Book Review

Comparative/World

Thirty years or so into the resurgence of research on the nature of nationalism and national identity, scholars have tended to support one of two schools of thought: one that asserts that nations are real, tangible and historical phenomena that grow out of prenational ethnic bonds ("perennialist" or "primordialist," depending on the permutation), and another, currently much more popular school that views nations as uniquely modern and constructed, the products of the imagination of states and/or intellectuals who concoct national identity out of shreds of the past in order to exploit the communal ties and strong emotions that they have invented (this school is often referred to as "modernist" or "constructivist"). The editors of this volume bring together a selection of new and previously published articles that all testify to the importance of intellectuals in the defining of national identity, regardless of the schools to which the authors belong. For Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, intellectuals "appear to have the greatest agency in the shaping of national understanding, propagating the values of the nation, disciplining the people internally, and enforcing the rules and boundaries of the constituent people" (p. 2). While acknowledging that both the "perennialist/primordialist" and "constructivist" schools accord intellectuals an important role in nationalism and the nature of a given national identity, they ally themselves with those "who have seen intellectuals, not merely as reflective of what exists, but as constitutive of the nation itself . . . intellectuals here are the creators, not only of nationalisms, but of the more universal discourse of the nation, of the very language and universe of meaning in which nations become possible" (p. 3). Where intellectuals are creators, nations are created; the editors favor the modernist position on the origins of nations. Their contributors, sometimes uncomfortably, follow their lead.	1
In this volume, only Alexander J. Motyl's "Inventing Invention: The Limits of National Identity Formation," is explicitly theoretical. All, however, have theoretical implications. Janet Hart's "Reading the Radical Subject: Gramsci, Glinos, and Paralanguages of the Modern Nation" examines the "political paralanguages" of Antonio Gramsci and Dimitris Glinos and their conceptualizations of the revolutionary behavior of intellectuals under fascism. Other contributors examine the activity of intellectuals in several national contexts, for the most part eruditely and informatively. These articles include Yuri Slezkine's on Soviet anthropologist N. Ia. Marr, Andrzej Walicki's on Polish nationalism, Khachig Tololyan's on the place of the poem "Ter Getzo" in Armenian national consciousness, John-Paul Himka's on intellectuals and national identity in Galician Rus', Katherine Verdery's on postsocialist uses of national symbols in Romania, and Kennedy's on the intersections of liberalism and nationalism among businessmen in Poland. Facing the usual difficulties in reviewing a diverse collection of essays, I will focus on just a few contributions.	2
One of two exceptions to the modernist rule in this volume, Motyl's article is hostile to the constructivist position. After critiquing the formulations of influential modernists Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson (whose "invented traditions" and "imagined communities," respectively, have exerted a powerful pull on the imaginations and exertions of scholars of nationalism), Motyl argues that "national identity is . . . always and everywhere possible" (p. 70). Motyl's assertion threatens the constructivist insistence on the modernity of nations and nationalism while expanding the possibility of discovering nations and nationalism in unlikely places. He concedes that nationalism is more common and more likely to arise in the modern era, thanks to the technology of modern communication and the existence of powerful centralized states, but he convincingly insists that "there can be nationalism without nations and nations without nationalism—a proposition that rests on a crucial distinction between identity and ideology that constructivism has failed to appreciate" (p. 71). Motyl's conclusion is that constructivism would be more useful if it abandoned "the language of invention and imagination and the unwarranted theoretical claims they imply" (p. 72).	. . .