Nation and Memory in Russia, Poland and Ukraine

Nation and Memory in Russia, Poland and Ukraine Lecture 2 What is a nation? Week 2

Outline What is a nation? Classical definitions 2. Primordialists vs modernists 3. Ethno-Symbolism 4. Nationalism and nation-building 5. Sites of Memory 6. Conclusion

“Nature brings forth families; the most natural state therefore is also one people, with a national character of its own. For thousands of years this character preserves itself within the people and, if the native princes concern themselves with it, it can be cultivated in the most natural way: for a people is as much a plant of nature as is a family, except that it has more branches... As the mineral water derives its component parts, its operative power, and its flavour from the soil through which it flows, so the ancient character of peoples arose from the family features, the climate, the way of life and education, the early action and employments, that were peculiar to them. The manners of the fathers took deep root and became the internal prototype of the descendants... No greater injury can be inflicted on a nation than to be robbed of her national character, the peculiarity of her spirit and her language.“ Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803 Johann Gottfried von Herder: Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784

“Man is a slave neither of his race, nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. (...) A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (...) Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. Ernest Renan, 1823-1892 Quotes from ‘What is a nation?‘[Lecture at Sorbonne, 11 March 1882, in Discours et Conferences (Paris, Caiman-Levy, 1887), pp.277-310; translated in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny , eds, Becoming National: A Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 41-55.

“A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite…”Ernest Renan

Primordialist viewKey assumptionsNations are real process National sentiment is no constructIt is rooted in a feeling of kinshipNations are eternal or at least go back to ancient times

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Modernist view Ernest Gellner “Nation as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent … political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality”.

Ernest Gellner • Nations accompany the transition from agrarian societies to modern industrial societies • Nations are functional for modern industrial society. • The most important tool in forming nations is the modern education system • The replacement of “low” by “high” cultures marks industrial society and nation building. • Nationalism imposes the new high culture on the population and uses material from old “low” cultures as raw material see also “The invention of tradition” (Eric Hobsbawm) • Nations are necessary, every single nation is contingent • Ernest Gellner, Nation and Nationalism

“Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round”. (Eric Hobsbawm)

Benedict Anderson A nation is “an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” • Preconditions of nations • Capitalism as a modern system of production and productive relations • Print as a modern technology of communication • Human linguistic diversity The nation as a community imagined through language is simultaneously open and closed “For it shows from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition (London, New York, 1991)

Modernist viewKey assumptionsNations are a product of modernityNations are constructed by elitesNationalists created nations

Critics of the modernist position “For the diffusion of national ideas could only occur in specific social settings. Nation-building was never a mere project of ambitious or narcissistic intellectuals… Intellectuals can “invent” national communities only if certain objective preconditions for the formation of a nation already exist.” Miroslav Hroch, From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation, p. 61

Ethno-Symbolism “ethnies are constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population.” A.D. Smith, National Identity, p. 29

Ethnies (characteristics) a common name a common historic territory (homeland) or an association with one a set of myths of common origins and descent and some common historical memories one or more elements of common culture – language, customs, religion; a sense of solidarity among most members of the community . Anthony D. Smith: The Origins of Nations, pp. 109-110 Nation and Ethnie “A nation can therefore be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members .“ Anthony D. Smith: National Identity. Reno, Las Vegas, London 1991, p. 14.

Ethno-Symbolism • Modern nations and pre-modern ethnies are linked • Ethnies are crucial for the formation of nations • Myths, symbols, folk tales, histories, memories, cultural traditions play important roles in transforming ethnies in nations • They are the basis for social cohesion

“The point at issue is how far the modern, mass public culture of the national state is a modern version of the premodern elite high culture of the dominant ethnie, or how far it simply uses ‘materials’ from that culture for its own quite different, and novel, purposes.” Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, p. 42

Ethno-Symbolism (Anthony D. Smith)Key assumptionsNations are a modern phenomenon, but have roots in pre-modern eras and culturesModern nations are directly or indirectly related to older ethnies with their distinctive mythology, symbolism and cultureNations are expression of the “need for collective immortality through posterity” Nations are both construct and real process

“A nationalist argument is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions: There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character. The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values. The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty.” John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago, 1985), p. 3

Two types of nationalism (Hobsbawm) Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780

Types of Nationalism (Michael Hechter) • State-building nationalism: England, France • Peripheral nationalism: Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia • Irredentist nationalism: Sudeten Germans, Hungarians in Romania • Unification nationalism: Germany, Italy Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford, New York, 2000), pp. 15-17

Irredentism – irredentist (from Italian irredenta – unredeemed): advocating annexation of territory of one state by another state based on common ethnicity or historical 'rights': Separatism – separatist: advocating autonomy or an own state/governmen for part of the territory of an existing state

Pattern of a successful national movement from below (M. Hroch) • A crisis of legitimacy • A certain amount of vertical social mobility (educated people from the non-dominant group) • High level of social communication (literacy, schooling, market relations) • Nationally relevant conflicts of interest

Nation building in non-dominant ethnies (Phase A) Groups in the ethnic community start to discuss their own ethnicity and conceive of it as a nation-to-be: scholarly enquiry into and dissemination of an awareness of the linguistic, cultural, social and historical attributes of the nation-to-be (Phase B) A new range of activists try to “awaken” national consciousness and to persuade as many members as possible of the ethnic group – the potential compatriots – that it is important to gain all the attributes of a fully-fledged nation: (1) development of a national culture based on the local language and its use in education, administration and economy, (2) civil rights and self-administration, (3) creation of a complete social structure – beginning of a national movement (Phase C) A mass movement is formed which pursues these aims: a fully-fledged social structure of the would-be nation comes into being Miroslav Hroch, From National Movement to the Fully-Fledged Nation, pp. 61-62

Conclusion: some problems and questions • Are nations really contingent (occur by chance)? • Why did the identification with the nation have a greater impact on behaviour than religious, regional, class or gender identifications? • How important was ‘national indifference’? • How important are ‘sites of memory’ and the belief in a common past for nation building? • National mass education is only possible after having a nation state, it does not explain the nationalism before and the emergence of national movements in “backward” agrarian societies.

Nation and Memory in Russia, Poland and Ukraine