hall 1992: 30). So, national identities result of a reunion of two half of the national equation, as observed by Hall (1992), the sum of culture and politics coherent; plus cultures reasonably homogeneous to have their own political agenda. But can national identity be such an unifying force?
Most nations consists of separate cultures that were unified throughout a long violent process of conquest, in which the weakest was suppressed by the conquerer. In this sense, one can argue that national identities were strongly generalized. Hence, instead of thinking of unified national cultures, we should think of them as a discourse device that represents the difference as unity and identity. Especially in the globalized society, one is forced to convey that nationality or even ethnicity is actually a fabric where various characteristics are sewed together in order to provide a discourse of meanings.
Space plays an important role in this signifying process, where communities related to places, either concrete or abstract spaces, to form their national identity and their share notion of selfness. Therefore, as they become more structured the territorial control becomes more important as a defining feature of belonging to include or assimilate the desirable nations and to exclude and repressed the unwanted ones. In this process, tensions arise and most communities feel the need to rescue their historical ancestry and reaffirm their ethnic unity and authenticity to justify their claims.
Sometimes, this attempt leads to the replication of the unfair system the nations were fighting against, Smith (2010) believes that this conservative notion of state-making based on the European model of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is changing, in a slow process from a generation to the other. This would lead to more pluralistic and accommodating political grid divisions of space. Nonetheless, Mavroudi (2010) points out to the opposite direction where she sees the reemergence of xenophobic and racists movements that repress and exclude visible minorities, migrants and immigrants out of irrational fear of difference and the inability to deal with the inherently diversity of society today.
My conclusion is in between both assumptions. On the one hand, I see the resistant movements pointed out by Mavroudi (2010) specially racist irrational rants against visible minorities and immigrants that are segregated as outsiders and aliens in a supposedly cohesive state. On the other, I know I understand Smith’s (2010) generational theory, since I am part of a small group of people that try to change the ways we have understand and arranged society so far. However, whether this understanding will stem to better social structures in the future is a question that is still open to discussion.
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