These are the stages of the formation of a nation-state:
1. First, the intellectual elites work to create the feeling of nationhood, of a national community, of cultural togetherness and value.
2. Then, once this work is done, the people demonstrate that the message sank and come out – maybe peacefully, maybe not – to proclaim and defend their nationhood.
3. A national government is formed, and it starts imposing uniformity and cohesion.
These are always the steps. The intellectuals, the people, the government. It was like this in Spain where the intellectuals battled all through the 18th century to create the concept of “the Spanish national character” (today we’d say ‘identity’). And then in 1806, people came out to fight for the independence of Spain from the foreign invader when much of that same elite had run away to the country of the invader.
In Ukraine, intellectuals worked all through the Soviet tyranny to keep Ukrainianness alive. And as a result, in 1986 people started raising Ukrainian flags in public. In 1990, still in the USSR, Ukrainians stood, holding hands, across 700 kilometers of the country’s territory to show their support for the Ukrainian independence.
And only after all that the statehood came.
It works the same with the post-nation state. Intellectuals create the ideas, spread them around, people accept them as “common sense” or normal, and the state molds into the new form. Intellectuals, people, state.
Them are the steps.
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