Category Archives: democracy

by | 22 October 2024 · 12:03 pm

Language Conflict in Bohemia, 1880s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 244-245:

In the elections in June 1879, the German liberals (themselves divided over Bosnia) lost seats, and Taaffe cobbled together a government without them, consisting of conservatives, clericals and Slavs—including the Czechs! The combination wobbled but proved the longest-lasting government in Cisleithania: Taaffe said he maintained power by keeping the nationalities in a balanced state of mild dissatisfaction. The Taaffe years were a nightmare for German liberals, who had “fought” for representative government for decades, only to be excluded by their enemies, some of whom had opposed the constitution as such.

Though hardly conservative and even less clerical, the Czechs now abandoned their boycott of government in return for promised concessions on the national question. Their representatives old and young operated as a disciplined club in Vienna’s parliament and scored victories, above all the 1880 “Stremayr ordinance,” which introduced Czech as an external language of administration in Bohemia (that is, as a language that had to be used with those who spoke Czech). A further achievement was the division of Prague’s Karl-Ferdinand University into Czech and German halves in 1882, meaning that Czechs could be educated from the humblest to most advanced stages in their own language. They also got more high schools. But to achieve all this, the Czechs accepted conservative “reforms” that strengthened the church’s role in education and marriage, moves at odds with their own liberal convictions, and not surprisingly, German liberals accused them of hypocrisy.

After that, concessions had to be dragged out of Taaffe, about whom one Czech leader said he threw the Czechs “little crumbs, as if to poultry.” Any progress for the Czech cause took place outside parliament through energies generated from below. As we have seen, when the Czech National Theater was damaged by fire just after opening in 1881, almost half the inhabitants of Prague contributed so that it could reopen two years later. In 1890 the Czechs founded and paid for their own Academy of Sciences and Arts, because the government had refused to support it.

But Minister President Taaffe himself operated under pressure. German liberals were out of government, and Austria’s ally in Berlin scrutinized what he did, protesting if anything seemed “pro-Slavic.” Taaffe forbade a gymnastics festival called by the nationalist Sokol movement in Prague in 1887 because guests were expected from other Slavic lands. This move in turn alienated the restive Young Czechs, the radical and growing wing of the Czech National Party, who formed a bloc within the Czech Club after 1888, calling for universal suffrage, local self-government, and getting the church out of schools. In accord with the ideology of Bohemian State’s Rights, they insisted that the entire Bohemian kingdom was Czech property. In 1882 Taaffe had expanded the franchise by lowering the tax requirements for voting, and the number of Czech voters shot up in the parliamentary elections of 1885, while German liberals lost almost twenty seats.

But if Taaffe left Czech politicians dissatisfied, he produced trauma among Germans. The division of the university in Prague, considered by Germans to be Germany’s oldest, only aggravated fears that they were on a downward slope toward cultural obscurity. From then on, German professors treated Prague’s university as a temporary way station, hoping for a call to a university outside Bohemia. But much worse, Germans in Austria had to stand back and watch a modern state taking shape in Cisleithania [the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary] without their input, a state that seemed increasingly Slavic.

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by | 24 September 2024 · 5:29 am

Berlin, 1878: Prelude to Versailles, 1919

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 210-212, 238-240:

In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, sovereigns, and even citizenship of four national states, which like Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1919, had to be created in the wake of imperial decline so as to secure Europe’s balance of power. We date the independence of modern Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from July 1878.

But in the interests of balance, the statesmen in Berlin traduced the spirit of nationalism by denying to Serbia territory where a plurality of the inhabitants was Orthodox South Slavs. That was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a quilt of ethnicities, which Austria-Hungary was permitted to occupy in 1878 with no purpose other than making sure it did not go to Serbia. Politicians in Vienna and Budapest viewed the prospect of a “great South Slav state” with horror, all the more so as it promised to be a close ally of Russia.

Some have called this frustrated Serb determination to expand “irredentist,” and that is both correct and misleading. The characterization is correct because Serbia felt there were Serbs beyond its boundaries who had to be included, but it is also misleading in suggesting that this agenda was unusual. In fact, every new state, beginning with Italy (where the word “irredentism” originated) and Germany, was irredentist in the sense that it “redeemed” national territory. Piedmont-Sardinia had not been Italy, nor was Prussia Germany. Without irredentism, there would be no Serbia, or any other new East European state, whether created in 1878 or 1919. Therefore, it is not hard to understand the tremendous affront that many Serbs, in and outside Serbia, felt after 1878.

But where Austria-Hungary was concerned, it was not only an affront but also the bizarre act of a troubled imperial state, now taking millions more Slavs under its rule, just a decade after dividing into Austria-Hungary precisely to keep a lid on the empire’s Slavs. But even more intriguingly and confoundingly, the man who negotiated the inclusion of more Serbs and Croats, as well as millions of Bosnian Muslims, was the beautiful hanged man, Count Gyula Andrássy, who became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, and whose own Hungary was trying to make loyal Magyars out of millions of Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenes, and Croats. Before the Compromise of 1867, Magyar politicians had assured representatives of those groups that their rights would be legally guaranteed. Afterward, those promises were forgotten, and demands for national autonomy were treated as seditious. Austria was not Germanizing its population, but German liberals were deeply concerned about the growing numerical superiority of Slavs. Now Vienna and Budapest took responsibility for 3 million more. How could they possibly make them into loyal citizens?

This story takes place in three acts. The first is the last major uprising of a Christian people against Ottoman rule in Europe, the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The acts of Herzegovinian and then Bosnian peasants generated the pressures leading to the Berlin Congress. The second is the sanguineous military campaigns of Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia against the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1878, whose success triggered concern among the European powers about the growth of Russian and the decline of Ottoman power. The third is the Berlin Congress itself and how the European powers rescued peace as well as Austria-Hungary, largely by extending their blessings to four new states, each of which considered itself not an end product but rather a toehold from which the respective ethnic nation would expand.

…

Internationally, the Congress of Berlin was a major step toward the twentieth century, perhaps its inaugural event. The Congress took a principle implicit in the 1830 London Protocol founding modern Greece—that an ethnicity could be a source of sovereignty—and multiplied it by four. By implication, it also adumbrated the idea of minorities, people in the nation-state who did not belong to the nation and required protection. The idea that ethnicity was the basis of the right to rule—a principle later called national self-determination—had been foreign to the Vienna system of 1815. Berlin was not just a halfway point; it was a rupture with that system. What changed in Paris in 1919 was to make the new principle not simply a result of grudging acceptance, but an explicit and valid—indeed, universal—method of organizing statehood.

For South East European peoples, the events of 1875–1878 had a meaning like that of 1848 in Bohemia: after initial uprisings, events soon cascaded in a way that forced choices about self-identification. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox still called themselves Bosnians but increasingly desired attachment to Montenegro or Serbia, while Catholics opted for Austria and more clearly than ever identified as Croats. Religious identity was a starting place but not an endpoint; the participants in the 1875 uprising knew that they were united by religion against the “occupier” and were picking up a script from earlier in the century, when Christian populations in Serbia and Greece had likewise risen up and begun carving out autonomous zones from Ottoman territory. Yet the issue was not religion per se—the insurgents did not care about suppression of worship or doctrine—but a sense that religious belonging had condemned much of the population to subservience.

Did Bosnian identity ever stand a chance as a form of nationhood? “Of the basic criteria by which the Serb and Croat nations established themselves during this period, history, language, and religion,” writes Noel Malcolm, “only religion could apply in Bosnia, a country which had its own separate history.” But in fact, history (that is, people’s consciousness of the past) ignored the boundaries of Bosnia and focused instead on a past that Orthodox South Slavs in Bosnia believed they shared with Orthodox South Slavs in Serbia. According to epic poetry, the common history stretched back to the 1389 Kosovo battle and earlier.

In Bosnia, Orthodox and Muslims had separate imaginations: the former told stories in oral poetry of their coreligionists deceiving Turkish authorities; the latter of theirs outwitting the Austrians. And if advocates for Serb nationhood in Bosnia were inspired by the romantic nationalism that was popular at Central Europe’s universities and understood language as a people’s soul, they had to look no further than Vuk Karadžić, who had based his Serb dictionary on a dialect in Herzegovina. Against Karadžić, Benjamin Kállay had not stood a chance; probably ten times the number of schools he built would not have resulted in the Bosnian identity he intended.

If Bosnian identity amounted to anything, it was the beginning of a strategy for Muslims to oppose complete assimilation by Serb and Croat nationalism, each of which expected co-nationals to become Christian, at least nominally. What the Bosnian and Romanian stories share is a hint that twentieth-century European nationalism was vigorously and exclusively Christian, even when its carriers were fiercely secular.

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by | 23 September 2024 · 5:57 am

Fatal Ausgleich/Kiegyezés of 1867

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 207-209:

The Compromise provided a stable legal platform for state consolidation and steady economic progress in both halves of the monarchy. From 1867 to 1914, the national income tripled, with a yearly rate of growth between 2.6 and 2.8 percent. In Hungary, agricultural exports grew and industrialization accelerated, though it lagged behind Bohemia and Austria. Still, its advance was remarkable. In the 1850s, an average of 250 kilometers of railroad were built each year, and after 1867, the total jumped to 600. The assets in Hungarian banks more than tripled between 1866 and 1873.

The Compromise would have continued to provide a basis for law and order in the Habsburg lands beyond 1918 had World War I not intervened. But the new arrangement was also marked by tension from the start. Hungarians were never satisfied with junior partner or even partner status, and they hoped that the center of gravity in the monarchy would be Budapest, not Vienna.

In 1867 the monarchy’s majority was Slavic, and in both halves Slavic politicians became deeply alienated. Czechs, Croats, Serbs, and Slovaks said their nations had come to the Habsburgs’ rescue in 1848/1849 but were now abandoned; the latter three had been placed at the mercy of the amnestied rebels! In Hungary, only Croats received any recognition, and that was due to the historic integrity of the Croatian kingdom. The others were simply “nationalities” to be subsumed in the “indivisible Hungarian nation.” Rights applied not to national groups but exclusively to individual citizens, and there was no appreciation of the need to protect local vernaculars. The Cisleithanian [Austrian] constitution respected German sensitivities above all others, not officially establishing the German language, but also not permitting it to be challenged as the dominant language of state. All ethnic groups (Volksstämme) had equal rights to nationality and language, but what constituted a Volksstamm, or how the state might protect it, was not specified.

In neither half of the monarchy did the new arrangement come close to satisfying the desires of the nationalities’ political elites for self-government and legally binding protection of their cultures. The difference between the two halves was that the Hungarian state actively sought to make its subjects into Magyars, while the Austrian government was for the most part nationally agnostic. It even passed a school law in 1869 that gave each nationality the right to a school if forty of its children lived within 4 kilometers of a given locale. Yet once this provision passed, Czechs took it for granted rather than crediting it to the Austrian government, and as the percentage of literate Czechs reached among the top rates in Europe, so did the dissatisfaction of Czech elites with the fact that they had no national autonomy comparable to the that of the Hungarians. The Czech leader Rieger called the Compromise “unnatural injustice,” and in general, Czechs referred to the December Constitution as “artificial.”

Czech passive resistance dated back to 1863 with the partial boycotting of the Vienna Reichsrat, but full-scale abstention by Czech deputies began in 1868 from Vienna and extended to the Bohemian and Moravian diets. It was accompanied by public protests so severe in October 1868 that the government imposed a state of siege in Prague and surrounding communities. Czech politics became what would later be called “extraparliamentary opposition.” Between 1868 and 1871, the movement staged more than a hundred mass meetings, called tabory, or camps, in the countryside, with between 1 and 1.5 million participants. The protesters called for Bohemian state rights, suffrage, education, and Slav solidarity. Authorities in Vienna tried to suppress the agitation through arrests and confiscations of newspapers, measures that were in clear violation of the freshly printed constitution. As we will see in Chapter 9, promising attempts to placate the Czechs were worked out in 1871 and supported by Francis Joseph, but they came to nothing because of Austro-German Magyar opposition. Magyar politicians feared that any concessions to nationalities in the west—“Cisleithania”—would encourage demands from the nationalities in Hungary.

The Compromise kept the monarchy afloat but ended any pretense that it might call itself an empire. The monarchy had no “imperial center” and no effective control over more than half the realm in the east, which was becoming a nation-state, while Cisleithania became a partly decentralized territorial conglomeration. Yet if Austria-Hungary was no empire, it was propelled by imperialist energies, based in the joint desires of German and Magyar elites to subjugate Slavs and convert them to the “higher” culture. The combination of condescension and fear led the monarchy forward—and also downward. In 1878, Austria-Hungary took the odd step of occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina, and taking charge of even more Slavs. In the background lay the conviction that it was bringing civilization to yet one more benighted region. In the foreground lay the simple determination to deny this land to a growing Serbia. Yet there was no chance of making Bosnians into Austrians or Hungarians. As the monarchy reformed, it made itself less reformable; as it grew in size, it shrank in self-confidence; and as it entered the imperial age, it was less an empire than ever before.

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by | 22 September 2024 · 6:20 am

Czech vs. Magyar Paths to Nationhood

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 120-122:

Many residents in these small-town [Bohemian] communities knew German for the sake of public life, but it stirred no deeper sense of loyalty, whereas Czech was the language of the intimacy of the home. They flocked to spectacles that were extensions of their families’ lives, a “traveling theater nation,” where people sang together, instantly understood allusions, and nodded their heads about things that mattered, comedic or tragic. The punch lines came in rapid succession and served to define the community: Czechs were the people who got the jokes and laughed uncontrollably, while their “betters” stared in befuddlement.

Still, the Czech movement advanced slowly against ideas of respectability and facts of ownership. All the established theaters in Bohemia and Moravia remained in German hands. A barrage of petitions moved imperial authorities to permit the building of a Czech theater at Prague, yet they allotted no money for it. Supporting a “nationalist” undertaking was out of the question, and the authorities wanted the two ethnicities to cooperate as they did in the Estates Theater in Prague, where the same actors appeared in German and Czech operas. But ultimately, no force could stop the dividing of institutions in Bohemia. When Czech patriots got a chance, they separated from the Germans as soon as they could, first in theaters but then on every other stage, whether cultural, scientific, economic, religious, or political.

In the early nineteenth century, theaters also expanded in the Hungarian cities Pest and Pressburg, and Magyar-language productions rapidly displaced German. But by the 1830s, there was little to struggle about. If the Hungarian movement wanted Hungarian theater, the parliament simply decreed it. The gentry political elite that controlled this institution was the national movement, and its prime efforts had moved to the stage of public life: to the most recent speeches of Kossuth, or to debates about political reform between him and more moderate opponents that filled the newspapers.

By the 1830s the Hungarian movement was imagining how to take control of and build the institutions of a nation-state that might stand next to England or France, sharing a point of view that would emerge among Czech politicians only two or three generations later. At this juncture, the Hungarian and Czech movements each desired what the other took for granted. If Czech patriots looked with envy on the museums, high schools, casinos, and theaters sprouting up around the Kingdom of Hungary, Magyar activists looked jealously at the cities and industries, roads, bridges, and urban prosperity of Bohemia, the most economically advanced place in the monarchy.

Bohemia had long stood at the crossroads of commercial routes, and it possessed age-old industries, a diversified and intensive agriculture, and an educated workforce in its innumerable small towns and cities. From the time of Joseph II, we can trace a growth spike that made Bohemia unrecognizable within a generation. The number of linen looms in Moravia went from 8,769 in 1775 to 10,412 in 1780, and 14,349 in 1798. Workers in the Moravian textile industry increased from about 288,000 in 1780 to 504,000 in 1789. Glass, wool, cotton, and stationery manufacturing likewise improved in the late eighteenth century, and agricultural products became more abundant. Such increases in production then fostered the expansion of regional and transregional markets, which in turn promoted the communication and movement of people from villages to growing towns.

At the same time, the transformation from rural to modern was achingly gradual in Hungary, noticeable in reforms accomplished through the strong will of a few workaholics like István Széchenyi, the most spectacular being the Chain Bridge connecting Buda and Pest in 1849, designed by Scottish engineers and financed by Greek capital. Yet Hungary’s vaunted reform parliaments of the 1830s and 1840s did little to advance modernization beyond measures facilitating the litigation of commercial disputes; their major achievement was to firm up the use of Hungarian in the educational system.

Hungary remained overwhelmingly and unproductively agricultural, facing tremendous legal barriers to even the thought of modernization. Seigniorial land could not be bought or sold, and peasants were not a labor force available to emergent industry but instead were bound servants of their lords. Széchenyi understood that agricultural land had to attract credit to prosper, but even after 1848, when seigniorial rights were abolished, Hungary did not bring in much foreign investment. Rather than put their money in the agricultural enterprise of an underdeveloped country, Western credit markets tended to fund transportation and industry in more prosperous regions.

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by | 21 September 2024 · 5:45 am

1848: Nationalism’s Icarus Moment

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:

Never before or since have Europeans seen common hopes smashed so rapidly as in 1848, the year of democratic revolutions. In February and March, after a disguised King of France escaped the wrath of his people, populations across the continent rose up against princes and kings, unified as never before, seeming to act according to one script. Divisions of nation or religion that had caused countless wars no longer seemed to matter, and even terms like “east” and “west” became secondary. The watchword was self-rule. Crowds demanding rights and democracy forced divine-right rulers to retreat and negotiate, from Italy and France through central Germany and into Bohemia, Prussian as well as Austrian Poland, all of Hungary (including Transylvania), and even farther east, into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the heart of today’s Romania), still under nominal Ottoman rule. Everywhere in this vast space, Europeans were telling the same story: they were leaving feudalism behind for better lives under democracy. If kings or princes survived, they would be bound to constitutions, as was the norm in Britain or the Netherlands.

But as early as April, the push for democracy was exposing divides among populations that few had imagined existed, and the stunned princes began surging back, making use of resources, some old (like a well-trained military), others new and unexpected. For the Habsburgs, virtually every national group turned out to be a potential ally against German and Magyar democrats, but they also exploited class divisions, playing peasants off against urban liberals, and urban liberals off against suburban proletarians. When pogroms broke out across Central Europe in 1848, the House of Habsburg also revealed itself as the defender of Jews and their property against urban mobs, who claimed that Jews stood with their ethnic enemies. That house was not only a bastion of the old order but also a defense of life and liberty against an emerging new order, of liberalism and national self-determination, but also of seemingly intractable interethnic feuding.

By the fall of 1848, the Habsburgs and other monarchs were rebounding, even if the final victories were not scored until the spring and summer of 1849, when imperial authorities closed down the elected parliament in Austria and crushed the democratic revolution in Hungary, with the assistance of Croat, Austro-German, Serb, and Romanian forces recruited from within Habsburg territories. The fighting between Hungary’s democrats trying to establish their national state and these nationalities became so intense that the region became a staging ground for ethnic cleansing: Magyar, Serb, and Romanian forces staked claims for territory by expelling ethnic others and burning their villages.

The difficulties of making a transition from feudalism to freedom were shocking because Habsburg subjects had not known the full extent of the realm’s complexity. The historian Joseph Redlich wrote much later that censorship and poor internal communications had kept the various parts of the monarchy ignorant of one another. There was little critical higher education, and for the elites, the “state almost completely coincided with German Austria,” and they assumed it would govern from Vienna with no concern for the “nationally foreign” inhabitants of the Sudeten and Alpine countries. Little was known about Czechs and South Slavs, and few anticipated that people speaking in their names might demand independence.1 Inhabitants of Central and Eastern European were neighbors who got to know one another only after they had to deal with one another as free human beings for the first time.

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by | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

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by | 18 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

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by | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

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by | 11 September 2024 · 1:56 am

Caribbean Categories of Race, Color, Class

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 405-406:

From the earliest days of colonial rule, the Caribbean social and moral order was based on ranked gradations of “races” and “colors” represented by such physical attributes as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. These criteria were treated as literal descriptions of appearance, and their presumed fixed qualities formed a hierarchy of identities—from “white” at the top to “black” at the bottom, with various mixtures and gradations in between—supported by legal structures as well as social values and mores. Consequently, for much of Caribbean history, race and color also have connoted social position and class status. Yet the recognition of a vertical color continuum separates the Caribbean from the rigid binary racial logic of the United States.

Given the legacies of colonial rule and ideology, color and race are still commonly used in daily conversation as idioms for social organization. In Jamaica, for example, the color term “brown” (or “colored”) serves as a category of racial identity but also connotes middle-class status. Color terms are necessarily relational; being “white” or “brown” or “black” necessarily means not being something else. In Haiti, mulâtre is an in-between term connoting a mixture of “black” and “white,” flexible in its interpretation yet typically positioned above “black” and below “white.” In the Dominican Republic, indio literally translates as “Indian,” suggesting indigenous heritage, but its contemporary application signifies a lighter skin color (and perhaps straight hair)—someone not “black,” yet also not “white.” In Martinique, beke refers to French “white” slave owners and their descendants. “Trinidad white” and “French creole” have served as categories of racial identity in Trinidad, specifically distinguished from British, French, and Spanish “whites,” who, in this racial accounting system, historically could claim to be “pure” white and, concomitantly, members of the upper classes. In Trinidad, the term “red” generally refers to a light-skinned individual of mixed “black” and “white” parentage (positioned toward the upper-status end), while in Barbados it is also a historical reference to “red legs” communities—poor whites who, from the days of the slave plantation, labored outdoors and hence were likely to get sunburned.

Mixedness can also refer to multiple combinations, not simply the amalgamation of “black” and “white.” Thus, in the Francophone Caribbean, the term marabou refers to a black-white-Amerindian combination. In Trinidad the term “Spanish” should be interpreted as if in quotation marks, indicating a particular and fluctuating combination of local criteria, including area of origin (Venezuela, or certain locations in Trinidad with historical concentrations of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Venezuelan immigrant labor), skin color (some variation of “brown” or “red’), hair texture (not curly), and self-ascription (Khan 1993).

Notably, these terminologies are based on an African-European axis: the hierarchical color continuum does not lexically include South Asians or Chinese, or the mixed offspring of South Asian or Chinese and European parents. Though the term achinado is used in Cuba to index Chinese phenotypical features (as, for example, in mulato achinado), there is only one term, dougla—common in Guyana and Trinidad—indicating individuals of mixed South Asian and African descent. Indio (Amerindian) in the Hispanophone Caribbean and “Spanish” or “French creole” in Trinidad are not color terms per se, but are measured along the continuum of black and white ancestry. “Indian” (South Asian), “Chinese,” and “Syrian-Lebanese” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “Hindustani” in the Dutch Caribbean, and Hindou in the Francophone Caribbean are common categories not amalgamated into the black-white lexicon.

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by | 2 August 2024 · 6:04 am

Replanting Uprooted Memories

I’ve quoted many passages from Matthew Madden’s painstaking translation of Chan Samoeun’s uniquely detailed memoir of an especially horrible era in Cambodian history, for reasons that echo the translator’s poignant Afterword quoted below.

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 637-640:

I still have a special affinity for the early chapters of Prisoners of Class, which capture so many details of 1975 Phnom Penh at the moment of Khmer Rouge victory. I feel almost greedy for those details; I collect any photograph, map, or description from the city’s past that I can find. I feel a deeply personal connection with and nostalgia for what I am now coming to think of as “Old Phnom Penh,” and very fortunate that I got to know it well in the last years before it began to change dramatically. With the breakneck pace of economic investment and development, seemingly devoid of coherent urban planning, increasingly little of Old Phnom Penh remains now, at least on the surface. I have been taken completely off guard by the speed and scope of the transformation in recent years, which is hard to overstate. (This has been a common topic of conversation with Samoeun, as he feels a similar disorientation.) The city had changed so little during my first several years there, and still looked so much like it had in pictures and film from before the revolution, like an insect trapped in amber, that I never imagined I wouldn’t be able to just continue revisiting old haunts or exploring landmarks whenever I liked, finding them much as they had always been, or that everything was about to become so different, so quickly.

It is truly the passing of an era.

Passing, too, is the generation of people who lived through the most turbulent, defining, and transformational eras of modern Cambodian history in the twentieth century—the post-colonial “golden age” of Sihanouk and the Sangkum (1954–70); the Khmer Republic and civil war (1970–75); and the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). It is a generation now grown unexpectedly gray-haired and frail. In my early years in Cambodia, including when I first discovered Prisoners of Class, this generation constituted the backbone of Cambodian society. They were the parents, the shopkeepers, the maids, the farmers, the doctors and nurses, the taxi and cyclo drivers, the policemen, the politicians—all of the aunties and uncles of Cambodia. At that time, only the youngest Cambodians, those about my age and younger (I was born in 1977), had no memories of Khmer Rouge rule. For everyone else, virtually the entire adult population of the country, the Khmer Rouge era was fairly recent memory, and the effects of it were pervasive. (And in rural areas, especially, a sizable percentage of that population had themselves once been Khmer Rouge in some form or other.) I somehow don’t know that I ever truly appreciated that this would change.

But now, the vast majority of people in Cambodia have no memory of those events. Nobody younger than about their late forties or so—and current demographics skew overwhelmingly young—has even so much as an early childhood memory of the realities of Democratic Kampuchea, and nobody under their late fifties or so has any memory of life in pre-war Cambodia. And those numbers keep going up every year from this writing. And now many of those who do remember, especially those who were grown when the Khmer Rouge captured power, are dying out slowly, soon to be quickly. Samoeun’s thick black mop of black hair has now turned silver. Before long there will be nobody at all left who remembers what happened, and the country that they knew will have finally passed, transformed, to an entirely different cohort of forward-looking Cambodians. It will all belong to the past, to the history books.

Thus Prisoners of Class is and will remain a precious link to history, a priceless document to remind later generations of the now almost unthinkable things that occurred, to memorialize the heroic travails and losses (and crimes, lest we forget) of the now-passing generation. In the preface to Prisoners of Class, the author laments that “in Cambodian society we have very few articles or books describing the real lives of people who lived in any era of our history.” How fortunate indeed that that young man felt compelled to write down everything that he and his family saw and experienced while the memories were so fresh. How fortunate that he thought to include so many details! And how fortunate that he had the heart of both a chronicler and a poet. Though he almost certainly did not appreciate it at the time, that labor of personal writing would become a historical treasure memorializing, for all time, not just him and his family, but his entire generation, a whole era, a whole country, for future generations of Cambodians—and now for the world outside of Cambodia as well.

So now, with this translation, it is my hope and aspiration to give this important historical document an even wider distribution, a stronger foothold, a larger audience, to preserve and propagate a witness of a not-so-distant but rapidly receding past, for many more people in many more generations to come. May it become an essential and immortal resource for all those who seek to understand Cambodia’s turbulent twentieth-century past.

Matthew Madden, 17 September 2023

Mekong River Press has also made several chapters freely available online, as well as photos and maps of people and places cited in the book.

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