Prof: It's kind of a
complicated lecture today. I want to talk about
nationalism and I do so with a skepticism that you'll quickly
pick up on. Aggressive nationalism helped
unleash the demons of the twentieth century,
beginning with World War I, which unleashed even more
dangerous demons after that. I want to talk about
nationalism and particularly in--a little bit of France,
but in places that one doesn't usually consider.
I'll end up drawing on my
friend Tim Snyder's work to talk a little bit about Lithuania and
Belarus, and why their nationalism were
very different and, in the second case,
didn't really exist at all in the nineteenth century.
And I'm going to give a counter
example, which I treat in the book but is the
Austria-Hungarian Empire. It's funny, because one
couldn't have imagined in the 1970s,
looking nostalgically back on the Austria-Hungarian Empire,
this polyglot Habsburg regime. But the horrors of the Balkans
really made lots of historians and other social scientists look
back and try to figure out how it was that--instead of asking
why it was the Austria-Hungarian Empire collapsed during World
War I, or really at the end of World
War I, turning the question around and
saying, "How did it hold together
so long?" So, the Austria-Hungarian
Empire is sort of a counter example to these nationalisms.
One of the things that brought
the empire down, along with the war,
was competing national claims from ethnic minorities within
those vast domains. I want to start with a story.
It's a book I read maybe five
or six years ago. Histories have their histories,
so I'm going to tell the history of this particular book.
You'll see kind of what I'm
getting at. By the way, I sent out--one of
you had a great idea, emailed me saying,
"Why don't you send out the terms before the
lecture?" That was a great idea.
I'd never thought of that.
I did it last night,
though I didn't put this particular book on it.
Anyway, the book is Anastasia
Karakasidou's, Fields of Wheat,
Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek
Macedonia, 1870-1990. When I say that
histories have their own history,
what I mean is the following. In this book,
this anthropologist, who is from both Turkish and
Greek extraction on either side of her family,
is writing a book about a small part of Macedonia.
Macedonia, of course,
was heavily contested for centuries.
A trade route went through it.
In Macedonia there were Turks,
and there were Serbs, and there were Bulgarians,
and Macedonians, and Greeks.
For centuries they had all
basically gotten along as that part of the Balkans,
as you know, in the past was under the
Ottoman Empire and then through a whole series of arrangements,
of wars, the Balkan wars before World
War I, passed back and forth.
Essentially,
that is one of the points of the book,
is that basically people got along very well,
but that gradually what happened is that among competing
national claims that part of Macedonia became seen by Greeks
as part of greater Greece. Whenever you hear the term
"greater Greece," or "greater Serbia,"
or "greater Germany," or greater anything,
look out. What that means is that in the
imaginary, in the view of nationalists,
particularly aggressive nationalists,
parts of the territories that have large percentages of a
certain ethnic group or even in some cases only minorities,
but in other cases majorities, should be included,
come what may, in the greater state of that
particular ethnic group. If you take the example of
Kosovo, and Kosovo has about eighty-five percent of the
population is made up of Albanian Muslims.
Kosovo was part of Serbia.
When Milosevic was talking
about "greater Serbia,"
greater Serbia for him could not exist unless Kosovo,
with its eighty-five percent of people who weren't Serb,
was included in that. Anyway, that's another story.
What happened with this
particular book is that when this book was in manuscript,
arguing that basically the idea that Macedonia was Greek was a
construction, was an invention,
an invented identity by Greek nationalists,
the press, the university press,
I guess since this is being recorded I shouldn't say which
one that was, chickened out and decided not
to publish the book. At one point they got a bomb
threat from Greek nationalists saying that,
"If you publish this book, we will blow up your offices in
Europe." So, they chickened out.
In an example of just utter,
craven cowardice refused to publish the book.
They sent this author,
whom I don't know--I've read the book.
It's a really terrific
book--and said, "Sorry.
We're not going to publish your
book. Too bad, contract or no
contract." So, University of Chicago Press
published the book, and when the book came out this
particular author received a lot of hate mail.
She received a picture of
herself with a picture of a Greek flag stuck through where
her heart would be. These are fairly serious
threats. The point of that is not to
jump on Greek nationalists or on Serb nationalists,
though certainly the Serb ultranationalists have done just
an incredible amount of damage in the Balkans over the past
decades, but merely to underline the
point that national identities are constructed.
They're invented.
They're, in a way, imaginary.
One of the most interesting
sort of historical things you could do as an historian is to
try to figure out, from where do these identities
come? Language plays a lot of it.
Maybe if I have time,
because I've got to do a lot today, but this is more of a
conversation than a lecture. If I have time I might talk a
little bit about language in the case of France.
But, in doing so,
like most people talking about nationalism,
I'm drawing on some of the thinking of Benedict Anderson,
and his concept that nationalism and the construction
of national self-identity represents "imagined
communities." Basically, if you consider
yourself a member of X nationality,
you are creating links or you are agreeing to links with
people whom you don't know, people that live in Portland,
Oregon, or people that live in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, or people that live in New
Jersey, even though we are sitting here
in Connecticut. One of the useful aspects of
Anderson's account is yet again to look back at the construction
of nationalism to see that here we have that old story.
It's states and large-scale
economic change that are the two driving forces in the
construction of national identities.
I've gone on,
at least in two lectures and part of another one talking
about British national identity--and I'm certainly not
going to go through that again, except to say that it was
precociously early, the sense of being British.
I also argued along the lines
that we can now, at least for elites,
say that French national identity began to be constructed
in at least by the middle of the eighteenth century.
When you think of the real
hotspots, the real trouble spots of the
twentieth century, when you think of the origins
of World War I, which we will be doing and
thinking out loud together over the next couple weeks,
we will be considering Eastern Europe, Central Europe,
and the Balkans. What's important to understand,
and this is a reasonably decent transition from the initial
discussion of this anthropologist's excellent book,
is that in most of those places there was no sense of national
identity, of being Slovene,
of being Czech, of being Croat,
of being Bulgarian, of being Ukrainian or
Ruthenian--the two are essentially the same--until
quite late in the nineteenth century.
Part of what's going on in
Europe between the 1880s and 1914 is this is an incredible
"advancement," if you want to call it that,
in thinking with the emergence of ethnic national identities
competing and demanding their own states in that part of the
world. When, in late June 1914,
a sixteen-year-old heavily-armed guy,
Serb nationalist--I once put my feet,
which no longer--my feet still exist,
but the steps in Sarajevo no longer exist because of all the
bombing, in the place where Princip shot
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the assassination that led,
because of this sort of entangling diplomatic alliances,
to World War I. He was someone who practically
could not have existed in the middle of the nineteenth
century, even though among Serb elites
there was a national sense. I'm going to give you some
examples taken from Anderson of even the publication of the very
first dictionaries in languages that now are quite common for us
to identify with ethnic national states.
In fact, some of these
languages did not even have their own written dictionaries
until the middle of the nineteenth century.
That's not so long ago.
Nationalism has to be
constructed. A sense of self-identity has to
be constructed. That's what I want to talk
about. Let me say something at the
beginning. Because of the French
Revolution and because of the development in Europe and in
other places of parliamentary regimes and democracies,
it's fairly common to think, "National
self-consciousness equals a desire for national states and
you can't have that with a monarchy."
That's not really true at all.
That's influenced,
for example, by the experience of the United
States. In the United States,
the thirteen colonies, English was overwhelmingly the
language of the thirteen colonies.
They are rebelling in 1776 and
all of that against other English-speaking people who
happened to have a monarchy. So, "no taxation without
representation" really became also a kind of an
anti-monarchist sentiment. If you think of the Spanish,
the rebellions in Latin America against Spain,
there, too, the rebellions, though there were millions of
indigenous peoples who did not speak Spanish,
but basically it was a rebellion of Spanish speakers
against a monarch that was Spanish,
speaking in the case of Spain. If you think about really
extreme ethnic nationalism at the end of the nineteenth
century, you think of two states which
helped kind of push the world to the catastrophe that was World
War I, one has to point the finger at both Russia and
Germany, which had autocracies.
This is jumping ahead a little
bit, but I'm providing you an overview.
For example,
the campaign--;this is jumping ahead a little bit--;the
campaign of Russiafication that was undertaken by the Russian
czars, a brutal campaign against
non-Russian minorities, was, in part,
a response to rebellions within the Russian empire by Poles,
for example, who rise up in 1831 and in 1863
and are crushed like grapes. In 1863, Bismarck,
the chancellor of Germany, congratulates the czar for
stomping on the Polish insurgents.
But the campaign of
Russiaficiation was part of the re-invention of Russian national
identity. When I talked about Peter the
Great, I talked about how he saw himself as this great Russian
patriot. Well, aggressive Russian
nationalism picks its targets rather systematically in the
campaigns of Russiaficiation. The big pogroms,
the massacres of Jews in Odessa, in Crimea,
and in other places, are cheered on by the Russian
czar, by Nicholas II, whom I will talk about when I
get to the Russian Revolution, who saw this as a healthy
thing, that the Jews are being beaten
to death by real Russians. This was part of his campaign
of Russiafication. In the case of Germany you've
got this madcap loser, Wilhelm II,
cracking bottles of champagne, or not of champagne,
but of Riesling, as I said, over big speedy battleships and
all of that. Nobody was a more aggressive
nationalist than Wilhelm II, the Kaiser,
who kept saying rather disingenuously that he was
"the number one German" and all of that.
We can get rid of the idea that
strong national identity necessarily has a parliamentary
outcome. In the case of Britain,
we're not going to talk about Britain too much,
but the case of Britain is pretty interesting,
too. But there you have a monarch
without real power. Victoria represents in the
imaginary of the British citizens the stability and the
constitutional settlement of the British Empire.
Yet, a couple of points need to
be made. Language is important in all of
this, though not always. Maybe if I have time I'll give
a Swiss example later on. Basically, in the case of
Russian and German nationalism, and French nationalism and even
Spanish nationalism, because of the dominance of
Castille, one looks back to the time when
national languages, which already existed,
are used and become identified with this self-identity of
national people. Now, Latin was the language.
Latin was the language of
science, of diplomacy, of everything.
Part of what's intriguing and
important about the scientific revolution is that vernacular
languages begin to be used as a way of communicating scientific
discoveries. There's a little bit in that
chapter that you read about that.
Certainly, language is closely
tied to national self-identity. One of the ways when
nationalism is most aggressive and most vulgar is when very
ordinary people who are whipped up,
egged on or in some ways urged on by elites began identifying
people who don't speak the same language is somehow not part of
this imagined community. An obvious example would be all
the Hungarians who, after the Treaty of Versailles
in 1919 and the subsequent treaties named after Paris
suburbs, are included in Romania and are
treated as outsiders. This is very important even in
the origins of the 1989 revolution that brought down the
dreadful Ceausescu dictators in Romania.
Anyway, the vernacular develops.
If you exclude the cases of
Latin America rebelling against Spain and the Americans
rebelling against the British, development of these languages,
and the use of the languages and their identity with this
imagined community is obviously a very important part of this as
well. With the development is the
concept of being a citizen. This is one of the many reasons
the French Revolution is so important.
You were no longer the subject
of the king, you were a citoyen, or if you're a
female you're a citoyenne.
Citizenship takes on this kind
of linguistic aspect as well. During the French Revolution,
there was a revolutionary priest called the Abbé
Grégoire. I think I mention him in the
book. He thought that all of these
regional languages should be squished like grapes,
because somehow they stood in the way of a true French
national identity. Language is so terribly
complicated. In the case of Italy,
which is in some ways a counter example, I think I said before
but it's true. At the time of the Italian
unification, only about four or five percent
of the population of Italy, of the whole boot and Sicily,
spoke what is now considered to be Italian.
The case of France,
which I know more about, is equally fascinating because
of the time of the French Revolution half the French
population did not speak French. There was a lot of
bilingualism, but they did not speak French.
If you imagine a map of France,
and I think I went through this very quickly before,
but if you imagine a map of France and if you start at the
top, they spoke Dutch in Dunkirk and
places like that. If you move over to Alsace and
much of Lorraine, they spoke a German dialect
there. That would be a majority
language until well after World War I.
How the French tried to get rid
of the German is another story, a sort of national aggression,
even in the context of Germany's defeat after World War
I. If you move further south,
as you go to Savoy, don't write this down,
but Savoy was annexed to France in 1860.
People spoke essentially
Piedmontese, which is the language spoken in northern
Italy in the strongest state of Italy, Piedmont Sardinia.
Then you go further down and
they spoke what? They spoke Provencal.
Provencal, as in Jean de
Florette, and Manon des Sources and these
Provencal poets setting up at a place called Les Baux and
freezing in the winds of the mistral and reading each other
Provençal poetry. Then you go to Languedoc and
they spoke Occitan, which is a language of Oc.
It's a southern French language.
It's a written language.
You go to Catalonia and they
spoke Catalan. No surprise there.
You go into the Basque country
and they spoke Basque, which is only remotely
connected to Finnish and Magyar. Those are the three hardest
languages in Europe. How they got there is another
whole story. We don't really know.
If you go north,
they spoke Gascon. If you go into Brittany,
they spoke Breton, which has nothing to do with
French at all. Even in places that didn't have
languages there were patois. Patois is a sort of a
denigrating term. "Well, they speak
patois." In other words,
they don't speak really French. In central France they spoke
one patois. In the Limousin they spoke
another patois that was related to that one.
Even in the Loire Valley people
spoke patois. This did not condemn them to
eternal backwardness. One might say that in the
construction of French national identity,
there was an argument a long time ago by my late friend Eugen
Weber that said that all French national identity had to be
constructed between 1880 and 1910,
because of railroads, military conscription,
and education. Railroads, military
conscription, and education.
It's easy to see how that would
work. In fact, he missed one of the
complexities of this glorious country,
which is that lots of Breton soldiers didn't learn French
until they were in the trenches, if they were lucky enough to
survive in World War I, and they still spoke Breton in
the 1920s and 1930s. There are still old ladies in
Brittany that still speak Breton and their command of French is a
bit problematic. In Corsica they still have many
people who speak Corsican. They may or may not feel like
they're French. Bilingualism,
just as a little aside, in the village where I've spent
half my life almost, in the last twenty-five years
or so, people spoke patois and not
French through the 1930s. That really sort of disappeared.
Now older friends of ours
understand patois, but they don't speak it.
I had something from a book
that I needed someone to look at to make sure that what I'd
written in patois was correct. Not that I wrote it,
but I took it from something. My friend, my boule
partner, Lulu, his parents spoke that as their
main language, but he couldn't correct it.
Those languages are
disappearing. The point of all this is that
now the more we know about national self-identity,
it's possible to have more than one identity.
It's also just a leap of faith
to say, "Who are you?" You ask who they are.
That they're going to say,
"Well, I'm German,"
or "I'm French" is going to be the first thing
that they're going to say. They may say,
"I'm from this village,"
or "I'm from this family,"
or "I'm from this region,"
or "I'm Catholic," or Protestant,
or Jewish, or Muslim, some response like that.
But yet when we think of
nationalism, we think of these languages as
being motors for elites, first,
and then ordinary people to demand that the borders of
states be drawn in a way that reflects their ethnicity.
After World War I in the Treaty
of Versailles, you've gone to war over the
whole damn question of nationalism.
All these millions of people
get killed, dying in terrible ways--gas and
everything else, flamethrowers and machine guns
and all this stuff that we'll talk about.
And, so, they say,
"If we draw the lines around these people and give
everybody a state, that will be cool.
Then we won't have wars
anymore." So, they get all these big maps
and these mapmakers and they try to draw these state boundaries
after the collapse of the four empires.
It doesn't work.
You can't do it.
You've got winners and you've
got losers. If you're going to punish the
losers, like Hungary,
then you leave Hungary this small country with much of its
population living on the other side of borders,
and either imagining that that should still be part of Hungary,
or wanting themselves to live back in Hungary where there
would be nothing for them at all.
Yet, the period we're talking
about and the period I began with, you've got this
mobilization of elites saying, "Holy cow!
We need our own state."
Remember a line I already gave
you a lecture or two ago, all these Czechs sitting in
1848 in a room like this, not quite as nice.
They say, "If the ceiling
falls in, that's the end of the Czech national movement."
Between 1848,
the springtime of the peoples, and 1914,
you have millions of people who,
a couple decades before that, had absolutely no sense or very
little sense of being Slovene, or Slovak, or Croat,
or whatever, who are suddenly making
national demands and wanting to have a separate state within the
context--or to be independent from the Austria-Hungarian
Empire. One of those people was the
sixteen-year-old boy, Princip,
who blows the brains out of Franz Ferdinand and his wife
when this car backs up the wrong street in Sarajevo,
although some of his friends were out there trying to get
him, too. That's just a way of kind of
thinking about that stuff. Let me give you a couple of
examples here I wrote down. Ukraine is a huge country,
a huge important country, very contested relationship
with Russia now because of having gotten Crimea,
and Russia wants to have Crimea and all of this.
It's a highly contested
relationship because of the number of Russians who live in
Ukraine and all of that. For Ukrainians,
the sense that Ukraine always existed is always taken as a
given. The first Ukrainian grammar
book, and this is not dissing
Ukrainians or anybody, but I'm just saying that the
reality is that the first Ukrainian grammar book was
published not in 1311 or in 1511,
but in 1819 is the very first one.
The first Czech-German
dictionary--if you're going to have a national identity you've
got to have a dictionary so you can translate things between
German and Czech. It's a long publication process.
It's published in 1935 to 1939,
A to Z. The first Czech national
organization, the one I just described,
starts in 1846. That's pretty recent.
The first Norwegian grammar
book, which distinguished Norwegian
as a separate language and a separate identity from say
Swedish and Danish, is not until 1848.
The first dictionary that is
making a distinction between Norwegian and Danish isn't until
1850. That's what I mean about the
construction of national identity.
You have to have a sense that
you are part of this imagined community.
Having said that,
before I talk about a counter example, let me do this like
that. Why not?
Let me give you a couple
examples that I hope make the point.
These I'm drawing from Timothy
Snyder. Let's look at why at the end of
the nineteenth century Lithuanian nationalism develops.
You know Lithuania,
capital is Vilnius, big tall basketball players
like Sabonis, who played in the NBA.
Why Lithuanian nationalism
rapidly develops, but only at the end of the
nineteenth century, and Belarusian nationalism
doesn't develop at all until way in--it's even pushing it to say
in the 1920s and 1930s. Now there's this huge
Belarus--I was in Poland. The various times I've been to
Poland. There was a huge dinner with
all these Belarusians who most of them were dissidents and are
there to discuss the history of Belarus,
but none of them would be claiming that Belarus had a
self-identity before the 1930s. But Lithuania existed.
Lithuania was part of the
Polish-Lithuania commonwealth, which exists basically until
the last partition of Poland in 1795,
when Poland gets munched, bouffé,
by the great powers. Who do these people think they
were? They think they're Polish.
They consider themselves Polish.
Poles already had a basis for
nationalism. They had a written language.
They have heroes, Chopin.
Chopin didn't go to Paris as a
refugee from Russian repression. He went there to further his
musical career. But anyway, he wrote lots that
had to do with Polish national themes, folklore and all of
that. There have been dukes of
Lithuania, grand dukes, but they didn't accept
Lithuanian as a language. If they wanted to get anywhere,
they tried to pass themselves off as Poles.
Pilsudski, a name you will come
back to who destroyed the Polish republic,
as one after another of European states goes
authoritarian in the 1920s and 1930s.
Pilsudski, who was the hero of
the miracle of the Vistula River when the Polish army turns back
the Red Army at the end of World War I in just sort of an amazing
moment. Pilsudski himself was
Lithuanian. But he considered himself
Polish. He was absolutely a Lithuanian.
Yet there was a Lithuanian
language, but it was not spoken by the elites.
Who spoke the Lithuanian
language? It was spoken by the peasants.
At the end of the nineteenth
century, you've suddenly got all these
Lithuanian intellectuals and grand dukes and priests and
various people saying, "Wait a minute.
We are Lithuanians and happily,
the Lithuanian peasantry has saved our language."
The last Lithuanian duke who
spoke Lithuanian died before Columbus discovered America,
Tim Snyder informed me. Some may say,
"These Lithuanian peasants, we won't treat them
anymore as the scum of the earth.
They have preserved our
language for us." Suddenly, you have poets
writing in Lithuanian. It's no longer a disgrace to be
seen as a Lithuanian. One of these poets,
a guy called Kudirka, who died in 1899,
he recalled when he was in school as a smart Lithuanian
kid, he said, "My self preservation
instinct told me not to speak in Lithuanian and to make sure that
no one noticed that my father wore a rough peasant's coat and
could only speak Lithuanian. I did my best to speak Polish,
even though I spoke it badly."
Polish is a terribly difficult
language. There's all these sort of
squiggly things. Things don't pronounce like you
think they're supposed to. I don't do very well at picking
up Polish. "When my father and other
relatives visited me, I stayed away from them when I
could see that fellow students or gentlemen were
watching." He was embarrassed to be
basically Lithuanian and the son of a Lithuanian peasant.
"I only spoke with them at
ease when we were alone or outside.
I saw myself as a Pole and thus
as a gentleman. I had imbibed the Polish
spirit." By the end of the century he
sees himself as a Lithuanian. He is one of these people who
are pushing Lithuanian nationalism and it is embraced.
How does this physically happen?
You don't wake up and say,
"I was Polish yesterday and a subject of the czar,
because Poland is divided between Prussia,
Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
But if you were in the Russian
part of what they called Congress Poland,
then suddenly today I'm Lithuanian.
How does that happen?
Because Lithuania is next to
Germany. This is also something that
will make you again think of what I said about the
Enlightenment. Lots of literature is smuggled
into Lithuania in Lithuanian. Therefore, there's this wild
profusion of Lithuanian literature that comes into
Lithuania, which of course as you know was not independent.
It was part of the Russian
Empire. So, there's another reason,
too, which is for the Russian imperial secret police,
the ones that they're really worried about.
They're worried about the
Poles, because the Poles have risen up in 1831 and in 1863.
So they're on the lookout for
people that are saying, "Hey, I'm Polish.
We want a Polish state."
They don't pay much attention.
They don't really care about
these Lithuanians who are discovering their own
self-identity, who are constructing their
self-identity. Why doesn't it happen in
Belarus? I don't have time to tell you
very much about this, but the main thing is that
Belarus is a long way away from anywhere at the time.
There isn't any kind of elite
in Belarus that embraces Belarussian anything.
The language has not seen part
of a national self-identity that basically does not exist and
would not exist until at least after World War I.
Now Lithuanians will look back
on their country as if Lithuania had always had this sort of
self-identity. Part of the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth, that was more basically a
Polish operation and it was a territorial thing more than any
kind of construction of two peoples participating in this
thing. Furthermore,
Belarussians were not allowed to publish in their own
language. Whereas Lithuanian priests
began giving sermons in Lithuanian and you've got all
this written material coming in the vernacular.
Nobody read Belarussian in
church. There were no priests to say
that "this is our language."
Belarussians who were literate
could read Polish or Russian or both, but in many cases not what
would become Belarussian at all. By the end of the nineteenth
century when you've got these other people insisting that
"we're Slovenes" and "we're this and
that," Belarussian speakers called themselves Russian if
they were Orthodox religion. They called themselves Polish
if they were Roman Catholic. If they were simply looking out
for themselves, they just called themselves
local. They said, "We live in the
Russian empire and that's who we are."
There was no sense of being
Belarussian. There are different outcomes in
all of this stuff. Having said that,
we're going to get there. Let me give you another example.
I want to find this date that
will make you at least realize that you can have a national
identity and have more than one language.
It's very complex.
I guess the most interesting
case now would be Belgium, which I don't have a lot of
time to talk about. In Belgium, I have friend who
works in the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels.
About seven years ago I asked
him, "Do you think Belgium will exist in ten years?"
He said, "I hope not."
This guy works for the Belgian
Ministry of Culture. This reflects the sharp
antagonism between the Flemish, who basically live in the north
and east, but above all the northern
parts of Belgium, and who are more prosperous and
who are more numerous, about say fifty-five percent of
the population. Their tensions with the
Walloons, that is the French speakers,
Liège, and Arlon and all those places,
and also in Brussels, which is technically part of
the Flemish zone. Because of the bureaucracy and
because Brussels is the most important city,
it has become this sort of third place hotly contested by
the Flemish and real serious tensions there.
If you ask in French what time
the train is to Bruges, they're not going to reply.
They know perfectly well.
They just simply won't reply.
Not all of them,
but those are serious tensions that are compounded also by the
fact that there's going to be, not everybody,
but the far right is really tied to Flemish self-identity.
The Walloons,
that is the French, many of the French speakers
want to be attached to France, see their lives as very
different. Also, the Walloon part of
Belgium is basically the rust belt and the Flemish part is
very prosperous in comparison. Yet Belgium,
which didn't exist legally until 1831, the revolution of
1830 and 1831 is still there. By the way, there's also five
percent tacked on after Versailles around a town called
Eupen who speak German. Anyway, there we go.
But Belgium is still there.
When I'm in Belgium,
which I am frequently, I think, "Now this is
really Europe," because of the complexity of
it. You can have a national
identity without having a single dominant language,
if the two sides are tolerant. Let me give you another quick
example, and then we've got to rock and roll onto the A-H
Empire, a shortcut now. Not Austria-Hungary.
I've got to save time,
so "A-H" Empire.
What about Switzerland?
Here you've got Switzerland.
If I remember correctly,
the statistics, I think the French speaking
population is twenty-two percent.
German speaking or Swiss
Deutsch speaking population is about maybe seventy-one percent,
or something like that. You've got an Italian speaking
population of about five percent.
And you also have another
language called Romansch, which is spoken only by a few
hundred thousand people. That's three languages already,
plus English, because of the international
role of Geneva, is the fourth major or
recognized language in Switzerland.
Switzerland now is so
prosperous, and full of chocolate, and full of banks,
and full of watches, and all of that.
You think of everybody yodeling
and cows running around and everybody's very happy and
eating perch out of the lakes. But the Swiss have to create
this sense that they have always been a nation.
But they haven't.
The decentralized,
federalist nature of Switzerland was always there.
During the Reformation,
to say somebody was turning Swiss meant that they were
rejecting the demands of their lords,
and rejecting the religion imposed by their lords and
turning to Protestantism, if they were in a Catholic area
or to Catholicism if they were in a Protestant area.
The Swiss were big time
mercenaries and big time farmers.
But Switzerland fought its last
war early in the nineteenth century and has been neutral.
It's a very complicated story,
what happened in Switzerland during World War II.
It's very tragic.
The Swiss turned so many Jews
back at the frontier and sent them back to Germany,
and laundering Nazi money, and all that.
I'm not dumping on the Swiss,
but it's a complicated story in the case of their neutrality.
They decided in 1891,
on the 600^(th) anniversary of the Swiss confederation that
Switzerland began in 1291. That a bunch of people got
together between all the cows and eating chocolate and all
that stuff, and they announced that they were Switzerland.
Here's again what Anderson
means about this sort of imagined community,
that you're inventing a kind of date that you said,
"We've been like that since then and that's all there
is to it." But if you've got all these
different languages and the languages are not as far apart
as French and Dutch, well in a way they are because
Dutch is really, although the Dutch would not
see it that way, but is a German dialect.
Nonetheless,
the Swiss are a lot better at learning each other's language
than the French speakers certainly are at learning Dutch,
which they view as impossible and don't like their kids having
to learning it in school and all that.
It's terribly complicated.
So, they imagine this
community, but it exists. Switzerland exists.
People have a sense of being
Swiss, despite these different languages.
There are not the economic
disparities. Well, there are between urban
and rural life, but nothing like the disparity
between the Flemish parts of Belgium and the French parts of
Belgium, if you exclude Brussels and all
that. Let me end in the last five
minutes and seven seconds that is allotted to me.
Let me end with a counter
example, which you can read about.
I said at the beginning,
inspired by the sheer horror of the Balkans,
and some of you aren't old enough to remember,
certainly not, my god, I am,
all the stuff that happened in the late 1990s.
You can probably remember all
the massacres and stuff like that.
I said at the very beginning of
the hour or the beginning of the fifty minutes that people now
tend to look longingly back. They say, "The
Austria-Hungarian Empire, it sure lasted a long
time." You had fifteen major
nationalities. It was kind of a balancing act.
It becomes the dual monarchy in
1867, where the Hungarians have, more or less,
equal rights. You've got Austria and you've
got Hungary. But you've got another thirteen
peoples, at least thirteen peoples living within the
empire. You've got the Croats,
who have their nobility. They're kind of given favorable
status. This whole thing is sort of
balanced. How does the place stay
together? How does Austria-Hungary stay
together? I end one of those chapters,
that chapter with this very famous scene from the parliament
in Vienna where you've got these different ethnic groups playing
drums and singing songs and trying to disrupt the speeches
by people from the other nationalities.
You've got all these problems
with the south Slavs wanting at least minimal representation as
sort of this "third state" along with Austria
and Hungary. How does the thing stay
together? Basically, in this way.
I'm just telling you briefly
about things that you can read about, but I just wanted to make
some sense of it. First of all,
the language of the empire is German.
To get somewhere in the
Austria-Hungarian Empire, you need to know German.
So, learning German becomes
kind of a social mobility, the way that learning French
becomes for somebody from Gascony a form of social
mobility. You can get a job in the
bureaucracy. If you're going to have a
humongous empire going all the way to the rugged terrain of
Bosnia-Herzevogina, you've got to have officials
and their little hats and their little desks who are going to be
running all this stuff. You've got to have a language.
The language of the empire is
German. This does not mean that people
feel that they're German. After all, they're not German.
They're German speakers within
the Austria-Hungarian empire. It gives them an allegiance to
this apparatus. Secondly, the middle class.
The middle class is German,
largely, except in Budapest where it's Hungarian.
Still, many Germans live in
Budapest as well. One of the things I wish I had
time to talk about, but you can't talk about
everything, is that what you've got in
these cities, and I mentioned this in
reference the other day. Cities of all of Eastern Europe
and central Europe, you have kind of an
ethnicization of these cities. All of the cities,
whether you're talking about Budapest or you're talking about
Warsaw, or anywhere you're talking
about, even Vilnius, you have large German
populations and also large Jewish populations.
In the course of the last
decades of the nineteenth century,
you have this sort of rival of Estonian peasants into Talin,
of Czech peasants into Prague, of Hungarian peasants into
Budapest, of Lithuanian peasants into
Vilnius, etc., etc.
But you've still got,
in the Austria-Hungarian case, you still have,
even in Budapest, you still have a large middle
class that is fundamentally German and believes in the
empire. Next, you've got dynastic
loyalty. You've got this old dude,
Franz Joseph, who had been there since 1848.
He lives until 1916,
the same guy. That makes Victoria seem like
she had a short reign. People have an allegiance to
this dynasty. The Habsburg Dynasty had been
dominant in central Europe until they contest the Prussians and
lose out in the War of 1966. So you've got this Franz Joseph.
Also you've got the Catholic
Church. There are lots of Protestants.
For example in the Czech lands
in Bohemia, where Slovakia is almost
overwhelmingly Catholic in what would become Czechoslovakia and
then divorce, amicably enough, in 1993.
Croatia is overwhelming
Catholic, aggressively so. Despite the fact you have these
huge Muslim enclaves in the old what had been the Ottoman
empire, you still have this church as a
unifying force, not for everybody and certainly
not for the Jews, not for the gypsies,
of whom are the Roma, who are very many there,
and not for protestants and not for orthodox Serbs,
which is part of the tensions there as well.
They saw Russia as being their
protector. You can read more about that,
but that's another thing. Finally, you've got the army.
The army is a form of social
promotion as well. The army doesn't have the bad
reputation that the French army did for shooting down young
girls, young women protesting in strikes.
It doesn't have the reputation
that the brutal Garda Civila did in Spain.
The army is seen as a useful
way of representing the empire. It has a good reputation.
German, the language,
is the language of command. These soldiers and soldiers are
drawn from all of these nationalities,
they at least have that in common.
To conclude,
the most important question to ask about this empire,
particularly in reference to what I've been saying about this
whole hour is to not look at why it came apart,
but to look at how it held together so long.
Given the horrors perpetuated
on Europe by aggressive nationalism from then,
and even before, as during the French Revolution
to this very day, sometimes,
and I never thought I'd ever say this about me looking
nostalgically back to an empire, but it is interesting and at
least food for thought. On that note,
bon appétit and see you on Wednesday.
