Introduction:

The end of the Cold War has indicated not only to the material and ideational disparity between the former enemies, but has also set off resurgence in ethnic segmentation. It has been suggested that the tensions between “the West” and “the East” kept the lid on ethnic divisions not only within the immediate realms of the two superpowers, but also in the world at large. Once the conditions that maintained the order of deterrence disappeared, the supposed primordial aspirations re-emerged from the dust of ideological oblivion and groups whose names seemed condemned to the pages of history textbooks resurfaced in a full-blooded and often bloody fashion.
“How and why ethnicity becomes a political tool?” is the topic of Patrick J. Geary’s book. His, however, is quite an unusual account and is, perhaps, one of the most refreshing recent inquiries into the issues of national identity and nationalism. The Myth of Nations is comparable in its conceptual framework and explanation to such seminal works as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London, 1983), Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983) and Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986). Geary, however, distinguishes himself from other scholars by his approach. Unlike many, who take a distinct sociological, political, historical, psychological or a mixed psycho-socio-historico-political perspective, the methodology of his investigation is a peculiar brand of medieval scholarship interlaced with a profoundly humanist anxiety and consideration for the dilemmas plaguing the post-1989 world. This handling of the subject makes The Myth of Nations an extremely stimulating and valuable repository for comprehensive, and, at the same time, perceptive exploration into the long-winded and complicated avenues of national discourses.
Geary puts forth an argument, which is fairly straightforward and, at the same time, well grounded in relevant data: Rather than interpret the past from the vantage point of the present, he delves into the hoary times of yore to decipher how identity was perceived by the people living then. Geary’s justification for such an approach is quite unequivocally and lucidly spelled out: “Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness. Cleaning up the waste is the most daunting challenge facing historians today” (p. 15).
For the purposes of clarity, the six chapters of Geary's rigorous account and deft dismantling of nationalist myths could be distinguished into three broad themes: (i) mythologies of nationalism – where the lucid prose of the author and his succinct argumentation engages different modes of group-organization; (ii) imagining the past – Geary's most ingenious and resourceful contribution to understanding the theories of nation-formation through his unflinching reconsideration of national origins via critical evaluation of primary sources; and (iii) the politics of language – an outline of the pattern in which political agendas permeate the processes of national construction by reducing the individual complexities of many centuries of development to a single, standardized set of identifiers. It is in this way that Geary's book puts forward the suggestion that ultimately the formation of European peoples has to be seen as an ongoing process that began in antiquity and continues in the present. He discards as historical nonsense the idea that national character is fixed for all time in a distant and bucolic past. Instead, the actuality, as The Myth of Nations attests, was one, where the underscoring complexity of the daily environment of ancient societies is comparable to the one surrounding societies today.

Mythologies of Nationalism

The premise of The Myth of Nations is that the perversion of history was and still is the rallying cry of nationalistic rabble-rousing. Therefore, rather than history it becomes “pseudohistory,” whose assumptions that “the peoples of Europe are distinct, stable and objectively identifiable social and cultural units, and that they are distinguished by language religion, custom and national character, which are unambiguous and immutable” (p. 11). The crucial point for Geary is not the limitations of such rather truncated and primordial understanding, but rather its implications. By explaining away identity as a taxonomized feature, which has emerged in the oblivion of the past, but has since “then ended for all time” (p. 11), national history becomes the dangerous minefield through which historians have to negotiate their way. Geary's suggestion is that more often than not, they jump on the bandwagon of “pseudohistory,” which has made them and their discipline the vehicle for particular political agendas.
The importance of ethnogenesis is that it cuts across political, cultural and social identification. Therefore the boundaries of cultural identity are perceived as the desired frontiers for the political organization of a given group. The obscurity of the period when a nation was allegedly born has made it an easy prey for ideological propaganda. In other words, once “the premises projected onto this period have been accepted, political leaders can draw out policy implications to suit their political agenda” (p. 9). Thus, ongoing debates of political legitimacy are couched not in terms of democratic representation or good governance, but in terms of “ninth-century history” (p. 8). In such context, justification of policy actions is rooted in the understanding that once a nation has settled on a given territory (i.e. after the moment of “primary acquisition”) all subsequent “migrations, invasions, or political absorptions [of this territory] have all been illegitimate” (p. 12).
The responsibility for such understanding of legitimacy lies not only with seditious politicians, but also with the so-called international community. For instance, the universal (and recently contested) acceptance of the right to self-determination is underpinned by the perception that peoples exist as objective phenomena and that their very existence gives them the right to self-government. Said otherwise, “we assume that, somehow, political and cultural identity are and have a right to be united” (p. 12).
Thus, Geary’s overall argument echoes the words of Mancur Olson that nationalism is “often a consequence rather than a first cause of political outcomes. As often as not, it is governments that create nationalisms rather than nationalisms that create nation-states… we get nationalism and a sense that a given set of human beings are a ‘people’ or a ‘nation’ mainly because the accidents of history have given us governments with certain domain... The people in the domain are then given a certain set of experiences by this government and an indoctrination in a nationalism that is convenient for the government in question. Even a language is, as the saying goes, usually a dialect backed by an army.”^[1] In this manner, perhaps rather cynically, Olson exposes the cynicism of national ideology as a disguise for challenging or justifying (according to the circumstances) a certain type of rule. Geary strikes a similar cord by suggesting that “Europe’s peoples have always been far more fluid, complex, and dynamic than the imaginings of modern nationalists. Names of peoples may seem familiar after a thousand years, but the social, cultural, and political realities covered by these names were radically different from what they are today” (p. 13).
These inferences suggest an explanation for the resurgence of inter-ethnic strives in the post-1989 period. The issue of identity became paramount for the processes of social transition. It encompassed popular relationships with the state, more specifically the shifting of allegiances away from the institutional representations toward more personal and local ones. In other words, the substitution of the civic for the ethnic understanding of identity was tied to the functions which the state had to perform (but it did not): (i) to guarantee the existence of a legislatively regulated administrative and legal order; (ii) to ensure the security of its citizens within the boundaries of a defined territory; and (iii) to warranty its monopoly over the legitimate use of force.^[2] Geary engages these issues in his investigation of the origins of nations. His suggestion is that while nationalisms do not create the conditions of existence, they utilize them as resources to “manufacture the nation itself” (p. 18). Thus, the simulation of truth, becomes truth itself and meaning is exhausted of its content.
That is how The Myth of Nations connects to the larger literature on post-communist transitions. In effect, it is in unison with Mary McAuley’s conclusion that students and analysts of democratization politics are often tempted “to argue that past culture is a crucial factor in forming today’s culture. Fair enough. But then the relationship has to be spelled out. This has to be done by examining and rejecting explanations of today’s culture which do not include past culture as a variable, and by tracing the process by which perceptions are transmitted over time. It is strange that subjectivists do neither... Given that they have identified past values precisely because of what has come after, they cannot then use them to explain what followed. This is to fall into a trap similar to that of inferring attitudes from behavior and then using them to explain behavior: we cannot first infer the past from the present and then use it to compare two periods or to explain the present.”^[3] Like McAuley, Geary puts forward the view that nationalism should be viewed as a system that is both continuous and malleable, and which gradually absorbs new infusions from its historical experiences and contacts, while older elements are either eroded, metamorphosed, or ultimately sloughed off: “The history of the people of Europe has not ended – it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and the future as much as it is of the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or a nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be. Peoples of Europe, like peoples of Africa, America, or Asia, are processes formed and re-formed by history, not the atomic structures of history itself… Europeans must realize the difference between past and present if they are to build a future” (p. 174).

Imagining in the Past:

In order to chart the possible futures for the peoples of Europe, Geary does the unimaginable – he successfully puts himself in the shoes of someone living in the times of antiquity and asks himself the question: “Who am I?” It is the answer (or rather the search for an answer) to this question that The Myth of Nations posits as the challenge to current nationalist discourses. What Geary finds is (i) that it is not so easy to extrapolate the identity of our ancestors; and (ii) the complexity and diversity of self-perception in the past is at least comparable to the one today. Thus, the lack of a unitary answer to the question “Who am I?” suggests the simplicity (if not falsity) of nationalistic suggestions. The author intuits that the best possible answer under the circumstances is that “It depends!”: “Congruence between early medieval and contemporary ‘peoples’ is a myth… claims that ‘we have always been a people’ actually are appeals to become a people – appeals not grounded in history but, rather, attempts to create history. The past, as has often been said, is a foreign country, and we will never finds ourselves there” (p. 37. Emphasis original).
The pernicious effects of national identification are traced by The Myth of Nations back to the times of Herodotus and his contemporaries. Geary argues that Herodotus owing to his origins (belonging neither to the Greek or Persian power-structures, but at the same time part of both) was largely able to eschew the avenues of value-laden and judgmental account of the habits of the peoples that he encountered. His social fluidity allowed him to take a “processual approach to peoples” (p. 49). However, subsequent authors perceived Herodotus’ blurring of the demarcation between “us” and “them” as undermining the framework of the state. Due to their clearly defined positions and embeddedness in their respective societies, the post-Herodotus authors emphasized the corresponding existence of individual identity within the framework of allegiance to a certain state. This allegiance was internalized as the understanding that the boundaries of the state represented the boundaries of civilization (beyond which lived the barbarians). Thence, the origin of the notion that “our state should accommodate our people,” which has suggested the articulation of the political aspiration to fulfill the principle of “one nation, one state.”^[4]
Therefore, nationalism has come to be understood as the (re)assertion of the mutual sovereignty of a community in the form of a nation-state. The Myth of Nations, however, challenges certain portions of the conceptual background of such an inference. Mainly, Geary takes issue with the understanding that identity is pre-determined by an inherent and inherited decent. Thus, attachment to a collectivity illustrates the lack of latitude of such explanation. Instead, he points out that the practice of nationalism is the result of a specific set of social conditions, which reflect the dynamism of group-socialization. Again taking his hint from the times of Antiquity, Geary asserts that post-Herodotus ethnographers objected to his sense of historical change. Thus, Pliny, for instance, proffered a new approach to social identity in his Natural History, “a sort of law of conservation of peoples – no people ever disappeared, no trait ever changed” (p. 49).
In this way, The Myth of Nations reverberates the debates on the meaning of the social world at the level of concept-formation. Geary indicates that a more lucid and comprehensive scrutiny is on order, so that researchers can overcome the befuddlement caused by nationalistic interpretations of the past and present, in order to address the challenges of the future. His intuition is that, probably, nationalism is a term (as well as the actualization of a practice) which people would do better without. The conceptualization of this point has been suggested a decade ago by Harry Eckstein, who observed that “the muddle about the meaning [of abstractions begins] with a strange inversion of the proper and usual relations between concepts (labels), objects, and subjects... Normally, one begins with observation or ideas (or both). Concepts are used to make statements about them: ‘massages’ that convey information. In making statements, difficulties may arise. More or less misinformation, or ‘noise,’ may be conveyed. Unless conventional language has been seriously abused, the fault can hardly lie in the words. Messages will be unclear to the extent that observations or ideas are crude or fuzzy. To achieve greater clarity, it is usually not to the point to revise the definitions; the obvious remedies are more exact observation and more lucid thought. The exceptions that call for abandonment are concepts that turn out to be vacuous because they label ignorance itself - like ‘phlogiston’ or ‘having the vapors’.”^[5]
Coming from a similar vein of thought, Geary conjectures national myths as mere labels of ignorance. However, their “muddle of meaning” is not a recent phenomenon, but one that “drew on a much more ancient tradition of identifying peoples, a tradition already developed in the historical sources that historians and philologists attempted to use to find peoples in the past" (p. 40). This tradition was the pattern of “pseudohistory,” according to which only "the populus Romanus alone, unlike foreign ‘peoples,’ had a history... Thus, other ‘peoples’ had no history... They only became part of history when they entered the sphere of Roman existence” (p. 50).
Geary's overview of nation-imagination has significant implications for the contours of ethnic politics in post-communist societies. National revanchism found fertile ground in the context of failed states, declining material and economic contingencies and rising social (as well as individual) insecurity. Similar corollaries were extrapolated by Fareed Zakaria in his study of “illiberal democracies,” where he declared that “without a background in constitutional liberalism, the introduction of democracy in divided societies has actually fomented nationalism, ethnic conflict, and even war... In countries not grounded in constitutional liberalism, the rise of democracy often brings with it hyper-nationalism and war-mongering.”^[6]

The Politics of Language:

The significance of national language for the purposes of group-identity has already been suggested in the previous sections. However, the justification for laying a special emphasis on this aspect derives from the fact that standardized locution provided (and still does) the content for national signification and furnished the purposes of establishing sovereign, national imagination. Said otherwise, language is not simply involved in the production of social truths, but it also participates in their assessment: that is, it reflects and shapes the daily experiences and aspirations of society. Therefore, language became the means for inventing^[7] a national consciousness as well as for imagining the common future of the nation. In some sense, this process of nationalization of the forms of articulation is an expression of Marxian rhetoric that “ideas are materialized in a nation to the extent that a need for them exists… It is not enough that thought should strive toward realization; existence itself must enter into thought.”^[8]
Geary resonates these ideas; but in his own idiosyncratic way, he manages to rephrase and re-conceptualize their connotations. Taking his cue from the objectives guiding his research, he makes it clear in The Myth of Nations that philology is “a tool of nationalism” (p. 31). Geary’s point of departure is that “philology... became the primary tool of medieval history study, a tool that is used to discover the prehistory of... nationalism” (p. 29). National languages: (i) provide the means for the codification of the production of national symbols; and (ii) introduce a “securitization” of identity discourse, which even further muddles up their meaning through the logic of national responsibility: “Security discourse is characterised by dramatizing an issue as having absolute priority. Something is presented as an existential threat: if we do not tackle this, everything else will be irrelevant… By labeling this a security issue, the actor has claimed a right to handle it with extraordinary means, to break the normal rules of the political game.”^[9]
The detrimental effects of such line of reasoning are unequivocally spelled out by Geary. The first one is that once “national languages were established – in theory if not on the lips of the population – then the rules of Indo-European philology made it possible for linguists to ascribe ancient vernacular texts, some over a thousand years old, to these languages. Thus linguists could speak of the ancient monuments of their nations.” (p. 32). Thus, ethno-linguistics have opened the potential for revisionist desires to rectify the failures and “wrongs” of the past, as has been emphasized by the over decade-long Yugoslav crises.
The other effect is that national languages through the “educational institutions became the locus for the creation of the nation-state, both through the inculcation of nationalist ideology and, more subtly, through the dissemination of a national language in which this ideology was incarnate. Language became the vehicle for teaching the national history of the ‘people’ whose language this was and whose political aspirations the language expressed. However, the new philology allowed nationalist educators and ideologues to go even further: It made possible the creation of a national, ‘scientific’ history that projected both national language and national ideology into a distant past” (p. 31).
In other words, language became the glue that helped stick individuals together into the national pattern of social integration. It symbolized an essence, which was the result of a particular formulation of knowledge and truth and as such is an effect of particular power relations. Said in the diction of Foucault’s logic of the production of power, “in society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth, which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.”^[10] For instance, this power of language to produce national symbols has been exemplified by the post-Cold War economy of discourses, which has emphasised the ideational advantage of Euro-Atlantic norms and rules.
The Myth of Nations further elaborates these ideas and suggests that the modulation of distinct national articulation provides “ethnic markers [which] gave a physical dimension to the linguistic parameters of ethnicity... [This] posited a direct, one-to-one relationship between language, material culture, and peoples known from historical sources... In particular, it encouraged modern states... to claim regions of neighbouring countries on the basis that these territories were the original homelands of [their] peoples” (p. 35). Thus, the peculiar mixture of ethno-linguistics and ethno-archaeology provided the machinery for the political agendas of “pseudohistory” justified by the heritage of the ancient past, which suggested common unity around the buzzwords: language, territory, and distinct culture.
Therefore, Geary's suggestion is that in its groundwork, identity is an empty shell that is filled up with individual/collective aspirations pre-conditioned by present-day power-relations; hence it is modifiable. Thus any identity, is always and only a simulation of material appearances for the purposes of producing meaning. The proposal is that there is no ultimate foundation behind this simulation of identity, since the signified of identity (national symbols) represents signifiers (nations) who are reflections of manipulated appearances (imagining).

Conclusion:

It is in this way that The Myth of Nations provides a threefold re-evaluation of the contested concept on nationalism. At first, it looks at the modes of group-organization; then, it mounts a challenge to nationalist interpretations of the past; and, finally, it deals with the production of meaning within and through national articulation. Although that these themes were looked at separately in this review, in the book they are intertwined in the complex imbrications of complementarity. At the end of the day, Geary's own, concise and pithy realization is that “after almost two centuries of attempts to map ethnicity linguistically, archeologically, and historically, one must conclude that all of these programs have failed. The fundamental reason is that ethnicity exists first and last in people's minds. Yet ethnicity's locus in people's minds does not make it ephemeral; on the contrary, it is all the more real and powerful as a result. A creation of the human will, it is impervious to mere rational disproof” (p. 40).
It is inevitable that the unabashedly challenging style of The Myth of Nations will foment intense debates and discussions. Nevertheless, its clarity of explication and original approach serve only to recommend Geary's effort and draw attention to the urgency and relevance of his subject. Consequently, his investigation into the birth of nations is going to be a valuable source of insight to any student of nationalism as well as the inquisitive reader without any specific background on the issue.
A final aspect of Geary's effort, which beckons mentioning is his attempt to understand the diverse interdictions of human existence, a substantial number of which are not in the least palatable. In its gist, The Myth of Nations is a humanistic inquiry into the problems of being. As such, it queries what is that human beings share (rather than what do they have in common): (i) the fact of historical existence; or (ii) immanence through time. Geary's book provides all the necessary questions and tools of interrogation. It also imparts the author's experience. However, it leaves it to the reader to draw a conclusion.