Canadian Identity

The concepts of “nation” and “national identity” were developed in the late eighteenth century by thinkers whose acute sensitivity to the way in which language and culture made peoples different led them to place an unprecedented stress on the variety and texture of humankind. Reacting to the Enlightenment tendency to define human beings in terms of abstract and universal characteristics – notably the ability to reason – and building on the concepts of “folk” and “people,” of which German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder would make so much, they argued that human beings were always situated in a particular linguistic and cultural space and could not be understood or defined unless full account were taken of that critical fact.

In principle, these claims amounted to no more than a romantic, variety-affirming assertion that there were many ways to be human. In practice, the fact that they were taken up by groups delimited territorially as well as culturally transformed them almost immediately into a brief for the notion that each of the several communities within which human beings lived had a right to maintain the language and traditions that distinguished it. Further, each of those communities could, in pursuit of its collective self-preservation, not only resist control by some other nation over the domain that it occupied but also act within that domain to entrench and consolidate the linguistic, cultural, and other characteristics that set it apart. Communities that understood their special genius to derive from a unique historical experience or to be embodied in particular institutional forms were especially concerned to specify and preserve the features in their national lives by which they were distinguished. Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s celebration of the English talent for progress and sound government struck what would become an endlessly repeated note in his society, while the emphasis that philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and later Johann Gottlieb Fichte placed on the Germanic capacity to provide for the highest needs of humankind through a perfectly structured state apparatus developed into a principal component of their people’s troubled nationalism.

Even peoples who incorporated “universal” ideas into their definition of self and identity took a strongly conformist approach to the task of national consolidation; precisely because they saw what they possessed as something of universal significance, they could allow no deviance from it. As custodians of the republican ideal, both post-revolutionary France and the new United States acted to ensure that this ideal was honoured and maintained within their own borders; only if it were unchallenged there would it have the power to do its work among humankind in general.

For the first hundred years in the history of the national idea, much of its conformist, even coercive, character was obscured. Its partisans, managing to concentrate attention on those aspects of it that stressed a people’s right to live together free of external constraint, diverted notice away from the extent to which that people’s success in leading such a life placed it in a position to impose burdens – cultural, linguistic, or religious – on those whom it controlled. A few observers, the most important being English historian Lord Acton, saw the difficulty, but their pleas for a non-national form of political association seemed too much based on alien and exotic experience – in Acton’s case, that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was most frequently invoked – and so attracted little support. The great nation-building exercises of the nineteenth century and the thrust towards self-determination and national liberation that became so prominent a feature of the twentieth thus continued to be viewed in positive terms. As manifestations of the principle that men and women could be “free” only if the (ethnically defined) communities in which they lived were autonomous, they seemed to be movements that were at once “natural” and “good.”

Even the fact of fascism did not discredit this expansive and generous view. Disturbing, to be sure, and clearly linked to nationalism of a debilitatingly conformist sort, its appearance did become the occasion for much rethinking of positions. This analysis, however, led not to a fundamental querying of the nature and processes of “nation,” but to the making of a careful distinction between two types: a bad, immature, immoderate sort of nation, out of which fascism had come, and the good, temperate, responsible kind, which had kept its liberal, democratic character and eventually triumphed. At its most influential, in the form given to it by Hans Kohn in the immediate post–World War II period, this argument staked out the ground on which conventional ideas of “nation” and “national identity”maintained their resistance to the sort of rigorous interrogation that might have focused attention on the less benign and positive aspects of their character.

The situation was nevertheless changing. Even as Kohn’s argument extended its influence, events were undermining the foundations upon which it and the “old” view of nationalism in general rested. Developments in global politics were particularly critical to this shift; these suddenly highlighted the problematic nature of the relationship among nations, states, and identities and so drew attention to the arbitrariness that had in greater or lesser measure always characterized it. The emergence of independent states in Asia and Africa showed in an especially dramatic way how imperfectly the limits of “state” and “nation” might coincide. Frequently founded on territorial units created by the old imperial powers, they had a patently multi-ethnic character that at once made it difficult to define them as nation-states and provoked closer examination of the concept of “nation-state” itself.

In Europe, too, events were calling old ways of seeing the nation into question. Like the multi-ethnic character of the “new” African and Asian states, the persistence of Basque, Catalan, Breton, Welsh, Scottish, and other nationalisms in the “old” nation-states of Europe raised questions about the coincidence of “state” and national boundaries. Of special moment in the process by which new realities were forcing a change in view was the arrival of immigrants who were distinguished in both appearance and culture from the majorities in whose midst they came to live. Denied – the term is not too strong – full acceptance in their host societies, the newcomers developed relationships with those societies that threw into sharp relief the strategies of exclusion and marginalization and the concern with assimilation that had always been part of nation making and national maintenance.

Students of the nation-state, increasingly mindful of these realities, began to consider the extent to which it had to be seen, not as a cohesive social entity whose evolution had been “natural,” spontaneous, and unforced, but as a “made,” “created,” polydimensional fabrication whose manufacture and consolidation had always involved attempts to manipulate, silence, and suppress minorities and their identities. The arguments that the nation-state is a modern phenomenon created by elites concerned with consolidating territorial units for bureaucratic, economic, or class-related reasons are at their most cogent in the work of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and E.J. Hobsbawm – “constructed essentially from above” is Hobsbawm’s crisp formulation. But these interpretations have not eliminated the idea that a dominant ethnic group may be an important part of what happens.

The most apparently homogenous of nation-states, then, rest on the suppression of local identities. And, if a kind of internal imperialism can plainly be seen in the process by which France and Britain constructed themselves as national societies, the sort of difference and diversity with which these great states were preoccupied is no less evident in political formations throughout human history. Indeed, argues W.H. McNeill, so central is “polyethnicity” to the experience of political communities generally, and so recent in origin are attempts to root it out, that viewed in the context of world history, the efforts to construct national societies must be seen as both new and aberrant.