The importance of ancestry

Ten years ago this July, my friend Professor Anthony D. Smith, scholar of nationalism and formerly of the LSE, died after a long battle with leukaemia. Anthony was almost exactly twenty-five years older than me, but his son and mine were in the same school year (he came late to fatherhood), he lived in the next street, and through our sons we got to know each other well. 

During the last fifteen years of his life, and particularly during the last seven or eight when he was increasingly house-bound, I visited him more or less weekly, and we had long discussions about everything under the sun including history, nationalism and probably more than either, music. Smith had eclectic tastes within the classical realm but was particularly a Mozart devotee. (I will always be indebted to him for his introduction to me of the string quintets, especially K516.) He had inherited half a box at the Albert Hall from his father, and my wife and I were often invited by him and his wife to join them at Proms concerts. Indeed, it was at one such concert — I believe the Dvorak cello concerto was playing — that I suggested to Anthony that he write a book on music and nationalism (he had just completed his work on art and nationalism, The Nation Made Real (2013)). He felt that to do so he would need the assistance of a musicologist, and so I found him one, and thus his final work came into existence. Nation and Classical Music (2016), which he wrote with Matthew Riley, was his last work and, as I had anticipated in suggesting it, its writing gave him purpose and pleasure over his last few years of life.

Smith was a major influence on my own decision to take up a PhD years after completing my masters and — a devoted supervisor of theses himself — he was a constant source of encouragement. It was fortuitous that when I found the perfect supervisor for what I wanted to write about, namely the confluence of demography and ethnicity, I discovered Professor Eric Kaufmann who, it turned out, had been Anthony’s own pupil. Thus, having been my own supervisor’s supervisor, Smith became my doctoral grandfather years after we first met.

To understand Smith’s contribution to nationalism, the perspective that came to be known as “Ethno-Symbolism”, one needs to understand the theory against it was primarily positioned. Anthony’s own supervisor (for his second PhD), was Ernest Gellner. Gellner’s view, captured in his famous work Nations and Nationalism, is this: in local agrarian economies, where the majority of people travel no further than to the next village and exist in small communities, there is no need for any kind of macro-identity. But once a highly specialised largescale industrial society comes into being, with millions absorbed into vast enterprises and regular interaction required with people from different places and backgrounds, the state needs to manufacture some kind of common language and set of assumptions in order to lubricate industrial-scale communications. This was Nationalism, purposefully and deliberatively created by the state to ensure its smooth functioning.

Anthony Smith accepted that, at least in its modern form in the context of industrial society and mass participative politics, Nationalism was something new. To this extent he was not a “perennialist”. But unlike his doctoral supervisor Gellner, he believed that insofar as states “manufactured” nationalism, they could not do so from thin air. Rather, to be effective, they needed to deploy, revive and repackage the raw materials of real memories and myths of the ethnic groups from which nations are formed. On the stage of history, nations may be created by blood and iron, but in the consciousnesses of their component individuals, they were made not through invention or dissembling but through the reawakening of latent collective recollections and emotions.

Among those recollections and emotions was what Smith (citing Max Weber) called the myth of common ancestry. Descent from a common stock was a key ingredient, and in the era before genetic testing, whilst that descent could not be definitively proven, it did at least need to be believed in. For a nation to come into being it needed to conceive of itself as an ethnic group; individuals submerge themselves in the family, the family in the community and the community in a wider community of communities, namely the nation. There may have been special cases. How to explain a sense of nation in a settler state like the USA or Australia? How, if at all, could the patent absence of common ancestry allow for the creation of a coherent people, and could such a people ever really be called a nation? These are interesting cases but do not in themselves contradict the nature of the nation in its ancestral homeland such as in Europe. Smith’s focus was on the origins of the ethnic origins of nations: he did not dispute that they might evolve over time eventually to conceive of themselves more civically than ethnically. He tended to feel that the ethnic and civic were more of a spectrum than absolutes.

Anthony Smith was anything but a little Englander (although, at time of the Brexit referendum which took place weeks before his death, he told me he would have voted for leaving the EU if he had had the strength to get to the polls: a brief stint at the College of Europe had disgusted him with the institutions of the European Union). Apart from classical Greek and Latin (the subjects of his first PhD) he had reasonably good French and German and more than a smattering of Hebrew. The son of a lightly educated East End Jewish father and a highly cultured German Jewish refugee mother — parents who had divorced shortly after his birth — Smith was fascinated by questions of belonging. Politically a devoted British patriot, loyal to the country that had taken in his father’s family then his mother’s, he had a strong sense of Jewish identity which was arguably behind his interest in how the Hebrew Bible had acted as a template for nationhood, arguably in medieval Catholic France, unquestionably in early modern Protestant England, as outlined in his Chosen Peoples (2003). Smith’s maternal grandfather had been an early victim of the Nazis and he was acutely sensitive to racial prejudice. But I don’t think it ever occurred to him that such sensitivity precluded a frank acceptance that nations were, at least in their origins if not necessarily in their continuing functioning, essentially ethnic in nature.

For such a model to work, inflows must ideally be modest in scale, from cultures with some adjacency and into a nation with a clear, strong and proud sense of itself

I have argued elsewhere that while a nation is indeed essentially ethnic, that need not make it hermetically sealed. If an example is required here, it is surely Ruth whose story is told so beautifully in the eponymous book of the Old Testament and who willingly chose to align with her new people and whose Moabite origins did nothing to prevent her great grandson, David, from the monarchy. For such a model to work, inflows must ideally be modest in scale, from cultures with some adjacency and into a nation with a clear, strong and proud sense of itself. The problem with modern Britain is that none of these conditions apply. Attempts to overcome this with some kind of rootless “civic nationalism” — the substitution as the basis of national identity with values rather than any ethnic core — are bound to collapse into banality and vacuousness.

When Anthony Smith died in the Summer of 2016, I was honoured to be one of the two people asked to speak at his funeral (the other being his colleague John Hutchinson). I recalled then that I had suggested to Anthony that his disagreement with Gellner was an unspoken one: two Jews arguing about Zionism, Gellner the cosmopolitan eager to portray any kind of nationalism as useful nonsense, Smith imbued with a strong sense of his own identity and what it could only mean for a Jew born in 1939. Projected onto the wider world, the subject matter of their disagreement was openly global, surreptitiously parochial. And, as I recounted at the funeral, although he did not definitively agree with me when I had made this suggestion to him, Anthony had smiled and refrained from comment.