REVISITING NATIONALISM - 1

 

PRASANNA KUMAR CHOUDHARY

 

 

NATION, NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISM

1648. The Thirty Years' (1618-1648) European War ended in the Treaty of Westphalia. In this devastating war, fought in the background of the Reformation, the Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and Catholic German princes rallied under the banner of Catholicism, and battled against the Protestant countries - Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of The Netherlands and a number of German Protestant states. Germany was the principal battle area and the main object of plunder and territorial claims.The specific feature of this war was the role of France - the rulers of Catholic France supported the Protestant camp, thereby taking their rivalry with the Habsburgs beyond the bound of religion. The Treaty sealed the dismemberment of Germany (The Vienna Congress of 1815, after the fall of Napoleon, did not alter the arrangement.) (1)

This Westphalian Peace, as is widely believed, heralded the system of nation-states in Europe. However, this peace should be understood in the sense of Orwellian doublespeak.The Westphalian system ushered in a new series of national wars for hegemony in Europe and in colonies - and through a number of local wars, Napoleonic campaign, Franco-Prussian war (1870-71), this process went on upto the two world wars in the twentieth century, and even beyond that up to the present time.In the form of nation-states, the emerging bourgeoisie of Europe finally realised its long-cherished goal of sovereignty. It replaced the medieval, feudal organisation of political authority based on hierarchical religious order. The old order was a great hindrance in the development of new relations of production, and in the process of getting rid of this order, a few transitional forms of sovereignty too emerged, particularly in periods of absolute monarchies.These tumultuous developments were going on in Europe for more than a century. Long before Westphalia, the famous formula governing the peace of Augsburg (1555) was cujus regio, ejus religio (the lord of each territory will settle the religion of the land where he is landlord). Later on, the Doctrine of Toleration, which ended the Christian Catholic domination, was confirmed (by the ex-Protestant Henry 4 ) in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, marking the end of that epoch of domination of politics by Religion, which is said to begin with the Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan of 313. (The Holy Roman Empire was formally disbanded in 1806.) (2)

In the process of the development of nation-states, the ideology of nationalism took its strong roots. Nation was defined as a community having a common language, a spatial continuity of territory, a shared history, a cultural integrating identity founded on an biological continuity of blood relations, and as a result of all these characteristics, a common psychological make-up. Sovereignty based on religious hierarchies was replaced by national sovereignty. In other words, national sovereignty replaced papal suzerainty.

Nationalism provided the European bourgeoisie a strong ideological basis for organising and protecting its domestic (national) market and for establishing its economic-political-cultural hegemony over other countries and colonies in the name of furthering 'national interests'. Along with nation-state came the concept of an abstract 'nation-people' having common interests and aspirations, always ready to sacrifice everything in the interests of, and for the glory and pride of the nation. In this way, the internal dissensions and discords, confrontations and conflicts within a nation were pushed into the background, and from time-to-time, in the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie, the imaginary nation-people were mobilised in real battles as a pro-active force. Nation-state became one of the symbols of the new, modern age.As a whole, after the decline of feudalism in Europe, the modern era is identified by following characteristics - the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Newtonian(scientific) revolution, manufacturing, and later on, the industrial revolution, world trade and colonization, urbanization and city life, nation-states, rise of secular ideologies, violent popular revolutions and republicanism, prose writing and development of novels, in particular.

The rise of nationalism in Europe proved to be quite devastating for the small countries of Europe. Imre Szabo's work 'The State Policy of Modern Europe' chronicles in detail hundreds of bloody wars fought in Europe from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. These wars were accompanied with loot and arson, mayhem and massacres. The small nations of Europe became victims of arbitrary divisions and dismemberment at the hands of the hegemonic powers of Europe. Here the case of Poland will suffice for an example.

There was no country in Europe where there were not different nationalities under the same government. “It was a natural consequence of the confused and slow-working historical development through which Europe had passed during the last thousand years that almost every great nation had parted with some outlying portions of its own body, which had become seperated from the national life, and in most cases participated in the national life of some other people so much so that they do not wish to rejoin their own main stock. The Highland Gaels and the Welsh were undoubtedly of different nationalities to what the English are, although nobody would give to these remnants of people long gone by the title of nations any more than to the Celtic inhabitants of Britanny in France. Moreover, no state boundary coincided with the natural boundary of nationality, that of language. There were plenty of French-speaking people out of France, same as there were plenty of people of German language out of Germany. A sizeable population of Switzerland consisted of French and German-speaking people." In Poland along with the Poles ( the chief constituent of the Polish population ), there were Lithuanians in the northern provinces on the Baltic, 'White Russians' in the south and the east, and the 'Little Russians' in the southern provinces. It can be easily assumed from the afore-mentioned facts that the 'theory of nations and nationalities provided a powerful weapon in the hands of the dominant powers of Europe in order to intervene in different countries. In the name of 'nationality principle' and of pan-slavism, Russia used to spread its hands across the entire eastern Europe, becoming self-proclaimed defender of Serbs, Croats, Ruthenes, Slovaks, Czechs and other remnants of bygone Slavonic peoples in Turkey, Hungary and Germany.

Poland was partitioned in 1772, 1793 and 1795 between Russia, Prussia and Austria. " The way in which this partition was brought about, is particularly interesting. There was atthat time, already an enlightened 'public opinion' in Europe. There was that kind of public opinion which has been created by the influence of Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other French writers of the eighteenth century. The Russian Czarina Catherine II had made an elaborate arrangement for the 'celebrity endorsement' of Poland's partition. She always knew that it was important to have public opinion on one's side. .... The court of Catherine II was made the headquarters of the enlightened men of the day, especially the Frenchmen; the most enlightened principle was professed by the Empress, and so well did she succeed in deceiving them that Voltaire and many others sang the praise of the 'semiramis of the North', and proclaimed Russia the most progressive country in the world, the home of liberal principles, the champion of religious toleration.

The principle of nationality, endorsed by Enlightenment and put into practice by Russia, Prussia and Austria, resulted in the annihilation of Poland. There was no outcry at all in Europe, and indeed, people were astonished at this only, that Russia should have the generosity of giving such a large slice of the territory to Austria and Prussia. ...." (3)

French historian Fernand Braudel later commented on that period in the following words, "The autocratic Catherine was thought liberal in France because she had ' The Marriageof Figaro ' staged in Russia before it was authorized by Louis XVI. We should be less gullible. In reality, Catherine's government was socially retrograde; it consolidated the power of the nobility and worsened the condition of the serfs." (4)

EUROPE AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

The self-identity of European countries as 'nations' was invariably linked with the process of denying and destroying the identities of so many tribes, societies and countries of the rest of the world. Here we can have a glimpse of this process.Between 1451 and 1600, some 2,75,000 African slaves were sent to America and Europe. In the seventeenth century this number rose to an estimated 13,41,000, largely in response to the demand of the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It was the eighteenth century, however, that was to be the golden age of slaving, with the forcible exportation of more than six million people from Africa to the Americas between 1701 and 1810. Novelist Jaimaica Kincaid, herself a West Indian, has written, 'Twelve years after Christopher Columbus landed in this part of the world, over a million people he found living here, were dead. In addition, so many Africans were thrown overboard on voyages from Africa to this part of the world that it would not be an overstatement to say that the Atlantic Ocean is the Auschwitz of Africa.' (5)

The competition among European nations for the plunder and colonization of Africa continued until almost the end of the 19th. century. ('For Europe after the final act of theCongress of Berlin in 1885, the colonization of Africa was the last great overseas adventure.') In pre-colonial period, Africa was home to a few empires such as Ghana, Ashanti, and Edo empires. 'Ghana Empire had been established around 800 AD and so was contemporary with Charlemagne.' Nigeria was home to the Haussa, Yoruba and Igbo cultures. There was Kingdom of Monomotapa (now Zimbabwe), Mali Empire (which spread throughout the whole bend of the Niger), Songhay Empire (with its capitals in Gao and Timbaktu, destroyed in 1591), and Benin (a clearing in the dense mass of equatorial rain forest between the waters of the Gulf of Guinea and the inland tablelands. It was in Yoruba country, between Niger delta and present day Lagos). All these cultures were barbarously ravaged, ruined and sacrificed at the altar of the new industrial civilization. (6)

Latin America: At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) was a great city, full of life - as large as Seville or Cardoba. In 1519, Spanish Army under the leadership of Hernando Cortes reached the capital and was amazed by the great highways leading to the metropolis. Cortes had expected to see savage, instead he encountered a civilization with its own language, an advanced calender, a central government and complex aqueducts. The sheer size and beauty of the temples and pyramids astonished him. Aztec Emperor Montezuma II's empire had a population of 15 million. 'In the marketplace,' he marvelled, ' over 60,000 souls gather to buy and sell ( and ) one can behold every possible kind of merchandize found in lands the world over. ....' He entered Montezuma's grand palace, which was big enough to house the entire Spanish Army. Cortes of 'civilized' Europe threatened Montezuma II of 'barbarous' America: 'Give me all your gold or I will kill you.' Montezuma had never seen someone like him before. ....He yielded and handed over all of his gold. ....Despite his promise, Cortes killed Montezuma. Chaos ensued. The Spanish Army barricaded the roads, preventing any food from entering the city and they blocked off the aqueducts. Within eighty days, 2,40,000 inhabitants of the city starved to death. By 1521, just two years after Cortes first laid eyes on Tenochtitlan, the entire Aztec Empire - the civilization that traced its root to centuries before the time of Christ - had collapsed.About eleven years later, in 1532, the similar fate befell the Incas. The Spanish Army, led by Francisco Pizzario, captured the Inca leader Atahuallpa. A year later, with all the Inca gold in hand, the Spanish executed Atahuallpa. Again the annihilation of an entire society took only two years. (7)The French essayist Montaigne wrote at the end of the sixteenth century, 'So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinitemillions of harmless people of all sexes, states and ages massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and best part of the world topsyturvied, ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper.'Here I am deliberately leaving out the examples of India, China, Indonesia and other countries of Asia. Through loot, thuggery, massacres, unimaginable barbarity and monstrosity, the 'civilized' and 'powerful' nation-states of Europe unfurled their flags of victory over Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Continued.

 

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