Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews

1. Euro-Visions: IIIS/TLRH Public Lecture Series Trinity College Dublin February 14, 2013, Thur, 18:15-19:45 How to Think of EthnolinguisticNationalism in Central Europe?(or the Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State) Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews

2. Nationalism • What is nationalism? (The standard state- and group-building ideology in the [late] modern world) • Hans Kohn: Western vs the Rest (Eastern) nationalism, 1940s • Absence of nationalism in the West (But > Michael Billig: ‘banal nationalism,’ 1995) • John Plamenatz: ‘good’ Western vs‘bad’ Eastern nationalism, 1970s • ‘Ancient hatreds’ in the East vs ‘reason and rationalism’ in the West • Ethnic vs civic nationalism: Is it a dichotomy at all? • What about nationalism across the globe? • - Hans Kohn The Age of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History, 1962 • - Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities, 1983 • Most books on nationalism draw examples from CE Europe and generalize on their basis • Is it rational and justified to generalize on nationalism on the basis of ‘bad ethnic Eastern’ nationalism?

3. What is Ethnic Nationalism? • What is ethnicity: A difficult question with many answers (Totality of all the cultural markers employed for distinguishing a group from others?) • But if CE Europe widely considered home of ethnic nationalism: What are the nationalism’s practices? • In most cases language is of paramount importance for the region’s nationalisms • Is it then ‘ethnolinguistic nationalism’? • I propose to define ethnic (ethnolinguistic) nationalism through the observed practices of state- and people-building steeped in language • Where is Central Europe? In turn the territorial extant of such practices could define the region

4. What is a Language? (1) • The distinction between ‘language’ and ‘a language’ • ‘Language’ is studied by linguists, but ‘a language’ is a socio-political phenomenon, more determined by extralinguistic forces than linguistic ones • Hence, ‘languages’ in plural should be researched more by social scientists • Leonard Bloomfield’s 1926 linguistic definition of ‘a language’ and dialect (mutual in/comprehensibility) • But: mutually incomprehensible dialects of Arabic or Chinese are dialects of these languages • But: exactly the same Moldovan and Romanian, and almost the same Bulgarian and Macedonian are different languages • But: Low German is NOT a dialect of Dutch with which it is mutually comprehensible, but of German with which it is largely incomprehensible • What about: asymmetrical incomprehensibility between Spanish and Portuguese, or among Scandinavia’s Germanic languages

5. What is a Language? (2) • Who decides when a dialect / language is a language? • ‘Imagined language’ ≈ nation as an ‘imagined community’? • Nation = ethnic and/or other human group(s) imagined to be a nation • A language = dialect(s) imagined (through dictionaries, grammars, official use, educational system, army, state offices and other state institutions, mass media, enterprises, cyberspace, etc) to be a language in its own right • Yugoslavia: Serbocroatoslovenian (1921-41) > Croatian, Serbian (41-44) > Serbo-Croatian + Macedonian (44-91) • Breakup of Yugoslavia (1991-2008) • Breakup of Serbo-Croatian > Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian

6. Practices of ‘Really Existing’ Nationalism 1: The speakers of a language constitute a nation (ergo, the language is a national one) 2: The territory inhabited by this language’s speakers should be made into the nation’s nation-state 3: The nation’s national language cannot be shared with any other nation or polity 4: No autonomous regions with official languages other than the national one can exist in the nation’s nation-state 5: By the same token, no autonomous regions with the nation’s language can exist in other polities (NB: Disjunction between ideology and reality on the ground) ‘Serious’ name for the practice: Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State

7. All That Began in the Balkans? From Religion to Language

8. WW I: Isomorphism Moves North

9. Central Europe = Isomorphism?

10. NB: Not fully matching with the tables

11. WW II: Race Trumps Nation?

12. (National) Communism Trumps Nation?

13. NB: Not fully matching with the tables

14. After Communism: Isomorphism After All?

15. NB: Not fully matching with the tables

16. The Complication of the EU

17. Instruments of Analysis: (Dis)Contents • Rubbish in, rubbish out • Lies, big lies and statistics • States are not the only unit of analysis • States being so variable in territory and populations, are they really comparable? • How to limit the distorting potential of generated data? • How to nuance the data?

18. Nuancing the Data: 2007

19. Fine Tuning: Populations in 2007

20. Isomorphic Languages in 2007 [1] The parenthetical remark ‘(C)’ indicates that the language is written in Cyrillic. [2] The parenthetical remark ‘(L)’ indicates that the language is written in Latin characters.

21. Scope for Wider-Ranging Comparisons: Isomorphic States Outside Central Europe in 2007 • W Europe: Iceland (Icelandic) • C Asia: Turkmenistan (Turkmen) 1 • S Asia: Bhutan (Dzongkha), Maldives (Maldivian) 2 • SE Asia: Cambodia (Khmer), Indonesia (Indonesian), • Laos (Lao), Myanmar (Myanmar), Thailand (Thai), • Vietnam (Vietnamese) 6 • E Asia: Japan (Japanese) 1 • Total Outside Central Europe 10 • Some interesting questions: • Why is SE / E Asia similar to C Europe in its ideological-cum-national makeup? • Are C Europe and SE / E Asia comparable? • Why are isomorphic states contained to Eurasia only?

22. Human Costs of Achieving Ethnolinguistic Homogeneity

23. Will Ethnolinguistic Homogeneity Last in the Borderless EU? Ethnolinguistic Diversity in Today’s Berlin and London