The forging of countries
Two distinct and conflicting forms of nationalism – civic and ethnic – helped create the nation-states of Europe
For Kohn, the real culprit for the downfall of his multinational homeland (Austria-Hungary) was not the war itself, but the force of nationalism that in its waning years exerted such a powerful sway over its people.
The Hapsburg was doomed by its defeat in 1867 which meant it had to let Hungary gain an equal status. But the Magyars were a minority in the territory they claimed and, in any case, were kray kray. German speakers increasingly looked to Germany, while the Czechs dreamed of a restoration of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Southern Slavs- if Catholic- may have been conciliated and acted as a counterweight to the Hungarians. But the Italian subjects of the Emperor were chafing at the bit. The Poles hated the Tzar more than the Hapsburgs and thus they too would want to join their compatriots.
What the Great War revealed was that War was no longer 'the sport of Kings'. The age of Emperors had come to an end. A Nation- like the Serbs- might be prepared to take massive casualties and engage in 'total war', but no Emperor could inspire such devotion.
He was hardly alone in this assessment. For at least three-quarters of a century, central and eastern Europe has served as the prime example of the pitfalls of nationalism.
They could be ruled in no other way than as nation-states. Kings were useless. Even the Communist Party's 'Evil Empire' had to pretend to rule sovereign nation-states.
In particular, of the kind of ethnic nationalism that, we are often told, is characteristic of this non-Western world.
That's interesting. I think most people include countries like Greece and Poland in the Western world.
It was this particularly central and eastern European ethnic nationalism, this perspective goes, that was responsible for the collapse of the diverse and cosmopolitan Habsburg Monarchy.
Catholic Ireland separated from Britain though this had few practical consequences as England could still get in plenty of cheap Irish labor as well as highly educated professionals.
For the failure of the new democracies that took over from empires in 1918 – Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and others.
Liberal democracy first failed in Portugal (where the monarchy was overthrown in 1910). Indeed, the brief reign of Siodonio Pais has been considered by some to be a precursor to the Fascism of Mussolini. By 1926, the military had taken power and the country went down a Corporatist path.
And for the rise of authoritarian and fascist regimes in their place, the largest of which would go on to perpetrate the most horrific genocide in human history in the Holocaust.
Why bother with gas-chambers when we can blow up the entire planet?
According to this orthodox view, the essentially ethnic nature of central and eastern European nationalism contrasts starkly with that of the Western democracies of France,
which is within what Talleyrand called its 'natural borders'
the United Kingdom
which let go of Catholic Ireland. Perhaps Ulster, with a Catholic majority, will join the Republic and thus remain within the EU. What about Scotland? Will it become independent?
and the United States.
Perhaps there will be another Civil War between Red and Blue states.
They are characterised as thoroughly civic nations, based not on supposedly primordial tribal identity, but on common citizenship and a democratic understanding of politics.
The US is understood as a country based upon slavery and genocide.
In all three, the US, UK and France, their civic nationalism is a centuries-old tradition, dating back to their foundation as modern nations.
The UK is a Kingdom. That's what the K in UK stands for. King Charles is a direct descendant of the brother of Athelstan (who had no children) the first King of England over a thousand years ago. He is also descended from Count Dracula- which is totes cool.
Incidentally Charles is also King of Canada and Australia.
Kohn was the first historian to systematically seek out the roots of this divergence between the nature of nationhood in the Western democracies, and the central and eastern European countries in his weighty book The Idea of Nationalism (1944).
It was foolish. Finland is like Sweden and Norway. Once given a chance, Estonia and Latvia and even Lithuania went down a similar road. Russia didn't. The nature of nationhood has a lot to do with economics and geopolitics. It has nothing to do with ideology.
Kohn’s book grew into a foundational work of ‘nationalism studies’ in the Anglophone world and has influenced generations of scholars and readers alike.
It was useless. If a country- like Greece- was worth saving from Communism, it went one way whereas Albania went a different way. Yugoslavia was sui generis. When I was at the LSE, a Yugoslav scholar- Borna Bebek lectured me on how his country had overcome divisions of religion and ethnicity. Apparently, he was a chum of Rajiv Gandhi wo fell victim to Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism.
The fact is, India could be said to have embraced 'civic nationalism' while Pakistan went crazy. During the Bangladesh War, a Pakistani Army commander instructed his troops to rape as many Bengali women as possible so as to change the DNA of the next generation. I suppose, one could say Hindu India inherited more in the way of 'civic' institutions from the Brits.
He did not just see Western and non-Western nationalisms as different,
His book came out just when the influence of racialist theories was at a peak.
but came to believe they were, in effect, totally different phenomena.
Coz only Nordics are nice. Everybody else is shit.
Kohn argued that Western nationalisms were ‘based upon liberal middle-class concepts … pointing to a consummation in a democratic world society’,
Nonsense! In England we might speak of Henry V at Agincourt while the French may gas on about Joan of Arc. The Swiss, of course, have William Tell. No doubt, Kohn thought Joan was a solicitor while William had a flourishing practice as an actuarial scientist.
while central and eastern European nationalisms derived from ‘irrational and pre-enlightened concepts … tending towards exclusiveness’.
After the American Revolution, loyalists had to flee. On the other hand, it is true that General Custer used to go out of his way to invite Native Americans to his birthday party. Jim Crow was about giving up your seat on the bus if a nice African American lady, like Rosa Parks, looked like she might want to sit down.
The enlightened Western ones, he claimed, developed in France,
Vichy France?
the UK and the US, the primordial superstitious ones in Germany,
The Holy Roman Empire defined that nation's borders. The Elector of Brandenburg only got to be a King once he conquered non-German territory- viz. Prussia. Incidentally, the Hapsburg Emperors tended to be the head of that Empire till Napoleon spoilt everything. Kohn didn't understand that a Nation can be subdivided into lots of Princedoms and Duchies and Archbishoprics etc.
before spreading across the rest of central and eastern Europe and, eventually, the world.
Eurocentric much? The truth is Greece only started to unite in response to Persian expansionism. Rome created a sense of Italian nationalism. The Old Testament speaks of many nations- 'goyim'- some of which founded great Empires. But then King Solomon, too, ruled a great realm.
The backwardness of all non-Western countries apparently made it all but predetermined that the latter would win out over the former.
Japanese nationalism- which celebrated a divine Emperor- was nothing like Western nationalism. Neither was that of Gandhi or al Afghani. As for the Bolsheviks- they were sui generis. China followed that path- indeed, it follows it still.
While the distinction between these two kinds of nationhood was known to 19th-century thinkers, the notion that ethnic and civic aspects of nationhood were necessarily in conflict, or that one or the other was purely characteristic of a certain part of Europe, was not.
Kohn does not seem to have known that American 'First Nations' only got US citizenship in 1924. Clearly American nationality was 'ethnic'- non-Caucasians (e.g. Indian were being stripped of citizenship (e.g Bhagat Singh Thind) in the Twenties- not 'civic'.
Western ‘civic’ nation-states have always been built on the dominance of certain ethnic groups with their own language, traditions and myths of origin and distinctiveness.
Not necessarily. In Spain, all Basques were given 'hidalgo' status. Minorities who were dominant in a particular region might be well treated or even respected for their slightly exotic provenance.
Indeed, the assimilation of minorities into the dominant ethnicity in Western nation-states was celebrated as progress.
In the case of Welsh speakers this backfired. A perceived insult to them from Westminster led to a great educational effort such that Wales began to supply more and more intellectuals to the country. Under Lloyd George they got their revenge on the effete English aristocracy in the shape of 'death duties'. I suppose, since the Tudors were of Welsh origin, it is they who rule over us rather than the other way around.
Central and eastern European nationalists did not ‘reject’ the civic values of their Western counterparts but tried to follow them closely.
There was a difference between more urbanized, industrialized, areas- like the Czech territories- and those which were more agricultural- e.g. much of Poland. But this is about economics, not ideology.
They acknowledged civic rights for all that lived in a given nation-state but sought – like their Western counterparts – to eventually see all ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities assimilated into the general civic nation that was ultimately shaped by the dominant ‘state-forming’ ethnic group.
No. They could go for the 'cantonized' Swiss model with different languages being used in different provinces. Canada is bilingual. So was Finland from 1863 onward.
They were in awe of the assimilatory power of the English language and its culture in Britain or North America,
Tell that to the Quebecois!
and of the French equivalents ultimately defined in and around Paris. That German or Hungarian nationalists wanted to see Slavs or Jews shed their culture and become true Germans and Hungarians did not reflect some ‘irrational and pre-enlightened’ exclusivism. It simply reflected the reality of the Western nation-state.
It also reflected the fact that those Germans or Hungarians wanted to rule over lots of territory not occupied by Germans or Hungarians. Ideally, everybody would speak their language and obey their orders.
The reality is, Switzerland was a 'Western nation-state' and had lots of languages. After the Sonderbund War (which was about the expulsion of the Jesuits) a stronger Federal Government was formed in 1848, but the country remained multi-ethnic and a model of 'subsidiarity'.
Nevertheless, in nationalism studies, this geographic distinction between Western civic and non-Western (or ‘Eastern’) ethnic nationalism remains one of the most deeply engrained orthodoxies.
Only stupid people go in for 'nationalism studies'.
The problem is it simply isn’t true. To understand how this misleading but influential view took shape, it is necessary to understand how the descent into ethnic extremism in early 20th-century central Europe shaped the enduring works of early theorists of nationalism. Many of whom – like Kohn himself – were ultimately shaped by its consequences, their work marked by a deep desire to discover where the histories of their homelands had ‘gone wrong’.
So just say 'Kohn was stoooopid.' and be done with the matter.
Kohn was born in 1891 in Austria-Hungary, perhaps the most bewildering state in modern European history. In fact, it wasn’t one state at all, but two. The half colloquially referred to as Austria consisted of three kingdoms,
While the UK consisted of three Kingdoms and one Principality. Prior to Victoria's accession. Hanover was in personal union with the UK. But Victoria became Empress of India at about the time her daughter became German Empress.
six duchies, two archduchies, a grand duchy, two margraviates, two princely counties and a free city, all with their own unique histories, identities, flags, forms of patriotism, celebrations of belonging and more. The other, Hungarian half itself had a kingdom within a kingdom in Croatia-Slavonia.
The Germans weren't too bad but the Hungarians were kray kray.
What united all these political entities was
the Army backed up by a fairly efficient civil service. Austria-Hungary was experiencing quite rapid economic growth but the Germans looked to Berlin while everybody else, except the Jews, dreamed of the reconstitution of their own ancient Kingdoms.
the emperor-king Franz Joseph, who sat atop the Habsburg dynasty that had ruled most of these polities for centuries. With two brief interruptions, the Hapsburg family, from the 15th century to 1866, had acted as hereditary heads of the entirety of today’s Germany,
which was not united- more particularly during the wars of religion
first as Holy Roman Emperors and then as ‘heads of the presiding power’ of the German Confederation,
which was useless.
itself consisting of 39 different German states.
Russia had propped up the monarchies of Europe in 1848- the year history reached a turning point but failed to turn. After the Crimean War, it was obvious that Kings and Emperors would have to arrive at some sort of modus vivendi with the urban middle-classes.
This bewildering political tapestry did not make for simple nation-building on the Western model.
The Napoleonic model- maybe. But that required a kick-ass army.
France and Britain were centralised,
they were more urbanized and industrialized. But the Dutch Republic had been ahead of both.
but central Europe was decentralised.
It was more agricultural. This meant the Church and the Nobility had more of a role.
The former had dominant national languages, but the latter was extremely multilingual.
Which wasn't a big problem. Urban folk spoke good enough German and they could give orders in the mother tongue to rustic soldiers or factory hands.
The former had strong centres of political authority, the latter diffuse and overlapping ones. Kohn’s hometown of Prague was the historical capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia
Historically, it was educationally ahead and represented an island of industrial development. The Slovaks were more rural.
sandwiched between the Austrian duchies to the south and the rest of Germany to the north. It was a prime example of the kind of national complexities arising from this complicated Habsburg inheritance.
No more so than Swansea or Cardiff in the nineteenth century. People in town spoke the elite language with fluency. People coming in from the countryside did not.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bohemian natives nurtured wildly different visions of their homeland’s place in a possible national state. Most German-speaking Bohemians envisioned it as a part of Germany or a German-dominated Austrian state. Nationally conscious Bohemian Slavs variously imagined it as part of a wider Slavic-Austrian state, a more narrowly ‘Czechoslovak’ one, a purely Czech one, or even a bilingual Czech-German nation-state.
Only after 1871 did the idea that civic borders should conform to ‘objective’ national ones based on ethnic criteria come to prominence
Because Prussia hadn't just taken down Austria's pants and made fun of its puny genitals. It had also kicked Napoleon III's ass.
The problem for the Czechs was that, on the one hand they benefited from having a bigger market within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whereas, on the other, regaining their ancient glory would involve hostile linguistic minorities or else a large rural population which would resent their dominance.
The problem faced by all nationalisms emerging out of central Europe before 1918 was that no ethnic nation was congruent with the state.
The bigger problem was that lots of states wanted to push their borders outward. Sometimes this was for strategic reasons. At others, it was simple greed.
Insofar as German or Czech-speaking nationalists in Bohemia, for example, saw their nation as the one truly representative of the kingdom, they would have to assimilate their rivals against their will. Or, as Kohn maintained, ‘redraw the political boundaries in conformity with ethnographic demands’, supposedly one of the tenets of ‘non-Western’ nationalisms.
France and Britain and the US had no objection to helping themselves to attractive real estate. I personally want to reconquer Calais so I can get duty-free booze.
Somewhat bizarrely considering nationalism captivated Europe only in the 19th century,
Nationalism triumphed with the Reformation. Before that it was possible to believe there was something called 'Christendom'. It wasn't really true as the Anglo-French wars showed but some people pretended to believe in it. Once you had national churches- e.g. the Anglican Church in England and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland and the Dutch Reformed Church or the Prussian Union of Churches- nobody could pretend that Nationalism hadn't triumphed. Thus, the Kaiser didn't become the Emperor of Germany. He was the 'German Emperor'.
Kohn concluded The Idea of Nationalism with the 18th, content that he had discovered the roots of the two nationalisms by then.
Egyptian nationalism existed in the eighteenth century BC. Sadly a bunch of foreigners- the Hyksos- invaded. The Egyptians were not pleased.
Yet the historical record contains very few demands from 18th- or even 19th-century eastern and central Europeans for the redrawing of borders.
This would be news to the Poles. Stanisław August Poniatowski may not have been a great King but he, like other Poles, wanted to restore the greatness of his country. The Irish were just as passionate and just as tragic.
The first example of ‘objective’ ethnographic measures being used as the basis for border changes in Europe was in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871,
because this favored the winning side. One may ask why the Prussians exchanged Belfor for territory near Metz. I suppose the heroic defense put up by its people convinced them that occupation would be resisted.
and there its goal is only the exchange of a few villages on the initiative of an entrepreneurial statistician.
Diplomats and politicians use Statistics in the same way that a drunk uses a lamp-post- i.e. more for support than illumination.
Only in the decades after 1871 did this idea that civic borders should conform to ‘objective’ national ones based on ethnic criteria come to prominence.
Talleyrand had popularized the notion that 'natural borders' promoted peace. However the wars of German or Italian reunification were about ethnic nationalism. So were the Hungarian uprisings and the Polish uprisings and so forth.
Importantly, it arose with the maturity of nationalist movements, not at their birth. For most of the 19th century, we find political or civic nations in central Europe seeking to assert their rights to manage their own affairs while opening up the boundaries of the nation to people of wildly diverse religious or linguistic backgrounds.
Nonsense! Nobody was trying to bring in Africans or Chinese or Indian people. Even the influx of Russian Jews fleeing pogroms could be resented. England, for the first time in is history, brought in immigration controls in 1905. It also interned Germans during the Great War.
In return, however, they asked for assimilation, that outsiders identify with the political community of the state and its leading ethnic group.
Or religion or, at a later time, ideology. More generally, what a state wants from foreigners living within its borders is that they pay taxes or contribute to national security- e.g. Chinese laborers in France during the Great War. They may not want to assimilate them if this means paying them the same wage or giving them the same professional or business opportunities.
Sometimes – as in Bohemia – competing claims arose about the question of which ethnic group had the right to be identified with the political nation.
Many Sudetens preferred Czech rule for economic reasons. Sadly, the Great Depression hurt industrial areas more than proportionately. There was also the problem that Poland wanted to take a bite of the country.
Scholars usually date the emergence of modern nationalism to the 18th century.
If the date modernity to that period, then they are bound to do so.
But it’s also true that the word ‘nation’ has been used in Europe for centuries.
It was used in the Old Testament.
What changed is the modern claim that nations consist of the ‘masses’
masses exist in cities. We are speaking of urbanization and industrialization. But then Rom started off as a City-state.
and the modern nationalist assertion of the rights of those masses to statehood.
I suppose you could say Czech nationalism got a boost when Prague as it ceased to be German majority after about 1860.
That’s what we call ‘nationalism’.
Unless we prefer to call it populism or Fascism or something of that sort.
But for a long time before modern nationalism, the word ‘nation’ frequently referred to political nations in premodern Europe
More particularly, it applied to invading tribes- e.g. the Goths or Franks- who established Kingdoms and converted to Christianity.
That is, the nation as a corporate group consisting of those whose rights and privileges marked them out as a distinct group in and above society. Whose privileges made them the group that ruled society, complete with their own language, customs, traditions and identity.
e.g. the Normans in England and Ireland
This is why one of the great innovations of the French Revolution was the extension of nationhood through political emancipation to the broad masses of French society.
France was playing catch-up with England which had chopped off the head of its King a century and a half previously.
The nobilities of the Habsburg-ruled kingdoms – of diverse ethnic and linguistic origins – had strong and well-developed conceptions of belonging to a common nation.
Not the Hungarians. Nor the Poles, like Count Rozwadowski who seamlessly transitioned from being an Austro-Hungarian General to being Poland's Chief of Staff during the Battle of Warsaw. One could go on.
So strong, in fact, that they resisted incorporation into the kind of centralised absolutist states characteristic of 18th-century Europe.
Even Prussia under Fredrick the Great wasn't that centralized.
The Habsburg Monarchy was nearly torn apart by the pressures of such policies pursued by Joseph II, who rescinded most of them on his deathbed in 1790.
The Hapsburgs, served a purpose. It was in the interest of Russia and England to keep it together. Even Napoleon saw it had its uses. What did for them was the crazy Hungarians.
In the kingdoms of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, nationalism was pioneered in the 19th century by patriotic nobles keen to assert their ‘state right’. That is, their political sovereignty as a corporate nation with the right to manage their own affairs.
The decline of Ottoman Turkey made this inevitable. Still, but for Tzarist Russia's Pan-Slav obsession (shared by Narodniks), perhaps the Empire could have limped along under more favorable economic circumstances.
They were aided by small groups of middle-class publicists and scholars who, under the strong influence of German romanticism, sought to reform and cultivate vernacular languages native to the kingdoms,
This had already happened during the Baroque period.
build narratives of historical continuity for the nations, and educate the broader masses in order to make them productive members of the nation at large.
Or give idle folk an entertaining book to read.
Kohn saw exactly this romantic veneration of the common folk as the root of reactionary non-Western nationalism.
Nobody does 'folksy' like an American politician. Yet, as Marx pointed out, America was more modern than any country in Europe.
He even claimed in The Idea of Nationalism that, after 1806, local central European elites proclaimed ‘the uniqueness of the folk … as an aggressive factor in the struggle against Western society and civilisation.’
Against French Imperialism? Sure. But Napoleon, too, celebrated his peasant soldiers- each of whom carried in his knapsack the baton of a Marshall of France.
An exaggeration of the role played by some nationalist publicists during the Napoleonic Wars, whose vitriolic anti-French views were more important to Wilhelmine or First World War-era German nationalists than 19th-century ones.
This is not a complete sentence. The plain fact is ultra-nationalists in Germany looked to Luther who said ' I, the German prophet seek salvation and blessedness not for myself but for the Germans." But Luther himself saw John Huss, who had a similar position for the Czechs, as a hero.
German liberal nationalists of the first half of the 19th century contrasted their envisioned nation-state not with Western society and civilisation, but with the reactionary princely confederation in which they lived.
Disraeli, in 'Vivian Gray' painted a vivid picture of the smaller, more badly ruled, German principalities.
When national revolts broke out in Greece or Poland, German nationalists cheered their fellow Europeans fighting for freedom against despotic regimes.
So did the Brits who also supported the Latin American revolutionaries.
They largely recognised the liberal struggle as a cosmopolitan European one, not as a narrowly German one nor as one that existed in opposition to ‘the West’.
Germans decided that Shakespeare was one of their own because Anglo-Saxons were Teutonic. Then they decided they were Aryans- like the Hindus. I was born in 'Benares on the Rhine' which turned Sanskrit philology into a heavy industry.
England and France as bastions of progress and civilisation presented models for admiration, emulation, and – occasionally – envy.
But Holland had been superior to either at an earlier period.
In the 1830s and ’40s, Hungary’s generation of reform nobles who transformed the country’s social and political life were enamoured by England, as were many German intellectuals. England seemed to represent everything that their countries lacked in terms of national and political life, where the prosperity created by liberal social and political ideas allowed for the full flourishing of national life.
Because of industrialization and a vast oceanic mercantile trade. However, Germany had already begun to influence England through Coleridge, Carlyle and the Prince Consort. Young girls started studying German, though speaking that language makes you ugly, so as to turn into the next George Eliot.
The most difficult question faced by liberal nationalists in ‘non-Western’ countries was not how to redraw borders to make nation and state congruous. It was rather how to reconcile the model provided by France, England or the US with their own circumstances.
France was a bad model. Proportional representation is a bad idea.
In other words, how to transform the civic nation from a narrow noble elite
the 'civic nation' had three estates. Burghers or guild masters or prosperous farmers gained a degree of enfranchisement one way or another. Service to the State was another route into the nobility.
to a broader public of educated middle-class men from a confusing collection of linguistically and politically diverse states tied together by the House of Habsburg.
This problem had been solved long ago. The King decided who was or wasn't noble with either letters patent or attainder. There might be a 'nobility of the robe' as well as one of the sword. In Tzarist Russia and Manchu China, service to the state was required or else there was one degradation of status in the table of nobility per generation. However, some ancient Princely lines were exempt.
In 1848, a series of revolutions broke out across Europe.
In England, this was crushed quickly enough. Tzar Nicholas helped the Austrians suppress the revolution in Hungary and urged the Prussian King to backtrack.
Terrified at the sight of disgruntled masses in the streets, European monarchs made once-unthinkable concessions. They called democratically elected assemblies, drafted constitutions and ratified liberal laws. Though by 1850 the revolutions would be defeated – the assemblies closed, constitutions revoked and laws overturned – they had given the middle-class liberal nationalist public its first taste of politics.
Napoleon had done that. With that dynasty restored in Paris, liberals thought history had turned in their favor. They did not foresee that it would be Cavour and Bismark who would unify their respective countries. The disillusionment of the Russian liberals was more extreme after about 1866 when the 'Liberator' Tzar was almost assassinated and started to backtrack.
In 1848, a German National Assembly formed in Frankfurt where revolutionaries produced the first draft constitution for a German nation-state. Hungary, meanwhile, adopted a raft of liberal legislation in spring 1848 that transformed it into a modern parliamentary state. The realisation of the right of ‘historic’ nations like Hungary and Germany (as well as Italy and Poland) to statehood would have meant a de facto partition of central Europe among these four nation-states. Revolutionaries across Europe celebrated the prospect, dismissing the objections of Czechs, Slovaks or Slovenes who would be subsumed in the German or Hungarian nation-states as the cries of ‘unhistoric’ nations or mere ‘fragments of peoples’.
Indeed. The fact is Kings and Emperors served a useful purpose. They could provide a modicum of minority protection- for a fee.
None of these nationalist movements sought to withhold civic rights to members of ethnic minorities.
Sadly, all of them did. This guy might have heard of the Romani people. Hitler killed lots of them. What civic or civil rights did they have?
Rather, they expected them to assimilate,
otherwise they had no civic rights- e.g. the right to hold particular civic offices
as did those minorities who lived in prosperous, progressive Western states.
Like England where Jews to sit in the House of Commons in 1858. Atheists had to wait till 1888.
As one deputy asked in the Frankfurt Parliament
which had seven Jews
in 1848: ‘What would the French say if the Breton, Basque and old Ligurian fragments of peoples declared they no longer wanted to be French?’
The problem the liberals faced was that Austria said either its entire Empire would join or none of it would. This meant they had to offer the crown to Prussia which knew it would be worthless unless the other German Princes agreed.
Deference to the Western nation-state – where the supposedly most advanced ethnic group in the state had become the core of a democratic civic nation – was a common point made in prerevolutionary Hungary as well.
France may have fitted the bill because of the centrality of Paris but Britain did not. Try telling the Scots they are inferior to the English in any way. They will give your head to play with.
The politician Ferenc Pulszky, who himself had travelled extensively in Britain, asked in the 1840s: ‘What do we Hungarians demand of the Slavs[?] … we demand nothing more than what the English ask of the Celtic inhabitants of Wales and high Scotland, nothing more than the French ask of Brittany and Alsace.’
The British Royal family make a point of appearing more Scottish than the Scots. Actually, the majority of Scots are descended from English speakers and never wore the Tartan. Apparently, there is now a Pakistani Tartan. I must say, the Scots are very good at assimilating people unlike the Irish who are still not allowing me to return to my ancestral homeland to claim the throne of Iyerland. Admittedly, I only do this when I am drinking Jameson.
Pulszky could not see why the civic model of nationhood could work for France but not Hungary.
Hungarians be kray kray.
Perhaps 40 per cent of the country spoke Hungarian – not enough to claim that only Hungarian be used in public life
Also Hungarians be kray kray. Not the women- strangely enough. It's just the over-sexed dudes. Very clever, but kray kray.
The Western nation-state was a model for some, but a warning for others. From the enslavement of people of African descent
which happened a lot in Africa
and the displacement of native Americans in the US
or the displacement WASPs fear at the hands of Vivek Ramaswamy who has gone to Springfield, Ohio, with the express purpose of eating everybody's puppy dog or pussy cat. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Palghat Iyers are crypto-Iyengars who are making unfounded allegations that I put garlic in my sambar. You don't see Kamala Harris saying any such thing. Her mother brought her up to be better than that. That's why, come November, I'll be rooting for the first African American President to become an Iyer by displaying political imbecility of a higher order than Sleepy Joe.
to the suppression of minority languages and dialects in France to the disenfranchisement of Catholics in the UK and the gradual elimination of Celtic languages,
Sadly, minority languages can die out by themselves without any suppression.
Western nationalisms were predicated on the homogenising force of a dominant national group that gave no quarter to national minorities in public life.
This also happened in the East and the South and the North without there being any nationalism or, indeed, despite it seeking to preserve an ancestral tongue.
Unsurprisingly, representatives of national minorities in German states and in Hungary near-universally refused to accept subordinate status in someone else’s nation-state. Or to recognise that the nation-state belonged to groups that were themselves minorities.
This was because they had a better option. But a multi-lingual language may accept a minority language or even one which hardly anyone speaks- e.g. Urdu in Pakistan or Bahasa Indonesia or Swahili in East Africa.
Though Bohemia’s elites overwhelmingly spoke German, the majority of Bohemians were Czech speakers. Hungary, meanwhile, was perhaps the most linguistically diverse country in Europe. German dominated its cities, Hungarian the nobility, and Latin served as the official language until 1844. Yet the masses spoke an array of Slavic, Romance, Germanic and Hungarian vernaculars. Only perhaps 40 per cent of the country spoke Hungarian (even by the 1880 census, it was only 46.5 per cent), a plurality but not enough to claim that only Hungarian could be used in public life.
Given the examples set by Western countries,
Switzerland?
it makes sense that Hungarian nationalists presumed that the predominant national vernacular would be the linguistic rallying point for national development.
No. They were kray kray and thought they could revive some long lost National glory.
France, the US and the UK were all home to enormous ethnic, linguistic and racial minorities. But these minorities were either assimilated to the dominant nationality or excluded from national life altogether.
French and English had a copious literature and were, indeed are, very useful. There was also a time when serious scholars needed to learn German.
Conversely, there was little reason to expect that nationally conscious Czechs should have accepted that their state was fundamentally German.
There was no such need. Austria showed it could accommodate reasonable demands for mother tongue instruction and local administration. The problem was that the Hungarians were kray kray.
Or that Hungary’s numerous nationally conscious minorities – Croats with their own subordinate kingdom, Slovaks concentrated heavily in the north, or Romanians who formed majorities in large swathes of Transylvania – should have accepted the conflation of a Magyar ethnic nation with a Hungarian state.
Magyar has only 13 million native speakers. They were crazy to think they could be a great power.
In either case, this had little to do with any kind of distinct idea of nationalism but was caused by inherent contradictions in the model of the idealised Western nation-state in a central European context.
Everybody's ideal of their own nation-state was one when they themselves were super-important. Sadly, even if you have your ideal nation-state all the problems of economics and geopolitics and ideology would remain.
Despite such conflicts and contradictions, central European nationalists did not reject the civic nation.
They didn't reject the rule of law. Sadly, total war tends to put an end to it- more particularly if you are bound to lose.
The final draft of the revolutionary constitution produced by the Frankfurt Parliament declared in the most straightforward civic terms: ‘The German people consists of the citizens of the states that form the German Empire.’
There was no German Empire. There could be if various Kings and Dukes paid allegiance to an Emperor. But Prussia had to defeat Austria for that to happen.
In 1868, a year after the creation of Austria-Hungary out of a unitary Austrian Empire, the new Hungarian government wrote into the constitution that there would be only a single Hungarian nation. Multiple ‘nationalities’ were also recognised, but there was only a single civic nation. Anyone could be a member, but they had to speak, dress and effectively become a Magyar.
The picture was more complicated. The Hungarians made a compromise with the Croats but tended not to honor the agreement. Still, in the Great War, after Germans, Magyar speakers were considered the most loyal troops. Still, there were indications that Hungary wasn't greatly enthused by a war in which victory would mean greater German glory. One opposition politician- Mihaly Karolyi- was trying to do a separate deal with the Entente in return for a guarantee of the Kingdom's borders.
It was an outrage to minority nationalists, but surely no less of an outrage than the national development of Western nation-states.
It may have been an outrage to the new educated class of teachers and petty officials that another language was dominant but peasants and factory workers were little concerned with such matters. The attempt to revive Gaelic in Ireland failed. Though it is a compulsory subject at School only about two percent use it everyday. Welsh may be doing better. However, it is in Belgium and Holland that language is currently a divisive issue.
The French Ministry of Public Instruction found in 1863 that at least a quarter of the country spoke no French at all. For the millions of Occitans in the south – whose Romance tongue was at least related to standard French – to Celtic Bretons in the northwest, rebellious Corsicans and totally unique Basques in the southwest, ‘becoming French’ entailed assimilation into a language and culture that was not quite theirs.
The Franks spoke a Germanic language. The Gauls knew that they had been Romanized. Still, there was some trading of insults between the 'lazy' Southerner and the had working Breton.
The congruence of the French ethnic and civic nations was not a result of pure ideas, but of decades – centuries even – of nation-building.
Lots of Belgians and Swiss people speak French. If more and more French people came to speak French or Italians came to speak Italian, it was because of economic growth which in turn meant money was available for schools. But, even then, parents only sent their kids to those schools if it raised their life-time earnings.
In the latter half of the 19th century, international statisticians
there were no such beasties. Some governments had National statistics. Most did not. Prince Albert had a bee in his bonnet about standardizing weights and measurements. He got some Belgian to arrange 'International Conferences' which failed completely. The UK only went metric when I was a kid though I still buy my vegetables by the pound and my beer by the pint.
were faced with a seemingly intractable question: how could a nation be measured objectively?
Statisticians had no power. Whatever questions they were faced with mattered to nobody at all. Lord Palmerston had power. He could tell Russia and Austria to fuck the fuck off and let the Swiss Protestants chuck the fucking Jesuits out of Switzerland and turn it into a proper Federal Republic.
From the 1850s, a series of conferences had brought together statisticians from across Europe and North America in an attempt to harmonise how countries collected statistics around the world. In 1872, they endorsed the notion that ‘mother tongue’ could determine the boundaries of nationalities.
Fuck off! Wars determined those boundaries. The mother tongue of the Algonquin or the Iroqois didn't matter at all. On the other hand, a census could usefully record mother tongue as well as gender and occupation.
But this was not a universally recognised measure. The following year, the newly founded International Commission on Statistics tasked three Austro-Hungarians with tackling the problem head-on.Karl von Czoernig had made a pretty good ethnographic map of the Empire.
The Austro-Hungarians couldn’t agree. One put forward the civic idea of conscious self-identification, another the ethnic idea that it was ‘racial’, and the third simply argued it was a complicated mix that was difficult to measure universally.
The thing was complicated. One might only speak one's mother tongue to one's grandmother but one could probably get up to speed with it pretty quickly. Equally, one might not want to be seen as belonging to a particular linguistic community- like me pretending I'm actually Chinese.
The tensions between civic and ethnic nationalisms were on full display, but they had little to do with geography.
No. That tension is only on full display when ethnic cleansing occurs. Nobody cares about statisticians or sociologists or academics of various types.
Their range of opinions came at a time in the late 19th century in which ethnic nationalism was increasingly influential across the continent, inspired by the rise of racialist thinking, eugenics and social Darwinism.
Spain chucked out the Jews and Moriscos. But ethnic cleansings and 'folk wanderings' were much older. Apparently some of the Britons chased out by the Anglo Saxons became Bretons and returned with William the Conqueror. Germany may have started the Second World War to grab territory to its East but it ended up losing a lot of land. But shite like this has been going down since the time of the Neanderthals.
By the turn of the 20th century, young radicals across Europe put forth ethnic conceptions of nationhood in which Jews especially were singled out as being a foreign element supposedly unable to be a member of the political community of the nation.
Everybody forgets the Gypsies.
But the appearance of antisemitism did not signal a quick triumph among nationalisms with long traditions of Jewish assimilation. In the years up to 1918, the majority of German Jews insisted that they were simply ‘German citizens of the Jewish faith’. Jews in Hungary were no less assimilated. In Austria and Bohemia, most Jews were German-speakers who similarly identified themselves as German.
During the Great War, Polish Jews felt their lives got better under German occupation. Incidentally, the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte thought the Jews were behind the Young Turk movement. My point is that secular, educated, middle class, Jews were likely to be Nationalists or Socialists or Liberals or espouse some other such ideology as a substitute for their ancestral religion. Zionism was compatible with other convictions- e.g. Socialism or, for British Jews, British Imperialism.
Kohn was one such German-speaking Jewish Bohemian. He embraced Zionism prior to the First World War, at a time when it was a tiny movement among the elite,
Poorer Jews, at least in England, tended to be more well versed in the most advanced political ideologies than 'the elite' which was preoccupied with dressing for dinner and going shooting or hunting with the aristocracy. In Dublin, Leopold Bloom was well up on the latest Zionist propaganda. He was lower middle class.
and assimilated, Jewish communities of central Europe. After stints in Paris and London, he ended up in Palestine in the mid-1920s hoping to live his Zionist beliefs. After a wave of violent riots broke out there in 1929, Kohn grew disillusioned. The same ‘spirit of extreme nationalism among [Austria-Hungary’s] peoples’ that had made the ‘building of a peaceful multiethnic state’ he saw manifesting itself in Palestine too. He opted to abandon Palestine for the US, where he settled in 1933.
This was sensible enough. American Jews were always more conflicted about Israel than British or Russian Jews. In the former case, the assumption was that Israel would be virtually a Commonwealth country. In the latter, any place looked good which was out of reach of the Cossacks.
Unlike in the empire of his youth, or the Jewish state of his dreams, in the US Kohn thought he had found a country in which nationalism as a progressive and tolerant force had produced a truly just and liberal society.
Because Kohn was White.
The contrast between this US reality and the exclusivist ambitions of German, Zionist or Czech nationalists deeply moved the former lawyer-cum-historian.
I suppose he wasn't tuning into Father Coughlin on the Radio.
Nationalism, he concluded, was not the problem, but only a certain ‘type’ of non-Western nationalism.
The problem with Nationalism is that it can lead to your launching unwinnable wars. But no 'ism' has a monopoly on stupidity.
But nationalisms – both Western and non-Western – contain a complicated mixture of civic and ethnic factors, excluding some while offering others the chance for inclusion through assimilation.
No. A nationalism can have the rule of law such that resident aliens can thrive well enough without having any political rights. Saudi Arabia is an example. Assimilation may be not be desirable as it may dilute the entitlements of the 'sons of the soil'.
The state acts as the most powerful force for both. That’s why historians of nationalism like to say states make nations, not the other way around.
First there were tribes and then, when tribes came together, there were Nations some of which developed a State apparatus. But that had a lot to do with economics.
Nationalism is, by definition, exclusivist insofar as it excludes those who do not think of themselves as a part of the nation.
Nope. It includes them. Ask a conscript or a guy who has to do jury service or one of those crazy American red-necks who belongs to the 'sovereign citizen movement' and thus thinks he doesn't need to pay taxes.
Citizenship cannot force people to feel part of a civic nation, just as citizenship does not stop some from trying to exclude others from their ethnic nation.
Citizenship is a matter of law. Either there is the rule of law, or there isn't. To be more accurate, either- for a given person, legal remedies are accessible or that isn't the case.
Today, it feels vaguely accurate to say that countries like the US, the UK or France base their national identity on the ‘civic’ nationhood of common citizenship. Poland, Hungary, Czechia or even Russia, on the other hand, appear wedded to a more ethnic idea of nationhood rooted in a common language, traditions and myths of origin.
are Russian speaking Ukrainians, Russian. Zelensky doesn't think so.
It would be an error to read the world of 2024 into the past, as much as it would be an error to read the world of 1944 into the past.
It would be an error to think economic and strategic considerations don't determine outcomes. The rule then is the same as the rule now- don't start wars you are bound to lose.
An error to assume that today’s ethnic homogeneity in central and eastern European countries, as well as the inclusive nationhoods of Western democracies, are nothing but the consummation of eternal and essential truths rather than the result of contingent historical events. Unfortunately, this was precisely Kohn’s error.
The only error here is to assume that people who study politics or history aren't as stupid as shit. People who make history or who wield power may use some convenient 'ism' or the ravings of some so-called scholar. But they could always find some other 'ism' or nutter to serve their purpose.
In many ways, Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism is really a book about a prototype of the Sonderweg (‘special path’) thesis, seeking to explain where German history had ‘gone wrong’ to such an extent that it led to Nazism.
Germany was playing catch-up and thought it could find shortcuts of various sorts. But what made its path 'special' was its geographical location. It could either dominate or be dominated. With hindsight, it should have settled for the latter option. Germany is safer now its army trains with broomstick handles painted black.
Why it did not follow the supposedly inclusive path of other Western countries like France, UK and the US but instead went down a fascist path that culminated in the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Like Italy, there was a clear and present danger from crazy Communists. We have to understand that Fascism was slightly better than Stalinism- till it started picking fights it could not win.
Yet the US of the 1930s that Kohn was so enamoured with was a country whose extremely restrictive immigration policies sought to retain ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ethnic dominance,
Nonsense! There was large scale Irish and German and Scandinavian and Italian immigration. German-Americans are the single largest ethnic group reflecting the relative poverty of much of Germany. The Americans were also cool with Arab and Persian immigrants. Where the drew the line was at Indians, Chinese, Japanese etc. Indeed, they decided to grant the Philippines independence rather than risk those handsome people coming in and taking their jobs.
to which end much of the country mandated racial segregation until the 1960s. With few exceptions, over the past three centuries, the building of all modern nation-states required one ethnic group dominating and assimilating others.
Which 'ethnic group' dominates India? I suppose you could say Hindus dominate India. Is there an 'Indian race'? Who can say? But who or what is a 'true born Englishman'? Daniel Defoe gave this answer-
Looking for the ‘roots’ of central and eastern Europe’s lagging behind the West in modernisation,
was simply a matter of economics. The Western European littoral was bound to develop more rapidly thanks to Oceanic trade. True, Portugal and Spain failed to develop their internal markets and suffered a type of 'resource curse' from their vast Empires. Having crazy monarchs didn't help.
and also at the horror of Nazism, led Kohn to make anachronistic claims about the long-term ethnic continuity and nature of their nations.
They were good enough for the period. What was clear was that Europe had been provincialized. It could no longer do 'balance of power' by itself because power had shifted away from it. It would have to give up its colonies and seek peaceful means of gaining affluence.
Civic and ethnic nationalisms were never two distinct courses of historical development taken by different nations, but in fact two different aspects of the development of almost all modern nation-states.
Nope. People who live and intermarry in a particular place become an ethnos. If they are sufficiently economically developed they may have a state apparatus and something like the rule of law. That's to do with civic and civil and other types of rights for which there are legal remedies. That's it. That's the whole story.
The tension between them unfolded across the 19th and 20th centuries as nationalism spread across Europe and the world.
Such tensions have been unfolding for millennia. So long as there is scarcity, there will be economics and armies to defend or extend the reach of economies. Still, at the moment, I suppose a journalist could make a bit of money gassing on about East European Nationalism and how it might turn totes evil. Also Nazi vampires from under the earth might rise up any day now.
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