The nation: a reality or myth? — I
In the history of humankind the demise of the Soviet Union proved to be a turning point when, for the working class, history actually turned turtle. It left quite a few wounds gaping and a number of new cauldrons simmering. Nation and religion were two such cauldrons that wasted no time in transforming into volcanoes. In the Balkan states, the fire was conflagrated even before the smoke could billow. Both nationhood and religious fanaticism went about as roaring lions: "The devils went about in a shape by which few but savages and hunters were attracted." And there was no dearth of those. The former communists — if at all they were entitled to this attribute — unsheathed their swords and, in the name of religion, de-scalped their own fellow countrymen.
Besides religion, which too has been sufficiently diluted by western values, Serbs, Croats and Bosnians had nothing uncommon among them. According to Noel Malcolm, "Only few individuals in the entire Balkan peninsula could honestly claim a racially pure ancestry for themselves. And yet, at many times during the last two centuries, bogus theories of racial-ethnic identity had dominated the national politics of Balkan land. The modern Bosnia can be called Slav due to language, culture and a thousand years of history. No typical Bosnian face can be seen in Bosnia." Eric Hobsbawm peeps into the past and adds: "In the past, Croats spoke three dialects — Èakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian. The two of these dialects (most likely the stratification of Èakavian and Štokavian) ultimately shaped the literary version. Ljudevit Gaj (1809-72) who wrote the orthography and grammar of the Croatian language was the leading Croat apostle of Illyrianism. His native language both as a speaker and writer was Kajkavian but he decided to opt for Štokavian or Shtokavian. Apparently, it seemed as if the purpose was to show unity and solidarity among south Slavs but the real intentions were a little less than noble. The mission covertly went on to achieve many masqueraded goals. For instance, this helped Štokavian to become a Serb-Croat language though written in different scripts. It ultimately developed as a literary language of the southern Slavs. That is how it helped to curb one kind of nationalism to develop the other. Croatian nationalism retreated while the south Slav one was fostered. This also provided an excuse for both Serb and later Croat expansionism. "The unique Croatian dialectical situation that is the use of three dialects...could not be reconciled with the romantic belief that language was the most profound expression of national spirit. Obviously one nation cannot have three spirits, nor could one dialect be shared by two nationalities" (Hobsbawm).
Finally, Croatian nationalism emerged somewhere around the 1860s. Akin to everywhere else, one finds no exception here too. It was led by the petit bourgeoisie — the retailers and tradesmen flaunted its flag. During the great depression of the 19th century, it got a firm hold among the economically hard pressed lower middle class. According to Mirjana Gross, "It mirrored the opposition of the petite bourgeoisie to Yugoslavism as an ideology of the wealthier bourgeoisie. In this instance, since neither language nor race was available to mark the chosen people off from the rest, a historic mission of the Croat nation to defend Christianity against invasion from the east served to provide strata lacking in self-confidence with the required sense of superiority." By the end of the 19th century, the same devastated middle classes ignited the fire of anti-Semitism after joining hands with the native bourgeoisie of Austria, Italy, Germany and France. This, as alluded to by Gramsci, later (that is, in the 20th century) became a cross-class phenomenon and led to the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany. Unlike German fascism, the pendulum of its twin sister, the Italian one though, oscillated between non-racial to anti-Semitic trends. In fact, prior to 1919, the capitalists of the world had easy excess to cheap labour from communities around the world. Due to the post-war economic crisis, the surplus labour created the anti-immigrant drive, a movement connived and supported by the capitalists, which was appropriately named by Edward H Carr as "economic-nationalism".
"In the history of nations, 1870 played a turning point. In 1871, after the unification of Germany and Italy took place, there were 14 states, in 1914, 20, in 1924, 26 states in Europe. In 1914 it (nationalism) spread to the Arab world, to India, to the Far East. Popular national hatred was created in 1914 and conflagrated before the 1st world war. In the 2nd world war any distinction between armed forces and civilian population disappeared from the outset" (Hobsbawm). According to Edward Hallett Carr (Nationalism and After), "Prior to the 19th century, throughout western Europe, the word nation was used for political units. In Eastern Europe this word or its equivalent meant a racial or linguistic group and had no political significance before the 19th century, when the doctrine gradually became prevalent that such groups have the right to political independence and statehood (national self-determination). The Habsburg and the Romanovs were not nations but empires and the colourless legal word 'state' covered them as well as both numerous small German and Italian states." He continues: "In the same way it has lately become customary to speak of Scottish, Welsh and Indian nationalism though more rarely of the Scottish, Welsh or Indian nations. The terminology is further complicated by the usage of United States where nation is reserved for the major unit and 'states' are its components and have no international standing; from the American point of view it would have made nonsense to call the 'League of Nations' as 'League of States'." "It is the pride of the US," adds Hobsbawm, "to have been the 'melting point' of nations. In the American army, for the liberation of Europe, men from German, Polish, Italian, Croat and a dozen other national origins have marched side by side. In the presidential election of 1940, one candidate could speak with pride of his Dutch, the other his German ancestry."
Did 'British' ever have any national connotations? Perhaps not. Even now the citizens of the UK have acquired no particular name, except the latest, 'the entitled ones' by Prime Minister Cameron showered upon the underprivileged of society. Benjamin Disraeli, a twice-elected conservative prime minister of England despite being an apostle of aristocracy, had to make an interesting confession about the British nation. In his novel, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Disraeli, while highlighting the misery, desolation and pauperisation of the working class, admits the class conflict. He writes, "[England is divided into] two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets, who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners and are not governed by the same laws. The rich and poor."
(To be continued++
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+http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/12-Feb-2014/the-nation-a-reality-or-myth-ii
The nation: a reality or myth — II
The Finnish — one of the two languages spoken in Finland and an official minority language in Sweden — speaking people were actually divided into two classes. The lower class, familiar as 'Fennoman', spoke Finnish while the language of the elite was 'Svecoman' and they advocated the two-nation theory based on class with language as its major pretext. "Basque nationalism" as Hobsbawm tells us, "developed 30 years after the Catalan movement. Their linguistic-racial arguments were sudden and due to safeguarding the ancient feudal privileges. In 1894, less than 20 years after the end of 2nd Carlist war (the 19th century civil wars of Spain for power) Sabino Arana founded his Basque National Party, reinventing the Basque name for the country, which had hitherto never existed."
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, 33 new states have emerged on the global map. This has apparently reinforced the concept of the nation state. Chris Herman has succinctly pointed out: "The talk of 'a new world order' and 'the end of history' may not have lasted long but what has replaced it does not seem to have been class politics, but rather the rivalry of reborn — or sometimes completely new — nationalisms." It is unlike the Freudian 'return of the repressed'. For the dominance of capitalism it was an objective necessity. Not that the Soviet Union itself was successful in eliminating the national question or religion for that matter but with the help of an ectopic form of state capitalism, which combined a few features of self-styled socialism, it managed to overwhelm them with another gigantic and real question, one related to class. The bureaucracy, however, was as indifferent to the 'class' phenomenon as any capitalist country. In the Soviet Union, admittedly, the illusionary sun of religion and nationhood continued to revolve around man since the conditions that created the illusion did not vanish. For multiple reasons, the revolution was lost in the wilderness and dusted into the bin of history. The theory of 'socialism in one country' was the stumbling block, the leading anathema, which turned its hue into social fascism. If capitalism has an international character, socialism — its antagonist — cannot be confined to one state. Real freedom, the freedom from want and objectified alienated labour too had remained unaddressed.
Today, those who are ardent advocates of the nation are facing an uphill task to define what makes up a nation — language, culture, ethnicity or territory? The aforementioned examples — especially of the Balkans — exclude both territory and language as criteria of a nation since they retained their respective territory while sharing a common language. Creation and imposition of an official language requires the presence of an overzealous middle class, which could assist the bourgeoisie to create a state. Without having a state, a language cannot be imposed as an official instrument upon the citizens. For example, during the French Revolution of 1789, merely 50 percent of people (in France) knew French. During the revolution, instead of 'nation', the word used was 'people'. Italy, in this respect, performed even worse. Only two and a half percent of the populace actually spoke the Italian language. Massimo D'Azeglio, the Italian statesman, artist and novelist, while addressing the first united parliament of Italy, imputed his historic statement, "We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians." Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed is considered to be the novel that "created Italian as the national language of prose fiction". In everyday life, Manzoni himself did not speak Italian and communicated with his wife in her language, which incidentally was French. It is widely believed that he was better off in French than in Italian. With the rest of the people he preferred to communicate in Milanese, the language that left its traces in the first edition of his novel. In 1842, as he put it, "after washing his vocabulary on the banks of the Arno", he revised the language of his novel.
The violence of language did not spare the people of India. Through the Hindi Sahitya Samuelan (HSS), the Hindustani language — a sanitised version of a regional dialect — was imposed upon them by Gandhi and the Indian ruling elite. Differences cropped up. The big names resigned but HSS, till its success, continued its work. The case with Hebrew is no different. A dead and interred language was, in Dickens' words, "recalled to life" as a fulcrum to create nationalism around it. It is a classical case of creating and maintaining hegemony in the name of language where even religion was not found to suffice to fulfil the requirements of a 'nation state'. Lewis Glinert says, "Linguistic nationalism essentially requires control of a state or at least winning of official recognition for the language...At all events, problems of power, status, politics and ideology, and not of communication or even culture, lie at the heart of the nationalism of languages. If communication and culture had been the crucial issues, the Jewish nationalist (Zionist) movements would not have opted for modern Hebrew, which nobody (as yet) spoke, and in a pronunciation unlike that used in European synagogues. It rejected Yiddish spoken by 95 percent of the Ashkenazi Jews from the European east and their emigrants from the west, by a substantial majority of the entire world Jews. By 1935, it has been said, given the large varied and distinguished literature developed for its 10 million speakers, Yiddish was one of the leading 'literate' languages of the time." The Ashkenazi Jews were so assimilated in Europe that instead of Yiddish they took pride in speaking the native languages.
Joshua Aaron Fisherman in his The Sociology of Language lays emphasis on the same point. He writes, "How except through support by public authorities and recognition in education and administration were domestic or rural idioms to be translated into languages capable of competing with prevailing languages of national and world culture let alone virtually non-existent languages to be given reality? What would the future of Hebrew have been had not the British in 1919 accepted it as one of the three national official languages of Palestine, at a time when the number of people speaking Hebrew as an everyday language was less than 20,000? The same happened with Finnish while the majority of the educated Finns find Swedish more useful than their mother tongue."
In the case of Quebec and Flemish, the national problem was never linked to the safety of the national languages but was related to the social position of the minority, which wanted to gain more privileges. It could only be solved through a political movement. The dilemma of Indian Muslims was exactly the same. Their struggle for a separate homeland in the name of religion was in fact a contest for higher social positions. A new country — with the Hindu majority excluded — could have provided them better opportunities with minimal competition. And that is what ultimately happened.
According to Declan Kiberd, an Irish writer and scholar, "The Irish national movement launched its doomed campaign in 1900 to reconvert the Irish to a language most of them no longer understood, and which those who set about teaching it to their countrymen had only themselves begun to learn very incompletely."
(To be continued)
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