Coercion, Nationalism and Popular Culture

Abstract

Nominally and officially, we moderns have no stomach for systematic mass violence. Inspired by the Enlightenment, the widely dispersed and institutionalised ideas of progress, humanism, rationality and moral equality of all human beings stand in stark contrast to feudal hierarchy, hereditary inequality and periodic butchery of ‘inferior’ others. Yet it is this historical epoch more than any other — and especially its most recent phase, the twentieth century — that witnessed systematic mass killings on an unprecedented scale. While coercion in all its forms is now utterly disdained, it nevertheless constitutes an essential ingredient of modernity as we know it. This is explicitly recognised by Gellner (1996: 31) when he states that ‘there are fairly good reasons why only coercion can constitute the foundation of any social order’. More to the point, he concludes his most important work of historical sociology, Plough, Sword and Book, by emphasising the role of state coercion in late modernity:

It is the sphere of coercion, of politics, which is now crucial. Contrary to the two main ideologies born of the age of transition, the political order can neither be diminished and consigned to the dog-house, nor will it wither away. A new kind of need for coercion or enforcement of decisions has arisen. (Gellner, 1988: 278)