Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (“What Is a Nation?”)
• Renan observed that race must not be confounded with nation. The truth is that there is no pure race; and making politics depend on ethnographic analysis is allowing it to be built upon a chimera. Racial factors, important as they are at the outset, have a constant tendency to decrease in significance. Human history is fundamentally different from zoology.
Race is not everything, as it is in the case of rodents and felines.
Speaking about language, Renan points out that language invites reunion; it does not force it. The
United States and England, Spanish America and Spain, speak the same languages yet do not form single nations
In contrast, Switzerland, which owes her stability to the agreement of its various parts, counts three or four languages.
In humans, there is something superior to language, WILL. The will of Switzerland to remain united, despite its linguistic diversity, is far more important than a similarity of language, which is often established through persecution.
Regarding common territory, Renan argued that it is neither the land nor the race that creates a nation. Land provides a substratum a field for battle and work while man provides the soul; man is everything in the formation of that sacred entity known as a people. Nothing material in nature is sufficient for nationhood.
Having demonstrated that race, language, and territory are insufficient to constitute a nation, Renan raises the pointed question: what more is necessary? His answer, in his own words, is as follows: A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two facets, though essentially one, constitute this soul: one found in the past, the other in the present. One is the shared possession of a rich heritage of memories; the other is active consent the desire to live together and the will to preserve honorably the undivided inheritance handed down. Man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the product of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotion. Ancestor veneration is thus all the more legitimate, for our ancestors made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory true glory form the social capital upon which the national idea may be founded.
To have common glories in the past and a common will in the present having achieved great things together and willing to do so again these are the essential conditions for the making of a people. We love in proportion to the sacrifices we have made and the sufferings we have endured. We cherish the house we have built and intend to pass to our descendants. The Spartan hymn, “We are what you were; we shall be what you are,” is, in its simplicity, the national anthem of every land.
In the past, a shared inheritance of glory and regret and in the future, a common ideal to realize; suffering, rejoicing, and hoping together all these mean more than common customs offices or frontiers drawn for strategic reasons. All this can be understood despite diversities in race and language. Suffering together, indeed, for suffering in common is a greater bond of union than joy. As for national memories, mourning are worth more than triumphs, for they impose duties and demand collective effort.
SOURCE - Renan, Ernest. Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1882.
It was all discussed in the book of Pakistan or partition of india by DR br ambedkar about two communities living under same shade!
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO YOU ALL
