Modernization theory is the predominant explanation for emergence of nationalism among scholars of nationalism. Prominent modernization scholars, such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawn, say nationalism arose with modernization during the late 18th century. Processes that lead to the emergence of nationalism include industrialization and democratic revolutions.
Modernization theory stands in contrast to primordialism, which hold that nations are biological, innate phenomena, and ethnosymbolism, which emphasizes their pre-modern roots.
Important theorists
Scholar Carlton J. H. Hayes wrote in 1931, "We can be sure that prior to the eighteenth century A.D. it was not the general rule for civilized nationalities to strive zealously and successfully for political unity and independence, whereas it has been the general rule in the last century and a half. Universal mass-nationalism of this kind, at any rate, has no counterpart in earlier eras; it is peculiar to modern times".
Benedict Anderson
Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, in which he argues nations are socially constructed. For Anderson, the idea of the "nation" is relatively new and is a product of various socio-material forces, defined as "an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". However, imagining does not imply falsity. As he puts it, a nation is "imagined" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", they are "limited" in that they have "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations", and they are "sovereign" since no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them in the modern period. He notes:
Anderson argues nations and nationalism were born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism [incongruence, divide] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gauge and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.
Although members of an imagined community will never know most of their fellow-members, interaction between a system of production and productive relations, innovations in communications technology, and the fatality of human diversity enable the development of national consciousness.
In contrast to modernists who trace the first nationalist movements to Europe, Anderson argues creole communities of the Americas developed national consciousnesses before most of Europe. Unlike in Europe, however, Anderson states language development did not play an important role in their formation, and these movements were led by creole elites and not by the intelligentsia.
Ernest Gellner
Gellner defined nationalism as "primarily a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent". Like Anderson, Gellner argues nations and nationalism are distinctly modern phenomena, and links them to industrialization. He posits that, in the pre-modern world, power and culture did not "have much inclination to come together" and thus there was no incentive for rulers to impose cultural homogeneity on their subjects.
Industrial societies, however, are characterized by high levels of social mobility and roles are no longer ascribed as in previous societies. As such, this entails: the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually sustainable atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. In other words, industrialization creates a need for impersonal, context-free communication and a high level of cultural standardization.
