From a theoretical point of view this chapter will deal with the expansion of social movement activism into the realms of national movement mobilisation. In addition, it will deal with the solidification of the movement as the core of peripheral political organisation in systems whereby overt centralism, or sectarian ethno-national predominance, dictate the nature of political exclusion of competing forms of ideational movement against the state. It is here where my theory of ‘mimicking’, that of the movement being a child of the state’s push for centralisation through repeating the nature of the state’s response to peripheral demands, will be fully explored.

The reasoning behind choosing national movements rather than other movements, is the permanency that national exclusion-inclusion and autonomy possess within the European political sphere. The ability of national movement elites to claim space within the mythology of protest and rebellion ( Tilly 1975c, 1993b; Kertzer 1988), plus the ethnic nature of many centralist elites’ makeup (Hechter 1975, 1978; Higley & Gunther 1992), has placed national movement mobilisation in an advantageous position of providing an oppositional statist alternative of some historicity and permanence that ‘New Social Movements’ and other movements could not have (Hechter & Friedman 1984). In this chapter what I intend to demonstrate is how the dynamic nature of state expansion, and the corresponding oppositional mobilisation of the periphery, shapes the nature of protest activism within a given state.

Through exploring how the ‘Nation-Building’ paradigm has failed to fully predict the emergence of peripheral national movements to political significance, it will be shown how the over concentration of the literature on defining nations in terms of the consolidation of nineteenth century and post-Versailles nation-states has wrongfully negated the role of national mobilisation in contemporary times. I believe this is due to the static, rather than the dynamic, way we have perceived the nationalist doctrine vis-à-vis the state. This has been solidified in the work of Deutsch (1979, 1980) who has ignored the reasoning behind much of the rebellion throughout Europe since the 1960s. Especially, in the case of the Catholic Republicans of Northern Ireland and Basques of Spain, and the plethora of revolutionary national movements that have emerged in the wake of the end of the Cold War in 1989 throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The defining of the nation in terms of the state has left little room for the exploration of the power of national movement mobilisation as a means to social revolution in an environment dictated by supposedly fixed nation-states. By taking my theory of peripheral ‘mimicking’ I intend to show how the formation of competing national communities is conducive to the theory of protest cycles, and hence integral to the development of permanent oppositional forces to the ever expanding and reshaping state centres. As explored in the previous chapter, I believe that the theories of protest cycles, and the subsequent expansion of movement repertoire, is integral to the rise of state engendered peripheral reaction, and in the case of national movements, the rise of national alternatives to the centralist integrationists.

Tilly’s (1993b, 1994b) theory that the nation, and as such the mobilised national movement, should be seen in terms of a societal revolutionary movement, will be the base of my initial argument. Within this context, the expansion of repertoire to counter initial state integration, and eventually as a strategy in itself to be employed to access political opportunity structures found within the struggle and perpetuation of the cycle of protest-reform-protest, or action-reaction-action, will be an integral part of this study. When talking of ‘protest-reform-protest’ I am referring to Maguire’s (1996b) application of Tarrow’s cyclical paradigm in ‘normal’ societies to ‘abnormal’ socio-political communities in perpetual conflict.

This chapter will, thus, show why a movement chooses to revolt against the centre in the form of a national movement, and how national mobilisation serves to polarise society into a permanent cleavage between centre and periphery, to the advantage of the movement, through solidifying the differences to a position of irreconcilability. I will attempt to show that the periphery has little say in the initiation of the cycle of protest-reform-protest. The role of state centre expansion, the creation of elite inspired societal polarisation, and the expression of reactive ethnicity, all play a part in creating the necessary preconditions for national movements achieving their goal of either enfranchisement, or autonomy. This, thus enhances the role of the state as mobiliser of the periphery and target of the action, via providing the reason behind the mobilisation of discontent. As well as providing the structural environment in which the perpetual cycle of protest-reform-protest forms necessary political opportunity structures for the redress of centre-peripheral ills. Without the state there would be little to ‘mimic’ and little to be discontented with in a structural sense.

The Working Definition and Problems with the Literature on Nationalism and National Movement Development.

Traditionally the literature has been divided between two streams of thought that have tended to concentrate too much upon the role of the classic nation-state in the development, concentration, and centralisation of wealth during the Industrial Revolution. The Marxist tradition of ‘internationalism’ through worker solidarity, and the liberal tradition that espouses moderate ‘patriotism’, have tended to view nationalism as a state sponsored extension of cultural imperialism (Brennan 1994: 45). Nationalism is an elitist doctrine, and hence any move by peripheralised communities to embrace it as an agent to socio-political emancipation through national movements, has been viewed as atavistic retrogradism (Deutsch 1969b; Bienen 1995; Billig 1995). The national movement is designed to empower a previously oppressed elite, through the formation of new political organisational structures that gloss over class conflicts at the core of social cleavages engendered by state formation. Thus, nationalism has been labled as an ideological construct designed to ensure hegemony (During 1994: 139). This, in itself, ignores nationalism’s agency as a movement of emancipation for marginalised groups denied access to political opportunity structures because of their ethnicity (Tilly 1993b, 1994b).

This ideological division within the literature has led to a scenario whereby Benedict Anderson (1996: 1) feels the attempt to create a coherent anthology about the re-emergence of the significance of national movements, is akin to “mapping the terrain” of nationalism that “finds the authors more often with their backs to one another, staring out at different, obscure horizons, than engaged in orderly hand-to-hand combat.” The protagonists who stood behind the doctrines of modernisation, supranational integration, and economic globalisation only served to heighten the polarisation within a literature already convinced of the diminished value of national sentiment to political mobilisation (Lijphart 1977: 48-55).

Amongst liberal theorists the continued tendency to regard the nation-state as a “necessary evil” on the road to political development has led to an ignoring of the significance of nation formation to contemporary peripheralised communities (Nodia 1994: 13). Marx and Engels (1981), Engels (1981), Lenin (1977) and Stalin (1975) have not failed to discuss the significance of national movement development on the road to modernity. Yet, this has been done more as a study of its transient nature rather than its relevance as a means to social emancipation and full political enfranchisement (Deutsch 1979: 2).¹ One of the major problems of Marxism was the dictum that it could create a society that would lack any form of organisation which was regulated through self-adjustment, as well as a society that would negate the historical significance of sub-categorical human groupings in contemporary political development (Gellner 1994b: 7). Whether or not ethnicity was a superimposed transient cultural entity that reinforced class distinctiveness and difference is not the issue. The issue in question is that in contemporary European society national movement activism is still viewed as a viable political option in the organisation of a viable political opposition and societal alternative.

It is the very agency of the movement, as opposed to the nominal significance of what is a nation and whether it is invented or not, that Tilly (1993b: 30-31) feels is where the study of nationalism becomes more salient in understanding the need for movements to adopt nationalist ideology as the centre piece of their ideological mobilisation. The circumstances of contemporary Europe show that it is in the nation, rather than other means of movement formation, that many disenfranchised communities have sought to redress important social, economic and political issues (Banac 1995; Breton & Breton 1995; Brubaker 1996). This may lie in the fact that the national movement, more than any other form of political oppositional formation, best offers a homogeneity of purpose, community and shared experience (Mugny & Perez 1991; Druckman 1994; Kecmanovic 1996). It is the ability to achieve change that is at the heart of the re-emergence of national movements as vehicles to political mobilisation, change and collective action. As Tilly (1993b: 31) rightly states one should ask, how did ideas of national self-determination become connected to those of sovereignty, community interests and individual freedom rather than what is a nation?

In my opinion, the answer lies in the state and its own willingness to departmentalise society through stratifying ethnos as the main determinant of social classification and societal division. This is the method by which movements seek to oppose the centralist state’s official doctrine of nationhood. As Jason Jenson (1995: 107) recognises there is little difference between a nation and a movement when assessing the repertoire employed in identifying their targets and modes of socio-political mobilisation.

Still, much of the literature views national movements as transient, and nationalist ideology as a doctrine of change placed upon more static ethnic communities (Deutsch 1963a: 3). This places the movement within a mechanistic paradigm and the feeling of communal belonging in a more organic framework (Hroch 1996). Perhaps this is why Tilly (1993a: 265) has suggested that we should forget about viewing national movements in terms of attaining a definition of the nation. Rather, we should see them as coalitions of social forces who utilise the national link as the best way of attaining social cohesion, through identification with social movements as an extension of communal development. It was Deutsch (1963b: 33) who pointed out that the problems with concentrating on the ideas of organic theorists such as Burke, Mueller, List and Spengler was that they stressed:

the interdependence of all parts of a system in their structures and functions, but they excluded all possibilities of major internal reorganisation, and of any evolution beyond a final goal of maturity.

I agree with Deutsch that it would be a mistake to ignore the mechanistic nature of national movements, but not in the same way he does. The importance of the mechanistic nature I feel lies in the dynamic relation between the at once expanding-consolidating state and the polarising, opposing peripheral elites. A ‘mimicking’ of the political shape of the opponent. It is, consequently, a mistake to view national formation solely in terms of state-building. Rather the very completion of the process of centralisation leads to a ‘mimicking’ from the periphery that now sees the formation of a national movement as an alternative to the established means of political organisation. The literature seems to ignore this ‘mimicking’ effect, as it does the significance of state actions and movement reactions to the usage of nationalism as the core ideology for peripheral movement mobilisation.

The Inadequacies of the Nation-Building Paradigm as the Apex of National Development: The Central Role of the State in the Development of the Dynamic Nature between Official and Peripheral Nationalism.

The state hence becomes central to any study of the development of nationalism.² This concentration on the state, as the raison d’être behind the formation of national movements, rather than the shaper of the modes of activism undertaken by the national movement, has led to defining national mobilisation on principles of ethnos, language, religion and customs, rather than the movement itself as a means of consistent protest activism (Connor 1977: 40). Nationalism has, I believe, become wrongly viewed as a functionalist doctrine designed to aid the nation-building process (Connor 1994: 91). This is symptomatic with what Gellner (1983b: 43) recognised as, the interpretation of nationalism by many academics with the formation of eighteenth century state building.

Nationalism has been defined, in effect, as the striving to make culture and polity congruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more than one roof at that (1983b: 43).

A culturo-political hegemonisation that is ensconced within the Western European origins of the state and nationalism’s parallel development. One that has led many students of the phenomenon to concentrate on the established nation-states as the ideological, political and empirical examples that best describe its emergence. In essence, the processes of modernisation are viewed as the cause of nation-state development and hence should be studied more fully than any other reason for the re-emergence of the phenomenon (Wallerstein 1974, 1980; Lijphart 1981; Markovits & Oliver 1985). The turning point in the 1960s was the realisation that the processes of nation-building were a front for the construction of national institutions by state elites that were designed for greater integration, and eventual assimilation, of all ethnic minorities living within the confines of a modern nation state (Smith 1992a: 1).

The reason behind this has been the equating of national movement development with the centralisation of the state (Breuilly 1982; Balme 1995). This has unwillingly diminished more peripheral national identities into sub-categories under the names of sub-national groupings or regionalism (Krejci 1978; Rokkan 1981; Arrighi 1985; Wallerstein 1985). In turn, nationalism has become equated with the doctrine of great state centralisation, inherently tying it to the outdated models of the French Revolution and Manzinian national movements (Rudé 1964; Said 1993). Which, though supplying an historical precedent of state attainment and ideological formation, nevertheless fails to relate to the dynamic relation of the contemporary parallel development of state centre and periphery.

Perhaps this was the reason why so many social scientists in the West, such as Lerner (1993) and Kedourie (1960) have failed to recognise the significance of nationalism as a tool for social change and political organisation because their own cultural experiences were achieved long before the ideology had surfaced in its contemporary movement form (Smith 1991: 123-125). This has led to a subsequent negating of those experiences that run contrary to the established international order. Thus at once legitimising and consolidating the role of the ‘Great Nation-States’ as the model of socio-political organisation (Deutsch 1969a, 1969b: 21, 1979: 2).

The greatest criticism of nationalism and national movements has been directed at this exclusive ‘Greater Nation-State’ nature (Ronen 1986; Greenfeld 1993a; van Evera 1995). Fukuyama (1994: 24), for example, had been able to ignore the resilience of national movements as a staid ideology of political transformation, due to its tendency to distinguish and divide people along collective lines that minimise the individual within the political processes of representation. Perhaps this is why Fukuyama could declare an “end to history” as he felt that no doctrine could so fully satiate the individual’s right to representation and action as liberal democracy. The problem here is that, as Tilly (1975c: 602) points out, national movements themselves more often than not tend to form around the rhetoric of personal representation through collective security; rather than ask important questions of what causes the contemporary relevance of a doctrine promulgated in the eighteenth century, and how it became equated with notions of equality through the extension of civil and human rights (ibid.).

The Significance of the Ideology as a Cause of Contemporary Peripheral Mobilisation in a Global Environment Dominated by Modernist Theories.

The tendency of internationalists to ignore the validity of the value system proffered by nationalists as hegemonic and narrow in scope, fails to see that as an agent of social change, internationalist inspired movements, such as market force globalisation, capitalism, and communism, are equally hegemonic (Brennan 1994: 46; Saul 1997: 21). This has tended to minimise the importance of emerging national movements in a contemporary global environment (Connor. 1994g). The problem with the literature is that it has failed to recognise the significant differences in the patterns of social development between imperialist established nation-states and contestant movements on the periphery (During 1994: 138). Nairn (1993: 157-158) feels this is due to the inability to distinguish between internationalism and internationality; the former is an ideal, the latter a doctrine, imperialistic in nature, that is designed to create a capitalist based monoculture. As such Nairn (ibid.) views nationalism in itself as a resistance to centralist state induced monoculturalism.

I believe much of this has occurred due to the over concentration upon studying nation-building processes, rather than dealing with the peripheral agency of it as a doctrine of political mobilisation for minority communities. Lijphart (1977: 56) felt that there was no adequate theoretical grounds for expecting a decline in ethnic mobilisation suggesting that, opposite to much of the contemporary theory proffered by Deutsch (1979), “if modernisation leads to rapidly increasing social transactions and contacts among diverse groups, strain and conflict are more likely to ensue than greater mutual understanding.”

A scenario that would lead to an increase of state activity which, by chance, would increase the possibility of unequal treatment through processes of state discerned inclusion and exclusion along ethnic lines (Gellner 1994b: 63). In such circumstances, the failure of states to recognise the emergence of national movements as political expressions of popular social discontent has cost centralist elites dearly (Dofny & Akiwowo 1980; O’Dowd 1990; Prazauskas 1991; Connor 1994f).

Theorists such as Deutsch (1969b), Lerner (?), Friedrich (1963) and Gellner (1986) have viewed that once integration has been achieved and respective economic, civil and human rights attained then the role of nationalism as a means to state consolidation is complete (Breuilly 1982: 279). The problem with political science is that nationalism is more often than not brushed off as a by-product of modernity which in turn rids it of its contemporary importance as a doctrine of social revolution (Tiryakian and Nevitte 1985a: 57). This places nationalism within a monist paradigm that denies the role of parallel, yet alternate, movement development towards political modernity that many national movements fulfil. This fact Tiryakian and Nevitte (ibid.) attributed to the tendency of theorists to:

treat the terms “nation,” and “state,” and “society” interchangeably reflects a serious conceptual problem which still plagues the conventional literature.

One that serves only to further enhance the definitional incongruence between the “state” and the “nation” (Findlay 1995: 143). Modernisation theories tend to ignore the fact that national sentiment is not solely defined in relation to industrialisation, capitalism and secularisation. The literature tends to ignore that the more potent influence on the development of national movements is the dynamic relations between state and peripheral communities, which in turn tends to diminish the wider spectrum in which movement activism occurs (Deutsch 1963a; Seton-Watson 1977; See 1980; Rokkan & Urwin 1983). As a doctrine, nationalism is both reformist and revolutionary (Smith 1983: 81). It is as a doctrine, and an agent of change, that Tarrow (1995) feels nationalism should be studied. Nationalism is itself not a one sided doctrine, it is multifaceted. Hence the tendency of the literature to explain its emergence from one perspective is false (Smith 1983: 86).

One of the reasons for this state of affairs is that, like other big realities, nationalism is multidimensional, and it is difficult to ascertain which of these dimensions are fundamental and permanent and which are accidental and transitory (Tarrow 1995: 98)

Nationalism is a narrative designed for a specific goal of placing a movement within an historic paradigm of social development and historical representative political continuum, thus legitimising it as a facilitator of power consolidation (Bhabha 1994a: 303-304). Evoking the Weberian concept of “myth of common descent”, Connor (1994c: 145) believes that the literature has failed to deal specifically with the benefits and costs, supplied by political opportunity structures formed within cleavages found between competing elites, that are weighed by participants within national movements in a rationalist manner. This trend to narrate in terms of an elite created doctrine ignores much of the contemporary aspirations of movements that emerge between controlling elites and their constituencies. When they re-emerge they do so as movements that are designed to meet the demands of a particular community rather than an elite, as it is an active political phenomenon which lays dormant for some time giving it both a ‘passive’ and ‘latent’ dimension (Banton 1986; Breton et al. 1995). It is hence responsive to the dictates of the state, and as such mutable in the way it seeks to engage the state, as most movements are.

Peripheral National Movements as a Rational Response to Centralist Hegemonisation of Official State Centralist National Doctrine.

National movements are therefore movements rooted in rational choice that may be transitional, yet this transitional nature should not deny its relevance. For Ronald Rogowski (1985: 87) the problem with current social theory is that the two great schools of thought, liberalism, that views the primordial organisational formation of nationalism as irrational, and Marxism, that sees it as all too rational, perceive it solely in atavistic terms. For many political scientists the re-emergence in the 1960s throughout Europe of nationalist inspired movements, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), ETA and Croat nationalism, created a paradox (Nairn 1977; Tilly 1993b; Alter 1994; Cushman 1996). Especially, considering that many were proving much larger in scope, in terms of social and political issues addressed, than classic national movements of the nineteenth century (Levi & Hechter 1985: 128).

I believe this has led to a misreading of the post-1960s national movement environment as a revival of ethno-nationalism. Hroch (1996: 38) feels that the movements of today are similar to those of the nineteenth century due to the fact that their demands are located within independence paradigms. They have a strong cultural component and their social demands of economic parity and policy reform concerning redistribution of wealth mirrors the attitudes of those they fought against during the industrialisation era. Contemporary post Cold War Europe shows us that nationalism is but a reaction, since nationalist political parties have failed to regain power in nations where the national goal has been attained.³ Schöpflin (1995: 38) saw this new push to define this re-emergence of ethnic reawakening only served to negate the protest movement aspect of these mobilised communities, as well as the ever present nature of national sentiment. Even in communities that have seemingly resolved such conflicts:

in reality, under the surface of events and indeed not merely under the surface, ethnicity and nationhood not only remained in being, but they contributed significantly to the pattern of politics, though it was seldom understood in this way (Schöpflin 1995: 38).

Where contemporary theorists in the literature differ from classic nation-building theorists is in recognising that the mobilisation of national sentiment presupposes the actual existence of the nation in terms of the traditional nation state (Brubaker 1996: 14; see also Nairn 1993; Said 1993; Kupchan 1996; Patterson 1996). This places the movement itself, vis-à-vis the movement’s relationship with the state, at the centre of the study, as the national movement is but an extension of a wider peripheral movement, designed to change the structure of power through a redefinition of the community within. Accordingly the nation, in terms of oppositional movement, must not be viewed in terms of “substance but as institutionalised form; not as collectivity but as practical category; not as an entity but as contingent event” (Brubaker 1996: 16).

This marginalisation of national movements through categorising them as sub-units of the established international political order, concurs with what Tilly (1993b: 30) identifies as the common mistake held by most theorists that concern themselves with the nationalist problem in terms of what makes up a nation. Rather than concentrating on how the national community, once mobilised, acts as an agent of, or against, the state in providing a cognitive frame for the mobilisation of popular discontent, and the eventual movement action that ensues from it, they concentrate too much on outmoded ‘Nation-Building’ paradigms. If one was to instead take Tilly’s viewpoint one could discern that the mobilised nation is induced by the political environment from which it emerges and hence is a response to pre-existing social relations within the state.

State Expansion and Centralisation: The Role of Nationalism in Polarising the Centre and Periphery.

Since the times of the rise of Absolutism, the nature of elite and minority relations have been built upon structures of power whereby demarcated boundaries of state were to be the defining realms of power (Rokkan 1981; Rokkan & Urwin 1983; Anderson 1988; Balakrishnan 1996). This allows for all political consolidation and opposition to be dictated by processes of state integration, consolidation, and isolation (Deutsch 1962, 1963, 1979; Breuilly 1982; Balme 1995). The state as an entity was chosen by these elites as the central form of political organisation (Weitzer 1990; Higley & Gunther 1992). A state could dictate more effectively the peripheralisation of outer groups, and give elites the organisational freedom to concentrate on economic development knowing full well that absolute compliance to laws and hierarchical structures were enacted at all times. At the centre of this was what Deutsch (1962: 75) saw as the ability of the elite to isolate their ‘own’ from the other, whilst maintaining the interconnectedness to ensure the growth of the state.

The emergence of nationalism as a doctrine of revolution, of change, emerged in this era, as the shifts demanded by societal restructuring were to forever change the social order through increased isolation of the periphery from the centre (Renan 1994: 11). A circumstance that would, in my opinion, lead the periphery to ‘mimic’ the political formations of the very entity that had marginalised them as a community. The process of state integration was, according to Deutsch (1969b: 16), that which would lead to a tension between institutionalised and non-institutionalised organisational bases within society. Deutsch (1963a: 6) takes national integration, and the dynamic processes of social mobilisation and cultural assimilation that it engenders, to be innately destructive. However, I believe for the marginalised community it provides necessary political opportunity structures that allow them to reclaim the political centre through opting for revolutionary mobilisation.

This elite nature of state formation has played a significant role in the legitimation of the nation as a means to social mobilisation and political action. Nationalism as a concept has succeeded in locating itself within the boundaries of the people, yet without the consolidation gained through state experience, there is doubt to whether it could have succeeded as a doctrine of social change so readily (Deutsch 1979: 14-15). It is here that Tilly (1975b: 6) believed that it was more important to understand the nature of state formation than nation building as a raison d’être for the mobilisation of peripheral communities to political action. A point that Tarrow (1993b: 84) was to support:

As the activities of national states expanded and they increasingly attempted to penetrate society, the targets of collective action against other groups shifted from the private and local actors they were aimed at the national centres of policy making. The national state was not only target for resistance and proaction; it became a fulcrum in which forms of collective action could be employed to gain the state’s intervention against opponents.

The notion of nationalism as a political response is due to the concurrent development of the state and political cultural community; one that would innately politicise all forms of societal discontent (Schöpflin 1995: 49). Yet, it seems to be in the cleavages that develop through processes of integration that political opportunity structures arise for discontent to be transferred into political action via the dynamic relationship that develops between consolidating elites and the rest of the population. Deutsch (1979: 15) exemplified this in his definition of the nation being a result of “the transformation of a people, or of several ethnic elements, in the process of social mobilisation.” For it was, according to Tarrow (1993b: 85), “in the shadow of the national state that social movements developed their characteristic modular forms of collective action.”

It is, I believe, this dynamic nature of elite consolidation and peripheral response to the processes of integration which determines the structural necessity of many movements’ adoption of an alternate nationalist response to increased centralisation. Greenfeld (1993b: 48) felt that nationalism rose before industrialisation and the state’s need to structuralise profit and economic development. As such nationalism is more a functional response to state consolidation, rather than a functional requirement of industrialisation. The religious paradigm (O’Brien 1988, 1994), that of nationalism as a substitute for a decline in the significance of religious doctrine in communal organisation, similarly fails to offer a solution. As the rise of national states emerged as compliments to fledgling state entities such as in the Lutheran Reformation in Germany and the Protestant schism in England. The social dynamics of the development of nationalism tend to point towards what Gellner (1994b: 182) calls ‘national striving.’ That is the desire for the creation of a geographical political unit designed to achieve hegemony for a class of people, ethnically defined, that had previously been excluded. It is in this desire for enfranchisement, or in the movement towards empowerment, that Gellner (ibid.) believed nationalism emerged as a goal that symbolises control over the state.

Enfranchisement was often delivered with the condition of cultural conversion that could develop into an ethnic-class divide quite unwittingly, as the identity of the periphery would take on larger political significance (Horowitz 1985; Chatterjee 1986; Prazauskas 1991). Yet, as Gallagher (1996: 202) points out, the notion of nationalism alleviating class problems may not occur if the form of ethno-nationalist consolidation that emerges is built around one ethnic elite consolidating their own ethnic dominance. It is in the post-Versailles Yugoslav example whereby Gallagher (ibid.) feels such a situation manifests autocratic rule over another. This only emerges as a consequence of the loyalty that the state demands in order to increase its fluidity through expanding into all economic, political and cultural sectors of society (Strayer 1963: 24). Yet, such loyalty could never be guaranteed unless a sense communal principle could be found. Tilly (1975a: 390) felt that this sense of continuity is needed in order to grant a movement historicity.

Deutsch (1988: 77) saw communicative control as the key to the expansion of the state into the realm of the cultural and traditional. Yet, I feel it is also a catalyst of further exclusion of already culturally marginalised communities who must now await the right shift in policy in order to exploit their discontent. This seems to meld with Said’s (1993: 199) belief that it is the state that determines the nature of liberty granted to the individual, and hence the collective. A viewpoint that tends to increase the significance of the structure of rule, especially if it is based on ethnic superiority, upon an oppressed group’s rebellion.

A major problem with elite engendered state identity is that it tends to co-opt those similar bourgeois strata from the periphery whilst ignoring concerns of the lower strata as inconsequential (Smith 1991). It is when the state sponsored identity correspondingly validates the ‘official’ national ideology of the centre that the periphery tends to revert to the antithesis of the moral value system held by the centre elite (Smith 1987: 223). This in effect 'mimics' the state’s centralisation via providing competing ideological claims of sovereignty that is riposted within the state structure. If this happens to be ethnic in origin then what emerges is what Conversi (1997: 231), following on from Wilson (1991), calls an ‘ethnogensis’ of competing national ideologies between centre and periphery embodied in the dynamic development between state and movement.

Nineteenth century Basque nationalism exemplifies how the nature of state integration may serve to further isolate the periphery from the centre (Payne 1971; Díez-Medrano 1994). Originally middle-class sponsored, the failure of the Basque elite during the Second Carlist War of 1876 to co-opt the workers’ communities would lead to the eventual shift of Basque politics to the Left during the Civil War of 1936 to 1939; to a more radical form of political mobilisation that would centre its opposition to the Rightist Centralist Government in Madrid in a Leftist national movement (Breuilly 1982: 290-291; see also Eisenwein & Shubert 1995). At the centre of this shift was the recognition by these peripheral movements of the necessity of the state, in terms of the nature of the state integration and consolidation processes, as the cause of initial movement identification. One that allowed for a dialectic homogenisation of a movement during a period of strategic repertoire expansion.

Greenfeld (1993a: 3) felt that nationalism’s fundamental attractiveness lay in its homogeneous structure which allowed it to impose a unity of purpose that more superficial, and transient, forms of societal structure like class, status and locality could not. For members of marginalised nationalist communities the issues of political unity and territorial demarcation are but responses to the encroachment of state expansion into the social field. This was further expanded by Avineri (1994: 29) who felt that that which was perceived as a “primordial or irrational residue of traditional society” was in fact still a powerful product of modernity, and as as such,a significant political force. The problem is many elites may perceive national awakening as a problem of modernity, as opposed to a child of modernity that offers an alternate form of political opposition to the structured nature of the state offered through oppositional mobilisation. As Connor (1994: 110):

Increased communications and transportation within a state thus have one impact among members of the same national or potential nation, but have quite another among members of separate nations. The error of referring to nationalism has thus led authorities to assume that the variations in identity with which they are dealing will disappear with modernisation. But the body of actual evidence points in the opposite direction.

Nationalism is essentially a form of alternate alignment that is shaped as a counter movement to the established state order; a counter movement that views nationalism as a strategy that responds in a territorial and political manner to processes of state expansion (Johnston et al. 1988a: 8). Hence the ideal of the nation in development was that of raising the people to a position of the elite (Greenfeld 1993b: 49). According to Dov Ronen (1986: 6) what had occurred in the 1960s was an extension of this factor.

The re-emergence of ethnicity as a means to social mobilisation was a shift in peripheral strategies as the national doctrine became viewed as a revamped means of utilising established organisational tools (Safran 1987; Hechter Friedman & Appelbaum 1992; Tilly 1993b; Connor 1994b). The adoption of nationalist strategies was a mobilisation of political discontent in periods of perceived exclusion from the structures of power. In the cases of the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe per se, Horowitz (1994: 40) felt that exclusion has often been the means by which many communities have become politicised. Leaving their own consolidation of power embodied in the rhetoric of defending their own. In such circumstances the embracement of nationalist politics by a peripheral movement can be viewed as, according to Ronen (1986: 8), an element of administrative decentralisation. As Greenfeld (1993a: 487) states:

Ultimately, nationalism can be traced to the structural contradictions of the society of orders. It was a response of individuals personally affected by these contradictions to the sense of disorder they created.

I believe, as in the cases of Yugoslavia and Spain, this exclusion brought around a radical rethink of the position of each group, as well as their own policies, on matters of self-determination that would be repeatedly played out throughout the rest of these states. In such circumstances the ability of an elite to create the national movement through introspection becomes as important as the influence of external factors such as the state; yet the state and its influence is as ever not so far away (Sharp 1996: 10). Deutsch (1979: 140) felt that the national community held five basic principles that could grant a movement a less transient structure that more traditional forms of social movement organisation could never grant: independence from external control; cohesiveness of traditional modes of communication, expression and co-operation; multi-generational political organisation; autonomy of government leading to the ability of creating one’s own societal rules; and self-perpetuating internal legitimacy.

Ethnos as a Means to Social Class Separation through the Exploitation of Social Cleavages.

The very elite engendered nature of the state has led to the development of political community within structures of state, as well as within cleavages produced between consolidating elites and resisting peripheries (Deutsch 1963b; Greenfeld 1993b; Hobsbawm 1993). Political opportunity structure, or rather the ability to access political opportunity structures, were to play an integral role in the willingness of elites to move towards the state’s centre (Tilly 1994b). The stratification of power relations through class and ethnic division was to lead to a responsive relationship between centre and periphery that has not quite ended in the establishment of a system based on parallel reciprocity (Tarrow 1977: 35). The notion of a political community, according to Deutsch (1962: 15), is best viewed as a system of relations that are built on social differentiation.

This disparous political formalisation of state power relations is, I believe, necessary to forming an effective inner structure, an effective inner past within the group, as well as to the ability of implementing a centralist rule from within the state. Correspondingly, it is the ability of the elite to enfranchise, through the granting of privileges previously denied as a reward for loyalty to the centre, that may determine the level of movement opposition arising on the periphery. As Tarrow (1977: 35) stated:

Clearly, the bias of national policy toward the periphery depends heavily upon the closeness of the links between the national administrative elite and the economically dominant national class.

These attempts by centralised governments to incorporate peripheries into national state structures were akin to how nineteenth century governments tried to enfranchise emerging movements into the governing body so as to neutralise any potential future opposition (Thomis & Holt 1977; Tilly 1994b, 1995, 1997). In fact, Tarrow (ibid.: 37) recognised that the greater the economic cleavage, the more likely that permanent ethno-class division would arise between centralist elites and minorities on the periphery.

Privilege would soon become related to the right of access to resources that would become central to individual empowerment such as property, education, position, and freedom of movement. The problem is that the nation-state, or societies that are stratified by nationality, also tend to be as such socially stratified, thus it is very difficult to gain any form of vertical mobility (Deutsch 1969b: 52). An occurrence that James Anderson (1988: 34) noted emerged due to the lack of shared culture between these developing classes; whilst Krejci (1978: 124) felt that ethno-nationalist identity becomes a major player in social disillusionment when the disparity between classes is clearly definable along communal lines. This seems to occur when the class status of the peripheral community is significantly different from the centre (Hechter 1975, 1978, 1985).

The Basques are an example where the bourgeoisie are remnants of the feudal ruling class who integrated into the dominant culture of the national state during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Basurto Larrañaga 1983). Yet their nationalist doctrine has consistently shifted from the Left, to the Right, to the Left according to the perceived needs of the movement at the time (Elorza 1978). The fact that it is the nationalist ideology which has not been replaced suggests the significance of it as an optimum form of popular mobilisation (James Anderson 1988: 34).

Party political organisations reflect and affect the political system in which they operate. Hence, when a group or class choose to mobilise along nationalist lines, they are in fact ‘mimicking’ the nature of social cleavages within the system they find themselves in. Horowitz (1985: 294), in fact, found that the emergence of ethno-nationalist political and social organisation arose from two sources within pre-existing cleavages of society in “the internal imperatives of the ethnic group as a community and the external imperatives of the ethnic group, in relation to others, as the incipient whole community.”

From a class perspective the blatant policies of ethnic preference creates an automatic polarisation of society along ethno-national lines that, I feel, can only be redressed from outside the established political system. In such circumstances, conflict automatically defines the other in terms of opposition and competition, a situation that is further enhanced through the stratification of societal positions along ethnic lines (Wilson 1991). Cleavages, according to Rokkan (1981: 92), be they ethnic or class oriented, were natural consequences of political centralisation. From the formation of the Absolutist state, the concept of granting specific linguistic and ethnic groups privilege lay in the desire of the Monarch to implement advantage in order to create a compact, yet loyal, cadre under the direct control of the state (Gellner 1986: 22). As an act of political administration, this automatically precludes a significant part of the population who may in future choose to mobilise against the elite in order to attain privileges that had previously been denied them. Gellner (1979: 273) felt that it was within great economic cleavages, due to the dislocation caused within society through modernisation, that ethnic cleavages arose. An aspect of centre-periphery development backed up by Seton-Watson (1977: 10):

Where political and social power are concentrated in a group who differ in both religion and language from the majority of the population among whom they dwell, and an educated elite is emerging from that population, then the optimum conditions are given for the rapid growth of a nationalist movement.

It is within this rhetoric of equality and egalitarianism whereby Gellner (1988: 211) feels the nation-state may in fact encourage those denied these privileges to seek them in a similar form of political organisation. The fact of modernity is that the contemporary citizen is heavily dependent upon the ability of the citizen to partake in all the advantages that high culture grants them such as “his employability, his cultural participation, his moral citizenship, his capacity to deal with the all-pervasive bureaucracy” (Gellner 1994a: 41). If enfranchised correctly this may also allow for the ascendancy of one ethnicity over another in the guise of state consolidation of privilege.

The advantages of creating highly defined cleavages between elites and the ruled are many. Deutsch (1979: 53) felt that in dividing wealth and profits unevenly, hence creating social disparity, an elite may increase the ability to control and subjugate a perceived political threat within their own boundaries. In this sense I feel Deutsch is correct, though, I believe it can also be used to create a mystique around the governing elite, as the Serbs have become personified as the ‘conscience’ of the Yugoslav state (Cohen 1996b), and the Protestants, likewise, as the spiritual and physical essence of Ulster state political distinctiveness from the rest of Ireland (Clayton 1996).

In my opinion, such a theory is exemplified in the emergence of the Protestant Ascendancy in Northern Ireland and the subsequent designed marginalisation of the Republican Catholic community. If an employer in ordinary times denies a Catholic skilled positions, they may cheapen the Catholic labour market, in doing so the minority inadvertently, or advertantly, is denied steady cash flow and the security gained via financial empowerment. Hence, those on the periphery become dependent on the state (perhaps via social welfare), crippling any ability to act independently of the political system. It is here that the political dominance of an ethnic elite through economic monopolisation emerges.

Though Greenfeld (1993a: 488-490) recognised that the socio-political origins of nationalism as a means to political mobilisation are attributed to political opportunity structures found within the development of the state, she never fully explores how it is the nature of the rule in formulating cleavages that determines the nature of the nationalist response. Similarly, Deutsch (1979: 50) believed this mobilisation to occur as a consequence of external pressures once a community feels under threat of total political, cultural and economic subjugation. I feel though that mobilisation can occur even once political, cultural, and economic subjugation are no longer issues due to the perpetuity of the cycle of protest between the ever shaping and reshaping peripheral ethnic elites and the state.

This is perhaps why so many fledgling national movements spread throughout Europe today construct the notion of national community out of class differentiation (Johnston et al. 1988a: 13; see also Hechter 1985). Their marginalisation is viewed as an extension of the notion of Hechter’s (1975) ‘internal colonialism,’ a consequence itself of the development of the ‘cultural division of labour.’ The problem however with Hechter’s theory of a solely class based version of an arisen national consciousness, is that in the cases of the Basque Country, Catalonia and Croatia, economic disadvantage cannot be relied upon as a cause for national mobilisation (Higley & Gunther 1992; Linz & Stepan 1992). In these countries, the nationalist doctrine has emerged in spite of relative economic wealth in comparison to the economic status of the ethnic group at the centre (Hechter 1985; Zirakzadeh 1989). As Gellner (1979: 274) sees it:

The ‘classes’ that really matter are those which are produced by uneven development; and they attain ‘consciousness’ through ethnicity. If ‘ethnic’ differentials are lacking, they fail to reach ‘consciousness’.

If we cannot fully concentrate our argument solely on economic reasons behind the rise of such movement activism, since many of the reasons behind the adoption of the nationalist doctrine into a movement’s ideational constructs are seemingly socio-psychological and political, then I believe the functionalism of the doctrine vis-à-vis the state must be explored. Movements underpinned by the nationalist doctrine see nationalism as an ideological tool towards liberation that ‘mimics’ the state centre. Especially, since it may be as a response to the state’s attempts at recentralisation in order to ensure the privileged status of the centralist elites.

A campaign built on principles of democracy, enfranchisement and civil rights are but means of attaining the desired liberation. The campaign built around the national question is one designed to resolve the question of communal succession, in order to guarantee that prior principles fought for are consolidated through political formalisation, so as to ensure hegemony for the emerging ‘ethnic’ class (Laitin & Lustick 1989; Lustick 1990; Weitzer 1990). Yet, always at the centre of this movement towards enfranchisement is the state, and the ability of emerging elites to hold influence over the centre, even through an attempt to shift the centre back to the periphery (Weitzer 1995). What determines a change in movement repertoire is the ability to explore the limits in organisational knowledge and resources made available for mobilisation within the confines of “enduring cultural expectations that resist transformation” (Tarrow 1993b: 70). Thus the reason why a movement chooses to adopt national causes as a focal point of movement mobilisation is that they ‘mimic’ the predominant form of political organisation dictated by the state they are challenging. If consolidation takes the form of national integration then the same limitations would be transferred upon the movement undertaking the collective action, through the very absorption of the ethno-nationalist repertoire, into their overall protest repertoire.

The Role of Ethnic Repression and Reactive Ethnicity in Developing Centre-Periphery Struggle.

The processes of state consolidation through integration, vernacularisation, social stratification, and centralisation of communicative channels between elites and peripheries were to play a major part in creating social preconditions for the polarisation of political society between varying ethno-national groups (Deutsch 1962, 1963b; Bhabha 1994a, 1994b). Much of this relates to the inability, or unwillingness, of expanding state centres to accommodate the needs, wishes, and pressures of newly mobilised social strata or regions (Gellner 1980; Diamond & Plattner 1994; Calleo 1995). This in turn may cause a greater identification with the communal/regional identity founded upon the periphery, than would have perhaps been granted if their political needs had been met (Deutsch 1979: 193). To understand the rise of such peripheries to political action one must look at specific conditions for the radicalisation of minority groups (Tiryakian and Nevitte 1985a: 70). In this case I would suggest it is found in the role of the state dictating the terms of engagement by which movements must act.

Socio-politically this is important, for it defines why individual choices are made in favour of a dominant nation (Levi & Hechter 1985; Polèse 1985; Coleman 1995). Tarrow (1977: 47) saw that the problem between centre and periphery was inherent due to three “fundamental flaws” of modern nation-state development: the inability to convince peripheries to forgo their autonomous status; the failure to recognise the strength of peripheral cultures; and the inability to transform “grassroots public support into participatory roles” within the new structures of power sharing. All are symbolic of the problems of integration, and the failure to fully enfranchise the entire periphery into the state.

It is important to realise that the expectancy of a centre for the periphery to assimilate, causes some of the greatest fault lines within the expected outcomes of social cohesion (Lijphart 1977; Nairn 1977, 1993; Hobsbawm 1993). Once centralist governments attempt to overtake the means of social mobilisation in order to assimilate populations, then problems of competing identities arise. Polarisation of the political system is often the consequence, as traditional means of state initiated forms of conflict and interest resolution lose legitimacy amongst alienated communities, who tend to incorporate what Levi and Hechter (1985: 130) call “reactive ethnicity.” Reactive ethnicity is the choice of extra-parliamentary activity or political action outside the state, which seeks to utilise the syncretic nature of contemporary ethno-national mobilisation; that of combining pre-existing political, cultural, economic and social structural disparity within political opportunity structures created through social movement activism. Within these cleavages the nature of centre-periphery relations is defined. For Deutsch (1962: 21) this has allowed for the institutionalisation of cultural differentiation which has its effects upon the politicisation of communities based on a dynamic model of competing, yet self-perpetuating, national movement ideologies.

The very establishment of a political differentiation between those who are part of the high culture, and those part of the low culture go a long way in explaining how those who are disenfranchised have come to see ethnicity not only as a bulwark to upward mobility, but also as a means of establishing one’s own hegemony (Gellner 1994b: 40). The subsequent deeming of one culture above another did much to establish permanent exclusivity of the periphery, that, once institutionalised takes the form of ethnic repression (Lijphart 1977; Polèse 1985; Tilly 1997). Herein lies the crux of centre-periphery power sharing problems, especially concerning centralised nations or national identifiable units. The stratification of cultural identity is a tool of political formalisation, which in the act of denying the other, may in fact consolidate one’s own power. It is here that elites must weigh the ability to openly court peripheries determined to resist full incorporation, with the necessity of creating a coherent cultural political structure:

Governments can modify communities, and they can make communities in rare and favourable situations; but on the whole it is the communities which make governments, or rather, it is the distribution of communities at any one time which both offers and limits opportunities for governments to consolidate or extend their power (Gellner 1994b: 52-53).

One of the problems I find with traditional theorists of nation-building such as Deutsch (1969) and Strayer (1963) is the acceptance that once “assimilation stays ahead of mobilisation or keeps abreast of it, the government is likely to remain stable, and eventually everybody will be integrated into one people” (Deutsch 1969: 27). This places too much emphasis on the ability of economic enfranchisement to appease issues of political, social and cultural disparity. National movements are vehicles for the attainment of specific collective goals that are mobilised in times when the crisis in the state’s, the centre’s, ability to solve specific social issues on the periphery are accentuated. The example of the extensive centralist campaign at the assimilation of the Basque people into the greater Spanish whole, failed even though the three Basque provinces are the wealthiest in the Spanish economy (Greenwood 1977; Beer 1980: 60-71 & 75-86; Grugel 1990). Foltz (1981: 27), in critiquing Deutsch’s emphasis on the economic nature of the rise of social mobilisation amongst the periphery, noted that where numbers may increase mobilisation is in how a rise in overall community wealth may increase access to education and means to communication, that cannot be achieved in times of poverty.

Central to this is the development of social distinction which further consolidates power relations within a given system. Deutsch (1988: 77) notes that this distinctiveness is further emphasised when a given minority at the centre of the power structure tend to identify with the centralist state. It is in these structures of centre-building networks, that power becomes equated with national hegemony and the eventual exclusion of the ‘other’. Within the cleavages that form between parallel, yet ideological opposing, modes to modernisation there develops a rift between competing communities that is defined by the nature of the relationship between state and periphery (Conversi 1994; Weitzer 1995). The state once again may act as a barometer of the nature for institutionalisation of power relations along ethno-nationalist lines, and the level to which a community may mobilise to fight against perceived injustices.

Hobsbawm (1993: 151-152) feels the Palestinian national movement exemplifies this, noting that Palestinian nationalism was in fact created in response to the settlement of the ‘other’. A ‘mimicking’ of the ‘other’ which is the basis of my arguments throughout the empirical chapters of this dissertation. If it were not for the coming of Zionism, and Zionist settlement, it is doubtful whether Palestinian national identity would have taken an overtly nationalist form outside the structures of pure Islam, as had occurred in other parts of the Arab world. Thus, it was the nature of oppression, and the nature of the ethnically polarised non-inclusive Israeli state, that ultimately shaped the essence of the Palestinian national movement and their subsequent modes of resistance. As it was the nature of Protestant Ulsterism, Francoist Spain and Serb unitarism that defined the shape and relevance of Catholic Republican, Basque radical and Croat peripheral nationalism.

It was the access of groups to states that activated, according to Tilly (1994b: 142), the formation, mobilisation and claim making process of ethnic groups. The threats of assimilation and coercion were to further isolate minorities from the centre as elites who had previously held brokerage positions between liege and region were now being cut off from centralist decision making processes (Deutsch 1969b; Gellner 1977, 1983b; Polèse 1985). Accordingly, Yugoslavia had been able to survive for so long by offering spaces for ethnic mobility via the reinstitutionalisation of the centre through decentralisation. Yet, in most political systems this may go against the aims of consolidated elites at the centre of the structure of state. The Croats and Slovenes were only able to achieve independence by:

giving preference in the administrations to those who could successfully claim to represent the presumably coherent populations within them. State and party relied heavily on ethnically-identified regional bosses who (in echoes of old imperial systems of rule) enjoyed considerable autonomy so long as they delivered goods and compliance to the centre (Tilly 1994b: 143).

What many political centres tended to ignore was that new loyalties grow on the periphery based on a codification of law, via the reinvention of peripheral culture, literature, and politics, in direct opposition to that proffered by the newly centralised elites (Brennan 1994: 45; see also Kellner 1992; Kiberd 1995). The problem with the idea of centre-periphery reciprocity within modern society, according to Gellner (1988: 206), was that those in control of the state expected the same level of loyalty from the periphery to the centre as had been attained under previous Imperial systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

The state’s ability to deal with politically diverse claims lies in the fact that the state in itself is a product of modernisation, and can be seen as the political centre with the sole right to the legitimate monopolisation of violence, self-determination, and the right to define the nature of socio-political organisation. Naturally, any expression of self-will or self-determination from the periphery is immediately viewed as a questioning of the legitimacy of the state to exist in the first place. In most circumstances the right to policing and political-juridical organisation was forfeited to the centre during the Middle Ages (Gellner 1980: 238), and once the centres modernised and expanded they came into direct conflict with elites who saw no reason why the relations should be defined other than in social economic and political terms (Smith 1991: 60-61).

In mixed regions the ascendancy to power by one specific ethnic group over another tended to occur at the expense of one group through the minimisation of political opportunity structures granted by the state (Watts 1981: 9). The subsequent isolation and alienation would tend to radicalise many a group to seek other means of communicative redress (Smith 1981: 27-28; Poggi 1978). In this way nationalism can be viewed as a monist reaction by a group seeking a solution by returning to an imagined past status to be utilised as a base for future mobilisation and resistance (Gellner 1974b: 13; see also Purvis 1996). When a people see themselves disenfranchised or excluded from the centre, more often than not (especially if the perceived treatment is seen to be based on ethnic lines) a consolidation of purpose that is diametrically opposed to the centre is formed on the periphery. This fosters an environment of elite competition. Yet, in most cases the periphery lacks the legitimacy of a continuum of entrenched social cohesion afforded the centre by the apparatus of state. In many cases the existing state may in itself be viewed by the periphery as the enemy which allows for the facilitation of power by another ethnic elite.

Giddens (1981: 190) saw that the reason nationalism was able to adopt such a significantly symbolic role, was due as much to its ability to offer an alternative to class ridden, social boundaries created in the guise of the state. In such cases an ideal is what the people choose to identify with, be it in a state or a cultural structure. Yet, in order to legitimise an ideal, a consensus must be formed. The nation is then seen, and here I concur with Brennan (1994: 46-47), as an extension of what Foucault (1972: 5, 1988: 151-154) calls a ‘discursive formation’, which is aimed at concentrating the efforts of the marginalised into creating an alternate that challenges the predominant state system through redrawing the lines of political participation. Even whilst forming the concept of the national community, within the activities of the movement or individual’s act of defiance. This creates a scenario whereby each makes the other possible through at once providing a bulwark, as in the state, or providing an alternative, as in the movement. It is here in the constructed movement of a marginalised community that the nation acts as a social agent of change.

It is nationalism’s agency that acts as the guiding principle for the desire to mobilise all disparate members and interests of a given community into a centralised force, that is symmetrically opposed to the existing state order (Hutchinson 1992: 104). An agency that allows a movement to reclaim political space within a given state system that is otherwise closed to political organisational alternatives. Repression, hence, acts as a catalyst whereby the marginalised, ‘mimics’ the empowered, in order to create the possibility for the inclusion of its demands by likewise challenging the established political order of state. The national movement is but an ideological response to the state’s official ideology of integration. A strategic use of ideology to expand movement repertoire which shall be discussed in the following chapter.

From this perspective Tilly (1975a: 385-388) tends to see movements cast in the role of a response to state hegemonisation as significant in gauging the popularity and legitimacy of the centre’s control in the perpetual dynamic relationship between centre and periphery. National movements, hence, are ideological alternatives formulated in periods of state engendered crisis in order to establish or dismantle existing power relations. As such they are an extension of peripheral discontent, and their success lies in their ability to portray the necessity of their existence within an historic continuum defined in the reciprocal, yet parallel, development of competing ethnic and ideological movements of state. A path to state development that is steeped in a tradition of ethnic and social polarisation as being the key to the formation of the dynamic dialectic mobilisation between centre and periphery, and its subsequent role in creating the necessary environment for a spiralling out of competitive demands that are the raison d’être for a justification of state transition.

Conclusion.

Hobsbawm (1993: 167), hence, is correct in pointing to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia as an example whereby polarisation of competing elites were far from being the cause of the collapse of the Federation, but were rather utilised as a facilitator of popular discontent against the perceived exclusiveness of an ethnically defined centralist system. In such circumstances, the national movement acts not just as a defender of a community’s position within a clearly ethno-nationally designed political system, but also as social guarantee of continuance in the face of rapid sociological changes (ibid.: 173). Central to the success of decentralists are their demands for greater autonomy which tend to be heavily influenced by the nature of the state oppression in the first place (Thompson & Rudolph: 42).

If the precondition for enfranchisement is the belonging to the state engendered notion of nationhood, the logical step is to formulate a new national ideal within the movement that is proffered as a political alternative (Brennan 1994: 58). When looking at the value of nationalism to peripheralised communities, the formalisation of a nationalist underpinned movement tends to grant a sense of autonomy of political choice that could not be gained through absorption into the centralist state. Yet this is still dependent upon political opportunity structures granted by the centre to the periphery. In Spain the two centralist parties never fully sought support for their policies in the Basque Country. This, in turn, left space for regionalist movements to open alliances with centralist parties granting an overall perception that the centre could accept autonomy of political organisation within certain limitations (Przeworski 1995: 24).

Nevertheless, the previous polarisation tends to bring great doubt amongst the two competing elites in the ability of the state in its contemporary form to satiate their demands. It is this doubt that will provide the initiative to reformulate centre-periphery relations, as well allow for the national movement to create space for itself within the cleavages that develop as a result of this emerging ideological conflict. In my opinion, the national movement grants the opportunity to proffer an ideological alternative to social organisation that may similarly effect individual and collective identity alike. At the core is the empowerment of the marginalised as a direct result of an intensification of the significance of the national movement in the day to day existence of the community.

The national movement, through the willingness to accept non-formalised participation, tends to increase the sense of the empowerment of the individual, which in turn, leads to a greater sense of collective democracy. One that nationalism as an ideological movement, is well positioned to exploit to the advantage of the disenfranchised community it represents. In expanding its repertoire to incorporate nationalism in challenging the state’s own ideology the social movement achieves a level of permanence within the overall cycle of protest, as will be demonstrated in chapter 5, that is unattainable to single issue movements. Nationalism is hence a reactive doctrine, but without the state either as the raison d’être or target for collective mobilisation it loses its saliency. After all, nationalism is but another rational choice for a movement seeking greater permanency from political opportunity structures created by the perennial struggle between reforming centres and mobilising peripheries.