Kenneth Minogue has paid my article ‘In Praise of Empires Past: Myths and Method of Kedourie’s Nationalism’ the tribute of a critical response, even if the compliment is somewhat back-handed, since he taxes me with pedantry, illogic and lack of control. He hopes, nevertheless, that he is still a friend. He is: but among the lesser duties of friendship are to tell a friend when he has missed the point, and when egocentricity goes so far that it threatens identity loss. My critic presents himself as the doughty defender of Kedourie’s Nationalism; in fact he is defending a less famous text, Nationalism, written some years later by one K. R. Minogue,footnote1 and what he has modestly subtitled ‘Minogue’s Theory of Nationalism’ in a recent encyclopaedia.footnote2 Let me remove initial confusions. He and I (with Kedourie and Gellner) agree that nationalism, understood as a doctrine about the legitimate foundation of states, is modern. Minogue responds as if I wish to ‘dismantle’ the modernist theory of nationalism. I do not. I want to throw out the bathwater, not the baby. By this I mean that, unlike Gellner,footnote3 Kedourie or Minogue I recognize the significant difficulties in that theory, to which Anthony Smith has devoted his life’s labour.footnote4 My argument was that Kedourie did not achieve the decisive clarification that Minogue suggests; that he erred as an historian of ideas; and that his later work in Nationalism in Asia and Africa plainly contradicts his earlier claims in ways that he appears not to have noticed.
Minogue concedes that I have a—pedantic—point in criticizing Kedourie’s thesis that nationalism was ‘invented’ in the early nineteenth century, but mounts his defence around the claim that there was no nationalism in the American or French revolutions. For Minogue and Kedourie nationalism proper, the full photograph, only emerges in German intellectual reactions to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The young Minogue was aware the usa posed a problem: ‘It is very easy to see the [War of Independence] in nationalist terms. Yet it would seem that the people of the American colonies, while they certainly developed a rapid awareness of themselves as Americans, did not think seriously of themselves as an American nation. Their struggle came too early for them to conduct it in that way.’ How improper of the Americans to display nationalist traits before the Germans, or for the Federalist Papers to be published in 1788; but fortunately, they took these matters more lightly, with a better sense of humour than those Teutonic Romantics.
For me, as for many others, liberal nationalism, viz. the doctrine that the nation—or the people, or the citizenry (the terms were used as synonyms)—should be the source of political legitimacy, developed in the usa, Britain (including England), France, Ireland and Latin America before (or in some cases simultaneously with) the flowering of the more overtly cultural or ethnic nationalisms of central Europe. Nationalism came first, in short, amongst those in (or in imminent) possession of states. This position is scarcely unusual. So far as the United States, Great Britain and France are concerned, it was the historiographical orthodoxy before Kedourie wrote, and has remained so among those not wholly immersed in life at the London School of Economics.