Modernism and nationalism

Abstract

Various scholars have addressed nationalism as a distinctive political ideology. The majority of them recognize it as a product of modernity and as inseparable from it. This article begins by accepting this view, identifying the spread of nationalism as part of a broader process of Westernization. However, the all-encompassing ideological dimension and common thread hovering above nationalism is identified here as modernism—that is, the sum of ideological discourses, artistic expressions and political practices gravitating around the ‘need to be modern’. Modernist notions like ‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘advancement’ and ‘development’ have been largely conceived within national frameworks and applied within a world of ‘nation-states’. Moreover, given the selective ways in which ruling elites used the vocabulary of modernity, the very ‘perlocutionary’ effect of labelling opponents as ‘anti-modern’ often became a sufficient condition for their exclusion. The article discusses whether modernism can be identified as an ideology on its own and whether its triumph was indissociable from nationalism. It concludes that nationalism belonged to a broader modernist discourse that thoroughly accompanied the expansion of modernity.

Acknowledgements

My most sincere thanks to my colleague John K. Walton (University of the Basque Country) for his invaluable suggestions and comments in drafting the final text.

Notes

  ^* The author of this article is Research Professor at IKERBASQUE, the Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.

  1. On Gallie's notion of ‘essentially contested concepts’ as applied to ideology, see M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 55ff.

  2. See D. Conversi, ‘Reassessing current theories of nationalism: nationalism as boundary maintenance and creation’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 1(1) (1995), pp. 73–85.

  3. See for instance, A. D. Smith, Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London: Routledge, 2009). D. Brown, Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).

  4. M. Hroch and J. Malecková, ‘Nation: a survey of the term in European languages’, in A. S. Leoussi (Ed.) Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), pp. 203–208.

  5. E. Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978); B. Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1985). As Freeden notes, his work has not been translated into English: M. Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 129.

  6. P. P. Pasolini, Passione e Ideologia [Passion and Ideology], 5th edn (Milan: Garzanti [1st edn 1960], 1994).

  7. M. Weber, ‘Science as a vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (Eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 2009).

  8. See J. M. Acuff, ‘Modernity and nationalism’, in R. A. Denemark (Ed.) The International Studies Encyclopedia (Oxford/Boston-Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

  9. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Wiley-Blackwell/Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press [1st edn, 1983], 2006). See also D. Conversi, ‘Homogenisation, nationalism and war: Should we still read Ernest Gellner?’ Nations and Nationalism, 13(3), 2007, pp. 371–394.

 10. T. Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997).

 11. J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); W. Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); M. Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger (Eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge; NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983); D. D. Laitin, Nations, States, and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). E. Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

 12. L. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); L. Greenfeld, ‘Modernity and nationalism’, in G. Delanty and K. Kumar (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 157–168. For a critique, see K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), particularly Chapter 5. Another critique from a broader and robust longue durée perspective is A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

 13. Smith, A. D. Smith, ‘Dating the nation’, in D. Conversi (Ed.) Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism (London/New York: Routledge, 2004); A. D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); A. D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); A. D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998). For a critique, see W. Connor, ‘The timelessness of nations’, Nations and Nationalism, 10(1–2) (2004), pp. 35–47.

 14. Smith, Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 3, Smith, ‘Dating the nation’, op. cit., Ref. 13.

 15. R. Tagore, Nationalism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), p. 15. See P. C. Hogan and L. Pandit (Eds), Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).

 16. S. Dayal, Resisting Modernity: Counternarratives of Nation and Masculinity in Pre-Independence India (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

 17. The term ‘eliminationism’ is systematically used and explained in A. A. Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (London: Routledge, 2009), and, more selectively, D. J. Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009). It has hence been applied to a host of cases, most notably to the rise of the American right: D. A. Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (Sausalito, CA: PoliPoint Press, 2009). For a wide-ranging application of the term to modern European history, see C. Carmichael, Genocide Before the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

 18. Kallis, ibid.

 19. D. Bloxham, ‘The roots of American genocide denial: near eastern geopolitics and the interwar Armenian question’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(1) (2006), pp. 27–49; R. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); R. G. Hovannisian (Ed.) The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986); M. Mazower, ‘The G-word’, London Review of Books, 23(3) (2001), p. 19.

 20. R. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); G. L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, 1st edn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966).

 21. Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press/Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 1989).

 22. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, op. cit., Ref. 19; C. Carmichael, ‘The violent destruction of community during the “century of genocide”’, European History Quarterly, 35(3) (2005), pp. 395–403. Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust, op. cit., Ref. 17. Possibly the most important book on the role of secular Turkish elites in the wholesale destruction of Turkey's ethnic, linguistic and religious communities is U. U. Ungor, The Making of Modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a collection of essays on the relationship between the Enlightenment and genocide as ‘contradictions of modernity’, see J. Kaye and B. Strath (Eds), Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity (Bruxelles: PIE-Peter Lang, 2000).

 23. O. Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); B. D. Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2006); D. Conversi, ‘Cultural homogenization, ethnic cleansing and genocide’, in R. A. Denemark (Ed.) The International Studies Encyclopaedia (Oxford/Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2010), pp. 719–742.

 24. H. Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 124–162; M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 111–178; Lieberman, ibid., pp. 80–150; Ungor, The Making of Modern Turkey, op. cit., Ref. 22.

 25. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). The book also includes the post-war period till 1991.

 26. R. Aron, The Century of Total War, 1st edn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954).

 27. C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 67.

 28. A. Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), Chapter 1. R. W. Smith, ‘Human destructiveness and politics: the twentieth century as an age of genocide’, in I. Wallimann and M. N. Dobkowski (Eds) Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 21–38.

 29. M. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Vol. 2 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 144ff.; S. Totten and W. S. Parsons (Eds), Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (London: Routledge, 2004); E. D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust, op. cit., Ref. 22

 30. Z. Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century (New York: Scribner/Maxwell Macmillan, 1993); D. Westwood, ‘Casualties, war in the twentieth century’, in S. Sandler (Ed.) Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 159.

 31. The literature on ‘American century’ is vast, with possibly one milestone work: V. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). For the impact of World War I on the rights of US citizens, see C. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

 32. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, op. cit., Ref. 27.

 33. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 1994).

 34. B. Harff, ‘No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955’, American Political Science Review, 97(1) (2003), pp. 57–73; B. Harff and T. R. Gurr, ‘Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides: identification and measurement of cases since 1945’, International Studies Quarterly, 32(3) (1988), pp. 359–371.

 35. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 24.

 36. E. Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).

 37. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 9.

 38. Kedourie, Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 11.

 39. Smith, Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 14, Chapter 2.

 40. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 256; and Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, op. cit., Ref 13, p. 9.

 41. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, ibid., p. 22.

 42. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 116.

 43. M. Freeden, ‘Is nationalism a distinct ideology?’, Political Studies, 46(4) (1998), pp. 748—765, 750.

 44. Ibid.

 45. See also P. S. Martin, ‘A discursive reading of the emergence of Asturian nationalist ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 7(1) (2002), pp. 97–116.

 46. S. Malesevic, ‘Nationalism and the power of ideology’, in G. Delanty and K. Kumar (Ed.) The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 307–319, 317.

 47. W. Connor, ‘Nationalism and political illegitimacy’ in D. Conversi (Ed.) Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism (London/New York: Routledge, 2004).

 48. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 116.

 49. M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), p. 22.

 50. H. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), p. 21.

 51. Cited by B. Sanders, The Private Death of Public Discourse (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 62; and C. Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2005), p. 67.

 52. B. Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (London: Granta, 2010).

 53. C. Ruzza, ‘Italy: The political right and concepts of civil society’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 15(3) (2010), pp. 259–271. See also S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka (Eds), Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

 54. This goes much beyond the largely literary and artistic quarrel developed in the 1690s in France, the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, as a seemingly vacuous infighting between two elitist views, one (the Anciens) supporting the eternal validity of classic authors, the other (the Modernes) supporting the need for new authors to come forward and surpass the knowledge of the classics. Of course, a dispute of the very notions of ‘progress’ as a supreme truth was at stake. For a ‘presentist’ and quite chronocentric rendering of this dispute, see J. E. DeJean, Ancient Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

 55. J. Alexander, ‘Purifying a nation: Performing trauma and salvation in the Egyptian revolution’, paper presented at the 21st Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), ‘Forging the Nation’, London School of Economics and Political Science, 28 March 2011.

 56. On the consequences of ‘speech acts’ and the notion of ‘perlocutionary effect’, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

 57. S. L. Branche, ‘Abuse and Westernization: Reflections on strategies of power’, Journal of Peace Research, 42(2) (2005), pp. 219–235, S. Latouche, The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope and Limits of the Drive Towards Global Uniformity, trans. R. Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).

 58. G. Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. P. Camiller (new edn, rev. and expanded edn) (London: Zed Books, 2002).

 59. C. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven. Progress and Its Critics, 1st edn (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1991).

 60. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, op. cit. Ref. 12.

 61. Greenfeld, ‘Modernity and nationalism’, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 162.

 62. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, op. cit., Ref 13.

 63. See Carmichael, Genocide Before the Holocaust, op. cit., Ref. 18.

 64. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 9.

 65. D. Conversi, ‘Homogenisation, nationalism and war’, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 371–394; D. Conversi, ‘“We are all equals!” Militarism, homogenization and “egalitarianism” in nationalist state-building (1789–1945)’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(7) (2008), pp. 1286–1314.

 66. J. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), p. 127.

 67. See R. Cobb, The People's Armies (The Armees Revolutionnaires: Instrument of the Terror in the Departments April 1793 to Floreal Year II) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); R. Cobb, Paris and Its Provinces, 1792–1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); D. A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2008) pp. 121–123.

 68. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic, op. cit., Ref. 67. p. 121.

 69. M. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

 70. Bell, The First Total War, op. cit., Ref. 67, pp. 130—135.

 71. Ibid.

 72. R. Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Vintage, 2006).

 73. R. Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). In his original French version, Secher used the term génocide franco-français: Le Génocide Franco-Français: La Vendée-Vengé, 1st edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). See also A. Jones, ‘Why gendercide? Why root-and-branch? A comparison of the Vendée uprising of 1793–94 and the Bosnian war of the 1990s’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(1) (2006), pp. 9–25; F. Lebrun, ‘La guerre de Vendée: Massacre ou génocide?’ L'Histoire, 78 (1985), pp. 93–99.

 74. See D. Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In the 1990s, egalitarian Jacobin directives permeated the discourse of Rwanda's genocidal leaders, such as ‘to ban, once and for all, the spirit of intrigue and feudal mentality’ and to extol ‘the valuation of labour’. See P. Verwimp, ‘Development ideology, the peasantry and genocide: Rwanda represented in Habyarimana's speeches’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2(3) (2000), pp. 325–361.

 75. G. Vidal, ‘What Robert Moses did to New York City’, New York Review of Books, 17 October 1974. Reprinted in G. Vidal, Matter of Fact and of Fiction. Essays 1973–1976, 1st edn (New York: Random House, 1977).

 76. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 99.

 77. Ibid., pp. 114–119. See Ungor, The Making of Modern Turkey, op. cit., Ref. 22.

 78. P. U. Verwimp, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998).

 79. Connor, ‘Nationalism and political illegitimacy’, op. cit., Ref. 47, pp. 34–37.

 80. O. Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 463.

 81. Ibid.

 82. C. S. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5(2) (1970), pp. 27–61, 29. Although Griffin's key text on fascism and modernism mentions neither Taylorism nor Fordism, the book analyses well the idea of fascism as ‘technocratic modernism’ (Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, op. cit., Ref. 20, pp. 224–227).

 83. M. Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 42.

 84. R. Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 216. Moreover, ‘Porsche was not shy in meetings with the SS and pushed to get his war. The Volkswagen Works under Porsche's direction established a concentration camp with the revealing name of “Arbeitsdorf ”, or Work Village’ (ibid., p. 216).

 85. See P. Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 22–34. On the ‘Zeppelin-mania’, see G. de Syon, Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939, 2nd edn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

 86. See M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA/London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989), pp. 64–70.

 87. J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 109.

 88. E. Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); D. Conversi, ‘Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909–1944)’, Sociology Compass, 3(1) (2009), pp. 92–117.

 89. A. J. Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); I. S. Campos, ‘Fascism, fascistization and developmentalism in Franco's dictatorship’, Social History, 29(3) (2004), pp. 342–357.

 90. G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, 1st edn (New York: H. Fertig, 1975); G. L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, 1st edn (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).

 91. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, op. cit., Ref. 20; E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); E. Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

 92. S. Latouche, Farewell to Growth, trans. D. Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 7.

 93. For a collection of post-development theory essays, see M. Rahnema and V. Bawtree (Eds), The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books,1997). More recent developments are in A. Ziai (Ed.), Exploring Post-Development: Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). For an overview encompassing the theory's ‘current experimental and optimistic mood’, see A. McGregor, ‘New possibilities? Shifts in post-development theory and practice’, Geography Compass, 3(5) (2009), pp. 1688–1702. See also Y. Nakano, ‘Singularity and ethics in post-development thought: Interpreting S. Latouche's L'Autre Afrique: entre don et marché’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 12 (2009), pp. 31–57.

 94. Billig, Banal Nationalism, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. x.

 95. E. Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? What is a nation? Trans. W. R. Taylor (Toronto, ON: Tapir Press, 1996). See C. Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? What is a nation? (Toronto, ON: Tapir Press, 1996).

 96. Billig's study of ‘rhetorical psychology’ is specifically dedicated to ideology. See M. Billig, Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology (London: Sage Publications, 1991).

 97. L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press/London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 143.

 98. M. Ozouf, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, in P. Nora (Ed.) Les Lieux de Mémoire, Quarto (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997), pp. 4353–4389.

 99. D. Conversi ‘“We are all equals!”’, op. cit., Ref. 65.

100. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998 [1899]). See R. S. Mason, The Economics of Conspicuous Consumption: Theory and Thought Since 1700 (Cheltenham/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1998). Of course, the origins of these attitudes among the elites long predate their spread among popular classes. Thus, Colin Campbell argues that Romanticism, dandyism, hedonism and other 18th century fashions are at the root of modern consumerism. See C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1987). However, the possibility of emulating the richest strata was extremely limited in those times. The coeval concept of ‘luxury’ seems to be more appropriate to describe 18th century trends. See M. Berg and E. Eger (Eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth-Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

101. E. R. Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); J. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); G. Ritzer, ‘Cathedrals of consumption: Rationalization, enchantment, and disenchantment’, in G. Ritzer (Ed.) McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006); G. Ritzer ‘September 11, 2001: Mass murder and its roots in the symbolism of American consumer culture’, in Ritzer (Ed.), McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2009).

102. L. Sklair, ‘The transnational capitalist class and the discourse of globalisation’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 14(1) (2000), pp. 67–85.

103. J. Naish, Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008).

104. D. Webb, ‘On mosques and malls: Understanding Khomeinism as a source of counter-hegemonic resistance to the spread of global consumer culture’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10(1) (2005), pp. 95–119.

105. M. B. Steger, ‘Ideologies of globalization’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10(1) (2005), pp. 11–30; M. B. Steger, ‘Globalisation and social imaginaries: the changing ideological landscape of the twenty-first century’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 1 (2009), pp. 9–30.

106. M. B. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); M. Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000).

107. D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960).

108. On the post-1989 fate of Marxism and its derivative ideologies, see T. Carver, ‘Did ideology fall with “the wall”? Marx, Marxism, post-Marxism’, in M. Freeden (Ed.) Reassessing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (Routledge, 2001), pp. 35–48.

109. D. Bell, ‘The old war. After ideology, corruption’, The New Republic, 23–30 August 1993.

110. A. Harris (Ed.), Incipient Globalization? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century, Reading Medieval Studies/British Archaeological Reports International Series No. 1644 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007).

111. W. Greider, ‘Media and trade: A love story–The “best and brightest” rushed, post-Seattle, to embrace the corporate line’, The Nation, 271(4) (2000), p. 18.

112. T. Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

113. D. Smith, Globalization: The Hidden Agenda (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

114. M. B. Steger, ‘Ideologies of globalization’, op. cit., Ref. 105. See also M. B. Steger and A. McNevin, ‘Global ideologies and urban landscapes: Introduction’, in M. B. Steger and A. McNevin (Eds), Global Ideologies and Urban Landscapes (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–30; Steger, ‘Globalisation and Social Imaginaries’, op. cit., Ref. 105.

115. A. Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, 1st edn (New York: Doubleday, 2003); D. Conversi, ‘Globalization, ethnic conflict and nationalism,’ in B. Turner (Ed.) Handbook of Globalization Studies (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 346–366.

116. M. Glenny, McMafia. A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld, 1st edn (New York: Knopf Books, 2008). N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 1st edn (Toronto, ON: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007).

117. B. R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books/Ballantine Books, 1996); O. Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a new Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, in association with Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, 2004); B. Schaebler, ‘Civilizing others: global modernity and the local boundaries (French/German, Ottoman, and Arab) of savagery’, in B. Schaebler and L. Stenberg (Eds) Globalization and the Muslim World. Culture, Religion, and Modernity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).

118. L. Wacquant, ‘From slavery to mass incarceration: rethinking the “race question” in the United States’, in D. P. Macedo and P. Gounari (Eds) The Globalization of Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), pp. 94–110.

119. A. Weiss, ‘The racism of globalization’, in Macedo and Gounari (Eds), The Globalization of Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006); D. P. Macedo and P. Gounari, ‘Globalization and the unleashing of new racism: an introduction’, in Macedo and Gounari (Eds), The Globalization of Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), pp. 3–35.

120. Given its pervasive presence, modernism is obviously more than a frame, discourse or mentalité. However, this article's scope does not allow space to identify it as an autonomous political movement, or as a coherent set of ideas orienting the direction of other modern political movements. This would have possibly required defining its support basis, describing its specific political programme and identifying its orientation ‘towards the formulation of public policy’.

121. Elsewhere, I have identified the slow emergence of ‘survival cosmopolitanism’ as a possible framework for addressing the looming modernist crisis from the perspective of political ideology (D. Conversi. ‘Climate change, state nationalism and the emergence of survival cosmopolitanism’ (unpublished manuscript).