Are nations ancient and natural, or are they modern creations? This question divides scholars, and the answer matters. If nations are natural, nationalism looks like the expression of something deep in human life. If they are recent constructions, nationalism looks more like a political project that could have gone differently. Four broad schools of thought have emerged.

Primordialism

Primordialists hold that nations are natural and rooted in deep ties such as kinship, language, religion and attachment to a homeland. Such bonds are felt as given rather than chosen, which explains their great emotional power and why people will die for their nation. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote influentially about these “primordial attachments”, though he stressed that what matters is that people experience them as given. Critics reply that national identities change, merge and disappear, that people switch them, and that many nations are far younger than they claim.

Perennialism

Perennialists do not claim nations are part of human nature, but they argue that nations have existed for a very long time, well before the modern era. Some historians, for example, see England as a nation already in the Middle Ages, with a shared language, church and royal government. Critics answer that medieval peasants mostly identified with their village, lord or faith, and that projecting modern nationhood backward reads history through modern eyes.

Modernism

Since the 1980s the most influential academic view has been modernism, which holds that nations and nationalism are products of the modern era, roughly the last 250 years. Three works from 1983 shaped it.

• Ernest Gellner, in Nations and Nationalism, explained nationalism through the needs of industrial society for a shared, standardized culture. Farming villages could live with many dialects, but factories, offices and armies need mobile, literate people who speak the same language, so states built mass schooling to produce them. In his view, nationalism creates nations, not the other way around.
• Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, called the nation an imagined community because members never meet most fellow members, yet they feel a shared bond. Imagined does not mean fake: any community larger than a village is held together partly in the mind. Anderson stressed print capitalism: vernacular newspapers and books helped readers imagine a shared nation, as thousands of strangers read the same news in the same language on the same day.
• Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger edited The Invention of Tradition, which showed that many traditions that seem ancient are fairly recent creations, often from the nineteenth century: anthems, flags, ceremonies and costumes designed to build loyalty to the nation.

Critics of modernism say it explains the timing of nationalism better than its passion. If nations were simply invented for economic or political convenience, why do people feel so strongly about them? And why did some modern nations take hold while other attempts failed?

Ethno-symbolism

The scholar Anthony D. Smith developed a middle position known as ethno-symbolism. He agreed that the nation as a political form is modern, but argued that modern nations usually build on older ethnic myths, memories and symbols. Long before nationalism, many peoples shared stories of common origin, heroes, sacred places and attachment to a homeland. Nationalists did not invent from nothing; they selected, reworked and spread these older materials. This helps explain why nationalism moves people so deeply. Critics reply that ethno-symbolism can overstate continuity, and that some successful nations had no clear ethnic core to build on.

Most scholars today borrow from more than one school. A common summary is that nations are modern in form but often draw on older cultural raw material, and that they are neither simply natural nor simply fake.

Worked example: four theories look at Italy

Italy offers a useful test case, because its unification in the nineteenth century is well documented. How would each school explain the Italian nation?

• A primordialist would stress deep continuities: the peninsula's shared Latin roots, Catholic faith and long settlement, which bound the people of the peninsula together long before a state united them.
• A perennialist would point to Italian national feeling well before modern times, for example in the medieval poet Dante, who wrote in the vernacular and lamented Italy's divisions, and in Renaissance writers who dreamed of freeing Italy from foreign armies.
• A modernist would point to a striking fact: at unification in 1861, only a small minority of the population, often estimated at well under one in ten, used standard Italian in daily life. Most spoke regional languages and dialects and identified with their town or region. Mass schooling, military service, railways, newspapers and later radio did much to turn the inhabitants of the new state into Italians who shared a language and a national story.
• An ethno-symbolist would accept much of that account but add that nationalists of the Risorgimento did not start from nothing. They drew on memories of Rome, the prestige of Dante's language, and the cultural glory of the Renaissance, and these symbols gave their project emotional force and a sense of rightness.

Each account captures something real. The modernist is right that most people in 1861 did not yet think of themselves as Italians first. The ethno-symbolist is right that the materials used to make them Italians were old and deeply felt. This is why many scholars now combine the approaches rather than choose one.