Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe

Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah, Marius Turda, Jan Dr. Fellerer, Robert Pyrah, Marius Turda

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000497274
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'Europa orientale

This volume addresses the question of 'identity' in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of 'sub-cultures' over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as 'ethnic group', 'majority' or 'minority'. Instead, a 'sub-culture' is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.

1 The fallacy of national studies¹

Tomasz Kamusella

Introduction

National studies is a broad field of academic pursuits potentially comprised of all the social sciences and humanities, though its typical core is limited to philology, history and ethnography (also known as folklore studies or ethnology). In Central Europe (also in Japan and southeast Asia), where the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism predominates for building, legitimising and maintaining nations and their nation states, national studies are the main intellectual cornerstone of these processes. As such the ideal of dispassionate and disinterested research open to all is abandoned, and scholarship is harnessed into the service of the state-led national idea. The resultant subservience of research to ideology requires the adoption of circular logic among proponents and practitioners of national studies that better serve the national interest. Language, history and culture are nationalised and essentialised. The basic assumption of this development is that a given nation’s language, history and culture are fully accessible and knowable exclusively to the nation’s members. Scholars sticking to this dogma are assured of employment at state-owned and state-approved universities, while those whose research contradicts cherished assumption of the national idea are summarily ostracised in order to bring them into line or make them leave academia.

Nationalism, philologists and peasantry

In the early modern period in Western Europe, a popular idea coalesced that people ‘naturally’ come in neatly delineated (ethnic) groups. These groups can be discerned through the careful research of their customs and appearance, thus allowing for the supposedly unambiguous and ‘scientific’ apportioning of all humanity into such ‘discoverable’ discrete population categories.² Without much comment on this fact, the assumption also entailed the normative belief, which persists to this day, that an individual can ‘naturally’ belong only to a single human group of such a type. Perhaps this normative belief stems from the conviction of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which claims that a person can profess only a single religion (at least, at the same time).³ The religious strife in Western and Central Europe that concluded with the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) reinforced this norm of (serial) mono-religiosity, as succinctly summarised in the 1555 principle of Cuius regio, eius religio (‘Whose realm, his religion’).⁴ It meant that the ruler decided on the single religion (confession) for his realm and all the population needed to follow this dictum, or leave.⁵ Another consequence of this novel principle was the rise of the sovereign ‘territorial state’, which was supposed to be internally homogenous and normatively free of any outside influences. This aforementioned homogeneity meant that the state was reserved for the population of ‘the same type’, which at that time meant of the same religion (confession).⁶ At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment quest for discovering and gathering knowledge about the entire (social) world decisively added the category of ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) to religion and customs as a necessary and unique trait of each discernible people.⁷

The afore-described ways of ‘sorting out’ human diversity are sometimes referred to by present-day students of nationalism as ‘national thought’, in order to avoid the self-serving phrases ‘early nationalism’ and ‘proto-nationalism’ that are actually preferred by nationalists.⁸ But in essence both terms are anachronistic labels applied to preselected earlier (that is, pre-national) intellectual trends, which nationally-minded scholars and national activists found [to be] of use for their own national projects, which were mostly developed in the nineteenth century.⁹ However, scholars and thinkers of the eighteenth century who were involved in developing and practising what nowadays is known as ‘national thought’ did not use the term ‘national thought’ or ‘early nationalism’ themselves. In no way did they see their period as ‘national’. There were some ‘peoples’ to be discovered and taken note of, but no nations on the horizon yet.¹⁰ Furthermore, such ideas on discrete peoples as developed by a narrow (almost invariably noble) stratum of male literati had no chance of reaching other strata of society, let alone the masses.¹¹ In the estates society, birthright, serfdom and illiteracy rigidly separated peasantry (or the vast majority of the population) from the demographically minute nobility. Studies of the national specificity of one people or another, usually focusing on this or that national language, originated in nineteenth-century Central Europe.¹² This field of research grew from two different pursuits. First, at the turn of modernity philologists discovered vernaculars (illiterate peasantry’s speech) as the ‘proper’ field of research. Second, these peasant vernaculars came to be understood as discrete national (people’s) languages (that is, Einzelsprachen) connected to this or that ‘written language’ used by an elite for writing, education and administration. In practice philology treated such vernacular languages as metonyms for speech communities, quickly (and with almost no comment) equated with nations to be led by ‘their’ elites.¹³ It was these elites who invented, imagined nations and their languages into being.¹⁴

In Central Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century the nation became a new sought-after form of human groupness that was gradually accorded the highest political recognition. This recognition came complete with the right of nations to their own state, especially after the Great War.¹⁵ Subsequently, the nation was elevated to [being] the hallmark of the future and modernity, as opposed to the region’s ‘backward’ and ‘reactionary’ empires that were not national in their social or political character and aspirations.¹⁶ This perceived ‘deficiency’ of the empires became more ‘visible’ during the nineteenth century, the greater the insistence that the nation must be defined through its own specific vernacular, unshared with any other nation. For instance, as a result the Austrian Empire’s population was largely homogenous in their Catholicism at the beginning of this century. However, three generations later, Einzelsprachen were replacing religion as the main locus of group identity in Austria-Hungary. Descendants of the previously undifferentiated Catholics began to see themselves as now belonging to a variety of ethnolinguistically defined nations tentatively united under Franz Joseph’s benign rule.¹⁷ Obviously, this process was messy, protracted and uneven. As late as the end of World War I, not all inhabitants of Austria-Hungary had seen themselves in national terms. Turning peasants into nationally-conscious individuals required a lot of ‘hard work’ on the part of nationalist activists (usually stemming from the nobility and burghers, as transformed into a middle class),¹⁸ who apart from creating nations and national languages, sought to combat what they termed as ‘national indifference’.¹⁹ The target population (usually peasantry) as a rule of thumb distrusted the novel ideology of nationalism and was reluctant to do their former lords’ bidding by joining this or that nation.²⁰ Ethnographers and ethnologists (often known as folklorists in Central Europe), together with sociologists and anthropologists, were at the forefront of this ‘hard national graft’, as the scholarly and political avant-garde of a middle class identifying with a given nation. These academically discovered peasantry were perceived through the national lens as the ‘forgotten soul’ and the ‘true body’ of the nation. A craze ensued for collecting peasant songs and customs, which retroactively were fitted to one national language (Einzelsprache) or another, as already identified and endowed with an authoritative dictionary and grammar by peasants’ social betters.²¹ Not that peasants who enquired about the process understood, supported or identified with the proposed languages or nations.²² Their identity remained wedded to their localities, pragmatically anchored in their everyday experience.²³ It was hard work to convince them otherwise. National activists had to establish newspapers, educational societies, publishing houses, cooperatives, literary organisations or schools in order to spread the national message among a target peasant group. More often than not, in order to take hold, this message had to be coupled with economic incentives that would meet the concerns and needs of peasants in a given village or region. Success at spreading a nationalism among a target peasantry was rare, came late if ever, and invariably was judged by national activists (almost invariably from the middle class) as imperfect or only partial.²⁴ Furthermore, the activists had to be watchful, so that peasant groups tentatively secured for ‘our nation’ would not be seized by a competing national movement with a more attractive educational or economic offer.²⁵

This novel metonymy of language (Einzelsprache) for the nation was set in stone by the equally novel genre of ethnographic (ethnolinguistic) map. It appears that this type of map is indebted to the eighteenth-century ‘depiction’ of languages (Einzelsprachen) through the ‘telegraphic’ representation of their writing systems (usually the beginning of the Christian prayer ‘Our Father’) on the maps of the world’s continents.²⁶ Ethnographic maps that locate peoples (nations) in cartographic space by depicting the territorial extent of the peoples’ languages appeared in the 1820s and became ubiquitous by the mid-nineteenth century.²⁷ Finally, statistics lent an overpowering aura of ‘scientific character’ to such maps in the last third of this century.²⁸ In 1866, it was proposed that language (Einzelsprache) should be used as the ‘objective’ marker of nationality.²⁹ Shortly thereafter, in 1872, the delegates attending the Sixth International Statistical Congress at St Petersburg decided that language and nationality (that is, the state of being a member of a nation) were to be included among the essential categories about which population at large must be asked in state-wide censuses.³⁰ Thus, modernising b...