In this book, via a newly written introduction and a selection of his recent articles, Smith attempts a theoretical explanation and illustration of his approach to nationalism, which he calls ‘ethno-symbolism’. His style is dry and academic. The historical evidence on which he draws to illustrate his argument is referred to rather than related in detail, so the book as a whole lacks colour. Nevertheless, he has an expert knowledge of this profoundly important subject and his arguments merit close study.

There are two broad approaches to studying nationalism which, following Smith, we can term ‘perennialist’ and ‘modernist’. Perennialists believe that nations have always existed throughout history. Some individual nations are themselves perennial, other nations come and go, but there is a continuous presence of nations as social and historical phenomena. The modernists reply that nationalism proper, and hence full consciousness of nationhood, is essentially a post-Enlightenment construction. They have differing explanations why. Nationalism is variously the product of industrialisation and modernisation (Ernest Gellner), literacy and mass communication (Benedict Anderson) or uneven capitalist development (Tom Nairn). But they all hold that nationalism fulfils a modern, mass need rather than an ancient yearning.

Smith criticises the modernists for ignoring the historical precedents of nationalism, which he locates in long-term cultural and ethnic ‘myths and memories’. As a consequence, he believes, the modernists fail to explain the popular and emotional appeal of nationalism. ‘What gives nationalism its power’, he says, ‘are the myths, memories, traditions and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered.’ At the same time, Smith rejects the perennialist trap of implying that nations are an inevitable part of the ‘natural order’. He acknowledges that nationalism has other uses which partly explain its ubiquity in the modern era. For example, as religious feeling has faded, nationalism has been able to provide an alternative source of meaning and belonging. It helps to explain the individual’s place in the world, his or her moment in a longer, encompassing history. Nationalism has also been a tool of political mobilisation. The attachment to a particular homeland may distinguish it from other kinds of political ideology, but it is nationalism’s unsurpassed capacity for motivating people that has made it such a dynamic force in the modern world.

Although Smith accepts that nationalism and, indeed, most nations are modern, he believes they cannot be understood without appreciating ‘their rootedness in shared long term memories or ethno-history and the resulting need to analyse them over long historical time-spans.’ The relationship between past and present may be complex and, to some extent, reconstructed or re-appropriated; but it is a cardinal failure of the modernists that they ignore la longue durée.

Nations may not be themselves perennial, says Smith, but ethnic groupings are. They ‘can be found in every epoch and continent, wherever human beings feel that they share common ancestry and culture’. There is, he says, ‘in most cases, a more or less powerful link between modern nations and pre-existing, and often pre-modern ethnies’. Although the various elements of ethno-history are subjective, in that they focus on perceptions, memories, beliefs and values, they produce over time a structure which is independent of these beliefs and perceptions and which provides ‘the framework for the socialisation of successive generations’. These cultural structures also allow flexibility in ethnic groupings, permitting demographic turnover and cultural adaptation and change. Smith therefore rejects the sharp distinction, popular nowadays, between ethnic nations and civic nations, arguing that the latter always have an ethnic core represented in their myths and memories, and that the former have an adaptive and porous cultural superstructure.

National identity is never fixed or static; it is being continuously reinterpreted over time. Smith’s claim is that ethno-history explains the real power of national sentiment and of the political nationalism which feeds from it. It also inclines him, in one of the essays reprinted here, towards scepticism about the project of creating a European identity that can transcend existing nations and nationalism. Europe, he says, ‘appears as a pale reflection of the much more rooted, vivid and tangible national identities’ and so is unlikely to develop the same motivating power.

There is obviously something in Smith’s case against the perennialists and the modernists, but, although his approach appears a more accurate description of the evolution of nationalism, it lacks explanatory power. Too often it lapses into a flurry of category definitions and sub-classifications which fail to move the argument on. We can understand that socialisation into a culture of myths and memories will affect an individual’s feelings, understanding and motivation; but just why have national myths and memories of the nation been more successful than the myths and memories of religion, race or other political ideologies? Smith’s approach does not provide an explanation. His attempt to explain the emotive power of modern nations by reference to their rootedness in pre-modern ethnic groupings is a bit like trying to explain consciousness by postulating the existence of little men inside our heads. Why are these ethnic groupings themselves so powerfully emotive?

And just what is it that gives one grouping of human beings an ethnic texture and another not? At times Smith’s analysis reads like a statement of current received opinion, a simple description of the status quo at any one time, rather than an explanation. European identity may be a ‘pale reflection’ now but, given the millennia of myths and memories that the peoples of Europe hold in common, what prevents a new sense of ‘national’ identity arising across Europe, just as, for example, the concept of being French or German supplanted the Burgundians, the Bretons and the Bavarians.

Other questions crowd in. Why aren’t Europe’s Gypsies a nation? Because they have no homeland? But perhaps that says more about the way Smith has defined ‘nation’ than about the sense of group identity that is involved. And how on earth did an early association of Germanic cantons, with a subsequent attachment of Romance ones, manage to produce a new Alpine nation with three languages and no strong cultural or political centre? Smith points to the myths and memories they share (William Tell et al.), but that simply begs the question of why they elect to hold these in common. The Swiss, one of Europe’s oldest ‘nations’, remain an oddity.

I fear that, in the end, all the carefully worded industry of Smith and his academic colleagues has yet to produce a more enlightening explanation of nationalism than the pessimism of Johan Huizinga in 1940: ‘The primitive feeling of aversion between tribes ...which is to be found everywhere and is apparently unavoidable.’