Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform "peasants" into citizens, Gina Anne Tam centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. She traces how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard "variants" of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. She simultaneously highlights, on the other hand, the folksong collectors, playwrights, hip-hop artists and popular protestors who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many - interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself.

Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant enquiry into the question of nationalism won further acclaim for his 'colossal stature ... his incontrovertible excellence as an historian, and his authoritative and highly readable prose'. Recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics have since reinforced the central importance of nationalism in the history of political evolution and upheaval. This second edition has been updated in the light of those events, with a final chapter addressing the impact of the dramatic changes that have taken place. It also includes additional maps to illustrate nationalities, languages and political divisions across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was supposed to be their graveyard at the end of the twentieth. Yet, far from moving beyond the nation-state, fin-de-siecle Europe has been moving back to the nation-state, most spectacularly with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia into a score of nationally defined successor states. This massive reorganisation of political space along national lines has engendered distinctive, dynamically interlocking, and in some cases explosive forms of nationalism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and the 'new institutionalist' sociology, and comparing contemporary nationalisms with those of interwar Europe, Rogers Brubaker provides a theoretically sophisticated and historically rich account of one of the most important problems facing the 'New Europe'.

Nationalism is one of the most powerful forces in the modern world, yet it is surprisingly little studied and only imperfectly understood, either by its adherents or its opponents. Its irruption into the modern world is often explained as a resurgence of primitive, atavistic instincts, or as a delusion fostered by a few theoreticians, politicians or propagandists.
The present volume interprets nationalism in terms of its social roots, which it locates in industrial social organization. A society that aims for affluence and economic growth, Professor Gellner argues, depends on innovation, occupational mobility, mass media, universal literacy, and education in a shared, standard idiom. Taken together these transform the relationship between culture and the state. The functioning of the society depends on an all-embracing educational system, tied to one culture and protected by a state identified with that culture. The principle one state, one culture makes itself felt, and political units which do not conform to it feel the strain in the form of nationalist activity. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Table of Contents
About the Authors vii
About this Edition viii
Editor's Preface to the First Edition R. I. Moore, Founding Editor ix
Acknowledgements for the First Edition xi
Introduction John Breuilly xiii
1 Definitions 1
State and Nation 3
The Nation 5
2 Culture in Agrarian Society 8
Power and Culture in the Agro-literate Polity 9
Culture 11
The State in Agrarian Society 13
The Varieties of Agrarian Rulers 14
3 Industrial Society 19
The Society of Perpetual Growth 23
Social Genetics 29
The Age of Universal High Culture 34
4 The Transition to an Age of Nationalism 38
A Note on the Weakness of Nationalism 42
Wild and Garden Cultures 48
5 What is a Nation? 52
The Course of True Nationalism Never did Run Smooth 57
6 Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society 62
Obstacles to Entropy 63
Fissures and Barriers 72
A Diversity of Focus 73
7 A Typology of Nationalisms 85
The Varieties of Nationalist Experience 94
Diaspora Nationalism 98
8 The Future of Nationalism 106
Industrial Culture - One or Many? 110
9 Nationalism and Ideology 118
Who is for Nuremberg? 125
One Nation, One State 128
10 Conclusion 131
What is not being Said 131
Summary 133