Nationalism According to Hobsbawm the Essay

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So denotes Hobsbawm in considering the era of revolutionary independence. Here, Hobsbawm asserts that nationalism "aimed to extend the scale of human social, political and cultural units: to unify and expand rather than to restrict and separate. This is one reason why Third-world national liberation movements found the 19th century traditions, both liberal and revolutionary-democratic, so congenial. Anti-colonial nationalists dismissed, or at least subordinated, 'tribalism', 'communalism' or other sectional and regional identities as anti-national, and serving the well-known imperialist interests of 'divide and rule'." (Hobsbawm, p. 2)

This indicates that nationalism is not the imperative driving independence so much as the assertion of its existence is an instrument for helping to justify entitlement to this independence. In many ways, this concept of nationalism is countered in the exhaustive text by Smith (2010), which instead concedes to defining nationalism according to the traits superficially attributed thereto. For instance, Smith indicates that "the term nationalism, therefore, will be understood here as referring to one or more of the last three usages: a language and symbolism, a sociopolitical movement and an ideology of the nation.

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" (p. 6)

Smith goes on to contend that these forces promote a sense of connection which helps to create an active 'national feeling.' However, Hobsbawm's text roundly rejects this idea by suggesting that these forces are instead appended to nationalism in order to fabricate a 'national feeling' in spite of the vast differences separating the experiences of citizens. Indeed, within the context of the United States or Europe, for instance, the idea of a homogenous linguistic, ethnic, racial or religious set of conditions is not only unrealistic but it is also considered anathema in modern progressive discourse. Some critics will attribute this discourse to the fact that the nation-state is eroding in the face of globalization. However, it may be more accurate to extrapolate from the Hobsbawm address that nationality is a force more driven by power-structures, political bodies and governments than by ethnicity or linguistic tradition. Indeed, it is only in the face of these encompassing and irresistible power-structures that we come to view nationality in terms of culture.

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