Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Introduction
It has become almost an orthodoxy to say that the great divide in the world today is between nationalisms. The talk of “a new world order” and “the end of history” may not have lasted long. But what has replaced it does not seem to have been class politics, but rather the rivalry of reborn – or sometimes completely new – nationalisms.
Yet those who speak in these terms have great difficulty in defining what makes up a “nation”. It cannot just be those people who inhabit a certain geographical entity – otherwise what sense are we to make of minorities declining to be part of the “nation” of the majority among whom they live? It cannot just be language – or what are we to make of Serb, Croat and Bosnian speakers of a single language declaring themselves to be separate nationalities, or of the founders of India attempting to impose Hindi, their own recently sanitised version of a regional dialect, Hindustani, as the “national language” of a whole Subcontinent? It cannot be that fashionable catch-all “culture”, since everywhere differences in culture, or ways of living, are greater between the rich and poor, or the workers and peasants, within a national state than they are between neighbours from the same class on different sides of national borders.
There is no single objective criterion by which to determine whether a group of people – or their would-be leaders – will decide they should constitute a nation. On this, at least, such diverse authorities as ‘old left’ academic Eric Hobsbawm [1], ‘new left’ academic Benedict Anderson [2], liberal academic Ernest Gellner [3] and former editor of this journal (International Socialism – Ed.) Nigel Harris [4] are in agreement. Nations are, in Anderson’s words, “imaginary” entities – although in this case imagination in power can use all the nastiest weapons of the state to impose its beliefs on those who dissent from them.
The ideologists of nationalism nearly always try to trace the ancestry of their particular nation back many hundreds of years – as when English history is said to begin with King Alfred and his burnt cakes and Ethelred the Unready, when Tudjman’s government speaks of “the thousand year old Croatian nation”, when the Serbian government invokes the battle of Kosovo in 1389, or Romanian nationalists claim a continuity going back to the Roman Empire’s settlement of Dacia. [5] But these claims are invariably based on fictitious histories. For nations as entities have not always existed.
The modern nation, with its ideal of a homogeneous body of citizens, enjoying equal rights, expressing loyalty to a single centre of sovereignty and speaking a single language, is as much a product of relatively recent history as capitalism itself. It is a notion as out of place in any serious account of the pre-capitalist societies that dominated the whole world until the 16th century, and more than 90 percent of it until little over a century ago, as that of the motor car or machine gun. In fact, it is the connection between the rise of the nation state and the rise of capitalism that enables us to understand the strength of the myths that lead people to slaughter each other – as always with wars, most of the slaughter being of the poor by the poor, not the rich by the rich.
Capitalism and the nation
The class societies that existed before the rise of capitalism were organised through states. But these states were external to most of the activities of the great mass of people. They robbed them through taxation and pillage and they coerced or bribed them into joining their armies. But they left untouched their basic everyday activity of getting a living, which took place mainly through subsistence agriculture even if a small portion of their output was traded. The peasantry were, of course, heavily exploited and subject to vicious legal repression but it was by particular lords and particular clerics (often the same people), who themselves owed only a distant and fragile allegiance to any central state.
In such a society the situation that existed in the 12th century monarchy called England (in fact made up of modern England, much of western France and parts of Wales, Ireland and Scotland) was typical, with the military rulers using one language (Norman French), the literate elite of administrators using another (medieval Latin), and the mass of the population using a variety of disparate dialects (various forms of Anglo-Saxon, French, Welsh and Gaelic). The state in such a society might be centralised and powerful or weak and fragmented. But in neither case was it a national state as we understand it today. Whatever else its subjects thought, they did not think of themselves as citizens speaking a common language or owing an undivided loyalty to a single geographic entity.
Under capitalism things are very different. The market impinges on every aspect of everybody’s life, from the work they do through the food they eat and the clothes they wear to how they amuse themselves. And with the growth of the market there is a massive growth of administration, both within individual companies and in the state. The ideological mythology of capitalism claims it needs only a minimal state. But, in fact, the market can only function on an extensive, enduring basis if it is backed up by an equally pervasive state – issuing money, ensuring debts are paid, limiting the scale of fraud, building roads and ports, keeping the poor from getting their revenge on the rich, engaging in wars and, above all, enforcing regular taxation on the mass of people.
But an administrative apparatus cannot operate efficiently without an easy means of communication between its functionaries, a language in which they are all fluent. It also prefers this to be the language of most of those who live under it: it makes the prying of the secret police and the tax collectors so much easier, the cohesion between those who give orders at the top and those who enforce them at the bottom so much more efficient.
The first national states
Capitalism first began to develop fully in Holland and England from the 16th century onwards – although market relations and, with them, the first nuclei of capitalist production, were already present in parts of 14th century Italy and Flanders, and 16th century Germany, France and Bohemia. In each case the rise of the market began, spontaneously, to give rise to the elements that were to come together to create the national state. The spread of trade caused people in different regions to have increasing direct and indirect contact with each other. Traders from the towns travelled through the countryside, buying, selling and talking to people in the most remote villages, picking up the bits of dialect they needed to make themselves understood and mixing them into the colloquial idiom of the town, creating, without thinking about it, new standard forms of communication which it was an advantage for everyone connected with the new commerce to learn. Along with the traders went itinerant preachers – often out to profit their pockets as well as their souls – and recruiters looking for men for the new mercenary armies. Meanwhile, the poorest in the villages would leave for the towns in search of work, and the richest to cut out the middleman and to trade directly themselves. While in rural France, the average peasant never travelled more than about five miles from his or her home in a lifetime of toil, by the late 17th century one in seven of England’s population would pass at least part of their life in London. [6]
Spontaneously, unconsciously, trading networks started to become linguistic networks. It was then that the administrators of the state, keen to tax the profits of trade, saw the point in carrying out their transactions in the language of the market, not that of the court or the church. It was then, too, that the innovative writers saw that using the new colloquial tongue was the way to win an audience – as Dante did in early 14th century Florence, Chaucer in England half a century later, and Luther and Rabelais in 16th century Germany and France.
The change took a long time to complete – even as late as the 17th century, Hobbes in England and Spinoza in Holland could still write major works in Latin – but where capitalism conquered, so did the new tongues. By contrast, where capitalism had a false start and then succumbed to a revival of the old order, so too the new languages suffered: the increasing refeudalisation of late Renaissance Italy meant much literature was in Latin rather than in Dante’s Italian [7]; the smashing of Bohemian Protestantism by the armed counter-reformation at the battle of the White Mountain in 1618 was also the destruction of Czech as a written language for nearly 200 years; Latin continued to be the language of administration in the Habsburg empire until the 1840s.
What became the first nations began their life as networks of trade, administration and language, which grew up in the hinterland of major cities. Everywhere in Europe the administrators of late feudal monarchies tried to increase their power over members of the old feudal ruling class by allying themselves with the traders and manufacturers of the towns. These ‘burghers’ were often already at the centre of geographically compact networks of trade and language. Some of the administrators could see great advantage to themselves in making the language of the burghers the language of the state, so cementing the alliance and beginning to create a linguistically homogeneous state, able as none previously had been to insist on the allegiance of all those who lived within its boundaries.
The growth of the new linguistically based state had great advantages for the rising bourgeoisie. It made it more difficult for traders from elsewhere, who spoke ‘foreign’ languages, to challenge their ‘home’ markets. And it made the administrators of the state increasingly subject to their influence and eager to pursue their interests, especially when it came to helping them compete with rival groups of traders on world markets – as with the state-backed struggle for control over the East India trade between the English and Dutch chartered companies in the 17th century. Even where the form of the state remained feudal, as in 17th century France, it was increasingly attentive to the interests of the nascent capitalists.
But if the creation of the national state began spontaneously, elements of consciousness were soon involved as well. Political philosophers from the time of Machiavelli (at the very beginning of the 16th century) onwards began to urge policies on states that would speed up the spontaneous process. [8] Political economists elaborated the ‘mercantilism’ doctrines, which identified the interests of the state with the accumulation of trade surpluses by its merchant class. Playwrights, poets and pamphleteers began for the first time to celebrate what would later be called ‘national’ traditions. The new ‘national’ state proved in practice to have an additional advantage for those who ruled over it, whether they came from the old aristocracy or from the rising class of capitalists. It provided an apparent tie between the exploiters and the exploited. However much they differed in their incomes and lifestyles, they had one thing in common: they spoke a language which others could not understand. This became particularly important to a section of the middle class who, knowing the language and proving their loyalty to the state, could get jobs in the state machine itself that were denied to national minorities at home and colonised populations abroad.
The drive to create new national states
The spread of capitalism through the globe was characterised by combined and uneven development. The first centres of capitalist accumulation in Britain and Holland had a double effect on the rest of the globe. They robbed and impoverished whole regions. But they also drew them into a worldwide network of market relations and so eventually encouraged the rise of new groups of capitalists – or of new middle classes who saw their future as lying with capitalism. But these groups found themselves in a world already dominated by existing capitalists using national states to protect their interests. If new centres of capitalism were to develop beyond a certain point, they needed states of their own to fight for their interests. So it was that French mercantile interests looked to the absolutist state that had grown out of feudalism to fight for its interests in a war for global influence with Britain, that land owners and traders in the North American colonies began to resent the dictates of the British state and aspired to create state structures of their own in opposition to it, and that sections of the middle class in Dublin and Belfast began to mutter about their own ‘right’ to independence from Britain.
Those who looked to the creation of new national states to advance their interests could not wait hundreds of years for spontaneous economic and social developments to bring such states into being. The path forward was at least partially blocked by the existing capitalist nation states, particularly Britain, on the one hand, and by the old absolutist, pre-capitalist states on the other. Conscious revolutionary action was required if they were ever to emulate, let alone out-compete, British capitalism. And revolutionary action had to be motivated by an ideology that laid out, in however confused a way, the key points about the sort of state they wanted.
The French revolutionaries went furthest in this direction, with their proclamation of “the French republic, one and indivisible”. They forcibly replaced the old administrative divisions, with their plethora of differing taxes and privileges, by a centralised structure run through government appointed prefects. They imposed a single standard of citizenship, demanding the allegiance of everyone, an allegiance that found expression in the universal conscription of young males to fight for ‘the nation in arms’. They established a single national educational system, and used it to propagate a single language in place of the regional dialects of the southern half of France, the Breton of the west and the Germanic tongue of the northern frontiers. Theirs became the model of what the national state should be for all those who sought to make the breakthrough to a ‘modern’, capitalist development of society elsewhere in the world. Soon young revolutionaries were striving to copy it in Ireland, Latin America, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Spain. By the beginning of the 20th century there were carbon copy nationalisms in the Czech-speaking regions of Austro-Hungary, the Balkans, Asiatic Turkey, China, India, the Ukraine and the Russian Caucasus. The next half century saw their spread through the empires of Britain and France, which between them controlled all of Africa and most of South Asia and the Middle East.
Nation, language and religion
The new nations were conscious products, in a way that the earlier ones had not been. There were Italian and German, Greek and Czech, Indian and Indonesian national movements long before the nation states themselves were established, whereas in the earlier English, American and French cases the idea of nationality had only taken hold as, or even after, the national state was coming into being. However, life was usually much harder for the creators of the new nations than for their predecessors. Not only did they often encounter vicious persecution from those in charge of the states they wanted to replace or reform, but the raw material – the people – from which they wished to construct a nation, was far from ready.
Centuries of long drawn out capitalist development had created in north west Europe – and in its transplant in North America – fairly large geographic regions in which single languages predominated: in most of England and part of Scotland, in much of northern France, even in Germany as a result of Luther’s success in establishing a church that used a single local dialect. By contrast, in southern and eastern Europe, in Asia and Africa, the late arrival of capitalism meant the task of linguistic homogenisation had hardly begun. It was still quite usual to find the same picture as in medieval Europe: a state administration using one language, a church another, local landlords a third, the peasantry a fourth and often the inhabitants of the towns a fifth. Thus in any particular part of the Balkans, the religious language would be a dead language – Latin, Old Church Slavonic, archaic Greek or classical Arabic. The language of administration would be German, Hungarian, Turkish or Greek. The language of the peasantry would be a Slav or occasionally a Romance or Hungarian dialect, and the language of the towns quite likely a German dialect. What is more, the language of the peasantry would vary from village to village, or sometimes from household to household within the same village. This did not lead to any great problems so long as pre-capitalist forms of production dominated. The peasants would know enough of the languages of administration and of the towns to cope in their limited number of transactions with them and indeed would often switch from one language or dialect to another without difficulty as the occasion demanded. They might not have been able to achieve examination level standards of competence – particularly written competence – in any of them, but they could cope very well without doing so.
But this plethora of languages and dialects was a headache for the modernising nationalists, with their aim of achieving linguistic homogeneity not only in the spoken language, but also in the written forms required for the advance of the market and the modern state. The only way they could achieve their goal was to pick on one or other spoken idiom and proclaim this was the ‘national’ language that everyone had to learn, not merely to speak, but to read and write. The choice was not always completely arbitrary. Capitalist development, however slow, usually meant there were sections of the peasantry already in continuous contact with part of the urban population, with a dialect that was already more influential than others. So for instance in early 19th century Prague there was already a growing Czech-speaking petty bourgeoisie that could act as the link with the peasantry that the nationalists wanted. But there was often a powerful, arbitrary element to it – as when Italian nationalists finally opted for the Tuscan dialect [9] (spoken by only 2.5 percent of the population of the peninsular) as the ‘national language’, or when the first Indian nationalists decided the regional dialect of Delhi, Hindustani, could be the national language once it was purged of all words of Persian origin, or when South Slav nationalists residing in Vienna rejected the idea of using Old Church Slavonic as the national language and instead gave the accolade to the Stokavian dialect (spoken by sections of both Croats and Serbs, but not by all of either) which they baptised “Serbo-Croat”. [10]
But deciding what was the national language was only the beginning of the problem. The mass of people then had to be persuaded to accept it. Here again, things were much harder with most late arriving, more economically backward nations than with their predecessors. For where capitalist development was successful, providing markets for peasants and jobs for growing urban populations, it was not that difficult to get people to put up with the discomforts of not being fluent in the official language. In France most of the non-French speaking minorities embraced the revolution and the nation because it seemed to offer them a better life. In the US generation after generation of non-English speaking immigrants treasured their new nationality, even if they could not speak its language very well. By contrast, in Spain Catalans resented having to speak the language of economically more backward Castille and Andalusia, in Romania Hungarians and Saxons insisted on using their own languages, in Ireland a mass of inducements by the state could not stop the people of the far west abandoning their native Gaelic for the economically much more useful English, and in India the peoples of the south simply refused to accept the Hindi of the north.
The late-coming nationalists had similar problems when it came to the question of religion. The model for nationalists was strongly secularist. For religion was a product of the pre-capitalist societies they were trying to transform. It usually encouraged them to take on obligations that cut right across the new state boundaries they were trying to establish. And it often encouraged divisions among the people they were trying to win to a sense of a single national identity. So 19th century South Slav nationalists wanted the unity of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim; Indian nationalists of Hindu and Muslim; Irish nationalists of Catholic and Protestant; Arab nationalists of Muslim and Christian. But the temptation was always to compromise with religion so as to find a base among a mass of peasants who were still fairly remote from the market and the modernising schemes that went with it, and who found the ‘national language’ incomprehensible. So the leaders of the Irish national movements always combined talk of secularism with attempts to win at least limited support from the Catholic Church, the Indian National Congress’s most popular figure, Gandhi, sought to compromise with peasant prejudice by adopting the garb of a Hindu saint, and the founder of the Arab nationalist Ba’ath party, Afleck, converted to Islam towards the end of his life.
These problems over language and compromises with religion had very important effects. The founder nationalists did not usually identify with one ethnic group against another, and did not embrace what today is euphemistically called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Their aim was to unify the population of a particular region so as to enable them to ‘modernise’ it in a capitalist sense. They were ready if necessary to force a certain language and culture on people, and if necessary to use the full power of the state against those who resisted – as the French Revolution did in Brittany, or the combined forces of the English and Scottish bourgeoisies did in the Highlands. But their aim remained to unite the whole population, not to use one section to eradicate another. However, they began to move away from this aim every time they picked on one minority dialect as the national language or identified with one particular religion. The national movement became based in one part of the population, not the rest. And it was very easy to make a virtue of necessity – to see the German speakers as excluding themselves from the Czech nation, the Protestants from the Irish nation, the Muslims from the Indian nation, the Catholics and Muslims from the Serbian nation.
The class base of nationalism
Nationalism grew up as part of the ideology of capitalist development. The idea of the nation is inseparable from a range of other ideas associated with the bourgeois revolution. If nationalism has conquered the globe, with every individual anywhere in the world today slotted into one national identity or another, it is because capitalism has conquered the globe. This does not mean, however, that the pioneers of nationalism have necessarily been capitalists themselves. There have been such cases. For instance, the first nationalist party in Catalonia, the Lliga, was the party of the Catalan capitalists. [11] More commonly, however, the promoters of new nationalisms have come from sections of the middle class frustrated by the stagnation and backwardness of the society in which they have found themselves. They have seen the only way out as being to turn their country of origin into a ‘nation’ like every other nation, and using that to encourage economic advance. Since every other nation is capitalist, this involves, in reality, encouraging capitalist development, however much it is dressed up in talk of the virtues of the traditional way of life: the Celtic twilight may have inspired Irish nationalists of a century ago, but the programme of the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffiths, was to create “a Gaelic Manchester” [12]; Mahatma Gandhi may have preached the virtues of homespun cloth, but his Congress was financed by the big Indian capitalists and the building up of heavy industry was central to its economic programme; Nkrumah of Ghana may have praised African “communalism”, but on gaining control of state power he set about trying to build modern industry. [13]
The nationalists were more often middle class intellectuals – poets, playwrights, teachers, lawyers – than big capitalists. But their programme depended on the encouragement of capitalism, even if this meant turning some of their own number into state capitalists by the establishment of new nationalised industries. Before being able to do any of these things, the nationalists had to find a base of support in society at large. The middle class itself, or, rather, certain sections of the middle class, was usually an important part of the base. The backwardness of society was reflected in the feebleness of career opportunities for the literate middle class, especially when state power was in the hands of a pre-capitalist ruling class or some already existing foreign nation state. Then an obvious way for the middle classes to improve their chances in life was to fight for their own right to work in the state machine – using their own language if this was a problem – and to go even further and fight for a revolutionary reconstitution of the state machine under their own ‘national’ control. In a similar way the small shopkeeping, trading and petty manufacturing bourgeoisie could rally behind the nationalist course. They did not have the ability to extract concessions from a pre-capitalist or foreign state machine that big capital sometimes had. The creation of a new national state would provide them with influence over political decisions and with the government contracts and protected markets that went with it. Finally, the peasantry and the incipient working class were always possible allies for the national cause. They suffered from the general backwardness of society and faced continual humiliation and repression from those who ran the old state machine. Nationalist agitation could act as a focus for a mass of discontents and stir the lower classes into action.
But there was always a problem for the nationalist in relying on the workers and peasants. Their discontent was not merely with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation or the behaviour of the old state; it was also with the new, rising forms of capitalism, often presided over by the new ‘national capitalists’, and with the privileges of the ‘national middle class’. A movement of workers and peasants that began with hostility to the old rulers and exploiters could all too easily spill over into confrontation with the new, home born variety. This could destroy all the plans of the nationalist leaders. That is why the history of nationalist movements often involves spells of agitation among workers, but these spells have always been brought to an end with a sharp turn to placate ‘national’ propertied interests, even if the price of doing so is to derail the national movement itself. Hence the ‘betrayals’ of Germany in 1848-9, Ireland in 1921-2 or China in 1926-7. The workers movement may be a temporary ally for the nationalists. But it cannot constitute a firm and reliable base for their schemes. For this they have to look to sections of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie.
Reactionary nationalist movements
The classic nationalist movements were part of the bourgeois revolution that swept Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Later nationalist movements were often associated with the struggle of colonial peoples to throw off imperialist rule. To this extent they involved a challenge to existing oppressive state structures – even if they intended only to replace them with new oppressive state structures. But from very early on movements arose that seemed to have certain ‘national’ characteristics, but which served to protect, not undermine, the old structures. One such movement was that of Highlanders who joined the reactionary risings of the Stuart pretenders to the British throne in 1714 and 1746 in the belief that this would protect them against the new, bourgeois organisation of society being imposed by the Lowlanders and the English. Another was the chouan movement in Brittany in the 1790s, with priests and royalists manipulating the fears of Breton peasants about threats to their traditional way of life so as to ignite a counter-revolutionary revolt. A third was the Carlist movements of northern Spain in the 1830s and 1872, with Basque and Navarese peasants expressing resentment at the loss of traditional rights by fighting under the leadership of the most reactionary forces (their first demand was the restoration of the Inquisition!).
In the same league, although with a rather different social base, was the Orange Order in Ireland – consciously established by the British state around the slogan of Protestant supremacy to help smash the Irish national movement in the late 1790s, and revived for the same purpose in 1832, 1848, 1884, 1912 and 1920-1. These movements did not proclaim themselves to be national, although some present day nationalists have claimed them as precursors. But a movement which emerged during the revolutions of 1848 did present itself as part of the more general nationalist upsurge. This was the movement of the Slavs living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its leaders aimed to create new national entities for the Czechs, the Ruthenes (western Ukrainians) and the South Slavs (the common name for Serbs, Croats and Slovenians). But with the partial exception of the Bohemian Czechs, these peoples were still in their overwhelming majority economically backward peasants, speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects, with the idea of any common national ties restricted to a handful of urban intellectuals. The mass of peasants could not be drawn into battle to replace the old traditions of economic backwardness and local parochialism by some new model of national unity. But some of them could be persuaded to play the role of the Bretons and the Basques – to fight in defence of the old feudal order against the challenge to it from the German and Hungarian nationalists. So in 1848 they fell in behind the counter-revolution and helped the Habsburg monarchy to crush the revolution in Vienna. As Marx wrote at the time, “In Vienna we have a whole swarm of nationalities which imagined the counter-revolution will bring them emancipation.” [14] No wonder, “in those months all of Europe’s democracy came to hate the small Slavic nations…” [15]
As ‘nationhood’ became the established, generally recognised symbol of legitimacy in an increasingly bourgeoisified world, so not only movements fighting the old order but those striving to reinforce it inscribed ‘national’ slogans on their banners. By the second half of the 19th century even the dynastic empires that had previously been the most bitter opponents of national movements began to redefine themselves in nationalist terms. The Prussian monarchy took over the German nationalist ideology. The Habsburg monarchy split its domains into two halves, in one of which Hungarian replaced Latin as the official language, in the other, German. The ‘Tsar of all the Russias’ – whose court had spoken French and relied to a considerable extent on German speaking administrators – for the first time began to encourage a Great Russian nationalism, which regarded other ethnic groups as innately inferior. “It was not until Alexander III (1881-94) that Russification became official policy.” [16]
The absolutist monarchies, which had established themselves in the late middle ages by using the urban burghers as a counterweight to the feudal lords, were now trying to prolong their life by renegotiating terms with sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The monarchy would give privileges to traders, bankers, manufacturers, gentry and literate intelligentsia that spoke one language, if they would ally with it against its enemies – inducing those sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie who spoke other languages. But it was not only the old absolutist monarchies who adopted the policy of pushing one nationalism and oppressing others. So did the already capitalist states that were dividing the whole of Africa and most of Asia between them. The second half of the 19th century saw a new celebration of ‘British’ nationalism, with the establishment, for the first time, of a state run educational system that indoctrinated children in the glories of ‘national’ history, the writing of nationalist popular novels, plays, poetry and songs by literary admirers of the empire and the conscious invention of traditions aimed at encouraging popular identification with the monarchy. For the middle classes the identification with ‘nation’ and empire was not to be simply ideological but contained crude material incentives: the bureaucracy that administered the empire was English speaking, and the career structures in it were open to the middle class English or Scots in a way in which they were not to the Irish Catholic or the Australian, still less the Indian or African.
The use of reactionary nationalism was combined with the deliberate exploitation of linguistic and religious differences to weaken movements against British rule in the colonies. Just as the Orange slogans of Protestant ascendancy had been used with effect in Ireland, in India the British sought to play the Muslim card against the incipient national movement by splitting Bengal along religious lines in the early 1900s, in Palestine they encouraged European Jewish immigration at the end of the First World War to undercut the power of Arab resistance to British rule. In Cyprus they recruited the police force mainly from the Turkish speaking minority, and in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) from a section of the Tamil speakers.
Contradictory nationalisms and communalism
There was one further twist to the spread of the national ideal across the whole world from the late 19th century onwards. Rival nationalities were soon battling for the same territory. The model of the early nationalists assumed they would easily be able to absorb minorities into their new national states. And so it was with many of the first national states: the English did succeed in getting the Scots to identify with ‘Britain’ and the empire, the French did absorb the southerners who spoke the Occitanian dialect and even gained the support of many German speaking Alsacians, the German empire did win the allegiance of Saxony, Thuringia, Hanover, Hamburg and Bremen (although separatist currents persisted in Bavaria and the Rhineland). But things were very different with many of the later developing nationalisms. As we have seen, the late arrival of capitalism meant there was rarely one predominant language or dialect among the people who were supposed to make up the new nation. The nationalists might be able to gain support from one section of the population by declaring its language the new national tongue – but only by antagonising other groups.
Even where a degree of capitalist development did take off, it did not always make things easier. For it drew new sections of the peasantry, not fluent in the national tongue, into market relationships and created a new petty bourgeoisie from among them. Intellectuals from this milieu began to codify peasant dialects into new tongues, to fight for official status for them and eventually for nation states based on them. Thus, as a continual influx of former peasants transformed Prague from a mainly German-speaking city into a mainly Czech speaking one, so the demand grew to establish a new Czech state out of the Austrian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. But at least by the late 19th century there was a clear Czech-speaking majority in Prague. In many major east European, Balkan and Caucasian towns all the competing linguistic groups grew, without any one necessarily predominating: Hungarian and Romanian speakers in Transylvania; Italian and Slovene speakers in Trieste; German and Polish speakers in Silesia; Lithuanian, Polish and Yiddish speakers in Vilnius; Ukrainian, Yiddish and Polish speakers in the western Ukraine; Turkish, Greek and Armenian speakers in Istanbul; Greek and Slav speakers in Macedonia; Russian, Armenian and Turkish speakers in Baku.
The capitalist world was a world organised into linguistic nation states, and so, as each ethnic group was drawn into this world, its petty bourgeoisie wanted its own language and its own state. But it had arrived too late on the scene to get this through the long drawn out, spontaneous processes that had brought linguistic homogeneity to England, Holland, France or Germany. The different nationalisms could only achieve their goals if they waged bloody wars against each other as well as – or sometimes instead of – against the old absolutisms. What this meant was shown in all its horror with the Second Balkan War of 1913, as the rival national states of Romania, Serbia and Greece ganged up against Bulgaria and sliced Macedonia in two, causing some half a million deaths. It was shown again in 1915 when, in an effort to draw behind them the Turkish and Kurdish speaking populations of the old Ottoman Empire, nationalist ‘Young Turk’ officers organised the extermination of the great majority of the empire’s Armenian speakers; in 1918-19 when rival Azer and Armenian nationalist groups murdered each other in Baku; in 1921-2 when the war between Turkey and Greece led to each army expelling hundreds of thousands of civilians of the other nationality. In eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus the point had been reached where nationalism came to mean ‘ethnic cleansing’ – pogroms, forced expulsions and even extermination camps.
Notes:
(To be continued)