Inventing national identity, Le Monde Diplomatique

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Inventing national identity, Le Monde Diplomatique



from Le Monde Diplomatique, June 1999
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/06/?c=05thiesse

Democracy Softens Forces of Change

Inventing national identity
by Anne-Marie Thiesse

In the dispute over who "owns" Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian
nationalists brandish arguments from history going back to antiquity
or the Middle Ages. Yet nations are a recent creation, barely two
centuries old. They were literally invented. And, once invented, they
were consolidated by founding myths - and sometimes by bouts of ethnic
cleansing. The recent upsurge of nationalism in Europe reflects above
all a failure of politics and the difficulty of forging new collective
identities based on a genuine political project.

Over a century ago the French historian Ernest Renan predicted the
death of nations in Europe. "Nations are not eternal. They had a
beginning and they will have an end. And they will probably be
replaced by a European confederation" (1). His prophecy would be about
to come true as the millennium draws to a close, were it not for an
inherent contradiction in European politics. Just as the maturing
European Union is beginning to supersede the nation-state, the banner
of nationalism is being raised all over the continent - not only in
former communist countries but also in Western European states like
Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

The supranational prospect held out by EU appears to be threatened in
two ways: by a deficiency of European identity, in striking contrast
to the continuing vigour of national identities, and by a process of
fragmentation into micro-nations. The real issue in this month's
European Parliament elections is a supra-national Europe versus a
union of nation-states. But these alternatives raise crucial questions
that need to be squarely faced. In the first case, supra-national
sovereignty must be based on a "European people". But how is such a
people to come into being? In the alternative case, how are the number
and composition of the constituent nation-states to be decided?
 
Nations are much younger than their official histories would have us
believe. No nation in the modern, that is political, sense of the word
existed before the ideological revolution that began in the 18th
century and conferred political power on "the people". From that time
on, the nation was conceived as a broad community united by a link
different in nature both from allegiance to the same monarch and from
membership of the same religion or social estate. The nation no longer
derived from the ruler. It was henceforth independent of the
contingencies of dynastic or military history. This powerfully
subversive concept opened the way for entry into the age of democracy;
but if it was to succeed, the future had to be justified in terms of
loyalty to the past.

In order to move from a Europe of kings to a Europe of nations,
disparate population groups had to be convinced that despite their
obvious differences they shared an identity that was the basis for a
collective interest. This was no easy matter. In 1800 the common
identity of a Prussian landowner and a Bavarian craftsman, a Magyar
nobleman and a peasant on his estates, or a burgher of Florence and a
Calabrian shepherd, was far from self-evident. It was, in any case,
far less certain than identities based on social status, religion or
attachment to a fairly restricted local area. To produce Germans,
Hungarians or Italians, it was necessary to postulate a community of
birth and continuity of filiation through the ages.

We have become used to distinguishing between two opposing concepts of
the nation: the French concept, based on free, rational allegiance of
the individual to a political collectivity, and the German concept of
objectively determined membership of an organic body. However, the
construction of European nations has always involved a mix of both of
these concepts, even if the proportions have varied with the political
and social context. For generations of French schoolchildren, the
teaching of civic rights and duties has always gone hand in hand with
the rote learning of a unified national history starting from the
Gauls that ignores or glosses over wide differences in regional
experience.

Parallel identities

Paradoxically, what Europeans most have in common is the fact that for
the last two centuries their forbears were engaged in a joint
endeavour to manufacture national identities which, though
superficially specific, share an underlying similarity. It is easy
enough to draw up a list of the symbolic and material items which any
real nation needs to possess: a history establishing its continuity
through the ages, a set of heroes embodying its national values, a
language, cultural monuments, folklore, historic sites, distinctive
geographical features, a specific mentality and a number of
picturesque labels such as costume, national dishes or an animal
emblem.

The list is prescriptive, as proved by the systematic emphasis placed
on all these items by nations that have recently achieved political
recognition as well as those whose claims to nationhood have not yet
been recognised. But in 1800 we were still in the first stages of
fabricating what Benedict Anderson has called "imagined communities"
(2). The common model for the generation of national identities was
forged by European intellectuals in the course of the 19th century
through a process of mutual observation, imitation and transfer of
ideas and expertise. The writing of national histories according to
liberal ideology, the concept of historic monuments, the idea of
ethnographical surveys and the painting of emblematic landscapes are
the fruit of this ongoing commerce in symbols.

Codification of the national languages that were gradually introduced
in place of a mosaic of dialects was also part of a joint undertaking.
The procedures involved extended as far as providing assistance in the
development of national identity to nations that suffered from an
initial deficit of native intellectuals as a result of their political
situation. German, French, English and Russian scholars helped to
establish national identities in Balkan countries emerging from
Ottoman rule. The constitution of a cultural heritage of the Southern
Slavs and the development of Serbo-Croat began with support from
Austrian and German scholars, including the distinguished philologist,
Jacob Grimm. Shortly after the massacre at Chios in 1882, the French
scholar, Claude Fauriel, took it upon himself to prove that modern
Greeks had a true national identity and a cultural heritage
undoubtedly derived from ancient Greece. This concern may seem
strange. It reflects the fact that, up to 1848 at least, the struggle
for the nation and the construction of national identities coincided
to a considerable extent with the struggle for freedom and modernity
waged against absolutism and the remnants of the feudal system.
Progress on either front could appear beneficial to all.

The perspective changed when victory was in sight and demands for
independent statehood according to national criteria were on the point
of succeeding. A practical problem arose. How was national territory
to be defined and the boundaries of the nation decided? Unlike
monarchies and empires, nations cannot invoke the right of conquest.
Their claim to territory can be based only on ancestral rights of
possession. A nation worthy of the name can never admit to aggressive
intentions towards its neighbours. It always claims to be acting in
defence of its inalienable heritage and right to freedom, come good or
ill (which is why nations sometimes commemorate their defeats as well
as their victories).

And so history, ethnography and philology were invoked to establish
national property rights over territories on which different
populations had coexisted or succeeded each other through the
centuries. Commenting on the controversies surrounding the drawing of
new state boundaries in the wake of the first world war, the French
sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss remarked angrily that "it
is almost comical to see little-known, poorly investigated items of
folklore invoked at the Peace Conference as proof that the territory
of this or that nation should extend over a particular area because a
certain shape of dwelling or bizarre custom is still in evidence" (3).
Such controversies are all the harder to resolve as the national
principle will hardly tolerate a statute of limitations on the earlier
occupation of territory. To accept such a statute would be to
legitimise the right of possession by invasion or the right of a third
party to establish itself on a territory which the previous occupants
had been forced to leave.

Serb nationalists accuse the Albanians of having taken advantage of
the Serbian kingdom's defeat by the Ottoman Empire in order to settle
in Kosovo. Albanian nationalists retort that their own ancestors, the
Illyrians, whom they claim as the founders of their nation, lived in
the territory hundred of years before the Slavs invaded the Balkan
peninsula. In the 20th century, as the claims of prior occupation
escalated, archaeology and physical anthropology were added to the
range of sciences that could be enrolled in support of nationalist
demands. They have been invoked, for example, in the dispute between
the Israelis and the Palestinians, and also in support of the
conflicting claims to Transylvania. The Romanians claim to be
descended from the Dacians, a people romanised after their defeat by
the imperial armies and immortalised in the bas-reliefs on Trajan's
Column. The Latin nature of the Romanian language, purged of its
Slavonic elements and transcribed in the Latin alphabet from 1848
onwards, was a major constituent in the construction of a Romanian
identity. But although the Romanians insist that their ancestors have
occupied a territory that includes Transylvania uninterruptedly for
2,000 years, the Hungarians deny any continuity between the Dacians
and the Romanians. They claim that the earliest presence of Romanians
in Transylvania is attested several hundred years after the ancestors
of the Hungarians established themselves there. This latter-day Dacian
war, which began 200 years ago, continues unabated in academic
publications and on the Internet.

Reconciling state with nation

The first world war gave birth to the League of Nations, the second to
the United Nations Organisation. In each case the word "nations" was
used, not "states". For in the 20th century the nation is considered
throughout the world as the only legitimate basis for the state. The
struggles against European colonial powers were conducted by national
liberation movements, and any claim to secede from an existing state
necessarily involves proclamation of the existence of a specific,
oppressed nation.

Nevertheless, the formation of nation-states raises a major problem:
how can state and nation be made to coincide? The "nationality
principle", regularly invoked since the 19th century to justify the
political division of a geographical area on a democratic basis, is an
attractive universal moral principle that disguises the economic and
military power relations at work in the formation of states. And even
if the principle were to be fully respected, the problem would not
disappear: the area within the boundaries of any state is
intrinsically heterogeneous and contains populations that can claim to
belong to various nationalities.

There are, however, other ways of making states nationally
homogeneous. The most violent method is to expel the "national
minorities". The tragic "ethnic cleansing" operations in former
Yugoslavia are only the most recent examples of this method. It has
been applied frequently in the course of this century, as witness the
massive population "exchanges" between Greece and Turkey after the
first world war, the expulsion of the Sudetan Germans from
Czechoslovakia after the second (in response to Nazi annexation of the
region), and above all, the Nazis' attempt to render Germany
Judenrein. The extreme right-wing movements of the present day
continue unhesitatingly along the same path with their calls for the
expulsion of immigrant populations in the name of national salvation.

Still other ways of achieving national homogeneity have been
attempted. They have consisted in denying the existence of different
nations within the state. For this purpose politicians have resorted
either to coercion or to inculcating a feeling of belonging to a
single unit. Coercion has been more frequent in states lacking proper
democratic process. Examples are the forced Magyarisation of the Slav
minorities in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire
following the 1867 Compromise, the repression of demands for regional
autonomy in Spain under Franco and, more recently, the forced
Bulgarisation of the Turkish minority (who were even required to
change their patronymics) by the dying communist regime in Sofia.

In democratic states a less brutal approach is generally preferred.
The method is to inculcate a feeling of national unity by the use of
mass propaganda over a long period. School is of course the main
instrument, but the effort extends to all areas of daily life, from
ordinary individual pursuits and leisure activities (particularly
sport) to public holidays, which have increased considerably in the
course of the 20th century and provide a setting for the celebration
of collective identity. In this system, unification does not involve
the denial of diversity. Rather, a hierarchy of values is established
in which everything on the territory of the state derives from the
nation, and local particularisms have meaning and legitimacy only
within that framework.

In the 19th century attempts were made to construct national
identities in Brittany and Provence in accordance with the common
European model (codification of the language, writing of a continuous
specific history, emphasis on cultural and historical monuments, etc.)
Since the economic, political and social context was not propitious,
they were reformulated as regional identities within the framework of
the French nation-state - i.e. components of national identity that
are valuable in themselves but subordinate to the whole (4). Since the
aim is to demote local identities rather than eradicate them, the
violence involved in this type of homogenisation is symbolic rather
than physical. The fact that it can be denounced, at the end of the
20th century, as "cultural genocide" requiring reparation is one of
the signs of a general crisis of confidence in the ability of the
existing nation-states to guarantee the rights of their citizens.

The nation was conceived as a secular brotherhood - at once protector,
vehicle of democracy, and supreme ideal for which people should be
prepared to lay down their lives if necessary. However, the industrial
revolution, the principles of which were established at the same time
as the national principle, gave birth to new social groups and
competing political aspirations. A new collective identity began to be
constructed in the middle of the 19th century - class-based
internationalism as opposed to nationalism based on union between
classes. The struggle between the two, which has been a major theme of
European history in the 20th century, appears to have ended in the
victory of the nation. Although this outcome was probably due to the
failure of attempts to replace capitalism with another mode of
production, it also testifies to the power of the idea of the nation
as a community of solidarity, in which individuals are guaranteed a
place not solely dictated by their economic status.

The battles for civil rights guaranteed by public authorities and for
a relative redistribution of wealth were fought and won in the
framework of democratic nation-states. So now, at the end of the 20th
century, when the globalisation of capitalism is restricting state
control over the production and distribution of wealth, the nation
appears as a refuge - and its disappearance as a terrifying threat to
social cohesion and the living conditions of the most disadvantaged.
 
Although nationalism was discredited by the appalling slaughter that
took place in Europe in the course of two world wars, attachment to
the nation is making a powerful comeback. The upsurge of
micro-nationalisms within established nation-states of Western Europe
probably reflects a belief that reconstituting the state on the basis
of a more "authentic" nation will better protect the rights and
interests of citizens - especially where the territory of the would-be
nation has strong economic potential. Respect for the right of nations
to independent statehood has been relatively scant so far, but it
could lead to the emergence of a still unpredictable number of small
nations and national minorities in Europe. The method of constructing
a national identity is sufficiently well established for it to be
applied rapidly - witness the invention of Padania by Umberto Bossi in
Italy.

Politics lagging behind

In the former communist countries the sudden collapse of the system
raised the urgent problem of forging a new social link that could
serve as the basis for rebuilding civil society, promoting the idea of
a collective interest and legitimising state authority. The national
idea could be used for that purpose, with a view to establishing
democracy. But it proved just as easy to use it to avoid the real
problems and exacerbate nationalist feelings that divert attention
from economic disaster, the criminalisation of public life and the
dramatic impoverishment of the population. The groundwork for this
disaster was laid in the last decades of communist rule, when demands
for democracy were diverted by drumming up nationalist passions to the
point where the regimes in power - especially in Ceaucescu's Romania
or Enver Hoxha's Albania - could properly be described as
national-communist (5).

Nations are not eternal. Nationalism's present vigour may be better
explained by the fact that politics has not yet caught up with
economics. The nation, in the modern meaning of the word, appeared at
a time when an enormous economic and technological mutation was
beginning. It was the binding force that permitted the development of
a form of political and social organisation commensurate with the
upheavals that were transforming the lives of whole populations. Now
another radical mutation is beginning, to which the nation is probably
no longer appropriate. There is nothing tragic in this, provided the
idea of the nation is replaced by a new cohesive force that can
guarantee democracy. Such a force will not be produced automatically
by the future forms of economic life. (And let us hope that we are not
necessarily destined to blind submission to market forces). The
history of nations clearly shows that the formation of a collective
identity is a militant undertaking involving a political project.

* Writer. Latest book is La cr�ation des identit�s nationales : Europe
XVIIIe-XXe si�cle, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1999.

(1) Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation", lecture given at the
Sorbonne in Paris on 11 March 1882.

(2) Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities : reflections on the
origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, London, 1991.

(3) Marcel Mauss, "Nations, nationalit�s, internationalisme", in
Oeuvres, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1969.

(4) See Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France. L'exaltation
des regions dans le discours patriotique, Editions de la Maison des
sciences de l'homme, Paris, 1997.

(5) See Pierre and Bruno Cabanes, Passions albanaises, de Berisha au
Kosovo, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1999, and Catherine Durandin, Histoire des
Roumains, Fayard, Paris, 1995.

Translated by Barry Smerin


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