Introduction
Simply-nationalism is a form of self-consciousness of pre-civilization societies in the aggregate of their historical experience, by which many people in the modern world explain and legitimize nationalism. According to Duncan, the concept of proto-nationalism and is based on four features that determine the national identity of a specific group of people: “language, ethnicity, religion, and membership in lasting political entity” (201). The proponents of the theory claim, that if each of these features is common for a particular association, then this is a sufficient basis to assert its national isolation, uniqueness, and exclusiveness. However, there are difficulties with the sufficiency of substantiation of such arguments, when scientists analyze world history in more detail.
Main body
There are some clarifications that primarily affect the definition of the actual situation in pre-civilization and early civilization self-determination. The first and most important argument, according to the proponents of the theory, is the identity of the language and the related reason for the primary separation of groups of people. According to some researchers, language is not a sufficient basis for this assumption, because the spread of different languages in the course of history has never occurred uniformly and positively (Hobsbawm 54).
In the era of Ancient Greece, there were already a considerable number of dialects in the world, and it is not necessary that residents of a specific area divided the rest into friends and enemies by language. The understanding of a language as a cultural object, which is stable in the territory and time, appeared mostly due to the printing, which unified the norms of languages, creating the illusion of their ancestry.
Conclusion
The remaining arguments of the proponents of the theory of proto-nationalism are just as easily refuted, based on specific historical facts. For example, there was a statement about the religious factor that determines the unity of the nation. Some Russian educators believed that Russia had received the status of a “Saint” since the 15th century because after the fall of Constantinople it was the Russian Church that became the only successor to the Orthodox heritage.
However, according to one of the modern researchers, this concept became popular and commonly used only during the time of troubles in Russia, when the society needed unifying guidelines (Hobsbawm 49). Neither before nor after the time of troubles was the concept used. This example shows that the so-called natural emergence of single religious consciousness is primarily based on the short-term interests of the ruling elite. It obeyed the natural course of history but did not determine the identity of a particular group of people.
The Question
The adaptation of proto-nationalism to the justification of nationalism is understood by the authors of the sources as a phenomenon mostly imposed by the political and economic elite for their purposes. Are these goals related to the desire to divide humanity to preserve the existing order that the elite needs to retain unlimited power over people and resources?
Works Cited
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Duncan, John. “Proto-Nationalism in Premodern Korea.” Perspectives on Korea, edited by Sang-oak Lee and Duk-soo Park, 1998, pp. 199-221.