Decolonizing the Concept of Nationhood

This chapter decolonizes the concept of nationhood. On 30 September 2021, French president Emmanuel Macron met a delegation of young French citizens of North African origin and stated that: “the post-1962 Algerian nation was built on a memory rent … Was there an Algerian nation before the French colonization? That’s the question”. This coming from the former colonial power almost 60 years after Algeria’s independence echoes existing theorizing on the subject of Nationalism, that: “modern nationalism originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in north-western Europe and its American settlements” and that “nationalism was unthinkable before the emergence of the modern state in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century”. Connecting Macron’s statements to these two quotes presupposes that whatever occurred prior to this period outside of Western Europe was not deemed as nationalism and the political entities which experienced such could not be deemed as nations. In existence is a ten-point checklist or criteria for determining whether a political entity could be referred to as a nation or not. This chapter therefore traces the source of the criteria and operationalizes the checklist, point by point, to explain their real meanings and significance. Operationalizing or applying the criteria to two non-Western political entities (the Fanti and Ashanti) reveal that these two nations of Modern Ghana attained nationhood earlier than some European nations, judging by the very criteria derived by Western authors. The operationalization therefore teaches how to do similarly for any other political entities of choice or investigation, to demonstrate how these entities likely meet the ten-point criteria. Furthermore, this chapter debates the concept of nationhood, how the theorizing assumed, and to what extent the theorizing is applicable to nations and nationalism across the globe. The chapter discusses terms such as nationalism, nationhood, nation-state, state, primordialism, perennialism, modernism, instrumentalism, typologies of the nation and nationalisms, while highlighting the technicalities and interpretations embedded within the terms.