Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly, and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:
Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.
Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.
But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. […] At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.
Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.
Well, that’s a partial explanation of why there are Hungarians everywhere you look.
Here’s what’s curious about the “getting Magyarized” notion. It sounds like some, maybe most, of these students were at university to pursue vocations as Protestant pastors in multi-ethnic/multi-lingual “Hungary.” Whatever intellectual or society types a Protestant pastor may otherwise mix with, he would have been expected to preach and conduct services in the ordinary language of his parishioners, whether that be Magyar, Slovak, German, or something else (speakers of the other-than-those-three languages then-current in pre-Trianon Hungary would have been less likely to be Protestant but anything’s possible). Moreover, Protestantism came in various not-entirely-interchangeable flavors and in those days you needed to commit to one -you couldn’t be a “generic Protestant” pastor. And within the Hungarian lands, Protestant Slovak-speakers were much more likely to be Lutheran than Calvinist, whereas Protestant Magyar-speakers were much more likely to be Calvinist than Lutheran (to this day, Slovakia’s small Calvinist or perhaps post-Calvinist minority is mostly from the ethnic-Hungarian minority). So Slovaks attending Jena (historically a Lutheran university, although I don’t know if things had gotten sufficiently mixed up by the early 19th century that aspirants to the Calvinist clergy might also go there) as would-be Lutheran pastors were going down a career path where they would be statistically likely need to function professionally in Slovak. Of course, maybe they could function in Slovak at work on Sundays and be Magyarized for social advantage the rest of the week. Or maybe they lost their faith due to exposure to trendy newfangled ideas at university (Hegel and the rest ..) and instead of becoming pastors became the sort of good-for-nothing rootless intelligentsia that tended to fuel 19th-century nationalism.
you couldn’t be a “generic Protestant” pastor.
As Prussia’s Frederick William III learned when he fell into the classic xkcd #927 trap.
Separately, the idea that the actually-existing boundaries of actually-existing France perfectly coincided in Herder’s day with what more ambitious French nationalists thought they ought to be is ahistorical. (The present within-Europe boundaries that most present-day nationalists are I suppose reconciled to are essentially those of the 1860-1870 interlude between a military victory and a military defeat.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_borders_of_France
Yes, and I’m not sure I understand what is “linguistic nationalism” for him.
As I understand the idea is NOT that French intellectuals don’t need it because they’re already linguistic nationalists (par excellence or not).
But then he says, no doubt what language French citizens should speak – that is, he recongises that language is ideologically important (perhaps not only for whatever he calls French “nationalism”, but for this nationalism as well).
Is the idea that it is not linguistic nationalism because the French “have always been like that”, while “nationalism” is invented in 19th century or else it is not nationalism?
Or is the idea that nationalism must necessarily compete with another ideology?
Two more tidbits about the shifting borderlands between French nationalism and German nationalism.
1. Apparently one of the big-deal events in German intellectual-etc. history is the young Herder first meeting and becoming friendly with the even-younger Goethe, which occurred circa 1770 in Strasbourg. Which at that point had been under French rule since late in the previous century but was still a predominantly German-speaking place with, crucially, a university that was still a German-speaking institution (to the extent it had moved on from Latin …) that thus attracted scholars and intelligentsia from all over Germany-as-a-geographical-expression. It was only when the Jacobins replaced the Bourbons that the Universität Straßburg was subjected to linguistic nationalism and transmogrified into the Université de Strasbourg.
2. I had not immediately remembered that in addition to the usual back-and-forth over control of Alsace and Lorraine with the fortunes of war, the instability of the official borders had lasted until 1956, when the French rather reluctantly accepted that they needed to abandon dominion over their post-war Protectorat de la Sarre and allow that piece of territory (sub nomine Saarland) to be annexed by West Germany. Just a prelude to losing Algeria, a certain sort of French nationalist may have thought in hindsight.
@drasvi: I think the idea is that at least in the context of the 19th-century rise of a certain sort of nationalism in Central/Eastern Europe, the French were seen as *already* having exactly the sort of modern nation-state (based on a semi-fictive common ethnicity based on a semi-fictive common language) that certain sorts of Slovaks etc. could only dream about. Which is broadly true, but may overlook or assume away the question of whether France was really that sort of modern-nationalist place before 1789, or only afterwards.
@drasvi: to embroider a bit on what JWB said: i think “linguistic nationalism” is mainly just a phrase to highlight the ways that emerging nationalisms in some places (eastern europe in particular) used language as their key defining element, or/and a specifiying term to point to the ways that nationalisms operate in the linguistic sphere, or/and a term to mark the importance of the invention and imposition of a “national language” to nationalisms’ nation-creating projects.
the first of these is an important phenomenon because by the time the “nation” is invented in the 18thC, the western european states that embraced it had already settled on* a lect to take on the role of “national language” in a comparatively linguistically homogenous area** (and the most prominent movements seeking to become nation-states – the german and italian nationalists – followed suit as soon as they existed) . that allowed the “Land” piece of the nation-defining trinity of Land, Language, and Bloodline to be the core element and starting-point for establishing a nation.
but in 19thC eastern europe, the level of linguistic diversity in any given area was a lot higher, making it pretty much unsustainable to start nation-creation projects with Land. and Bloodline has always been the most transparently fictitious person of the trinity, so nobody really wants to start there***. so Language became the founding principle for those movements, and the past 175 years or so have been about linguistically-defined nationalist movements fighting each other over who gets to make which Land as linguistically homogenous as possible in which direction (and doing internal processes of linguistic homogenization to make the “national language” the only one in use).
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* spain being the pioneer, with the 1492 grammar of castellano as the key inflection point. but they had the model of standardized/classicized arabic as an imperial language a lot closer to hand than the rest of western europe, and so were able to see the advantages of linguistic homogenization to a state that sought to be imperial long before anyone had the notion of a nation-state.
**often with the most linguistically different lects confined to peripheral areas, and targeted by assimilation schemes (as with euzkadi in france and spain, breton and alsatian in france, or the celtic languages in the english imperial core, for example – and with greek in future-italy as an example from the wave of aspiring nation-states).
*** except the nationalist movements that use religion as a proxy for it, whether in a negative mode like the Young Turks and kemalists and the original german Anti-Semites****, or in a positive mode like Zionism with jewishness and most strains of u.s. white nationalism with protestant christianity (Christian Identity even puts it in their name!).
**** whose profound innovation is obscured by approaches to contemporary Antisemitism that treat it as either a psychological or existential/structural issue rather than a specific, fairly young political ideology (an approach which also makes it basically impossible to effectively combat).
JWB, well, in part it is not true (as you pointed out above), and in part it must mean that the French already were “linguistic nationalists” (after all, it is “linguistic nationalism” and not “modern nationalism”). And in part it is modern mass education/mass media rather than local culture that make it possible.
My problem here is mostly with the concept of “linguistic nationalism” that excludes France. I learned first about it (not the name, just language ideology and ideas of nationhood) as a part of the explanation of the peculiar attitude of French politicians to regional langauges. I was learning Breton. It was presented to me as an uniquely French peculiarity.
Whatever role France played in spread of such ideas, for me they became the Model.
“the ways that emerging nationalisms in some places (eastern europe in particular) used language as their key defining element”
@rozele, yes, in a mixed (wrt some parameter: colour, language, religion) territory the outcome will be different.
Namely, if we assume that our nationalists want to build a state and that they prefer simple shapes to collections of enclaves (simple shapes have some technical advantage, e.g. during wars, but I don’t know if anything about nationalism itself must make a nationalist like them more than kings do), emphasising such a parameter may mean large-scale assimilation or some form of (colour/language/religion/ based) inequality or maybe an alliance of several nationalisms (like: Klingonophones and Vulcanophones are together building a state).
Also I think it can be a langauge like Latin or a conlang and it can be diglossia rather than assimilation (Arab nationalism).
If it assimilation, in such a territory this will imply a really profound change.
But if we’re making a prediction that in such a territory language ideologies are going to be more powerful, it is just not true for France. It is powerful enough there, whether we say they “need” it or not.
“if we’re making a prediction that in such a territory language ideologies are going to be more powerful”
Then our nationalists can choose NOT to associate their nationalism with langauge (“let’s build a Switzerland”), downplay linguistical/ethnic differences – “downplay” not in the sense of forced assimilation and pretending there are not such differences, but in the sense “what do they have to do with politics?” – or else not to choose any approach that requires assimilation for this very reason: too much must be changed, too many opportunities for tensions and conflicts*.
If the territory of the new state is more or less random, we of course can ask if it going to work at all. We also can ask, what about systems where people of cities and peasants (and also “nomads” in the “Oriental” contexts) are different groups. I think they always are different, e.g. in Russia, but in East Europe they could be different linguistically and ethnically as well. Will it work there, given industrialisation and everything?
But still avoiding potentially problematic themes and sharp corners is not an unusual behaviour.
So what I want to say, we expect from a historian that she will ‘explain’ rather than just ‘describe’ historical processes, but the only solid causal link I can propose here is trivial: “assimilation in a very mixed territory implies profound changes”.
*Unless they need either (their new country to be as much unlike what it used to be as possible – or conflicts), which of course does happen with political ideologies:-(
if we assume that our nationalists want to build a state and that they prefer simple shapes to collections of enclaves
these things are pretty much definitional to nationalism. and that’s knowable because nationalism is a deliberately created and deliberately spread ideology that was created as an innovation in the political sphere by very self-conscious activist intellectuals, and spread through processes that have been very thoroughly studied. the idea that it’s some kind of ‘natural’ phenomenon has often been part of that ideology, but is quite transparently an ideological fiction, and not related to actual history.
but/and: while the goal of a state is central to nationalist movements, all contemporary states aren’t nation-states. and trying to look at them as if they were is a sure way to misunderstand what’s going on with them.
a state like switzerland is not the product of a nationalist movement – no such thing existed when it was founded – and is not a nation-state. and as i understand it, the language/lineage groups within it aren’t assembled as constituent “nations” in the way that the language/lineage constituents of, say, belgium, are. what has developed around the preexisting swiss state could be called a “civic nationalism”, but i think is better understood as a racialized/religified (white/christian) patriotism (or stateolatry, if you will) that expresses itself in the language of nationalism because that is the basic language of european statehood at this point.
a state like the u.s., though created during the years when nationalism was being birthed, is also not a nation-state, in a quite different way. the u.s. is certainly, in practice, a state created by and for white christians, and has often sought to create a unitary white christian nation within its imperial core, but it is structured as a state-of-its-citizens, not as a nation-state. in fact, the contemporary movements within the u.s. most committed to the project of a nation-state – the groups that make up the white nationalist far right – are the ones most insistent on the necessity of completely restructuring the u.s. state.
A 19th century Eastern European nationalist wants everyone in his homeland (possibly expansively defined) to speak the true language of the homeland; he doesn’t think everyone in the world really ought to learn it. That’s more than enough to create decades of conflicts and ethnic cleansing, but for a French nationalist (or an American, or even an Arab), it seems kind of unambitious. Surely everyone everywhere, deep down, knows they could become a better person by joining us?
Perfectly true of French, naturally; but of course that rules out all the other candidates. I mean, say what you like about the beauties of Arabic, and I will agree; but at the end of the day there is no getting away from the fact that it’s simply not French, is there?
Certain early-modern Greek nationalists may have once had the more sweeping vision Lameen describes (possessed as they are of a language once known by the more educated sort throughout the then-known world), but most have narrowed their scope due to the various indignities and reverses of the last century or so and content themselves with comparatively modest irredentist claims against immediate neighbors. Far as I can tell, they don’t even want Sicily or Apulia back!
@rozele, but then Herder is not a nationalist! For what I know, his ideas imply break-up of such “monstrosities” as multi-ethnic states rather than assimilation (nothing that a French nationalist could like).
And our author calls his ideas “linguistic nationalism”
Of course we can say that his ideas are nationalistic, while he is not a nationalist – but then our language is messy.
i think the state vs nation thing is getting in the way again. assimilation, in the nationalist imaginary, is something that can only happen with people who are already “naturally” part of the nation, which is supposed to be united by bloodline. so to turn a multi-ethnic empire into nation-states starts with correctly identifying its constituent nations (often using language as a proxy for bloodline), and then dividing the territory among them, just as herder declared. it is only in the context of that effort that those who have strayed from the true national path – speaking slovincian rather than polish, for example, or gascon rather than ‘standard’ french – can be brought back into their proper place within the nation. similarly, as part of that effort, the “alien” elements within the national space – no matter how assimilated – must be removed, lest they continue to damage the unity of the nation. what defines alien-ness is of course endlessly negotiable, both socially and legally: german jews are the classic example, but the experiences of the deportees of 1922 provide a set of examples of how many different ways those negotiations can go.
the role of language in these processes shifts over time: often it’s at first the anchor point for establishing that a nation exists (and debates about what lects are “languages” become central to the question of which groups of people get to be nations – see all the permutations of the “macedonian question”, for example), then becoming secondary to the supposed bloodline whose existence it established, then transforming again into a sign of adherence / alliegance to the nation. but its centrality is maybe most clear in nationalist projects like zionism or u.s. white nationalism that are based on asserting the existence of a nation that unifies settler colonial populations with transparently independent histories. there, the imposition of a single language becomes a key practice to establishing the nation, and then to maintaining its unity, and stubborn retention of families’ or communities’ pre-existing lects is understood (and punished) as an anti-national act.
@rozele
Unfortunately, it is even more complicated than that. The Irish nation is notably not connected by blood, land, language, religion or any other tangible or objectively measurable/quantifiable thing, although nationalists have tried to pin it down that way. Even some Irish version of T.S. Eliot’s cultural hallmarks for Englishness would probably not work. It is probably something like being black, in that there is a self-identification and a validation by a generally accepted in-group (the two may be at variance), with lots of edge-cases and multiple identifications.
An interesting comparison!
A relevant excerpt at Far Outliers:
@PP (and @hat – thanks for the fascinating excerpt!):
yes, absolutely: the “nation” is always something assembled out of pure fiction, actively constructed by a nationalist movement. there is no way to understand any such thing (whether its concrete expression takes the form of a nation-state with imperial ambitions or a tiny and insignificant political movement) in a meaningful way by taking any of the claims that nationalisms make about their desired constituency’s “natural” unity as anything but ideological invention. the gymnastics and contortions that nationalisms devise to construct a nation are wildly varied and always messy. seeking some “tangible or objectively measurable/quantifiable thing” underlying any national project is a mug’s game at best, and only reinforces the common fiction of all nationalisms – that “nations” are “natural” entities that should be the basis for structuring human life (through the form of the state). there’s no preexisting “natural” there there.
blackness is something different, though. there certainly are black nationalisms, some pan-diasporic (like garvey’s UNIA) and some territorially specific (like the Republic of New Afrika), but they’re only one mode of black self-understandings, which encompass everything from explicitly anti-nationalist pan-diasporist thinking (like paul gilroy’s work, or zoe samudzi’s), to more phenomenologically-based modes that are harder to define in conventional political terms (like, in very different ways, the approaches of frank wilderson, hortense spillers, saidya hartman, or bob kaufman). what i – from outside – see them sharing is a focus on the concrete history of colonization and enslavement, and the specific development of antiblackness as ideology and practice (which is to say, the invention of “race” in any form we can recognize). and that basis in the historically concrete has complicated the relationship of blackness to nationalism, even within explicitly black nationalist movements (just as it has and does the various projects aimed at reconfiguration of indigenous politics in the americas into nation-shaped forms in the past 200ish years).
@PlasticPaddy: From what some informed observers have told me, the orthodox attitude toward Irish – that it’s every Irish person’s native language in principle, they just need to rediscover it – has done real harm to it in practice. Students aren’t taught it as the speech of a struggling minority community but as a stuffy old museum piece, and those that do achieve halfway-fluency exert a curious kind of linguistic imperialism, with native pronunciation and grammar being marginalized in favor of the anglicized gaelscoil variety.
Not to mention the petty insistence on correcting anyone who calls the language Gaelic even though countless of its speakers and proponents have called it just that (and that it’s called Gaeilge, not Éireannis, in Gaeilge), or the punctilious reminders that “the Republic of Ireland” is not the state’s name (but don’t say Eire or Southern Ireland, those are slurs), or the berserk button of “the British Isles” (don’t mention Claudius Ptolemy, or the Indian Subcontinent, or that it retains wide currency in the rest of the world because people simply find it less clunky than the (non-)alternatives). I love the Irish and have the one-quarter ancestry legally required to set foot in my state, but goodness if their netizens don’t provide my mental benchmark for the most trivial – and, fortunately, harmless – manifestations of small-nation chauvinism.
Are there any “natural” non-fictive ways of organizing human societies? Or do humans construct communities around fictions the way beavers build lodges out of trees?
To tie together religion in Bosnia and language in Ireland, surely the or at least a common perception of Bosnian Muslims by local non-Muslim nationalists is that they were the unfortunate descendants of weak-willed folks who had in prior centuries collaborated with the foreign occupation (British, Ottoman, whatever …) by adopting the occupier’s religion (language, whatever …) and they thus need to “rediscover” their true ancestral religion (or whatever …) – even though Croats and Serbs might disagree about what that was.
The problem of course is that the nth-generation descendants of those who personally shifted religion or language under duress may themselves feel not the least bit under duress about the situation and instead find that their immediate rather than remote religious/linguistic patrimony is what feels “natural.”
Or do humans construct communities around fictions the way beavers build lodges out of trees?
I’m not sure what you mean here. Trees must exist before beavers can build lodges from them. Fictions are made by humans, so fictions don’t exist before humans make them.
I think it’s safe to say that animal kinds and environment kinds develop together, or hook up together from different origins and possibly continue together for a while.
If all the trees died, it’s not certain that beavers could adapt so as to build lodges from pulp fiction.
Humans don’t need lodges, they find refuge in Cave shadows.
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So, let’s leave aside the question of how the history of language develops. On a smaller scale, Heidegger certainly thinks that language isn’t merely how we experience the world, for he rejects the idea that we start out with two poles: the world and our perception. No, for him the world is what shows itself to us, and it shows itself to us in the as-ness of language. Language is the house of being. It’s also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.
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[The language thing or Heidegger made dense]
@Stu: You may have hit upon why humans have a wider geographical range than beavers do.
I cycle around the former Yugoslavia nearly every summer for a couple of months, spending a lot of time talking with local men in village cafes, and I have never actually heard a desire from overtly nationalist Serbs that their Muslim neighbours revert to Orthodoxy, at least not that I can recall. The overwhelming opinion I’ve heard in Republika Srpska or near the Sanjak is that the local Muslims need to just all fuck off to Turkey or wherever, unless (though Serbs do seem a bit ashamed to say it out loud) they just get outright slaughtered when the next big war comes along and Russia rushes in to support the Serbs.
I don’t think that vehemence of opinion is all that surprising after so much water under the bridge. I’m curious how many hard-core Unionists in Northern Ireland, for example, have wanted their Nationalist enemies to see the light of Union instead of just disappearing through one way or another, or mutatis mutandis.
I am pleased to become better informed via Christopher Culver about the current situation in/near Bosnia. I was relying on my memory of various secondary sources that may have been describing a former era (before quite so much water had gone under the bridge) and/or were inaccurate even as to the era they described, perhaps by failing to distinguish between the musings of impractical big-city ideologues and the more practical-if-brutal attitudes of more typical local-village types.
One possibility is that the evolution of a self-conscious Bosniak nationalism and the modernish (post-1878?) ethnogenesis it may have helped engender was pretty explicitly grounded on rejecting the notion that they were wayward Serbs who needed to reconnect with their authentic Serbian roots and that eventually the Serbian nationalists themselves found this so convincing they stopped regarding them as wayward Serbs. By most accounts the (Muslim) Bosniaks got along tolerably well with the Croats during the Ustashe era during which they fell under Ustashe rule – I don’t know how Croatian nationalist theory of the time accounted for them or if pragmatic concerns simply overrode theory in the short-term.
@rozele reminded me
“xenophobia is bad” > “let’s make people alike so xenophobia is impossible” (peaceful evil)
Or (militant evil)
“xenophobia is bad” > “xenoi/ai are bad” (provided that 1. xenophobia inevitably follows from variation 2. we care not about people, xenoi or not, but about “stablity” of our state and it is this stability is put in danger by xenophobia).