The Mythic Lens : National Sovereignty as Mythic Narrative: The Nation-State as Sacred Community

Abstract

Much contemporary academic literature on the subject of nationalism seeks to explain its dynamics in terms of clashes of material interests or biological imperatives. This thesis will seek to add to the literature by adding another perspective; of viewing nationalism as a sacralized mythic narrative that has replaced the older conceptions of the dynastic kingdom and the unified religious community. By making the political community’s founding myth radically indeterminate, it will argue, it creates a permanent potential for violence and conflict whenever the stability of the political order comes under stress. We shall begin by considering what exactly is meant by the ‘mythical’, and its connection to the political sphere. We will argue that there are two varieties of political myth; a ‘first order’ and a ‘second order’. The first pertains to the origin of the political community, and the second to how it is administered or governed. We will then argue that prior to the modern age, the dominant myth on both levels was that of ‘sacralized kingship’, where political authority was vested in a monarch who traced his or her right to rule to a divine connection to the cosmic order. This order, we shall argue was fundamentally disrupted by the coming of nationalism, which was a new kind of ‘first order’ myth that defined an entirely new idea of political community. We will then interrogate the modern theory of political sovereignty, with reference to the accounts of sovereignty in the work of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, we shall seek to argue that despite these thinkers’ insistence that the religious and political spheres of action are distinct and governed by their own particular logic, the empirical reality of how sovereignty is exercised and construed in fact is inextricably bound with a mythological understanding that justifies it in the eyes of its subjects and often to itself. It is the collapse of this mythical understanding that leads to attempts to reconstitute sovereignty on a new basis, each force claiming the traditional rights of the sovereign, namely to designate ‘enemies’ whose lives are forfeit. We will argue that it is in fact the ‘first order’ political myth that in fact confers the power of the Schmittian or Hobbesian sovereign on any one body. The adoption of nationalism as the basic political myth of the modern age, because of its fundamental indeterminacy, has meant that political violence in the modern world is prone to erupt if there is any challenge to the political order. This can be juxtaposed to illegitimate or unjust premodern rulers, who could be deposed without any particular threat to the overall worldview that underpinned the state. We will then go on to consider the existing literature regarding nationalism and its origins, including the work of Anderson, Hobsbawm, Gellner, and many others. The purpose of this section will be to argue that nationalism, unlike a territorial or dynastic kingdom, or the boundaries of a unified religious system, is a fundamentally indeterminate concept that having been adopted as the basic myth underpinning the political order, inherently destabilizes the entire political framework, as instability for any reason prompts divisions within the community to seek to redefine the community as a whole. In the last section, we will seek to explore how the radical indeterminacy of national myths has contributed to atrocity and conflict in two particular cases; that of Japan in the 20th century, and during the creation of India and Pakistan. We will also consider the question of how ‘second-order’ myths, those that legitimate particular governing institutions, can help manage and mitigate such violence. We will conclude with a brief reflection on the application of this understanding of the political conflicts that drive the modern world, and will make the case that new myths, that can be shared by as many people as possible, may be just as necessary to solve the problems of war and conflict as the addressing of the strictly material and resource grievances that often underpin it.