The Comparative Approach to National Movements

Miroslav Hroch and Nationalism Studies

Alexander Maxwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317979159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Miroslav Hroch's Social Preconditions of National Revival has profoundly influenced the study of nationalism since it first appeared in English translation, particularly because of its famous three-phase model for describing and analyzing national movements in Eastern Europe. Contributors to this book explore Hroch's continued relevance to the field of nationalism studies with four case studies and two theoretical/historiographic essays. Two case studies apply Hroch's thinking to Eastern Europe in light of subsequent historiography, finding that Hroch's ideas remain useful for understanding national movements in Belarus and among the Kuban Cossacks. Two further studies apply Hroch's schema to the Mexican independence movement and contemporary Pakistan – times and places that Hroch specifically excluded from his own considerations. The first theoretical contribution seeks to apply Begriffsgeschichte to Hroch's work; the second suggests that Hroch's phases form a useful typology of nationalism, thus facilitating communication between different branches of nationalism studies. Hroch ends the volume with his own commentary on the various contributions.

This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.

The comparative approach to national
movements: Miroslav Hroch and
nationalism studies

Alexander Maxwell

Czech historian Miroslav Hroch was born to a working-class Prague family in 1932. He experienced the Nazi occupation as a schoolboy, and witnessed the Communist seizure of power as an adolescent. He spent his first year of university studying Czech literature in order to “maintain the Czech cultural tradition…endangered by Communist nihilism,” but switched to history because he found the discipline more intellectually stimulating (Hroch 2009: 42). As a child, he participated in a Red Cross program that sent malnourished Czech children to Norway, and learned some Norwegian. His facility with Scandinavian languages influenced his doctoral dissertation on the Thirty Years War, which specifically examined Wallenstein’s activities on the Baltic coast. Hroch’s doctoral advisor, Josef Polišenský, was a prolific scholar of the Thirty Years War (1949, 1957, 1960); though his later career turned to Spanish and Latin American history (see e.g. 1964, 1979, 1994). In a 2000 interview, when Jakub Machačka asked Hroch why he had taken up the study of history, he repeated his supervisor’s dictum: “because I enjoy it.”

Hroch spent most of his career at Prague’s Charles University, Central Europe’s oldest university and the most prestigious institute of higher learning in the Czech world. He went to Germany for a year during the 1960’s, but the Communist regime generally hindered his ability to travel. Since 1989, the year he became full professor, he has traveled widely, taking temporary fellowships at the universities of Halle and Saarbrücken, the European University in Florence, the University of Joensuu in Finland, Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He remains active in scholarly life despite his official retirement.

Horch’s most famous work, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations first appeared in German under the title Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas. The 1968 German edition attracted considerable attention in central Europe. It also influenced several Anglophone scholars with central European research interests, including Hugh Seton-Watson (1977), Joshua Fishman (1985), and John Breuilly, who declared Hroch’s treatment “superb.” (1982: 405). The English edition encountered several difficulties. British publishing house New Left Books (since renamed Verso) offered Hroch the chance to publish in 1974, but Hroch feared that collaboration with a press that had published Trotsky and other forbidden authors would attract unwanted attention from Czechoslovakia’s security services. The text then went to Cambridge University Press, which lost the manuscript! After Hroch reconstructed the book from his notes, it was translated by Ben Fowkes, himself a prolific expert on East European nationalism (1996, 1999, 2000, 2002) and the English edition eventually appeared in 1985. Hroch’s timing was unfortunate, since the long-delayed text did not take into account three landmark studies of nationalism published in 1983: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Ernst Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, and Anthony Smith’s Theories of Nationalism. Nevertheless, publication in English, however belated, brought Hroch’s work to an international audience. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe has since become a standard work in nationalism studies.

Hroch has repeatedly emphasized that his method was “above all comparative” (Esparza 2007: 52; see also Hroch 2009: 45–46). Every national movement has its own leaders, symbols and historical context; thus every national movement is unique. At the same time, national leaders facing similar problems engage in similar political activities, pursuing similar goals using similar strategies, and justifying similar tactics with similar rhetoric. While a single-minded focus on a single national movement may be most appropriate for understanding how nationalism affected a given society at a certain time, a comparative perspective sheds more light on nationalism as a transnational historical process. Only comparative study can justify claims to exceptional-ism. Students of comparative nationalism do well to define the terms of comparison clearly and narrowly, else the ambiguities inherent in the term “nationalism” lead to insuperable methodological difficulties.

Scholars use the word “nationalism” when referring to multiple phenomena, each worthy of scholarly attention. The word “nationalism” may denote right-wing extremism, an appropriate subject for comparative analysis; such scholars would therefore compare extremist movements but exclude from consideration, say, post-colonial projects to subsume tribal, ethnic and religious differences within an all-encompassing “nation.” Other scholars may use the word “nationalism” to describe post-colonial independence movements, equally susceptible to comparative analysis, while neglecting right-wing extremism. Hroch particularly criticized American use of the term as “pure hypocrisy,” since “you find thousands of titles about ‘American Patriotism’ but almost none about ‘American nationalism’ – the others are nasty nationalists, but we are noble-minded patriots!” (Hroch 2009: 49–50).

Hroch reacted to such terminological ambiguities by attempting to avoid the word “nationalism” entirely, remarking in a 2007 interview with Spanish historian Daniel Esparza (36): “I strongly dislike the term nationalism and I have never been involved in nationalism studies.” He also insisted that Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe “is not a theory of the national movement [nor] a theory on nationalism,” but simply empirical research, albeit with theoretical elements (Esparza 2007: 52). Whatever approach scholars may take to the word “nationalism,” however, no discussion of complex historical processes can wholly avoid problematic terminology. Hroch himself preferred to wrestle instead with the word “identity,” which he defended in his Na prahu národní existence (1999:10); he remains unswayed by the daunting difficulties Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) subsequently raised with the term.

Marxist thinking permeates Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, but while Hroch received his secondary education under Klement Gottwald’s Stalinist dictatorship, his Marxism owes little to Soviet Communism. Hroch’s Marxism drew instead from the Austro-Marxist tradition of Otto Bauer: Hroch characterized Bauer’s 1907 Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie [The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, English translation in 2000] as his first important intellectual influence “in a positive sense” (Esparza 2007: 37). Hroch also claimed he had “learned to understand and appreciate Marxism as a serious research method” from Wolfgang Abendroth, a former law professor in the German Democratic Republic who met Hroch after fleeing the East German regime to become a professor of political science at Marburg. Hroch characterized his theoretical approach as “Marxist methodology (historical materialism)” (2009: 39), but rightly claims to have developed a “non-dogmatic concept of Marxism” (44, 47).

Hroch’s work also shares some common assumptions with modernization theory, a school of thought that enjoyed considerable popularity among comparative-minded social scientists throughout the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Bernstein 1971; Black 1966; Mansila 1978; Tipps 1973). Hroch has credited Karl Deutsch’s study of Nationalism and Social Communication with a particular influence on his thinking (Esparza 2007: 38). Modernization theory transcended the transient ideological differences of the Cold War, promoting scholarly interaction across the Iron Curtain.

Similarly, Hroch’s own scholarly interests never respected the Cold-War division of Europe. In addition to examining both constituent nations of Communist Czechoslovakia, a country which in 1968 found itself at the center of Cold War confrontation, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe also examined Estonia and Lithuania (then Soviet Republics), Norway and Denmark (founding NATO members), and neutral Finland. While much of Hroch’s work concentrates on Czech history, Hroch has always situated Czech history within a wider European context. Hroch has also kept up with Scandinavian studies, as shown by his contribution to a 2005 Czech-language history of Norway.

Hroch characterized his object of research as “The Awakening of Small Nations as a Problem of Comparative Social-Historical Research” (Hroch 1971), focusing particularly on the transition “From National Movement to Fully-Formed Nation” (Hroch 1993), to quote two of Hroch’s smaller articles. Hroch has described Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe as the first volume of a trilogy on nationalism. While national awakening is a global phenomenon, Hroch restricted his interests to Europe, claiming that he lacked the expertise to conduct serious research on extra-European national movements. Both his 1996 In the National Interest: Demands and Goals of European National Movements of the Nineteenth Century, A Comparative Perspective and his 2005 Das Europa der Nationen: Die moderne Nationsbildung im Europäischen Vergleich [Europe of the Nations: Modern Nation-building in European Comparison] made their European focus explicit. Nevertheless, Hroch gave the concept of a “small” nation a technical meaning which scholars have found applicable to the studies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Nothing more persuasively demonstrates the usefulness of a scholarly idea than its applicability to unforeseen circumstances, and several scholars have generalized Hroch’s insights to other parts of the world.

To facilitate comparison between national movements, Hroch devised a schematic model of national awakening with three stages: Phase A (“scholarly interest”), Phase B (“patriotic agitation”) and Phase C (“the mass national movement”). Hroch’s analysis concentrated on the social composition of nationalist organizations during the different phases, paying closest attention to Phase B. Juxtaposing these phase transitions with the social transformations of the industrial revolution, Hroch further differentiated four different “types” of movement among small nations: “integrated,” “belated,” “insurrectional” and “disintegrated.” Hroch’s comparative approach thus emphasized not only Marxist class analysis, but schematization and classification. Hroch’s work on the class composition of national movements, however, has attracted less attention than the three phases themselves, which remain the best-known aspect of his work.

Hroch’s long-lasting influence has made him a respected figure among scholars thinking about nationalism, and he has won several honours since the collapse of Communism. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1997, and from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas ten years later. Miloš Řezník and Ivana Slezáková dedicated their volume Nations – Identities – Historical Consciousness to him in 1997. In 2000, Jan Pelikán organized a Czech-language festschrift. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the English edition of Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, the journal Nationalities Papers devoted a special issue to Hroch’s work in 2010.

This volume reproduces the special issue of Nationalities Papers as a free-standing volume. It seeks to give a retrospective on Hroch’s famous book and discuss its continued relevance for several different branches of nationalism studies. Some contributors apply Hroch’s ideas to case studies overlooked in Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe; others engage with Hroch’s ideas from a more theoretical perspective. Most contributors take issue with one or another aspect of Hroch’s work, yet all have found Hroch’s ideas a productive site of analysis, even when discussing parts of the world about which Hroch has declined to comment.

The first two contributors illustrate how widely Hroch’s influence has spread geographically. Farhan Siddiqi uses Hroch’s schema to analyze ethnic politics in Pakistan, specifically comparing the Baloch and Sindhi national movements. Applying a theory of nineteenth-century European nationalism to twentieth-century Pakistan, Siddiqi feels compelled to modify Hroch’s model. Modernization theory has since fallen from fashion, and Siddiqi criticizes it for an overly deterministic linear path to modernity. He also described “the ideational dimension of national movements” (p. 14 of this volume) as a gap in Hroch’s theory, suggesting that scholars must confront national ideology to ascertain the boundaries of ethnic groups. Nevertheless, Siddiqi not only accepts the A-B-C phase schema, the best known feature of Hroch’s work, but also engages at length with Hroch’s typology of small national movements.

Henio Hoyo similarly uses Hroch to examine the political ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. The comparative approach to national movements: Miroslav Hroch and nationalism studies
• 2. Nation-formation and national movement(s) in Pakistan: a critical estimation of Hroch’s stage theory
• 3. Transplant or graft? Hroch and the Mexican patriotic movements
• 4. Miroslav Hroch’s model of small nation-formation and Begriffsgeschichte
• 5. Nationalism and socialism: “Phase D” in the Belarusian nation-building
• 6. Uninvited guests in the communal apartment: nation-formation processes among unrecognized Soviet nationalities
• 7. Typologies and phases in nationalism studies: Hroch’s A-B-C schema as a basis for comparative terminology
• 8. Comments
• Index