Anthem Quality: National Songs: A Theoretical Survey

By Christopher Kelen

Anthem Quality is a book about the lyrics of national anthems. In this theoretical survey, Christopher Kelen deals with the general meaning of an inter-national social phenomenon – the words we sing together with our compatriots when we assert ourselves to be national subjects.

Thought of most often in the context of the Olympics or other sporting events, national anthems are a significant way for a nation and its citizens to express their identity and unity. Despite their prevalence, anthems as an expression of national self-image and culture have rarely been examined – until now. Anthem Quality analyses the lyrics of many anthems in order to explore their historical and contemporary context. Christopher Kelen’s research reveals how many of the world’s most famous and best-known national anthems, including 'The Marseillaise', 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and God Save the Queen deal with such topics as authority, religion and political devotion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783203697

Book preview

Chapter 1

Identification of the National Subject

the idea of the anthem in the world today

Music falls on the silence like a sense,

A passion that we feel, not understand.

The enlarging of the simplest soldier’s cry

In what I am, as he falls. Of what I am, […]

The cry is part. My solitaria

Are the meditations of a central mind.

I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound

Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice

That is my own voice speaking in my ear.

(Wallace Stevens, 298)

In the twenty-first century, new empires, virtual networks and (multinational) corporate governance notwithstanding, ours remains a world of nation states. Space in today’s bounded geography is divided into nations, and nations are marked off from each other by lines on the map that may or may not coincide with, or deliberately ignore, divisions in terms of race, language, religion, ethnicity. The world’s nations have been classified along various lines to account for that fundamental difference in orientation¹; the division of the world into national spaces remains the pre-eminent fact of human geography. One may sit at a computer communing through the internet in Manuel Castells’ ‘space of flows’ (181–2), but if one wishes to physically present oneself at a border for the purpose of crossing to the other side, then one is unavoidably reminded that the world’s real physical space is national and that national space is typically defined in terms of some kind of attitude towards difference in terms of race, language, religion, ethnicity. The definitional rubric is something along the lines of – it matters or it doesn’t – the ‘we’ of the national entity includes and excludes others at least partly on the reflexive basis of whether we see ourselves as the kind of people able to include or exclude persons who could be considered ‘others’.

In his seminal 1983 work Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner defined nationalism as a political principle ‘holding that the political and national unit should be congruent’. As a sentiment then, nationalism, for Gellner, ‘is the feeling of anger aroused at the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment’ (1). How nation and nationalism are related in such a political principle is the subject of Gellner’s and many subsequent scholarly works. These investigations, and the whole field of nationalism studies is of relevance to the present work, but this book concerns itself with the operation of national sentiment or feeling, rather than politics or principle. The writing and standing up for and the singing of anthems must be closely connected with (personal and collective) sentiments of the national kind. It would appear, prima facie, that national feeling generates self-sustaining cultural phenomena, and conversely, that symbolic/affective machinery is available for the purpose of generating and nurturing national feeling. As Anthony D. Smith writes, in accounting for what he describes as the postmodern conception of nation: ‘the nation is a communion of imagery’, ‘only in […] images or cultural constructs does the nation possess any meaning or life’ (1999, 170). I shall forego the chicken-and-egg speculation that begs a rather persistent question as to the naturalness as opposed to the manufactured-ness of sentiment of the national kind. One notes though that it is by way of such a disagreement that Smith is able to divide the field of nationalism studies among, on the one hand, primordialists and perrenialists and, on the other hand, modernists and postmodernists (1999, 3–27 passim). Nationalists themselves, of course, are among those who harbour few doubts as to the naturalness of (at least their own) national affiliation.

Nations are relational and bounded phenomena, with tangible existence and effects, and yet, as Benedict Anderson has famously theorised in his 1983 study Imagined Communities, the feelings of solidarity and identity that national subjects associate with their nation and fellow citizens demand collective imaginative effort. That kind of effort is necessary because of the scale of national community; it is possible because of the technology available to states and their supporters. The relationship between state and nation is crucial to the infrastructural basis for the existence of nations as we know them today.

Then how are nations and states related? To some extent we may take nation and state to be the one phenomenon viewed in different aspects, as suggested by the appellation – ‘nation state’. The nation is the territorialised (or de-territorialised) population aware of itself as such; the state is the institution that exercises power over all others, within and beyond the national territory, on behalf of the national entity, and with whatever violence it deems appropriate/acceptable and without regard to type of government.

But how did nations and states arise and how are these ideas related in theory and in practice? One might look for the Western origins of the concept of nation in the Old Testament. And one might seek the original notion of state power and its exercise in Plato’s Republic (and perhaps in other-than-Western texts such as the Analects of Confucius). It would be interesting to trace the intertwining evolution of state and nation. With a view to the kinds of analyses we associate with, for instance, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, it would be possible to gather institutional evidence of each; likewise to look at the ways in which cultural capital is invested in institutions of state and nation, their interdependence and the way in which they (dis/concertedly) generate patterns of belief and identity, power and discipline.

Gellner writes that the state is a necessary though not a sufficient condition of nationalism (4). In modernity (shall we say, of the last two centuries at least) the two have come to be normatively fused. As the age of empire waned, nations assumed state power; as per Weber’s definition: ‘A nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own’ (Gerth and Mills, 1970, 176). Perhaps more importantly, the state is, for Weber, that societal agency distinguished by its possessing a monopoly of legitimate violence within a particular territory, the territory that today we overwhelmingly associate with nations in particular (Gerth and Mills, 1970, 78). Today, state and nation are conflated to the extent that they may, in many circumstances, be used as interchangeable terms. Smith writes:

In the modern world only one form of political unit is recognised and permitted. This is the form we call the ‘nation-state’.[…] Nation-states have frontiers, capitals, flags, anthems, passports, currencies, military parades, national museums, embassies and usually a seat at the United Nations. They also have one government for the territory of the nation-state, a single education system, a single economy and occupational system, and usually one set of legal rights for all citizens, though there are exceptions. (In some federal systems, there may be citizenship rights for all members of the nation-state, but also communal rights for members of particular communities.)! They also subscribe, tacitly or openly, quietly or vociferously, to a single ideology which legitimates the whole enterprise – nationalism. Indeed, the whole system of states is built on its assumptions, even if its practice does not often conform to nationalist precepts. We even call it the ‘international’ system.

(Hall, 109–137)

There are many situations today in which we may take state and nation to be close synonyms, with this connotative difference: that the use of ‘state’ emphasises power and authority, whereas the term ‘nation’ emphasises an appeal to the ‘natural’ facts of who and where people are. What the nation demands of its people will have a more powerful emotional pull than what the state demands. The state is associated with the kinds of obligations citizens endure through such phenomena as taxation and conscription; the nation is most powerfully associated with a people’s sense of ‘who we are’, the feeling for instance that there are borders to defend. We may take the conflation of state and nation to be part of the process on the world scale by which political entities reify themselves and through the institution and regulation of an official culture, make themselves appear permanent and necessary. Anthems then are a part of that official, regulated culture through which state authorities appeal to the nation as their emotional constituency.

As relational entities (i.e. as items in a series), nations behave according to rules determined by precedent, expectation, and by their relative power and especially by their capacity to wage or threaten violence they see as legitimate, beyond their borders. The very existence of the United Nations may be taken as suggesting a consensus among nation states that the violent propensities of nations constitutes what might be considered a permanent problem for the inter-national system as we know it. And the UN also suggests by its existence that nations are like-enough entities to find common ground or means of adjudication necessary to peace. So there is, in late- or post-modernity, a sense in which, for all their necessary (defining) differences, nations are members of a club in which rules of decorum and standards of self-efficacy need to be followed. ‘Pariah’ states are those that fail to live up to the inter-national norms. Despite the idea of an ethnic core to nation in the modern sense (Smith, 2008, 28–48 passim) and the obvious examples of this phenomenon in cases such as those of China and Japan, the modern nation as site-of-identity-investment is familiarly seen (and often portrays itself) as transcending divisions we associate with race, language, religion, ethnicity. That is because, I would argue, in ideological terms the notion of nation has been skewed towards the multi-ethnic model we find in the settler societies of ‘new Europes’ and most particularly because of the dominating exemplar of the US The influence of the US model and the geopolitical pre-eminence of the US bring into focus key contradictions of modernity/post-modernity and the national basis of international relations in the world today. The world’s biggest economy is the key node in the network of global flows through which capital and information pass on their mysterious path, and this passage appears by the minute to diminish authority of the national kind and test geopolitical frontiers. Still, at the time of writing, we have very little indication of what might succeed the age of nations; nor is there any such prospect in sight. The US, circa 1776, was the first apparently ex-nihilo nation, a polity founded on principles that may be associated with modernity. The age of (notionally equal-footed) nations has notionally succeeded an age of (avowedly world dominating) empires; the ethnic/religious basis of identity and identification has notionally given way to a set of enlightenment inspired ideals, centred today on the idea of universal human rights – the endowment of civilisation that nations, in general, have a responsibility to guarantee for their citizens.

Yet nations are entities demanding loyalty and inspiring devotion in a manner analogous, in important ways, with demands made on members of religious communities in the pre-national past. Gellner comments, ‘Durkheim taught that in religious worship society adores its own camouflaged image. In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage’; Gellner’s exemplar for the phenomenon is Germany at the Nuremburg rallies (56). The extreme manifestation we see in Nazism though perhaps belies the more commonplace quasi- or pseudo-religiosity of national devotions. In The Cultural Foundations of Nations, Anthony D. Smith writes, ‘As secular religion of the people, nationalism was able to combine a purely human and terrestrial compact with public worship of the nation’ (xv, 2008). Smith further contends that, in the West and elsewhere, ‘it is impossible to grasp the meanings of nation and nationalism without an understanding of the links between religious motifs and rituals and later ethnic and national myths, memories and symbols’ (8). This continuity is demonstrated by the use of the generic category ‘anthem’² for the kind of song that allows the subject of state or religion to express devotion through unison.

Anthems are sites of powerful collective affect and are remarkable for being the key narrative means of identification – the words – held in common as sacred (or nearly sacred) by national subjects. Strikingly under-theorised, the lyrics of national anthems are among the best known poems in the world today. So how does the study of anthems stand in relation to a more general effort to understand nations, nationalism and their meaning for identity and identification of individuals and populations? Jonathan Hearn concludes his 2006 book Rethinking Nationalism with ten summary theses, the third of which is as follows:

Understanding the role of the emotions in the constitution of nationalism is important, but so far under-theorised. There is a tendency to simply draw attention to the use of symbols, and then assume their emotional efficacy. A more sophisticated understanding of both how symbols do (and do not) work, and how human beings are emotionally constituted, needs to be developed and then brought to bear on nationalism.

(230)

This book can be read as part of the project foreshadowed in Hearn’s third thesis. As Hearn argues in his tenth thesis (232), symbolic processes are part of a more general ideological pattern in which social power is organised. The making and mending of anthems, the singing and standing to attention anthems demand – understanding these phenomena will help us to understand the emotional efficacy of the symbolic processes and the general ideological patterns that shape identity in the world today.

Anthem and Nation, the Idea of Anthem Quality

I have already broached the question as to why it is nations have anthems. Perhaps such a question is rarely asked simply because national, like religious, devotion depends on articles of faith not amenable to scrutiny of any fundamental (‘why is this happening at all?’) kind. Singing and singing together go back such a long way in the human story that it seems natural collective identity would have always been sung by those who saw themselves as belonging to a particular group. Song has always played a part in human community, and nothing in history thus far has broken the continuity of the central role of song in culture. Song is perhaps as old as speech, nor is it inconceivable that speech evolved from song. In the third chapter of this book I will devote some effort to finding suitable ways of classifying anthems, but for now, before going any further in seriously attempting to answer such a fundamental (and perhaps unanswerable) question as why there is such a phenomenon as the anthem in the national sense, it will be a good idea to determine what kind of a song we are dealing with. In her article in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, Jeanette Bicknell places anthems in a three part classification of songs, as follows:

First, while any song can be performed in front of an audience, some songs are ‘works for performance,’ specifically intended to be performed, often in a formal setting. These include art songs, songs in opera and music drama, jazz standards, and the songs recorded by professional singers for a mass media audience. Second are songs intended for ‘participation-performance’ or communal singing. The ‘audience’ and the performers are one in this case. Such songs include national anthems, hymns, campfire songs, and many folk songs. Even when only one person performs such a song, he or she does so less for an audience than on behalf of an audience. Finally, some songs are best understood as ‘functional’ songs because they serve specific practical or cultural purposes. Examples include lullabies, mnemonic songs, work songs, and laments.

(Gracyk and Kania, 438)

Although this classification places our object of investigation in the ‘participation-performance’ category, anthems would appear to blur somewhat the lines Bicknell has drawn: often performed in formal settings where most of the audience would not be in a position to sing (for instance at international sporting events), anthems can also serve ‘specific practical and cultural purposes’. Culture, very generally conceived, is a kind of dreaming together and it might not be much of a stretch of the imagination to think of anthems as lullabies for adult populations. Certainly anthems have mnemonic functions in teaching citizens or helping them to remember how and who they are. Upon reflection, Bicknell’s ‘classification’ begins to look more like a functional continuum, and anthems are a kind of text which travels that continuum, according to the particularity of function being served in a set context.

Compare Bicknell’s classification with Edward T. Cone’s (1974) four-part classification of songs. For Cone there are ‘simple’ (unaccompanied) songs, ‘art’ songs that combine vocal line with instrumental accompaniment, ‘natural’ songs like ballads (where the particularity of authorship and audience have little relevance) and ‘functional’ songs in which singers express themselves as members of a community: the classical example of this fourth kind of song would be ‘Happy Birthday’ (Cone, 49–52). In Cone’s classification, clearly an anthem is a functional song, and whether it is also an art song or a natural song would be an issue up for case-by-case debate.

In Chapter 3 I will explore the sociolinguistic notion of speech function along with the generic classification of anthems; however, given that song is a fundamental cultural form, it might be useful from the outset to make a brief comparison of the idea of function in relation to song and in human language more generally. Consider Bicknell’s and Cone’s categories in relation to Jakobson’s famous six part classification of speech functions,³ which one might gloss as follows: the referential function (dealing with contextual information), the poetic/aesthetic function (where the reflexive focus is on the message itself), the emotive function (where self-expression is to the fore), the conative function (focussed on addressing a receiver), the phatic function (focussed on ensuring the channel of communication is working), the metalingual function (focussed on ensuring the code is working) (Sebeok, 1960, 350–377). Where does song, in general, fit in relation to Jakobson’s categories? The answer, again case-by-case, is anywhere or everywhere. Songs refer, are of a context, songs express emotion address parties; songs (like other texts) may unconsciously or reflexively test whether channels and codes of communication are working.

Leaving aside the question of whether song could or should be considered a form of speech (or vice versa), one key difference between song and speech is that monologue and dialogue. The salient point for the study of anthems is that the act of singing together, which we call unison, is a means of expressing identity-in-common: those who could be turn-taking in conversation instead take a turn together, to be of one mind/heart/soul. Anthems we can say, utilise a fundamental component of human culture in which assumed agreement is expressed, and so a common identity is more or less unconsciously asserted. As Bicknell writes, ‘singing is linked with the human desire for recognition and the obligation to recognise others’ (Gracyk, 444).

Why is it necessary to say who we are in this (self-convincing) way? Unison is a defence against the erosion of self and community brought about by the action of time. Lost in the moment of music, we claim a place in an eternal order (or in an order that appears unalterably out of time, as in the Platonist’s time as the ‘moving image of eternity’ [Plato, 450]). Singing together is more than a passive recognition of place; it is an assertion of presence; it makes vital the here-and-now of who we are. Then perhaps nations have this singing-together phenomenon we call the national anthem because the song inspires the devotion the nation requires and because the nation inspires the devoted to make this kind of music together. There is a lot of chicken-and-egg-and-which-came-first (?) in this equation and the fact is well expressed in the tautological character of many anthem lyrics.

Scholars and citizens alike may be inclined by temperament to consider phenomena such as anthems and the sentiment they generate as either natural (spontaneous outpourings of popular feeling) or as manufactured by political elites for defined and self-interested purposes. And surely there is truth to both of these views. Mark Pagel’s (2012) book Wired for Culture explores the biological/evolutionary basis of community and its relation to culture in presenting, as per the book’s subtitle, a ‘natural history of human cooperation’. Pagel proposes that evolution has duped us with a ‘group thinking’ emotion that makes us act ‘as if for the good of the group, an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activities’. Artefacts such as national anthems may well exploit this kind of feeling: ‘an emotion that by encouraging coordinated group behaviour has brought our ancestors and us direct benefits’ (98). Pagel’s thesis is that ‘our facility for culture is the key to our success as a species’. Until recently the human story had been one not only of population explosion but of the proliferation of cultures. For Pagel, propensity for culture, and its concomitant possibilities for cooperation, has played a key (and under-recognised) role in the evolution of the species. Flags and anthems and other ritual objects and processes of identification are a key to understanding the relationship between culture and cooperation and their concerted role in creating society on every level. So humans have a biological propensity to relate to each other through such means as song and unison, and that capacity (like many others) is available for political manipulation.

A key fact of modernity is that in a world principally organised on a national and inter-national basis, people see who they are as defined by their national sense of belonging. They express, assert and renew such affiliations by doing what humans have always done to assert who they are – that is, by singing together. The problem with easy answers to questions like ‘Why do nations have anthems?’ is that (however much truth they contain) they make the particular circumstances of particular people in the world today seem universal, eternal and inevitable. Whenever social phenomena appear to be universal, eternal and inevitable, it will be advisable to ask how and why they came to appear this way.

Paul Nettl commences his classic post-war work study, National Anthems, with the observation:

Love of country has always been among the strongest of man’s impulses. Nationalism and patriotism are a sort of collective self-confidence. The pride a man takes in his noble descent or in his personal work corresponds in another sphere to the pride he takes in being a member of his nation and the love he feels for his country.

(1)

This hypostasisation of the call of patriotism as eternal and therefore universal is achieved only at the expense of a de-historicising move that forecloses a question as to the nature of the relationship between pride in one’s noble descent and pride in one’s nation, likewise a question as to the relationship between pride of place (or love of land) and patriotism. Elided in this process of foreclosure is the issue as to the legitimacy of rights. By what rights – and at whose expense – is land or nation or noble lineage claimed? The claim is made while the player to whom it is addressed has her or his eye off the ball.

This particular de-historicising move is conveniently answered by Benedict Anderson in his introduction to Imagined Communities:

[N]ationness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider how they have come into historical being, in what way their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.

(4)

Anderson’s argument is that ‘nation’ as we now know it is an artefact of late eighteenth- century provenance, ‘the spontaneous distillation of a complex crossing of discrete historical forces’, which, once in existence, were able to be transplanted to various political climates. Anthem for Anderson is part of the imagined reality of the nation artefact (81). Although there is a sense in which anthems-as-we-know-them predate nations-as-we-know-them, our sense of what a national anthem is is governed by our concept of nation.

Over the nation-and-nationalism territory Anderson has critically explored, theorists have in recent decades argued long and hard. As has already been mentioned, scholars like Anthony D. Smith have divided the antagonists, for convenience, into such camps as primordialists, perennialists and modernists, postmodernists. One could see the field as divided more fundamentally between those, on the one hand, who essentially (however piercing their analysis may be) feel good about the idea of nation and their own possession of a national affiliation (those for whom ‘nation per se is not the problem’) and those, on the other hand, who approach their work (as a matter of course) with critical consciousness in mind and with the aim of developing a critique of nation and nationalism along the lines of a ‘thesis eleven’ assumption that ‘humanity can do better’. Where does the present orthodoxy lie? Smith is unhappy with the fact but himself acknowledges that ‘the western conception of the modern nation has become the measure of our understanding of the concept of nation per se, with the result that other conceptions become illegitimate’ (2008, 14). The orthodoxy thus is that nations as we know them are an invention of modernity; in Anderson’s terms, nations are phenomena made possible by the advent of print capitalism (1991, 37–46).

As scholars like Smith are keen to demonstrate, very many nations have pre-modern origins, and it will be interesting to trace (and compare) historically the nature of particular national affiliations. Perhaps the more salient point in today’s world is that scholars of nationalism are like other world citizens today, national subjects; that is to say their sense of who they are is in some large part determined by national affiliation. A scholar’s efforts at objectivity will always be laudable, but that kind of exertion should include a reflexive effort to acknowledge his or