Nationalism by Ernest Gellner, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 108pp, £11.99 in UK
"Conservatives are right to this extent: the most effective social cement is continuity, custom and the consensus based not on reason," concludes Ernest Gellner towards the end of Nationalism, his last completed work before his death. "People obey established authorities and observe established customs because others do so as well . . . Once the established order is disturbed, however, it is not clear where legitimacy and authority lie, and the rival claimants can only prevail not by good reasons, but by terror."
I quote these lines, though virtually any other lines would do from this most perfectly written and most perfectly thought-out jewel of a book. Its 108 pages contain more wisdom, more acuity and more simple understanding of the human heart and human habit than one might discover in an entire library.
Gellner was a coelecanth, just about the last survivor of that curious German-Jewish civilisation of Mitteleuropa which was dismantled by the post-imperial nationalisms of the region before its fragments were consumed in the holocaust. Fire passed his way, and he speaks from the ashes.
His insights are profound and moving because he was an inside-outsider, a Jew and a Bohemian, who could grow maudlin over the folk songs of the Czechs, yet was not a true Czech nationalist. He ardently believed that nationalists rarely understand the emotion which drives them and which was "a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond . . . In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes the necessary and sufficient condition of legitimate membership; only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so."
This would be the core-ambition of extreme nationalists everywhere, whether Nazis or the footsoldiers of Irish republicanism and loyalism (though their leaders tend to be more publicly circumspect) - the entire tribe must be assembled within one polity, and members of the untribe must at the very least be politically dispossessed within the polity.
The consequence of such preferences has meant that people have often preferred murderous or incompetent government by those of their own "nation" rather than good government by an outsider. Well might Gellner dispose of reason as an engine in this process; and simultaneously employ it in its acutest form in analysing this most unreasonable of phenomena.
In its oldest, western European manifestations, through the dynastic states based in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and London, linguistic nationalism has, generally speaking, seemed benign, enriching and inevitable, and since the 18th century, only one state - this one - has emerged in this region. But this was a happy and atypical coincidence of history. To cite the Montenegrin John Plamenatz: nationalism west of Trieste could be benign, but east of Trieste, where the linguistic-tribal models of western Europe are irrelevant to conditions of, say, the Balkans and the Volga Bend, it is inclined to be horrible.
Language as a basis of statehood is a new thing. To have used peasant idiom to define the boundaries of realms would have seemed purely laughable to the architects of 19th-century Europe in Vienna in 1815. A century later it was the normative tool, deployed with high-minded idiocy, to carve states out of the hinterlands of dead empires.
As Gellner observed, "the rights of nations to self-determination" sounds fine, but it is practical rubbish, as we see in the North today, with competing identities fetishising the same territory in different directions. These identities are immune to ratiocination: and very probably Gellner's lambent wisdom would be lost on the primary custodians of those identities. Still, one would hope they might slip this slim masterpiece into their pockets and from time to time dip into it. From a few minutes with this great stranger they will learn more about the workings of their hearts than a lifetime would otherwise tell them.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times staff journalist