Nationalism and Eastern Europe

...The nature of ethnicity is different in Eastern and Western Europe...

...actually means, "What's your state citizenship...

...It will open the door to exploitation of the minority issue by individual countries against others...

...Once reached, however, such agreements are far more likely to be respected...

...SUMMER • 1995 • 315 Politics Abroad Bereft of the organizing principles of statehood, lacking an urban focus and deprived of territorial continuity, East European nations have come to consciousness in a structureless environment...

...If they do, it is likely that these experiments will not be imitations of the West European experience but ones that in their originality will correspond to the uniqueness of the area...

...The answer may be sought in the following hypotheses...

...The three federal states (Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia) have all disintegrated, leaving in their wake a strong suspicion among state elites (and possibly the hope among minorities) that federalism is a step toward separatism...

...How could it be otherwise when the differences separating oneself from one's enemies are so fragile, so contingent and so ill-understood...

...the overwhelming majority of the insurrectionist Serbs of the Croatian Krajina do not use the cyrillic alphabet, even though the removal of cyrillic from public places is one of their grievances...

...When they reacquired sovereignty in 1918 they had the greatest difficulty in reconciling their earlier conception of nationhood—a medieval class conception or, in the case of Bohemia, a territorial notion—with their new incarnation as supposedly ethnically based nation states...

...Indeed, Croatia has even adopted the late-nineteenth century Hungarian notion of nationhood...

...The European Union will also have to give attention to the issue as it considers enlargement toward the East...

...It is the final stage in the conquest of the city by the countryside, the vengeance of those excluded from the city who can only come to terms with this foreign entity by destroying it...

...These discrepancies are due in part to official manipulation but, above all, they express varying definitions of nationality...

...Neither Vienna nor Constantinople nor St...

...Within the last century it has lived through the unification of Serbian and Croatian around the Stokayski dialect at the expense of Cakayski (perhaps still used by some elders on the more remote Dalmatian islands) and Kajkayski only to see this process now being reversed by Croatian nationalists in favor of Kajkayski...

...In Ottoman-conquered Balkan Europe, the urban-oriented Muslim administrators settled in the cities and were joined by Muslim (and occasionally Greek orArmenian) merchants...

...It has not been much more than a century that Budapest, Bratislava, or Prague has been predominantly Hungarian, Slovak, or Czech (in 1910 only 18 percent of Bratislava's population was Slovak...

...In most East European cities architectural and cultural reminders of previous dwellers stare down upon the present inhabitants, reminding them both of their lack of roots in the city and of their dubious title to their new urban environment...

...One finds the remains of Ottoman categorization according to millet or self-governing religious community in the distinction among Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs, which sacrifices linguistic nuances to religious differences...

...The uncertainty of identity has only increased in the communist and postcommunist eras...

...The Roman empire may have been a distant memory and the Holy Roman empire may have lost its vitality long before it was pronounced dead, but the imperial myth survived, and its universalism complemented the miniature state structures of German and Italian principalities...

...Even those parts of Western Europe that attained unification late, notably Germany and Italy, enjoyed an uninterrupted state tradition...

...Those countries that have acquired statehood late revel in it even though the state they have has come too late to fit the nation for which it was intended...

...In Western Europe, well-established bureaucratic, military, legal, and monarchic structures molded national society to the shape of the state...

...The essential foreignness of the city to the majority nations of this area is brought home to us every evening on our television screens: the destruction of Dubrovnik was not only an attack on a Croat city (only recently Croat and not very Croat at that), it was an attack on the city as an alien abode...

...Another factor complicating the emergence of national states in East Europe was the different expectations created by contrasting imperial regimes...

...Neither Hapsburg dynastic principle nor Ottoman religious categories nor czarist autocracy offered an ideological basis for a national state...

...Second, the character of urbanization has been different in each part of the continent...

...No one can tell who is a Macedonian or where the borders of Macedonia lie, to the infinite distress of Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs andAlbanians, not to speak of Macedonians...

...Some census respondents reply opportunistically, telling the census takers what they want to hear (but what does that say for their national consciousness...

...It has seen the definitive separation of Czech from Slovak but the unification ofTosk and Gheg dialects across the Albanian-Kosovo border...

...In all cases, the discontinuities of state development in Eastern Europe, provoked by foreign invasion, dynastic usurpation, and imperial domination, have led to what the Hungarian thinker Istvan Bibo called "a pathological absence of continuity in territorial status" and, one might add, in linguistic boundaries as well...

...The East European experience has been diametrically opposite...

...In Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary medieval rulers encouraged the immigration of qualified artisans, largely from Germany, as well as of German, Jewish, and Armenian traders...

...In these circumstances, communist dichotomies pitting the exploiters against the exploited are easily translated into national terms, as is the search for the villains re316 • DISSENT Politics Abroad sponsible for one's present woes...

...East European politicians may try to convince us that ethnic problems in the East are a legacy of communism...

...Just as anyone who then lived on Hungarian territory was declared to be Hungarian, present-day Croatia would consider all its inhabitants as Croats...

...Similarly, the former Hungarian crownland of Croatia appears to have entered the Yugoslav kingdom (and later federation) in the expectation that it was joining a new Austria-Hungry where it would play the role of Hungary in exercising absolute dominion over its own territory and co-dominion over the country as a whole...

...This is the case both in the northern and in the southern tier of the area, although for different reasons...

...Whereas the basic lines of the Carolingian partition have remained stable in the West, the borders even of ancient states such as Hungary and Poland have veered madly, as if drawn by drunk cartographers, and other entities, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, have undergone total displacement...

...The UN Sub-Commission on Minorities, the Council of Europe, and the CSCE (now OSCE, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe) have taken concrete measures...

...The far-reaching implications of ambiguous identity are vividly underscored by the Macedonian example...

...Serbs, in contrast, continuing a reconquista tradition of liberation from alien yoke, are less interested in making all inhabitants of Serbia Serbs than in ensuring that all Serbs find themselves within a Serbian state...

...As Bosnia has discovered to its woe, however, the millet system rested upon separation of religious communities and the presence of an imperial power...

...They remain at the receiving end of these institutions' decisions, even in matters that concern them directly...

...Communism bears the responsibility for having fostered a type of politics that thrives on ethnic tension, but its part in creating ethnic tensions was very modest...

...Federalism has suffered a severe setback in Eastern Europe and all efforts to protect minorities must take account of this fact...

...Eastern Europe is indeed different from Western Europe...

...At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no indigenous states in Eastern Europe and, in a sense, the whole population consisted of national minorities...

...The role of the bourgeoisie as agent of nationbuilding was taken up by the clergy (throughout most of the Balkans) or by the gentry (in Poland and Hungary...

...This is particularly evident in the case of Yugoslavia, which is heir to both the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires...

...Other attributes of identity are also blurred in Eastern Europe, producing the most paradoxical situations: Communist Yugoslavia's establishment of "Muslim" as a national category was posited on the conviction that religious belief was of no consequence...

...Postcommunist upheaval has created material insecurity and an ideological void where every nation is faced with the temptation of turning itself into a political party...

...Who has not heard of Catalans and Bretons, Scots and Welsh, Walloons and Flemings, perhaps even Frisians or Friulians...

...We need to recognize legitimate fears of secession and give support to non-territorial forms of autonomy...

...Here, urbanization has been the prime obstacle to national consciousness and nationalism has developed outside and against the city rather than within it...

...How, then, is one to account for the differences between Western and Eastern Europe with regard to ethnicity, nationalism, and minorities...

...Warsaw and Bonn have different conceptions of what it is to be a German when one happens to live in Silesia just as Tirana and Athens have different notions of what it is to be a Greek in Northern/Southern Epirus...

...This was the case for Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, which at one time seemed prime candidates for a West European type of development but instead fell under the sway of foreign powers and disappeared from the political map...

...It is not possible to tell whether such measures and the passage of time will one day induce Eastern Europe to undertake federal experiments again...

...The eastern part, however, is a crazy quilt of overlapping borders, with the colors running into each other within individual states...

...This identification with one's kin group is passionate but it is not reassuring...

...Thus, while the West European bourgeoisie was shifting its allegiance from a concrete city to a concrete national state, East European elites were cultivating loyalty to nostalgia or fantasy...

...And how can Switzerland, that archetypal multilinguistic state, possibly be depicted in monochrome...

...Poland switched its capital from Cracow to Warsaw at the turn of the seventeenth century and Hungary was in no hurry to move its capital back to Budapest from Bratislava at the end of the eighteenth...

...Of course, such agreements would require the most irreconcilable parties to confront their disagreements head on...

...Today, there are twelve (or sixteen) states, and minorities amount to no more than 10 percent of the population...

...For Czech patriots Prague was a German-speaking fortress to be conquered rather than the cradle of the nation...

...As the intelligentsias discuss marketization and democratization, the East European masses rally around those who replace socialist paternalism with nationalist paternalism and who provide national criteria for excluding competitors from scarce goods...

...By 1919 the area possessed seven states (eleven if one adds Greece and the Baltics) and minorities made up about 25 percent of the population...

...Today, in popular parlance the terms "state" and "nation" are so closely identified that they are often used interchangeably (the border guard's question, "What's your nationality...

...Others, considered primitive but perhaps wiser than most, call themselves tubylcy or hiesiger, that is, "people from here...

...It is useless to argue that these federal states were fundamentally vitiated by their long experience of communism or to invoke, as is often done, the Swiss counterexample, an ill-understood anachronistic anomaly...

...These legal differences, as much as the fact that the cities spoke different languages from the countryside, created an urban culture independent of its territorial context...

...It portrays the western part of the continent in solid colors coinciding perfectly with state boundaries...

...The communist industrialization of Eastern Europe produced first- and second-generation city dwellers, ill at ease in their urban environment but no longer at home in the village, self-conscious about speaking dialect but deficient in the literary tongue...

...The nonurban and even anti-urban character of East European nationalism has radically influenced the class structure of East European society...

...At the same time, the East European countries should be persuaded to conclude bilateral agreements guaranteeing conditions for fellow nationals in neighboring countries...

...A leading indication of uncertain identity is the glaring discrepancies in nationality statistics throughout Eastern Europe...

...Of coarse, the solidity of the West European ethnic map is an illusion...

...First, the relationship between state and society, especially national society, has been different in the East than in the West...

...Third, and however paradoxical it may sound, Eastern Europe is characterized by weak and ambivalent ethnic identities in comparison to those encountered in the West...

...The historian George SchOpflin has even noted an (unsuccessful) one-man attempt to hoist the PolishCzech Teschen dialect to language status...

...The qualitatively different nature of urban life was reinforced by separate legal codes...

...Has anyone forgotten that Ulstermen, Basques, and Corsicans were practicing ethnic violence before it erupted in East Europe...

...Not only are scholars hard put to pin down the linguistic composition of a given region but languages spring up with bewildering ease...

...Although the East Europeans are members of these bodies (with the exception of the European Union) their voices are seldom listened to...

...Even a year after the demise of that state, 10 percent of the population of besieged Sarajevo were still identifying themselves as "Yugoslays...

...First, whereas some new states were wholly modern creations, others were founded upon a tradition of once strong but brutally interrupted statehood...

...What does this imply in practical terms...

...The slow, painful, and belated emergence of states in Eastern Europe between 1800 and 1918 took place not through the combination of local territorial political units as in the West but through fragmentation of these huge ill-defined foreign entities...

...It is as if every possible factor had militated against the coincidence of East and West European development, making the division of the last fifty years not an exception but the repetition of a rule...

...Not only did the separation of town and country divide social development to the detriment of national unity but it created what the Czech sociologist Miroslav Hroch calls "incomplete" nations, lacking both civic values and a bourgeois class...

...Holocaust and expulsion have been the ultimate agents in this process, aided by discriminatory practices involving urban residence permits and labor recruitment...

...no Serb ever wept for Belgrade as he or she did for the burial ground of the Serb people on the empty Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo...

...The emergence of modern East European states was complicated by further factors...

...In fact, ethnic violence both preceded and survived the communist regimes...

...As modern national societies began to emerge at the turn of the nineteenth century, under the impact of Romanticism, industrialization and the French revolution, West European state structures were already firmly in place...

...The most ambitious earlier effort to deal with these issues, the post-World War I minority treaties, was a failure because it was seen by the states concerned as a diktat and a hypocritical one at that At that time, the great powers imposed rules of behavior on the East European states without much knowledge of their situation and with no consultation...

...Some states, the Netherlands or Sweden for example, also succeeded spectacularly, but only after having dropped the ballast of unwieldy provinces, such as Flanders and Wallonia, Finland and Norway...

...Minorities are already de facto hostages in the international relations of the area...

...of a Moldavian language...

...Some states, notably France and Great Britain, proved more successful in these tasks than others, such as Spain...

...One might add that the East European flaunting of the accoutrements of statehood— crests, banners, state titles, military pomp—only confirms this proposition...

...it will allow the East Europeans to raise, either opportunistically or in good faith, the problem of immigrants and other disadvantaged groups in Western Europe...

...What a contrast with Eastern Europe...

...The differences in the historical relationship 314 • DISSENT Politics Abroad between the state and national society in East and West Europe are closely tied to another fundamental difference between the two parts of the continent...

...Finally, Eastern Europe must grapple with the implications of the failure of federalism in the area...

...The ethnic separation of town and countryside has been one of Eastern Europe's predominant characteristics...

...One could call oneself a "Yugoslav" in the old Yugoslavia if one really did not know how to define oneself as Serb, Croat, Slovene, and so on...

...At the very least, it will slow down adoption of agreements on minority issues...

...Too weak to become modern national units, these political entities nonetheless served as the building blocks of the new states...

...The siege of Sarajevo is not merely the pursuit of a strategic objective...

...This article has suggested, however, that notwithstanding their obduracy and hostility the states of the area probably understand each other better than outsiders do...

...This concerns the role of cities in the process of nation-building...

...Thus, nation followed state in the West but preceded it in the East...

...Today, numerous international bodies are again concerned with formulating codes of conduct with regard to minorities...

...No wonder that no East European city has ever became the stable focus of national loyalty in the modern period...

...The result is the weakening of personal identities and an ensuing need to fortify these identities without regard to the consequences...

...At the turn of the nineteenth century this part of the conSUMMER • 1995 • 313 Politics Abroad tinent was divided among three empires, none of which was nationally based or locally governed...

...The only permanent solution to the crisis in Eastern Europe is one that accepts Eastern Europe on its own terms...

...Moreover, these same powers refused to be bound by any comparable provisions at home or in their own colonial empires...

...No wonder that East Europeans resented these treaties and repudiated them when they could...

...Nationalism, far from disrupting the process of state-building, reinforced it as states continued, under the nationalist banner, the homogenizing tasks that they had embarked upon centuries earlier...

...Within the last half-century Eastern Europe has seen the emergence of a Macedonian and (temporarily...

...The overwhelmingly nonindigenous character of the East European city persisted well into the present era...

...When even the language one speaks is uncertain, one's definition of oneself can hardly remain unaffected...

...Whereas the RomanceGermanic linguistic boundary has remained stable for centuries, even in the face of political changes, linguistic boundaries in the East have been chronically unstable...

...In contrast, Eastern Europe did not possess a single indigenous state...

...However, only in those states that preceded nations do the terms coincide, and therefore the order in which the nation and the state appear is not a matter of indifference...

...The basic difference in the state/society relationship between East and West revolves around what economists would call a matter of sequencing...

...q SUMMER • 1995 • 317...

...It has witnessed the rise and fall (and perhaps rise again) of Ruthenian as well as the near-demise of Kashubian...

...Given the conventional belief that East European nationality is founded on language, it is astounding to note the fluidity of the East European notion of language...

...These agents imparted their own value systems to the national idea...

...To be sure, involving the East Europeans in such decision making will complicate matters...

...If the city (civitas) is the inspiration for citizenship, it is not surprising that this concept and this quality should be so unfamiliar in Eastern Europe...

...According to Karl Deutsch, Europe possessed sixteen standard languages in 1800, thirty in 1900, and fifty-three in 1937, and the number has continued to grow...

...Petersburg tolerated manifestations of statehood within their realms...

...Formal bilateral agreements would not only protect minorities but would give contracting states a stake in respecting their commitments...

...Urbanization and the development of a city-dwelling (bourgeois) class have been powerful ingredients in the crystallization of national consciousness in Western Europe...

...The absence of a bourgeoisie will have obvious implications for capital formation and for the long-run development of a free-market economy in Eastern Europe...

...But the problem of minorities remains intractable, regardless of the size of the minorities themselves...

...Moreover, the appropriation of the city (including the capital city) by the majority nation of the surrounding countryside has rarely been an entirely natural phenomenon...

...Eastern Europeans themselves should be closely involved in discussion of international provisions for minority rights and minority protection...

...Instead of the demarcation lines of Western Europe one encounters transitional "shatter zones" of acute diversity where linguistic and religious borders are blurred...

...As Freud pointed out with reference to what he called "the narcissism of minor differences," the fact that differences are slight may exacerbate rather than attenuate conflict...

...Nationalism in the West was a centripetal force, whereas in the East it was necessarily a centrifugal one and it continues to be so...

...They spun myths of messianic grace, nomadic chivalry, or rural purity to found their quest for national identity...

...We would do best to begin a search for a solution to the problems of Eastern Europe by understanding the specificity of the region...

...And yet this map does convey a fundamental fact...