“Culture” and “power” are the main coordinates of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism. Culture is a shared set of symbols, ideas, norms and ways of behaving, and modes of communication (especially language) that enable a community to reproduce itself generation over generation. Some cultures are savage, some domesticated; some are wild, some gardens. Wild cultures “are produced and reproduce themselves spontaneously, as parts of the life of men” (48). In agrarian societies, culture is invisible and un-self-conscious; it’s just the form life takes. Garden cultures are complex and rich; they come into existence and are reproduced “by literacy and specialized personnel” (48). Shared culture is nationality: “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture.” But more: nationality exists only where two men who share a culture “recognize each other as belonging to the same nation” (7; emphasis added). To culture, then, we must add will as a principle of nationality.
And then there’s power. Nationalism isn’t a sentiment but a “political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent” (1). That is, the boundaries of a given state should encompass all who share the same nationality and should exclude those who don’t, apart from a few tolerated foreigners. Nationalism is “a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and . . . that ethnic boundaries within a given state . . . should not separate power-holders from the rest” (1). The principle fails if: a) there are too many non-nationals within the boundaries of the state, b) if a national community doesn’t have the power to determine its destiny, or c) if non-nationals hold power. Nationalism isn’t the effervescence of nation-building; rather, nationalism produces nations.
Like most analysts of nations and nationalism, Gellner thinks nations so defined are a relatively recent development in the history of humanity: “Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such” (6). Agrarian societies aren’t organized as nations. In traditional societies, the vast majority of people live their lives in insulated local communities, each with its own culture, dialect, customs. They’re ruled by military, administrative, clerical, and sometimes commercial classes, but don’t share a culture with those ruling classes (diagram on p. 10). Empires are organized the same way. Though the sub-cultures in an empire may be large enough to qualify as “nations,” power and culture don’t coincide.