Tag Archives: Nationalism

French Nationalism

Posted on by

Nationalism is a feeling of pride or patriotism to one’s country, it is the effort of an individual to attach their identity to their country. Nationalism was vital to the success of the French Revolution. Being united by history, a common language and customs made it possible for the French to stick together instead of tearing their nation apart. In Halsall’s introduction to Herder’s “Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind”, he says that “people are not ‘naturally’ aware that they belong to a nation in the sense that they might be aware they belong to a family, clan, village, town, or locality.” A nation has larger boundaries and the people who belong to it will go to great lengths to not only define these boundaries but also to protect them. A nation’s physical boundaries are defined by agricultural landmarks, separating different groups of people by nature. Therefore, to define a nation, one has to establish a character belonging to that nation; a character preserved by its people through history. To Halsall, an important part of this character of a nation is language. He believes that a nation should be united by one language, and that to take that away would be begrudging the people “of its one eternal good”. To Halsall, language holds “tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul”.

To Halsall, Nationalism is dependent on common language, traditions, and history. To him, it seems the past very much defines the future of a nation. What brings a people together and keeps them together is the stability of a nation’s “character”, and other cultures or languages hold a threat against this character. La Marseillaise calls for the “children” to rise up and protect the “fatherland”. This goes along with Halsall’s theory of a nation finding its identity and strength through their forefathers (or the founding fathers of their nation). The song goes on to say that the French need to unite against the “foreign cohorts” threatening their nation. This shows that they as a nation believe that foreigners taking over would ruin the nations character and thereby take away the identity they have attached to their nation. It is fitting that this became the marching song for the French troops because it reminded them why they were fighting- to protect the land as well as its traditions, language, and control of their interpretation of history that were so vital to its character.

Nationalism and the Frenc

Posted on by

Nationalism major part of the French Revolution, which itself was the creation of a new French nation.  In the introduction to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s “Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind” Paul Halsall wrote “People are not naturally aware that they belong to a nation”.  The French Revolution went a long way in establishing the idea of French nationalism.  An important factor of that was the poem “La Marseillaise” which later became the national anthem of France.  The entire poem is about defending the “fatherland” from “foreign cohorts”.  The French Revolution went a long way in creating a new French national identity.

The nationalists in France worked very hard to keep their vision alive.  They define what Halsall described as “In almost every case nationalists envision much broader boundaries, and have gone to considerable trouble to construct and defend these boundaries with particular interpretations of history.”  The French went to a lot of trouble during their revolution, a time that featured many executions in order to maintain control.  They also had very different views of their place then the nobles or clergy did.  The Third Estate believed that their Supreme Being did not give them their tyrants but it was their job to rid the country of them.  The French Third Estate spared no expense when it came to enforcing the new, national way of living.  They created an entire new society to fit with the new ideas of France.  From creating a new calendar to editing playing cards and chess the French definitely went to “considerable trouble” to maintain their beliefs.

 

Neo-Traditionalism from Modernization

Posted on by

In the 1930’s, the Soviet Union’s intentions were to create a more strongly collected, unified nation. While nations were an inevitable product of modernization through the massive uprooting and relocation of the working classes, there was a shift from a nation being modern in it’s fundamentals to focusing on the primordial roots of the citizen. What spawned from creating a national identity through the conduit of modernization was Neo-traditionalism. Neo-traditionalism in essence is the simultaneous cooperation of both modern and traditional aspects, and was the Soviet Union’s unexpected outcome. A pre-industrial state could not be considered a modern nation, because modernity cannot exist without the technology. However, industrialization exterminates old folk culture and is a catalyst for new culture. As the sense of nationalism developed, the game began to change with shifting ideologies with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks saw nationalism as something which was on a different plane than class, and socialism would be the unifying principle. However, Soviet affirmative action made class and ethnicity an issue because of discriminatory institutions, a product generated by over zealous statism. The Neo-traditional outcome of modernization is what shaped Soviet nationalities.

This article made me think of how we view the ethnicity of each other in America. When people ask me what I am in regards to ethnic background, I say I am South African and Irish. Most people would answer this way I believe, even though all who were born in America are Americans. What is the line between immigration and a true, newfound sense of nationality? Why do many of us feel a sense of pride to our ethnic backgrounds despite the fact that we have never experienced the culture?

The USSR as a Communal Apartment

Posted on by

Author Yuri Slezkine poses an interesting view of the USSR in the late 1920’s and early 30’s in his chapter “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism” in the book Stalinism: New Directions. The chapter details the “Great Transformation” of 1928-1932, during which ethnic diversity was highlighted and celebrated; it then explains the “Great Retreat” during the 1930’s, when nationalism as a whole was discouraged except those select nationalities that reinforced socialist ideas and contributed to the overall success of the USSR.

The promotion of ethnic distinctions seemed strange to me at first, considering the Communist goal of eliminating classes and the inequalities that came with them. I assumed that defining and strengthening different ethnic identities would only lead to more inequality and struggle. It seems that at first, ethnic particularism was a way to accept the inevitable differences that arise between people but in a manner that avoids classes. Towards the end of the chapter, however, the author alludes to the fact that certain nationalities were seen as more worthy, therefore superior to others. It may not be along class lines, but the people of the Soviet Union were still divided. This promotion of nationalism most likely created more problems for the Soviet government in the long-term as nationalism grew stronger and threatened the Soviet’s unity and control. These struggles would also plague the Russian government after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Critical Summary: Mazower, Chapters 1-4

Posted on by

Beginning in the 1920s, the first four chapters of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent describe a Europe traumatized by the First World War and caught in the thrall of a “bourgeois triumph”, heralded by the collapse of Europe’s great empires and their replacement with a “belt of democracies” stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, each equipped with a constitution enumerating the liberal principles and rights of its citizens and leaders with the express aim of rationalizing governance and reducing politics to the management of institutions responsible for protecting and cultivating the welfare of ordinary citizens (4, 5). The first four chapters of Mazower’s book explain how European dreams of a pacified continent organized around a liberal democratic consensus collapsed in the face of widespread nationalism and economic crisis.

According to Mazower, the rise of national self-determination served as one of the first indications of the liberal democratic vision’s incapacity to maintain peace in Europe. “[The Treaty of] Versailles had given sixty million people a state of their own, but it turned another twenty-five million into minorities,” says Mazower. This development would then create a situation in which young nation states turned into cultural battlefields for majorities and minorities who refused to recognize each other as members of the same society. The creation of parliamentary democracies that favored strong legislatures over executive power could only aggravate this state of affairs (42). The Great Depression also drove Europeans to look for alternatives to liberal democracy. In the face of a worldwide economic crisis, economic nationalism –not free market capitalism- as adopted by Italy and the Third Reich, reduced unemployment and increased the people’s confidence in both the nation and the economy (115).

While these factors do provide adequate explanations for the failure of liberal democracy in Europe, Mazower proves most instructive when countering the misconception that fascism installed itself in Europe as an ideological aberration. Instead, it arose as a natural response to conditions and attitudes already well established in Europe at the time. In some cases, liberals even looked to fascism as a solution to economic and social troubles in their countries. Mazower makes his general survey of European history more accessible to undergraduates through succinct descriptions of specific situations that demonstrate his points. In one such case, Mazower turns to Italy as an example of the ideological fluidity between liberalism and fascism, explaining how Mussolini’s rise to power depended upon the support of three other political parties, including the Liberals, who, along with many members of the police, the Civil service, and the Court saw in fascism a last line of defense against socialism (14-15). The most disturbing portion of Mazower’s exploration of the fascistic elements germinating in Interwar Europe comes when Mazower reveals that liberals also shared a proclivity for eugenics and other theories of racial and social “hygiene”. We learn, for instance, that Weimar Germany, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries passed laws allowing for voluntary sterilization while implementing welfare programs to encourage “valuable” births over the expansion of “inferior” social groups (97).

Dark Continent will help any student searching for a concise analysis of fascism’s rise to power in Interwar Europe. Using a wide variety of secondary sources including academic journals based in the countries studied and primary sources including newspapers, pamphlets, and philosophical texts like Spengler’s Man and Technics, Mazower condenses an extraordinary amount of information normally unavailable to the average reader into a relatively small number of pages. This proves helpful for both students looking for a digest of secondary literature on the period and those searching for primary texts that reveal the concerns and interests of European thinkers writing at a particular stage in the Interwar period. Were I to make recommendations for the book’s improvement, I might suggest adding a description of how colonialism reinforced scientific racism and acted as the precursor to the genocidal tactics employed by fascists before and during World War II. However, this would surely exceed the scope of Mazower’s first four chapters. For more information on this particular subject, I recommend Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate the Brutes.