- 04 Sep 2012 05:28
#14049150
1.National identity is extremely different from every other group identity that preceded it. We can talk about a certain level of biological ties with tribal identities (although even tribes were/are themselves quite mixed). Besides, things such as ethnicity weren't always as important as they were made later in the times of the birth of nationalism where it was elevated to a great level of importance in one way or another (most often via mythology). Look at the Ottoman Empire, where religion was what determined a person's social position (the millet system), and that was the most important identity. Then we have the Holy Roman Empire where lands were very important to people and a Carniolan Slovene and a Carniolan German would both consider their Carniolan land identity more important than their ethnicity.
But what nation-building does is select a certain territory and invent a certain identity, assigns it a certain destiny, and this can take all sorts or forms, depending on the socio-historical facts that led to this specific manifestation of identity (often this has to do with ethnic myths), which brings me to:
2.In France, for example, there was still great ethnolinguistic diversity in the beginning of the 19th century, and there still didn't exist a widespread national identity, eapecially among peasants. The centralised state-bueraucratic apparatus started to build a French national identity, and one of the ways they did that was to suppres their specific traditions and force a common French identity onto them, and that included the French language. Nowadays the descendants of these people are all proud Frenchmen, even though their ancestors from 200 years ago would give them funny looks if someone told them they were supposed to feel a strong connection with all inhabitants of France.
3.As far as "race" is concerned, all you have to do is look at the USA where black and white Americans share a common national identity. As far as genetic differences that aren't so visible, investigate the genetics of the average European nation and see how genetically mixed it actually is.
4.As for more about linguistics, you could take a look at Switzerland. The Swiss people are of different ethnolinguistic identities, and yet share one strong common national identity.
5.Another example with more similar languages are the nations in the area of the South Slavic dialect continuum. For example, let's take Croats and Serbs: A number of Serbs speak the Shtokavian dialect and so do a number of Croats. Some Croats speak the dialect of Kajkavian and some speak Chakavian. And yet, the Croats have a common identity and the Serbs have their own common identity. Which means that a Croat Shtokavian speaker shares an identity with someone who speaks more differently from him than his Serb neighbour. But it's true that religious differences historically played a part there so let's look at an example of where rhey didn't:
6.Slovenes and Croats are both historically Catholic. As far as language is concerned, here's the deal. A person living in certain border regions, whether they're Slovenes or Croats, speak very similar dialects, sometimes practically indistinguishable. I personally live in the other side of Slovenia where the dialect is noticeably different (Slovenia is actually extremely dialectally diverse, and not just in per capita terms). And yet, the Slovenes in the border regions feel a sense of connection with me, not with the guy who speaks the same as them but happens to have a Croatian national identity. Why? Because national identity is arbitrary and socio-politically constructed.
7.Another interesting example showing the arbitrariness of national identity are the Macedonians. Like the Bulgarians they are Orthodox. Their languages are quite similar. Their lifestyles, culture and mentality also. By all means, there's no reason why these people should not be one nation, right? Wrong. Due to historical events, mostly the fact that the Bulgarian government sided with Germany in WW2 which is something the Yugoslav Macedonians disliked as they were predominantly anti-Axis and set up their resistance movement with widespread support when Yugoslavia was attacked, they developed their own distinct national identity. Go to a Macedonian now and tell him there is no such thing as a Macedonian national identity and you might get punched in the face.
8.Look at the situation in Taiwan. There, you have an example of two competing national narratives about Taiwan. A bit over half of the population claim that Taiwanese identity is part of a greater Chinese national identity. But a number of Taiwanese claim that Taiwanese identity is a specific national identity. Both are right because national identity is what you decide it to be.
9.Look at Northern Ireland. Yes, there are the Protestants and Catholics but like in the case of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, this is not really a religious dispute. Religion in these cases serves more like a "national flag", symbol of national identity. To get to the point, you have two different national identities, both arbitrary, ideological, subjective, and both are completely valid.
10.I just listed the examples here that I know the most about. But look at any national identity and you'll see something similar going on - an arbitrary, ideological, subjective, psychological, systematically and deliberately created identity.
P.S.: Okay, I'm not really an expert on this. I'm just interested in reading about it. Perhaps I'm not presenting things exactly the right way. Maybe I'm getting half of it wrong. This is an incredibly complex issue and one has to read tons of books to get things straight, something I haven't really done yet, and perhaps never will.
Here are some quotes by Stipe I've just looked up (unfortunately, he's not posting here anymore, for some reason), who deals with this professionally:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=124226
On Northern and Southern Germany, and the North and South in the USA:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=103811
Here are probably some of the most important things about all this:
Some more great stuff by Stipe here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=108468
Such as this:
And this:
And here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1160&start=20
And this: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=84130&start=20
To sum it up, this: viewtopic.php?t=81737
Now that I think about it, this is probably the reason he eventually left:
But what nation-building does is select a certain territory and invent a certain identity, assigns it a certain destiny, and this can take all sorts or forms, depending on the socio-historical facts that led to this specific manifestation of identity (often this has to do with ethnic myths), which brings me to:
2.In France, for example, there was still great ethnolinguistic diversity in the beginning of the 19th century, and there still didn't exist a widespread national identity, eapecially among peasants. The centralised state-bueraucratic apparatus started to build a French national identity, and one of the ways they did that was to suppres their specific traditions and force a common French identity onto them, and that included the French language. Nowadays the descendants of these people are all proud Frenchmen, even though their ancestors from 200 years ago would give them funny looks if someone told them they were supposed to feel a strong connection with all inhabitants of France.
3.As far as "race" is concerned, all you have to do is look at the USA where black and white Americans share a common national identity. As far as genetic differences that aren't so visible, investigate the genetics of the average European nation and see how genetically mixed it actually is.
4.As for more about linguistics, you could take a look at Switzerland. The Swiss people are of different ethnolinguistic identities, and yet share one strong common national identity.
5.Another example with more similar languages are the nations in the area of the South Slavic dialect continuum. For example, let's take Croats and Serbs: A number of Serbs speak the Shtokavian dialect and so do a number of Croats. Some Croats speak the dialect of Kajkavian and some speak Chakavian. And yet, the Croats have a common identity and the Serbs have their own common identity. Which means that a Croat Shtokavian speaker shares an identity with someone who speaks more differently from him than his Serb neighbour. But it's true that religious differences historically played a part there so let's look at an example of where rhey didn't:
6.Slovenes and Croats are both historically Catholic. As far as language is concerned, here's the deal. A person living in certain border regions, whether they're Slovenes or Croats, speak very similar dialects, sometimes practically indistinguishable. I personally live in the other side of Slovenia where the dialect is noticeably different (Slovenia is actually extremely dialectally diverse, and not just in per capita terms). And yet, the Slovenes in the border regions feel a sense of connection with me, not with the guy who speaks the same as them but happens to have a Croatian national identity. Why? Because national identity is arbitrary and socio-politically constructed.
7.Another interesting example showing the arbitrariness of national identity are the Macedonians. Like the Bulgarians they are Orthodox. Their languages are quite similar. Their lifestyles, culture and mentality also. By all means, there's no reason why these people should not be one nation, right? Wrong. Due to historical events, mostly the fact that the Bulgarian government sided with Germany in WW2 which is something the Yugoslav Macedonians disliked as they were predominantly anti-Axis and set up their resistance movement with widespread support when Yugoslavia was attacked, they developed their own distinct national identity. Go to a Macedonian now and tell him there is no such thing as a Macedonian national identity and you might get punched in the face.
8.Look at the situation in Taiwan. There, you have an example of two competing national narratives about Taiwan. A bit over half of the population claim that Taiwanese identity is part of a greater Chinese national identity. But a number of Taiwanese claim that Taiwanese identity is a specific national identity. Both are right because national identity is what you decide it to be.
9.Look at Northern Ireland. Yes, there are the Protestants and Catholics but like in the case of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, this is not really a religious dispute. Religion in these cases serves more like a "national flag", symbol of national identity. To get to the point, you have two different national identities, both arbitrary, ideological, subjective, and both are completely valid.
10.I just listed the examples here that I know the most about. But look at any national identity and you'll see something similar going on - an arbitrary, ideological, subjective, psychological, systematically and deliberately created identity.
P.S.: Okay, I'm not really an expert on this. I'm just interested in reading about it. Perhaps I'm not presenting things exactly the right way. Maybe I'm getting half of it wrong. This is an incredibly complex issue and one has to read tons of books to get things straight, something I haven't really done yet, and perhaps never will.
Here are some quotes by Stipe I've just looked up (unfortunately, he's not posting here anymore, for some reason), who deals with this professionally:
...Yes, they're different ethnicities and the understanding of ethnicity in this poll is limited. There are no objective criteria for determining ethnicity. Rather, ethnicity is about the particular way people relate to each other, either seeing themselves as belonging to a common group or to different groups. Shared cultural traits are used as markers (and cultural differences are much more significant than how is represented in the first post), but these are fluid and changeable over time. Furthermore, much of what determines group belonging is conditioned by the social history of the individual groups vis-a-vis each other and those that ruled over them.
Language is only one potential external marker used to delineate belonging to the ethnic group, but it's not the only one and often the idea of common language for all the people who belong to the ethnic group had to be deliberately constructed (see Germans, Italians, Han Chinese). Religion, however, is marginalized here when it is historically at least as important. For centuries, religious adherence was the most important form of group belonging; it impacted on the group's status within the larger society (for instance, the status of Christians in an Islamic theocratic state), internal group solidarity, social life and economic relations, affected more benign areas of culture (diet, festivals, naming conventions) and the boundaries between groups were policed by conventions over marriage.
The interplay between religion and social difference is not a small thing and has everywhere perpetuated itself into the modern world, whether it be in Germany with the kulturkampf, northern Ireland, or the history of Jews everywhere. Now consider how that interplay would perpetuate itself in an area of Europe that was basically a Crusading zone for about 300 years.
And yet, despite all that members of these different groups in the former Yugoslavia worked for 150 years to bring these groups together as one national community. The common language that people with superficial knowledge of these things always emphasize was itself a product of that 150 years' process. And in many ways, these people had less to work with in terms of historical memory. There was never a Yugoslav version of the Holy Roman Empire that could be represented as a precursor to a future modern unity. In the usable past, there had simply been the medieval kingdoms of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. A myth of common ancestry, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of ethnic identity, uniting these groups did not exist (in contrast, Croats an Serbs do have such myths).
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=124226
Well, the subject peoples being talked about are ethno-national communities, so nationality can't be completely removed from the discussion. Part of the subject of my dissertation is how people in this region were ethnicized as a consequence of the competition between different national projects.
But in any case, I would back up and contend that there is no resemblance between Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs and the Greek polises. The Greek polises were politically-divided, but shared a conception of themselves as culturally-united on the basis of language and religion. The Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs were politically-divided, culturally-divided, and, when they came under the rule of one empire or another, socially-divided for their entire histories.
On Northern and Southern Germany, and the North and South in the USA:
It is a very significant cultural difference because of what underpins it. One reason is the Catholic cultural inheritance and the other is the historically different social structure. Writing off the agrarian character of the region in relation to the north shows the limits of your understanding of the theoretical subject of this debate. Differences in social structure and the problems of uneven development are frequently at the heart of ethnogenesis as well as nation-formation. Such differences very nearly divided the United States into two national communities in the Civil War.
As for your counter-example, it's not the same thing. You and your Catholic rural farmer neighbors are laterally united by several things: the political institutions of the Canadian nation-state, the social communication that takes place between the town and its agricultural hinterland, and your participation in common market structures. Though you live different occupational lifestyles, you participate together within the confines of larger structures.
The example of the United States is more illuminating. You need to think more deeply about what the consequences were of the Southern slave society. You cannot talk about it as a simple difference in economic modes of production. You also need to consider it as a bedrock of an entire, strictly hierarchical social order legitimized by an ideology of white supremacy. This reaches a height with the invention of the cotton gin and the subsequent development of the Southern cotton monoculture over the course of the 60 years prior to the Civil War. At the same time, the North is making the transition from a society based on subsistence agriculture to one based on industry and rapid urbanization. As a consequence of the industrial revolution, Northern society (like the societies of northern Europe at about the same time) is being radically transformed. Old hierarchies and social relationships in the North are being undermined and becoming vastly more fluid because of the emergence of capitalism, whereas in the South old hierarchies founded on the agrarian slave economy are being reinforced and intensified by market forces. You can see in this way how the two societies were then entering a fairly prolonged period of radical divergence, which was only overcome through war and the forced abolition of slavery which paved the way for the same basic kinds of developments which were already affecting the North to take hold in the South. In that way, their social structures moved back towards convergence.
The reality is that Croat, Bosniak, and Serb ethno-national identities function in exactly the same way other in the region do. In the Orthodox countries, the national churches have always been the primary carrier of national identity. Hence you had people "repatriated" to Greece from Turkey during the population exchanges who barely spoke a word of Greek but happened to be Orthodox. In the early history of Croatian nationalism, religious difference was in fact not regarded as the central element of national ideology, because the main national adversaries (the Hungarians and Italians) were also largely Catholic. It wasn't until after the First World War, as the political conflicts with Serbia began, that Croatdom came to mean being Catholic. It's not any different than how Catholicism became nationalized in Poland because of that nation's conflicts with Orthodox Russia.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=103811
Actually, that part isn't what I'm going after in particular. I'm rather warning against the whole idea that Serbs/Croats/Franks/whatever migrated and took possession of a territory as a coherent people and that the contemporary population are their descendants. The Geary book is good as it shows how such groups were not homogeneous populations to begin with and the meaning of the "ethnic" name was continually in flux, given new content, and used in different ages with completely different definitions.
How would you react if I said that a) that proto-Serbs, so to speak, were not what we would think of as an ethnicity and that b) those who identify as serbs today probably have no biological descent from those same proto-Serbs whatsoever?
One of those posts where you put up a map of Lusatia and said "this is where we came from." I distinctly remember the "we". It's a primordialist phrasing that assumes continuity between whoever those people were in the 7th century and the modern ethno-national community.
Your culture has nothing to do with those Serbs whatsoever. They left literally nothing but their name and were probably not even a cultural group in the first place. Serbian culture shares no more with Sorbian culture than all Slavs share with each other. You carry their name because they managed to found a state to which they gave their name, and then founded a church which conveyed that name and the memory of that state, but these things were not carried with them from Lusatia.
No no no, it is precisely the culture of those slavs which has been inherited. But those people weren't Serbs yet. Slavic tribes had already settled the Balkans a century before the Serbs appearance in the historical record. Those Slavs didn't spontaneously pick up the name. They did so for a very good reason - they became subjects of the Serbian state and, later, were adherents of the Serbian Orthodox Church which preserved the memory of said state.
But is it actually the memory of those people? I don't think so. If the memory was preserved, the "Unknown Archont" would have a name and not just a 19th century academy-invented stand in, albeit one that sounds supercool in English.
What Serbian collective memory recalls is a whole different category of people calling themselves Serbs. What the name meant to them is something different from what the name meant to whoever the Serbs were that moved into the Balkans in the 7th century. One was some kind of tribal-barbarian confederacy which, like everyone else in Europe, invented a myth of common ethnic descent along the model of Roman historiography and the concept of the organic gens. The other is a state community comprised of people who were there before previous mentioned Serbs ever arrived.
No, this is not a continuation by any stretch of the imagination. This is a transformation. A break with two pasts.
Once again, no they didn't. The Serbs that came down were assimilated without the slightest trace left, passed down *nothing* material. Once again, Slavs were already there. It is the culture of those Slavs that you have. I've stated it before, but there is absolutely *no* break in the archaeological record from the time before the arrival of the Serbs to the time afterwards. Pottery, building styles, jewelry, whatever, all stay the same. What this says is that these Serbs were a small group, probably more of a roving military band than a people, and simply imposed their political authority over a preexisting culture. That political authority's name was then transferred to that preexisting culture via that state and its use propagated and expanded via the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. Once again, this is not continuity, unless you choose to consider a complete re-defining to be continuity (but then why have language at all?)
You're going about this wrong. The general thought among historians is that Serbs (and Croats) established themselves as political-warrior elites in the territories they ruled. Being Slavic themselves, cultural assimilation to the majority would have happened easily. They probably maintained their sense of separateness not as any kind of discernible ethnic group but more as a closed social class (i.e., they became the nobility). Read Geary's book and you'll see not only how this sort of thing is possible, but also just how common it was across Europe.
Here are probably some of the most important things about all this:
That doesn't make any sense. Of course religion and ethnicity were distinguishable. One could be conscious of the fact that your village speaks a dialect completely incomprehensible to a village 50 miles down the road. They could still, however, be Christian, which was more important anyway.
Confessionalism refers to the time in European history when religious community was the overriding principle of political legitimation. A Catholic king derived his legitimacy before his Catholic subjects by virtue of the fact that he was Catholic. Likewise, if his subjects were Protestants, his legitimacy would be rather less in their eyes.
Ethnic homogeneity probably first started to be considered as important with the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He lived during the Napoleonic occupation of Germany and articulated a German nationalism in opposition to the French. However, since there was no united German state, he used ethno-linguistic and to some degree religious criteria to determine the extent of the imagined nation. Ethnic homogeneity as an overriding principle of political legitimacy grew from there but became especially around the 1880s and 1890s, when racialist thinking was also in the ascendant, and reached its nadir with the end of the First World War and the "nationalities principle". The idea wasn't exactly that other groups caught on the wrong side of the border should be exterminated or moved, but that state borders be coterminous with ethnic borders. This, obviously, was a problem considering that clear ethnic borders are far less common than areas of mixedness and cultural hybridity (Trieste and the Julian March being the examples par excellence)
Ethnicity is a very fluid concept but I would consider it a group united by cultural markers (in the pre-industrial period, also social structure) which shares a particular ethnic consciousnesses underpinned by a myth of common ancestry. Distinguishing between regional culture and a broader national cultural community (what you call "racial" culture, which is problematic terminology since it connects biology and culture) is actually to accept the assumptions of ethno-nationalists about the territory and extent of the ethnic nation. Regional cultures and identities are quite capable of being ethnicized as a result of socio-political processes, and indeed have.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that ethnicity doesn't mean anything. Rather, I think you've already put your finger on it: as one of the ways of identifying with (or rather identifying as a part of) a particular kind of social group. Ethnicity may be bounded by cultural markers, but seems to owe its salience as a type of identity to differences of social structure, either present or historical, within a particular political context. It's thus very much akin to other constructs like race in America or pre/early-modern European confessionalism, but is constituted through a particular set of cultural and historical narratives as opposed to religious or phenotypical ones.
I thin I'm pretty much in complete agreement with you. The idea that ethnic homogeneity is particularly desirable is not out of some special essential cohesiveness of ethnic groups, but because - since the 19th century - ethnicity has been constructed as a (in many places the) key principle of political legitimization and social organization. This has obscured the fact that even a supposedly ethnically homogeneous society continues to be riven by conflict between social groups though they may define themselves using a different terminology.
Some more great stuff by Stipe here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=108468
Such as this:
The turn of this conversation is interesting in that it illuminates, with its discussion of cultural differences just how much Herder and the 19th century central European conception of nationality has a grip on the modern imagination. I found it particularly interesting that in one post, political differences were specifically discarded. However, nation is fundamentally a political category, referring as it does to a group of people who recognize each other as belonging to a sovereign community with a common historical past and destiny as a political unit. Hence, the idea of the nation has always gone hand in hand with the the state, and the nation has always been formed *by* the state, either with it or in opposition to it. Language and culture do not determine nation but selective traits from those viewed as distinguishing are used to mark the members of the national community. That they recognize each other as belonging to such a community is on account of historical and social developments. Assertions that a Canadian nation (or a Spanish nation) does not exist are ideological claims made on large groups of people who would very probably strongly disagree with such a claim at the present time. Certainly,it's been my experience that there are very very few Anglo-Canadians who would even find the idea of a common community with Americans at all attractive.
And this:
A national identity is a particular kind of identity and when a community accepts such an identity, then it is a nation. Language and culture alone never made nations. In the past, they didn't even necessarily signify ethnicity. What was more important in determining ethnicity in the past were differences of social structure (agrarian vs. pastoral for example). It wasn't until industrialization brought a big flattening of these social structures that things like language, cuisine, folk dress etc were latched onto in order to maintain the social cohesion of the group.
As for Bretons and Occitans, it is in fact quite debatable how many of the Bretons and Occitans actually consider themselves as belonging to a nation separate from the French nation. I'm sure some do but I would wager that there are not terribly many. Two hundred years of living in an assimilationist French nation-state has done its job. The idea of Breton and Occitan nations remains largely a hypothetical or project idea. This is very different from the Czechs and the Slovaks (both of whom were never a part of the German Empire btw). The Czechs were a part of the distinctly non-national "Austrian" half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Slovaks were a part of the Kingdom of Hungary, which tried very hard to make the Slovaks into something like the Bretons and Occitans, but they did not have the strength to do it and instead ended up encouraging the idea of the Slovak nation, in opposition to the Hungarian nation-state.
And here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1160&start=20
Nationality has nothing to do with the biological concept of race even in ethnic nation states. They all possess a diversity of physical types because populations have been flowing and mixing long before the development of modern national identity.
And this: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=84130&start=20
Well, we'll be at an impasse because I find the biological element of ethnicity to be overplayed. It presumes an innateness which isn't there. I can name plenty of different ethnic groups which share common origins but which developed through separate ethnogeneses for socio-cultural, historical, and even political reasons. Even those socio-cultural reasons are insufficient in explaining ethnogeneses as the traits that become markers of ethnic identity derived from that I chosen more or less arbitrarily. It is my deeply held opinion that any attempt to understand ethnicity without consideration of the (subjective) ethnic identity of the individual is failed as it can just as easily be imagining and imposing (or negating) an identity which the individual (and his ethnic community at large) does not recognize.
To sum it up, this: viewtopic.php?t=81737
Most of the discussion on nationalism that goes on in this forum (either from the left or the right) is pretty poor on average. It's pretty frustrating for me, essentially as I'm starting a Ph.D on the subject.
Firstly, the the nation is best thought of as a large group of people which is self-conscious of its internal unity, recognizes limits (i.e., people and places which are outside the bounds of the nation), and (most importantly) conceives itself as being politically sovereign.
There are many different kinds of nationalisms, and subsequently different kinds of nations. Generally, the classical divide is between "Civic" (Western) and "Ethnic" (Eastern). In theory, the civic nation (examples, United States, France) is conceived as the community of citizens. Ethnic nationalism typically occurred in places without a preexisting national state. Generally speaking, peoples who conceived of themselves as a single nation but were politically divided (pre-unification Italy and Germany) or places that were under the domination of other empires (the nationalities of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires). That division isn't necessarily a clean one, nor always a good one. #1 objection is that nations we think of as "civic" can certainly exhibit "ethnic" characteristics and vice versa. #2 is that the division is inherently orientalizing, but that's a different beast altogether.
Nationalism is the ideology that "the nation" (that is, the people) is politically sovereign and thus deserves the right to govern itself. Carried out to its logical conclusion, it basically means that the nation deserves its own state (the nation-state) and that the nation-state should conform to the physical boundaries of the nation as closely as possible. Initially, this was a very romantic and liberal idea which saw (primarily) Europe as a group of independent and politically liberal states coexisting alongside each other. This made sense at the time (early 19th century) because it was part of a liberal reaction to rule by absolute monarchy. This began to shift later into various "integral nationalist" ideologies once the contradiction in romantic nationalism became apparent. Different nations can have a basis to lay claim to the same area (usually places with mixed populations) and that obviously leads to conflict.
The "nationalist state" is not really a term that is used and I'm not sure what you would call it. The nation-state is something like Germany, Hungary, or Poland. Generally, it's a state in which the majority of that nation lives and which sees itself as the political representative of that national community on the international scale. For example, Hungary would see itself as the international political advocate for ethnic Hungarian minorities living in Slovakia, Serbia, Romania etc. Of course, nation-states can have wildly different forms of governments. Liberal democratic Czechoslovakia was a nation-state, and Nazi Germany was a nation-state. They both derived their political legitimacy from the nation (Czech and Slovak or German respectively), but politically they were as different as night and day.
Today, nationalism is often equated to racism and the far right by some on the political left. Usually though, these are people with a quite superficial understanding of it. It's not that they're completely wrong because certain interpretations of nationalism (usually originating from people on the far-right) have had significantly racist connotations. My problem though is when people argue that nationalism is essentially racist and/or authoritarian, or that the nation was something imposed by elites to divide the laboring classes. It firstly displays ignorance of how and why the concept of the nation developed in the first place, ignores the long relationship between political liberalism and nationalism through the 19th century as well as the histories of the various national movements which were socialist or generally left-wing in their social content, and in general totally fails to acknowledge the staggering diversity of national ideologies that could (and would) develop within only a single nation (including sometimes very different ways of "imagining" the nation). There are definitely nationalist ideologies and movements which I perceive as fundamentally reactionary, but there are also many others that I definitely feel one would be justified in calling progressive (like any number of anti-colonial movements). Simply put, context and content are crucially important.
There are plenty of cases where some states and nations have tried to deny the nationhood of others living within their borders. Tends to be a particular characteristic of nations that claim to have a civic identity. They might recognize that ethnic difference, but will maintain that there is only one "political nation" in the state and that all citizens regardless of ethnicity are a part of it. It sounds inclusive, but in practice it has also usually been strongly assimilatory in nature. Generally, this is the state's reaction to what it sees (admittedly, with reason) to secessionist and/or irredentist tendencies among its minorities. This won't change the fact if a group has already acquired a national consciousness though and really, it's a means of the dominant community in the state to erode that consciousness. As long as that nation is aware of itself as a nation, it won't matter if anyone tells them otherwise.
Definitely and in most cases language is indeed a crucial marker identifying that nation. It's certainly not the only one though as different nations can share a language, but that particular language itself can be a marker. Example, Americans do not have a unique language of their own, but English is nonetheless seen by many (if not most) as a marker of American identity. Historically, linguistic assimilation has been one of the main weapons in weakening other groups' national consciousness (i.e., Russification in Poland and Ukraine, Germanization and Magyarization in the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
The crucial role of language is especially strong in Central Europe, where ethnic notions of identity originated. This is basically the result of Herder's argument that language was a carrier of the spirit of the nation. He predicated this on the idea that language determines how people think. Thus, according to him, members of the ethno-linguistic nation share something as fundamental as how they conceptualize the world. It then follows that that the defence of the native vernacular language and cultural traditions is actually also the defence of the nation's individuality and indeed of its very existence.
Of course though, there are nationalisms which aren't so much dependent on a common language. The obvious example is Indian nationalism, which encompasses numerous different languages. This is also true to some extent in Han Chinese national identity. Although Han do share a common literary language, although Chinese "dialects" are as divergent as Romance languages. Nonetheless, these communities perceive themselves (for the most part anyway) as a national whole united by common culture.
...
Well, reason does exist but it doesn't apply universally. Nazism, obviously, was absolutely a racist and authoritarian ideology and nationalism was an element within it. However, presenting all nationalist ideologies and national movements as the same thing as that, because they both have the nation as a concept, even if that nation might be defined in radically different terms, is kind of like conflating the welfare state with Stalinism.
You are right that drawing that link is nonetheless an effective way of attacking a national movement. It doesn't surprise me that it would be used against Scottish nationalists despite the fact that the parties supporting Scottish independence are virtually all center-left and that they never campaign on any kind of ethnic chauvinism.
Now that I think about it, this is probably the reason he eventually left:
Most of the discussion on nationalism that goes on in this forum (either from the left or the right) is pretty poor on average. It's pretty frustrating for me, essentially as I'm starting a Ph.D on the subject.
Last edited by Mazhi on 04 Sep 2012 10:02, edited 8 times in total.
"Nations ... 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." - E. Gellner