LET’S start here by investigating “nations” and “nationality.” We’ll consider what nationalism is in the next Full Marx column.

Nations — surely, are places on the map with their own government. England, Scotland, Wales: all “nations” now, at least in common discourse. So what about “Great” Britain? Or Ireland? One criterion is the existence of a territorial “state” — or the aspiration of populations (claiming a distinct cultural identity) to establish one.

Books on “British” history often go way back beyond 1066 — some even go back to the Neolithic or before. In reality, the concept of the nation as understood today is a relative novelty.

Italy and Germany were both unified — each under a single government and constitution — only in the second half of the 19th century, although arguably the idea of nation and nationhood emerged in Britain and France at least a century before this. In the case of France, unity was cemented by the revolution of 1789.

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm quotes Walter Bagehot, who presented the history of the 19th century as one of nation-building: “We know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot quickly explain or define it.”

Marx, however, does not equate the development of the nation with capitalism. Rather, following Lenin and Dimitrov, Hobsbawm argues that the concept cannot be considered in the abstract as an a priori definition.

As John Foster declares in the Marx Memorial Library’s journal Theory and Struggle, the terms need to be concretised in relation to “the revolutionary transformation of human society through class struggle which was at the heart of Marx’s own understanding of the nation and nationality.”

In this context, the concept of a nation is both a physical and ideological one. Physical, because it presupposes participative governance of some sort, as opposed to an absolute monarchy or theocracy.

It is for this reason that some historians date the origins of the English “nation” back to the mid-17th century with the English revolution (in most textbooks called the civil war). But, as an earlier Full Marx (number 96) argued, the state is always a feature of class society, an organ ultimately of class rule (though as in England from the 17th century, those class structures may be mixed and in flux).

Capitalist ideologues claim that capitalism only needs a minimal state. In fact the market — and its profits — is sustained by state regulation, however light, and backed in the last instance by force — issuing money, protecting private property (including financial property), collecting taxes, maintaining an infrastructure, ensuring that surplus value can be generated (and realised as profit), making sure contracts are honoured, debts paid and frustrating any significant moves to redress class inequalities and power.

The nation-state is essential to the reproduction and accumulation of capital. Paradoxically as capitalism — particularly finance capital — becomes ever more global in nature, the more it needs the state (and state-sponsored supranational organisations) to bail it out when things go wrong.

Ideologically the nation is also to some extent at least an “imagined” or “abstract” entity, realised in practice and maintained not just by law (and in the last instance by force) but by an ideological apparatus — perpetuated by the media, education, religion, in which individuals are persuaded of their commonality with others.

That’s where nationhood and nationality come in.

At its simplest, nationality is a legal relationship between an individual and a state. It gives the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state. Some states allow their nationals to hold dual nationality.

Individuals can become “stateless” when “their” nation no longer exists or when their nationality is rescinded. Most nationals are also citizens of the state — giving them the right to participate in political life (eg by voting or standing for election). But as the Windrush scandal shows, it is possible to be one without the other.

Nationhood in France was based, at least notionally, on the idea of citizenship: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” In Germany, “citizenship” is based on blood, on parentage. Until 1981, holders of British passports were all, technically, subjects of Her Majesty the Queen (whether or not they had “British citizenship”).

Some readers of this answer may reply “British” to official questions on nationality, but other “British” citizens will reply Scots, Welsh or English. And should a citizen of Northern Ireland enter “UK” or “Irish?” Few “natives” of the Shetlands or Orkney (under Danish or Norwegian control until 1472 when they were ceded to Scotland as a royal wedding dowry) perceive themselves as “Scots.”

The “United” Kingdom as a multinational state was established by, or on the proceeds of, imperial conquest. But not all multi-nation states are necessarily empires. Switzerland (a late-medieval confederation) is not an empire.

The Soviet Union was not an empire, “evil” or otherwise, though like all states, its territory was a legacy from history. Neither was Yugoslavia — the pre-war kingdom or the former socialist federation. The US is not in itself an empire, but despite its (waning) hegemonic military and financial influence, it should certainly be described as an imperialist power today.

Dispersal and diaspora are other factors. Individuals and their descendants, displaced from their “homeland,” may be sustained by an awareness of shared history, language or culture. Religious affiliation can also be important as the basis for an assumed identity as in Judaism or the “Nation” of Islam.

Nationality or nationhood, like the concept of the nation itself, is socially determined: both conventional and legal definitions vary with geography and time. Lenin — before and after the Russian revolution — insisted on the legitimacy of the concept of nations and nationality in part at least as a response to historical and geographical injustices. Before the Bolshevik revolution, over half the population of those living in imperial Russia were “subject peoples” — Georgians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Finns.

In 1913, while in Vienna, Stalin, who became the first People’s Commissar for Nationalities following the revolution in 1917, wrote in his famous work Marxism and the National Question: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”

Taken at face value, that statement could equally have come from the more articulate right wing in Britain today. But for its time it was progressive, emphasising the roots of nationality in history and culture as well as territory and a challenge to crude nationalism and to those who claimed (as some of the right still does) that nations are based on “race.”

Likewise, in 1935, following the fascist seizure of power in Germany, Georgi Dimitrov criticised those, including communists, “who voluntarily relinquish to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of nations.”

Marxist slogans include “the working people have no country.” However Marx and Engels never suggested that nations would necessarily disappear in the short term, writing instead (in the Communist Manifesto) that the working class “must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.”

They continue: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all, settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”

Working people the world over have common interests. But day-to-day politics presents itself, and often is, primarily national in nature.

The progressive slogan of all socialists “Working people of all lands, unite” is an exhortation to collective action irrespective of nation and nationality. It is likely that under socialism concepts of nationhood and nationality will remain for some time. But they would not underpin destructive nationalism — which we’ll examine in the next answer in this series.

John Foster’s 2023 pamphlet Nations and Working-Class Unity in Britain is available using the link www.mstar.link/Nations.

A recording of Marx Memorial Library’s event on May 11 “What Kind of Federalism” with Labour peer Pauline Bryan, Beth Winter MP, Jon Trickett MP, Sean Griffin and Clare Williams discussing how to develop a democratic challenge to the British state, is available, together with links to past Full Marx columns in this series, on the Library’s website www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.

Reports of two roundtable discussions on “The national question and progressive federalism: Democracy, neoliberalism and Britain’s centralised state” hosted by the MML in May and December 2021 can be found in the MML’s journal Theory & Struggle Volume 123 www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/theory — access is free with your membership of the MML.