At History's Crossroads
WALKER, CHRISTOPHER J.
At History's Crossroads The making of the Armenian nation by Christopher j. Walker In Xenophon's Anabasis—"The March Up-Country"—there is a description of the Armenian people. We learn of the...
...They retrieved the history and language of the Armenians, collecting texts, sifting facts, and building up a clear picture of the nation...
...By this time the population was on the way to emancipation and self-knowledge, and had outgrown the restrictive bureaucracies that governed them...
...Anyone caught even coming out of church with a Lithuanian prayer book was punished...
...The process of becoming a modern and aware member of a national group—a nation in the modern sense—seems best summed up in T. S. Eliot's words: To recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again...
...Enterprising and patriotic Armenians established an academy in Moscow in 1815...
...We learn of the clans and their chiefs...
...The Ottoman campaigns of extreme violence of 1894-06 and of 1915-16 were, in effect, a lengthy Armenian suicide...
...Modern Armenia is a child of World War I. When the great empires of Europe and Asia collapsed in 1917-18, having hammered each other prostrate in warfare, a host of nation-states took their place...
...The presence of the Kurds in historic Armenia requires explanation: Kurdish tribes, as Sunni Muslims, were introduced into western Armenia by the Turkish sultan, following his victory over the Persians at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514...
...Until World War I, Armenia was divided between the empires of Turkey and Russia...
...We learn how the new nation took shape: the processes of development, differentiation, learning, understanding, and self-knowledge that stirred the spirit of the people...
...You'll learn that Armenians have lived there continuously, rising to establish great dynasties, falling to subsistence, exile, or mass death, before becoming post-Soviet citizens...
...In a sense, though, Armenia's independence had been maturing for centuries, and that course is charted here...
...Lands were confiscated and leading families were compelled to leave...
...In Lithuania, in 1861, the czarist governor Muraviev had said he looked forward to a time 40 years hence when there would be no trace of Lithuania or Lithuanians...
...The true figure is closer to 30,000—still huge...
...All these activities predated the arrival of American missionaries, and Panossian proves the falsity of a malign theory about the Armenians, proposed by Elie Kedourie and repeated by Maurice Cowling, that by accepting modernization from U.S...
...Anyone who questions the reality of the Armenian genocide should read U.S...
...Henceforth, Latin, and then a bastardized form of German, were imposed on the Czechs...
...Local educational establishments were also set up in the Caucasus...
...Panoss-ian discusses the difference between the constructivists (who believed that national identity is a construct) and the primordialists (who believe it was always there, waiting to be discovered...
...A word about this book's physical appearance...
...The design of the book and its evocative jacket owe something to Shaker art, and something to the English Arts and Crafts movement—a classic of book-making, an item for anyone who values fine books...
...Financial success only denationalized some of those in the Ottoman capital...
...Compare the situation with that of the Czechs, whose language and identity were being abolished by agents of God and Emperor...
...From the facts he presents, and from his use of the word "retrieve" in the context of Armenian national identity, it would seem that he prefers a qualified version of the primordialists—which certainly makes most sense in the light of historical facts...
...Their history is an argument against big government...
...In other words, we should study the empires more than the subject nationalities, since the problem lies with them...
...And it is hard to see how nations like Armenia might fit into such a scheme, divided as the country was until 1918 between two empires, each, to a greater or lesser extent, destructive...
...The Jesuit Antonin Konias boasted of burning 60,000 books in the Czech language, including the Czech Bible...
...One of these was Armenia, which emerged as sovereign in May 1918—more than a year after Czar Nicholas II's abdication had set in train the process towards the state's independence...
...Intense theories about the construction of nationality appear rather less smart and modern when one recalls that the Armenian writer Grigor Tate-vatsi, writing almost exactly 600 years ago, declared that "a nation is divided from another nation by region, by language, and by canon law...
...The record of the generous and patriotic Armenian capitalist extends to the present day...
...missionaries (who first arrived in 1829), the Armenians prepared for their own disasters...
...He informs us of the activities of the Indian Armenians, who pioneered Armenian journalism in the 1770s and contributed a major history of the homeland...
...Razmik Panossian writes at length on the origin and nature of nationalism, though one regrets his omission of the views of Hans Kohn, an able and enlightened writer on the topic...
...Panossian's book is a warning against the return of empires, and a plea for localism...
...This led to the requirement that the native people speak French one day, and English the next...
...Xenophon was writing in 401 B.C...
...What these few examples show is that nationalism—local pride—is often little more than a common-sense response to the actions of empires: an expression of ordinary local folk against an Orwellian nightmare of giganticism...
...Armenians in the Russian empire lie outside this curious meta-physic...
...The ruling elite was not terminally reactionary...
...The introduction of Western values into an Eastern society, so the theory goes, created an impossible marriage, and the Eastern society was driven to murder...
...The book could also benefit from a stronger awareness of the international political situation...
...Two points need more extensive treatment than what Panossian offers us...
...This mandate lapsed with a treaty in 1639, but the Armenians were thereafter compelled to share their land with a privileged ethnicity, which was re-privileged in 1891 when the sultan, sensing a spirit of Kurdish revolt, nipped it in the bud by creating loyal Kurdish regiments, turning their threats towards the Armenians...
...this was when the monks in Venice were working hardest...
...Columbia University Press has done a fine job in producing a volume that, besides making public a valuable text, is easily usable and attractive...
...Is there a thread running through empires, which tends to make them, sooner or later, attack or destroy their own subject peoples...
...So this theory is disproved by historical facts, and cannot stand up by reason of its scant regard for basic knowledge...
...We are reminded that the Armenian people have always worked hard, and been self-supporting, and that from that work ethic has come a devotion to their heritage...
...Walker is the author, most recently, of Oliver Baldwin: A Life of Dissent...
...There was a farcical situation in New Caledonia, the Pacific territory over which, in colonial times, Britain and France perpetually quarreled...
...We are also introduced to the popular custom of drinking beer through a straw...
...Though the Armenian nation has never been large, the homeland is located on a pivotal part of the earth's surface, which has led to an excessive interest in Armenia by outside powers that do not share the usual Armenian characteristics of culture and self-limitation...
...A The Armenians From Kings and Priests To Merchants and Commissars by Razmik Panossian Columbia, 442 pp., $40 desire to loosen the bonds of empire was a natural corollary...
...a struggle to retain a human face, an identity grounded in town or neighborhood, when confronted by a governmental monster grinding towards political monopoly...
...Their purpose was to guard the frontier against the Shiite nation...
...Its crises with its empires came relatively late...
...It is odd that some new version of empire is championed as the way forward today by thinkers such as Philip Bobbitt and Robert Cooper...
...His text was reprinted in Constantinople in 1729...
...The czarist authorities actually dynamited Catholic churches in Lithuania...
...In the light of the facts of rule by empires, any general study of the topic should consist less in theorizing about the development of national identity than in exploring the dynamics within empires that lead them to oppress and crush national communities...
...His fondness for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which has shown genuine and dedicated service and activity, leads him to downplay the legacy of the scholarly and cautious Ramkavar party: less noisy, more conservative, but with a deep understanding of Armenia's history, culture, and options...
...Besides being constructed around a spineless concept of political responsibility, the theory ignores the point that development came from many more directions, and at an earlier date, than just from American missionaries...
...Examples spring to mind from the Baltic countries...
...As Panossian informs us, a Catholic Armenian order of monks based in Venice, known as the Mechitarists, was instrumental in pushing forward much of the process of emancipation...
...Few people in the world have endured more from the lack of localism, and from the intrusion of grandiose, secretive political conglomerates, than the Armenians...
...Panossian's study of the background to modern Armenia has a further value...
...Maybe some of the disputes about modern nationalism amount to little more than a barrowful of medieval scholasticism...
...Poland was not better off divided among three empires than as a unitary state...
...The perils that the Czechs had endured under the Hapsburgs attended Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1894-96, then those in Russia in 1903-05, and most seriously in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-16, when the Armenian population from the Aegean coast to the Russian border was driven out or exterminated in a totality and cruelty so vast as to make the charge of genocide a valid one...
...In Estonia and Latvia, the native people sought freedom from both Germans and Russians, but the Russian paternalistic fanatic Pobiedonostsev, a modern Grand Inquisitor representing the power of extreme orthodoxy, declared that no czar possessed the power to diminish his own authority...
...Only later, through the agency of antiquarians and historians of language, did they start to relearn their own language and rediscover their true identity—not as Jesuit-driven Hapsburgers, but as the Czech nation...
...We saw this in the last months of the Soviet empire (with Lithuania again in the forefront), and we have been witnessing it in the steady maintenance of Tibetan nationalism against the bullying nastiness of the Chinese empire...
...The British in Ireland also edged into imperial terrorism, by acts of collective punishment and, from 1831, by compelling children to speak English, forcing a cruel contraption into the mouths of kids unable or unwilling to do so...
...The people in the homeland were fortunate here, for the order was quite possibly acting heretically...
...The people were regimented and treated with disdain by their rulers, but there was no emergency until the late 19th century...
...consul Leslie Davis's dispatches from Kharput...
...He delineates the course of the roots that have fed the stems, leaves, and flowers visible today...
...Why, in their collectivity and tendency towards monopoly, do they end up looking like the Soviet Union of about 1974...
...There is, perhaps, a third point: that the author himself shows some of the partisanship that has divided the worldwide Armenian community for almost 90 years...
...tions across the centuries from the experience of the past to the reality of the present...
...Change was more nuanced, and the Turks themselves had been moving towards some modernization: scientific education, printing, and so forth...
...The Lithuanian language was forbidden...
...Today you can take a plane to Yerevan, capital of the Republic of Armenia, not so far from the region that Xenophon was describing, and you will meet the descendants of those whose lives were drawn by the ancient writer...
...Armenia, like other national cultures that developed into states, had been clogged for centuries by the dark weeds and oppressive mud of other people's empires, before it found a current with which to swim to the clear surface...
...The peasantry, denied their reformed faith and resenting the imposition of Catholicism, largely relapsed into paganism...
...From the early 18 th century, members of this order acted in a startlingly modern and critical fashion, ably separating Catholic concerns from matters connected with Armenian history and education...
...The question to answer is: Why are empires such a uniquely bad way of organizing human society...
...They, and other small nations, look for a world order, perhaps untidy, of many voices...
...Even the merchants, active across the world in late medieval and early modern times, favored patriotic activities, building churches and keeping in mind the historical, ecclesiastical, and cultural legacy of their people, especially their unique alphabet...
...A brilliant and cynical imperial ruse...
...In this fascinating and important book, Razmik Panossian traces the connecChristopher...
...Compare the situation with Catholic Hapsburg influence on the Czech nation...
...Their enterprise had been made possible by the privileged position that Armenian merchants had been granted in Iran in 1604...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 11
