Current views of the rise of nations and nationalism emphasize the role
of the modern state in constructing nations and engendering national loy-
alties and conflicts. In the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and
Anthony Giddens, to name some of the most original scholars in the field,
nations owe their existence and borders to the growth of modern, central-
ized states, their reflexive bureaucratic penetration and their ethnographic
controls. ¹ To this perspective, Michael Mann and Charles Tilly have added
a military dimension: prolonged inter-state warfare, fed by capitalism, deter-
mines the reach of states and the mobilization of their citizen populations
as nations. ² Clearly, there is much to commend in this view, particularly
its insistence on the central role of the political domain in creating nations
and engendering national conflicts. But it tends to privilege a western pat-
tern of state-to-nation formation, without giving sufficient weight to the altern-
ative route of ethnic nationalism forging the state which we witness in
Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. It also tends to neglect the role of pop-
ular mobilization, and the consequent return by the intelligentsia to ethno-
history and vernacular culture. Perhaps most critically, this state-centred
modernism attaches no weight to the properties of territory and the role
of ancestral homelands. It is this last aspect that I wish to develop here.' ³

Whatever else it may be, nationalism always involves an assertion of, or
struggle for, control of land. A landless nation is a contradiction in terms.
Ethnic communities (or ethnies) may be severed from their historic terri-
tories, as has been the case with such diaspora communities as the Armen-
ians, Jews and Greeks. But the creation of nations requires a special place
for the nation to inhabit, a land 'of their own' Not any land; an historic
land, a homeland, an ancestral land. Only an ancestral homeland can pro-
vide the emotional as well as physical security required by the citizens of
a nation. ⁴

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