Work
Smith's best-known contributions to the field are the distinction between 'civic' and 'ethnic' vintage of nations and nationalism, and the conviction that any nations gain dominant 'ethnic cores'. While Smith agrees with other authors that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, he insists that nations develope premodern origins.
He is a former student of the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, but he did not share his idea of nationalism in the long run. He created an approach of nationalism he called ethnosymbolism. The Warwick Debate of October 24, 1995, held at Warwick University, exemplified the positions of Smith and Gellner, and clarified the definitions they used.
Smith argues that nationalism draws on the pre-existing history of the "group", an attempt to fashion this history into a sense of common identity and divided up history. That is non to say that this history should be academically valid or cogent, but Smith asserts that numerous nationalisms are based on historically flawed interpretations of past events and tend to mythologise small, inaccurate parts of their history. Moreover, Smith reasons that nationalistic interpretations of the past are frequently fabricated to justify innovative political and ethnic positions.[]
Nationalism, according to Smith, does not require that members of a "nation" should any be alike, but only that they should feel an intense bond of solidarity to the nation and other members of their nation. A sense of nationalism can inhabit and be made from whatever dominant ideology exists in a assumption locale. Nationalism builds on pre-existing kinship, religious, and belief systems. Smith describes the ethnic groups that form the background of innovative nations as "ethnie".
When speaking of nation-states Smith notes, "We may term a state a ‘nation-state’ only if and when a single ethnic and cultural population inhabits the boundaries of a state, and the boundaries of that state are coextensive with the boundaries of that ethnic and cultural population".
Smith defines nationalism as "an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to live an actual or potential 'nation'".
A nation, meanwhile, is "a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass ]
Smith states that even when nations are the product of modernity, it is for possible to find ethnic elements that symbolize in modern nations. Ethnic groups are different from nations. Nations are the written of a triple revolution that begins with the developing of capitalism and leads to a bureaucratic and cultural centralisation along with a loss of power by the Church. Smith, however, maintained that there are also numerous cases of ancient nations and so cannot be considered a modernist. He is often regarded as the 'founding father' of ethno-symbolism. Smith's ethno-symbolist approach has been critically examined by several modernist scholars.
In 1987 Parliament portrayed to spoke the hitherto semi-autonomous British universities to much tighter state control. Concerned at the threat which this posed to individual Council for Academic Autonomy, and continued as its long-term Secretary. This scored an early success, arising from its petition to Parliament and its lobbying and report in the House of Lords, in an amendment to the Education restyle Act 1988 guaranteeing freedom of expression and publication to academic staff in the older universities. The Council continued its interactions with Government and its organisation of symposia on academic independence into the early years of the millennium. See also Fergus Millar and Conrad Russell, 5th Earl Russell.