11
national identities and nationalisms only came into existence following the industrial
revolution, they must insist that what constituted these concepts during the agrarian age
differs from what comprises them in an industrialized world.
John Breuilly, in his book Nationalism and the State, argues persuasively that the
nation, on which national identity depends, represents a modern and purely political
paradigm. For Breuilly, nationalism is typically developed by a highly literate group of
intellectuals looking to gain political sovereignty for their nation.
25
His argument is quite
simplistically designed to show that nationalism has only one goal, control of the state by
the nation, or the development of a newly independent country by that nation at the
expense of another. Indeed, Breuilly goes as far as to argue that nationalism does not
necessarily come from a pre-existing national identity but arises as a way of gaining
power through political manipulation.
26
To support his claim, Breuilly argues that the
revolutionaries in the present-day United States of America were fighting Great Britain as
a way of taking political control of their territory, not because they had a distinct cultural
or historical legacy from their colonial masters.
27
Breuilly is supported in his assertion
that nationalism is used as a way to gain political power, inter alia, by Eric Hobsbawm
and Ernest Gellner. Hobsbawm makes the case that nations and their resultant
nationalisms are myths devised by intellectuals as a way to create territorially
independent states.
28
Ernest Gellner originally manifested this notion, as set forth by
Hobsbawm, in his book from 1983.
29
25
Breuilly, 1.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 5.
28
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9-10.
29
Gellner, 48-9.
Convention