(1) I use the term "nationalism" . . . namely to mean "primarily a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent." I would add that this principle also implies that the political duty of Ruritanians to the polity which encompasses and represents the Ruritanian nation, overrides all other public obligations, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other obligations of whatever kind. This implication distinguishes modern nationalism from other and less demanding forms of national or group identification which we shall also encounter.

(2) Like most serious students, I do not regard the "nation" as a primary nor as an unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the "nation-state," and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality except insofar as both relate to it. Moreover, . . . I would stress the element of artefact, invention, and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. "Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent . . . political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality." In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.

(3) The "national question," as the old Marxists called it, is situated at the point of intersection of politics, technology, and social transformation. Nations exist not only as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one--broadly speaking, the citizen state of the French Revolution--but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. It has even been argued that popular spoken Italian as an idiom capable of expressing the full range of what a twentieth-century language needs outside the domestic and face-to-face sphere of communication, is only being constructed today as a function of the needs of national television programming. Nations and their associated phenomena must therefore be analysed in terms of political, technical, administrative, economic, and other conditions and requirements.

(4) For this reason they are, in my view, dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings, and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. . . .

That view from below, i.e., the nation as seen not by governments and the spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the ordinary persons who are the objects of the action and propaganda, is exceedingly difficult to discover. . . . However, three things are clear.

First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what it is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters. Second, and more specifically, we cannot assume that for most people national identification--when it exists--excludes or is always or even superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being. In fact, it is always combined with identifications of another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them. Thirdly, national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods. . . .

(5) The development of nations and nationalism within old-established states such as Britain and France, has not been studied very intensely, although it is now attracting attention. The existence of this gap is illustrated by the neglect, in Britain, of any problems connected with English nationalism--a term which in itself sounds odd to many ears--compared to the attention paid to Scots, Welsh, not to mention Irish nationalism. On the other hand there have in recent years been major advances in the study of national movements aspiring to be states, mainly following Hroch's pathbreaking comparative studies of small European national movements. Two points in this excellent writer's analysis are embodied in my own. First, "national consciousness" develops unevenly among the social groupings and regions of a country; this regional diversity and its reasons have in the past been notably neglected. Most students would, incidentally, agree that, whatever the nature of the social groups first captured by "national consciousness," the popular masses--workers, servants, peasants--are the last to be affected by it. Second, and in consequence, I follow his useful division of the history of national movements into three phases. In nineteenth-century Europe, for which it was developed, phase A was purely cultural, literary, and folkloric, and had no particular political or even national implications. . . . In phase B we find a body of pioneers and militants of the "national idea" and the beginnings of political campaigning for this idea. . . . My own concern . . . is more with phase C when–-and not before-–nationalistic programmes acquire mass support, or at least some of the mass support that nationalists always claim they represent. The transition from phase B to phase C is evidently a crucial moment in the chronology of national movements. Sometimes, as in Ireland, it occurs before the creation of a national state; probably very much more it occurs afterwards, as a consequence of that creation. Sometimes, as in the so-called Third World, it does not happen even then.