The Conceptual Framework

The study of nationalism and ethnicity has gone through a paradigm change over the last two decades, a change which in large measure has been subsequent to, and consequent upon a similar change of paradigm in the field of development studies.¹ Prior to the mid-1960s, the dominant school in western social science—the functionalist school—viewed the process of modernisation as an essentially smooth process of development, whereby growing interaction between the modern sector of society, or of the world, and its traditional periphery would result in the ‘diffusion’ of modern values and institutions and the gradual homogenisation of culturally distinct groups and areas of the world. With regard to nationalism, this school of thought anticipated ‘nation building’ and ‘national integration’ on the supposed western European model to be the outcome of this process of amalgamation. Ethnicity, and other ascriptive or ‘status’ characteristics were expected to lose their force as principles of social solidarity, and be replaced by rational, market-based, ‘class’ characteristics. (This last prediction was shared by Marxist writers as well, although they, of course, attributed a rather more precise meaning to the term ‘class’ and did not see modernisation as a smooth, harmonious process.)