Nationalism

Despite the importance of nationalism, there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world’s population. Any examination of nationalism must be preceded by some kind of definition of what constitutes a nation. This question is complicated by the manner in which people often use the terms nation, state, and country interchangeably. The last two terms refer to political entities. The first is a term used to describe a group of people who may or may not live in the same state or country. The difference is conveyed in the German by the words Staatsange- hö righeit (citizenship) and Nationalitä t (nationality). A person can be of German Nationalitä t without being a German citizen.

Definitions of nation or nationality rely either upon objective or subjective criteria, or on some combination of the two. Most objective definitions of nationality rely on the commonality of some particular trait among members of a group. Shared language, religion, ethnicity(common descent), and culture have all been used as criteria for defin­ing nations. A casual examination of the history of national differen­tiation indicates that these factors often reinforce each other in the determination of a nationality. Certain nationalities, such as the Croats, are now defined as distinct from Serbs almost exclusively on the basis of religious differences. Likewise, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis are distinguished from Hindi-speaking Indians largely because of religion.

In other cases, however, a shared religion seems a less accurate method for drawing the boundaries of a nationality. The German nation, for example, is divided mainly among Protestants and Catholics. Conversely, the inhabitants of France and Italy, though both overwhelmingly Catholic, belong to two different nationalities.

One of the most frequently used of all the objective marks of nationality is a common language. Indeed, a shared language has been a very powerful factor in national unification. Yet this definition, too, is fraught with difficulties. For one thing, what we today call national languages are, to one degree or another, artificial constructs. This is certainly true in the case of many of the languages of east-central Europe and of the non-European world. For example, the Serb philologist Vuk Karadzic modelled modern Serbo-Croatian out of the so-called Stokavian dialect in the early nineteenth century; this was part of a self-conscious attempt at uniting the Southern Slavs (Yugoslavs) into one nation.

Other national languages have been created for imperialpurposes. The various languages of central Asia (e.g. Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Khazak) did not exist until they were conjured out of local dialects by Soviet linguists during the 1920s. The languages were then used as evidence to support Soviet claims of the existence of several nations in Central Asia, which was then divided into separate Soviet Socialist Republics as part of a divide-and-rule strategy.

Even in cases where a popular vernacular becomes a national language, this transformation typically happens after the foundation of a nation-state. For example, French became a national language only after the creation of a French nation-state. In 1789, only about half of the population in the Kingdom of France spoke French. To the nationalist Revolutionaries, making French the common language of the nation was of the utmost importance. The same could be said of German, Italian, Hungarian, and other modern European languages. A common vernacular language of administration, state education, and military command was an important tool in the extension of the mod­ern state’s bureaucratic control. Thus, national languages are largely the creation of modern nation-states, not the other way around.

It seems, therefore, that pre-existing common linguistic or religious attributes may not be absolute indicators of a nation. Ethnicity or common descent are other possible criteria for national boundary drawing. These were especially popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and blended with that era’s fascination with racial pseudo-science. To the modern student, however, ethnicity seems a much less compelling criterion. The people of the various Mediterranean nations, for example, are plainly the product of cen­turies of inter-ethnic marriages. Likewise, the American, Mexican, or British nations are made up of people of many different ethnic backgrounds.

Hence, while objective traits can be useful as very rough criteria for defining the existence of a nation, they are not enough. Indeed, a nation may be a very subjective entity. Many students of nationalism are eventually led to the (almost tautological) conclusion that people belong to a certain nation if they feel that they belong to it.

UNIT 3