Category Archives: Europe

by | 31 July 2008 · 5:58 pm

Battling Militias in Defeated Austria

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 142-146:

Another European state to receive the Vatican’s blessing was the ‘State of Estates’ – or ‘Standestaat’ in German – created by Engelbert Dollfuss in the ruins of the first Austrian Republic. Since the turn of the century, Austrian politics had been dominated by a clash between ‘Red Vienna’, where the atheist and militant Social Democratic Party held sway, and the provinces, where the parties that made up successive governing coalitions – that is, the Christian Socials, the Pan-Germans, and the Agrarian League – had their greatest support. In this respect, Austrian politics resembled other countries with a ‘Red’ metropolis hated by many provincials, notably Berlin and Madrid in the same period, although it is important to note that since the days of Mayor Karl Lueger the Christian Socials had support among Vienna’s petit-bourgeoisie who were drawn to his demagogic antisemitism, antiliberalism and deference towards the Catholic Church. The intellectual and political leadership of the Party was also based in the capital….

Both the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats had large paramilitary armies, which were soon augmented by the strong-arm groups of the Austrian National Socialists. The Christian Socials (and in some places the Pan-Germans) were close to many of the regionally based ‘home defence groups’, or Heimwehren, originally established after the war to protect villages from looters and deserters. These had evolved into a strike-breaking force financed by the employers and armed by the Italians and Hungarians. In the Korneuburg Oath, which they swore in May 1930, the Heimwehr leaders resolved to replace democratic government with an authoritarian corporative system modelled on the ideas of the political economist Othmar Spann. In 1923 the Social Democrats formed their own Schutzbund, after the Heimwehr had crushed a strike in Styria. The nature of the problem faced by the state becomes clear from the fact that its army of thirty thousand men faced sixty thousand members of the Heimwehr and ninety thousand equally well-armed members of the Schutzbund. In 1927, following the acquittal of Heimwehr men accused of murdering socialists, the latter stormed and set fire to the Courts of Justice during three days of rioting. The Heimwehr threatened a Fascist-style March on Vienna. Austria’s domestic disturbances were intensified by the obtuseness of France and the Little Entente in blocking a customs union with Germany.

In May 1932 Engelbert Dollfuss, an able peasant boy and war hero who had risen to be agriculture and justice minister, was appointed chancellor. At thirty-nine he was Europe’s youngest head of government; at four feet eleven inches he was also the slightest in stature. Dollfuss immediately negotiated a foreign loan of 300 million Schillings, only to find that the Pan-Germans voted against it, on the ground that renunciation of union with Germany was among the loan’s conditions, while the Social Democrats also refused to support the government out of doctrinaire bloody-mindedness. He achieved a narrow majority only by bringing Heimwehr leaders into his cabinet…. Dollfuss turned to Italy and the Vatican for external support against Hitler…. Rather than relying for mass support on the Christian Socials, on 20 May 1933 Dollfuss established a new Fatherland Front, which was supposed to absorb all existing right-wing potential into one governing party, along the lines already essayed by Primo de Rivera in Spain and Piłsudski in Poland in the 1920s and by Salazar in the 1930s.

The regime faced two challenges: one from the left, which it won, and another from the Nazi ‘brown Bolsheviks’, which it eventually lost. In February 1934, the Heimwehr arrested Schutzbund leaders and expelled representatives of democratic parties from provincial diets. In Linz, the Social Democrats decided to fight back, and met police incursions into their headquarters with machine-gun fire. In Vienna, the socialist leadership dithered so that the general strike they declared was imperfectly implemented against a regime that was well prepared for just this eventuality. Martial law was proclaimed while Heimwehr troops surrounded working-class suburbs. A full-scale shooting war ensued, with artillery and tanks firing into housing projects with such resonant names as ‘Bebelhof’, ‘Liebknechthof’ and ‘Karl-Marx-Hof’. One hundred and ninety-six workers were killed and 319 wounded, with 118 dead and 486 wounded on the government side. The government banned the Social Democrat Party and neutralised the trades unions by subsuming them into its own corporatist entities. Socialists were expelled from the national and provincial civil service. Courts martial were used to sentence twenty-one people to death – one of the nine eventually executed being taken to the gallows on a stretcher. Even Hitler managed briefly to occupy the moral high ground when he condemned ‘the criminal stupidity of letting people shoot down socialist workers, women and children’. The Vatican secretary of state, Pacelli, intervened in vain on behalf of those sentenced to death.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, nationalism

by | 28 July 2008 · 10:14 pm

German/Austrian Catholics vs. Nazis, 1930

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 170-171:

Both the Austrian and German Catholic bishops were more condemnatory of Nazism than may be popularly realised. In 1929, bishop Johannes Gföllner of Linz warned the faithful against the ‘false prophets’ of Nazism: ‘Close your ears and do not join their associations, close your doors and do not let their newspapers into your homes, close your hands and do not support their endeavours in elections’ being as unequivocal as one could reasonably expect, although it was not incompatible with his advocacy of ‘ethical antisemitism’. The Austrian Catholic newspaper Volkswohl even parodied life in a future Nazi state in a manner that seems extraordinarily prescient. Every newborn baby’s hereditary history would be checked by a Racial-Hygienic Institute; the unfit or sickly would be sterilised or killed; dedicated ‘Aryan’ Catholics would be persecuted: ‘The demonic cries out from this movement; masses of the tempted go to their doom under Satan’s sun. If we Catholics want to save ourselves, then it can never be in a pact with these forces.’

The German bishops were similarly condemnatory of National Socialism when in 1930 the Nazis broke through the ceiling that separated a marginal sect with less than 3 per cent of the vote from a mass political party. Adolf Bertram of Breslau warned Catholics in 1930 against the Nazis’ radicalism, ‘racist madness’ and their schemes for a single supra-confessional ‘national Church’. The archbishop of Mainz went further, by declaring that Nazism and Catholicism were simply irreconcilable:

The Christian moral law is founded on love of our neighbour . National Socialist writers do not accept this commandment in the sense taught by Christ; they preach too much respect for the Germanic race and too little respect for foreign races. For many of them what begins as mere lack of respect, ends up as full-blown hatred of foreign races, which is unChristian and unCatholic. Moreover the Christian moral law is universal and valid for all times and races; so there is a gross error in requiring that the Christian faith be suited to the moral sentiments of the Germanic race.

The provinces of Cologne, Upper Rhine and Paderborn warned clergy to have nothing to do with the Nazis, and threatened the leaders of parties that were hostile to Christianity with denial of the sacraments. The Bavarian bishops banned Nazi formations from attending funerals or services with banners and in uniform, while condemning both Nazi racism and their eugenic contempt for unborn life.

The statements of these bishops so shocked the Nazis that Göring was despatched to Rome to smooth things over. Since Pius XI instructed Pacelli not to meet him, Göring had to vent his grievances against the Catholic Church on Pacelli’s under-secretary. His approach was to combine defence with attack, the latter diplomatically couched as ‘regrets’, such as the claim that many of the priests who belonged to the Centre Party were attacking Nazism in private. At the same time he disowned the writings of Rosenberg. Interestingly, as a prominent and sincere Protestant, who had married his wife Emmy in a Lutheran ceremony and whose daughter Eda underwent a Lutheran baptism, Göring tried to justify Nazi racism with reference to the theology of orders of creation, ‘for races had been willed by God’. He contrasted the silence of the Lutheran Churches with the ‘attacks’ the Party had received from the Catholic clergy, warning that the Nazis would defend themselves.

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Filed under Austria, Germany, nationalism, religion

by | 6 July 2008 · 7:44 pm

Foreign Surgeons at the Birth of Zimbabwe, 1974-79

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 321-326:

The coup in Lisbon in April 1974 changed the fortunes of Rhodesia irrevocably. The end of Portuguese rule in Mozambique not only deprived Rhodesia of a long-standing ally and brought to power there a left-wing nationalist movement; it meant that Rhodesia’s entire eastern border, some 760 miles long, was potentially vulnerable to infiltration by Zanu guerrillas operating freely from bases in Mozambique. Moreover, Frelimo‘s accession to power in Mozambique emboldened Rhodesian nationalists to believe that in Rhodesia too guerrilla warfare would succeed in overthrowing white rule.

The South Africans were quick to recognise, in the aftermath of the Lisbon coup, that an entirely new strategy was needed. Hitherto, they had looked on Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia as a valuable buffer separating them from contact with black Africa, a cordon sanitaire which it was in their own interests to strengthen. But with the withdrawal of the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, Rhodesia was no longer important as a front-line defence, for the winds of change had finally reached South Africa’s own frontier. The South African prime minister, John Vorster, calculated that in the long run Smith’s position, without an open-ended South African military and financial commitment, was untenable. White rule in Rhodesia was ultimately doomed. In this new assessment, Smith, with his long history of intransigence, was no longer a useful partner but a potential liability. His stubborn resistance to change only served to magnify the dangers of communist involvement in southern Africa. An unstable white government in Rhodesia was less preferable than a stable black government, heavily dependent on South African goodwill.

With this objective in mind, Vorster set out to force Smith to come to terms with the Rhodesian nationalists. He was obliged to act circumspectly for fear of antagonising his own electorate and provoking an outcry in Rhodesia. Fortuitously, he found an ally in Zambia’s President Kaunda, who had become increasingly concerned about the disruption caused in Zambia by the Rhodesian imbroglio and about the dangers of a widening guerrilla war there. In conjunction with other African leaders, Vorster and Kaunda conspired to impose on Smith and the nationalists their own plan for a Rhodesian settlement. As a preliminary step, Smith was required, much against his better judgement, to release nationalist detainees, including Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe….

Under pressure from South Africa, Smith went through the motions of attempting a negotiated settlement but, like Mugabe, saw no need to compromise. A conference in August 1975, held under the auspices of Vorster and Kaunda in railway carriages parked on the Victoria Falls bridge on the border between Rhodesia and Zambia, broke up in disarray after the first day….

In early 1976 the guerrilla war entered anew and more perilous phase. From bases in Mozambique, hundreds of Zanu guerrillas infiltrated into eastern Rhodesia, attacking white homesteads, robbing stores, planting landmines and subverting the local population. When Nkomo’s talks with Smith broke down, Zapu guerrillas joined the war, opening a new front in western Rhodesia, along the borders with Zambia and Botswana. Main roads and railways came under attack. White farmers bore the brunt, living daily with the risks of ambush, barricaded at night in fortified homes. A growing number of whites, rather than face military service, emigrated.

Though Rhodesia’s army commanders still expressed confidence in their ability to defeat the guerrilla menace, in many parts of the world it seemed that Smith was embarked upon an increasingly risky venture to sustain white rule which endangered the stability of the whole region. Among those whose attention was drawn to the Rhodesian war was Henry Kissinger. In the wake of the Angolan debacle, Kissinger was particularly alert to the dangers of how nationalist guerrilla wars could widen the circle of conflict, drawing in neighbouring countries and providing the Soviet bloc with opportunities for intervention. He found Vorster similarly worried and impatient with Smith’s intransigence. In tandem, they agreed on a plan to force Smith to accept majority rule. To make Smith amenable to the idea, Vorster cut back oil shipments and supplies of arms and ammunition, withdrew helicopter pilots and technicians from Rhodesia and delayed its import and export traffic through South Africa. Kissinger was left to present the terms of surrender.

At a meeting in Pretoria in September 1976, Kissinger handed Smith a typed list of five points that he said must be used as the basis for a Rhodesian settlement. Smith took the document and slowly read aloud the first point: ‘Rhodesia agrees to black majority rule within two years.’ He looked around the room and said: ‘you want me to sign my own suicide note.’…

When Smith finally left the stage as prime minister on the last day of white rule on 31 May 1979, his legacy was a state unrecognised by the international community, subjected to trade boycotts, ravaged by civil war that had cost at least 20,000 lives and facing a perilous future.

As the war intensified, Britain launched one last initiative to find a solution, calling for negotiations at a conference to be held in London. Muzorewa and Nkomo readily agreed to attend, but Mugabe saw no need. His guerrilla army was planning to embark on a new phase of urban warfare. ‘We felt we needed yet another thrust, and in the urban areas, in order to bring the fight home to where the whites had their citadels’, he recalled. The longer the war lasted, the greater were the prospects for achieving his revolutionary objectives.

Only under extreme pressure from Zambia ‘s Kenneth Kaunda and Mozambique’s Samora Machel did he eventually agree to attend. Both Zambia and Mozambique had suffered heavily as a result of Rhodesian raids on guerrilla bases and supply lines they harboured. Neither could afford to sustain the war any longer. Machel was blunt in his warnings: if Mugabe refused to go to London and explore negotiations, then Mozambique would withdraw its support….

Mugabe arrived in London in September 1979, a cold, austere figure who rarely smiled and seemed bent on achieving revolution, whatever the cost. While in exile he had repeatedly insisted on the need for a one-party Marxist state, threatened that Ian Smith and his ‘criminal gang’ would be tried and shot, and warned that white exploiters would not be allowed to keep an acre of land. His main hope was that the conference would break down.

Against all odds, however, the conference stumbled towards agreement. At the final hurdle, when Mugabe balked at accepting the ceasefire arrangements and made plans to fly to New York to denounce the whole proceedings at the United Nations, he was given a direct warning by an envoy from Machel that unless he signed the agreement, he could no longer count on using Mozambique as abase for operations; in other words, as far as Mozambique was concerned, the war was over. Mugabe was resentful about the outcome of the conference: ‘As I signed the document, I was not a happy man at all. I felt we had been cheated to some extent, that we had agreed to a deal which would to some extent rob us of [the] victory we had hoped we would achieve in the field.’…

Returning to Rhodesia in January 1980, nearly five years after his escape into exile, Mugabe was given a hero’s welcome by one of the largest crowds ever seen in Rhodesia. Banners portraying rockets, grenades, land mines and guns greeted him, and many youths wore T-shirts displaying the Kalashnikov rifle, the election symbol that Zanu wanted but the British had disallowed. But Mugabe himself was unexpectedly conciliatory. In Mozambique, shortly before Mugabe’s return to Salisbury, Samora Machel, still struggling to overcome the massive disruption caused by the exodus of whites at independence in 1975, had intervened to warn Zanu against fighting the election on a revolutionary platform. ‘Don’t play make-believe Marxist games when you get home,’ he said. ‘You will face ruin if you force the whites into precipitate flight.’ Consequently, Mugabe’s manifesto was stripped of all reference to Marxism and revolution.

Black Star Journal has an update on the latest reactions of African leaders to what Mugabe hath wrought.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, Mozambique, nationalism, Portugal, South Africa, U.S., war, Zambia, Zimbabwe

by | 27 June 2008 · 6:00 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Languages, Holidays

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 8-9 (my translation):

I was sent to a Saxon kindergarten. It seems to me that it would have been on Castle Street, beneath Mt. Tâmpa, but I don’t remember the exact location, even though I can still see before me the dark stairway to the upper floor. Fraülein’s name would seem to have been Liewehr, and I see myself singing, leaping like a pony, hear melodies like “Wulle, wulle, Gänschen” and “Alle Vögel sind schon da,” and see myself sitting on a stool cutting stars out of cardboard for the Christmas tree, on each of which Fraülein had written in gothic letters “Ştefan” and which Mama used to hang from the tree year after year. At about the same time, I went once or twice a week to a nursery school where we learned French with the Grande Dame Staia, singing “Savez-vous planter le chou.”

My education was, from the beginning, trilingual: Romanian at home, German in my earliest schools, Hungarian with the maidservants, because the latter all came from Szekler villages. Hungarian, I haven’t heard since leaving Brasov in 1937, and I’ve almost totally forgotten it, except for the songs I used to hear in the kitchen or on the Promenade, where we used to go for walks, listening to the city orchestra composed of solemn gentlemen in black jackets and stovepipe hats.

Christmases were celebrated at our home, where all the family gathered, but from the morning of Christmas Eve we were sent to my Aunt Jenny, who lived far from us, sometimes on Fork Street (Cuza Voda), sometimes on Postal Orchard. My parents felt bound to resort to this strategy because it was hard for them to restrain me until the arrival of the “Angel.” In those years, Father Christmas didn’t exist in Transylvania, and Saint Nicholas used to come on the evening of the 6th of December.

Otherwise, these traditions were scrupulously respected at home. At Easter came the Bunny, with Father making the sound of speedy steps going into the distance, to show that the Bunny had run past our house, leaving behind red eggs and chocolates, mandarins, and oranges. On the 6th of December came Saint Nicholas, with a big sack on his back, with a fur hat over his eyes and a white beard, in whom I believed with a religious intensity until I discovered that he wore the same gaiters as Father, and which he had bought a few days earlier at Lischka.

Christmas was, of course, the ultimate celebration, with a tree that reached to the ceiling, mountains of presents (the maidservants would carry theirs off in woven clothes baskets), a huge meal, interrupted by carolers who came down from Şchei hillside, or up from Old Brasov, who ended off with the chorus “To Şaguna High School” before being invited to partake of wine and pound cake. Name days were not celebrated; instead, birthdays had a special importance, with a ritual I still follow today, across decades and continents. Speaking of religious celebrations, I cannot forget Epiphany, when on the Twelfth Night came the archpriest Iosif (Sâvu) Blaga or the priests Nae Stinghe and Furnica, who had baptized me, and was now professor of religion at the “Real School” (Liceul Dr. Ioan Meşota).

NOTES: ‘The Grande Dame’ renders doamna maior; ‘stovepipe hats’ renders ţilindru pe cap (usu. cilindru) ‘cylinder on the head’; ‘continents’ renders geografii ‘geographies’; ‘Father Christmas’ renders Mos Crăciun; ‘Epiphany’ renders Bobotează (cf. boteza ‘baptize’); Twelfth Night (= Epiphany) renders Iordanul (the Jordan [River]); archpriest = protopop. I hadn’t realized that the Epiphany holidays came to focus on the baptism of Christ (in the Jordan River) among Eastern-rite Christians but on the coming of the Magi among Western-rite Christians. The Wikipedia entry for the holiday contains an interesting observation that may apply to Transylvanians in general: “Hungarians, perhaps because of their location between East and West, celebrate the coming of the Magi, but refer to the celebration as Vízkereszt or “water cross,” clearly a reference to baptism.”

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Filed under Austria, education, Hungary, language, religion, Romania

by | 25 June 2008 · 10:55 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Earliest Friends

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 6-8 (my translation):

On the floor below lived Major Mihailescu, who had two children, Mircea and Coca (the daughter had an air I now recognize as Japanese), with whom I didn’t become friends. The major had an orderly he called Zachariah, with whom the maidservant who used to take me for walks had fallen in love, calling him “Zakarias” and singing a pitiful song that ended with the words “Zakarias szép eletem.” One day, the major had a conflict with Mr. Borescu, apparently having to do with the beating of carpets at unauthorized hours. When the insulted concierge leapt up to hit the major, the latter rushed into his house, from which he appeared in a martial pose, brandishing a saber in the air like a fencer, threatening the head of the typographer, who didn’t know how to respond to this unexpected invitation to a duel. I remember that during the 1940s, as a discharged general, Mihailescu was named inspector of the casino in Sinaia.

In the back of the courtyard lived Doctor Valeriu Negrila, married to a beautiful Polish woman. I was friends with their daughter, Valerica, while I was little, but later, as often happens, we drifted apart and hardly even greeted each other when I became a “Şagunist” and she a student at the Princess (Elena). One day when I was returning from a walk with the maidservant, I saw two people dressed in white carrying a stretcher on which lay a body covered with a sheet, with locks of black hair hanging out from under it. The maidservant later told me that Valerica’s mother had been found to have “taken poison,” but after a few days I saw her passing through the courtyard with Valerica in tow. I don’t recall the other neighbors, but I cannot forget the entrance hallway in the evenings, with gilded metal bars glittering in the light of the bulbs, and marble veneer shining in a way that seemed fairylike.

Just outside the alleyway, on the right and left were two shops: Lischka, men’s clothing; and Books Cooperative Enea, Stinghe, and Ţigoiu, one of whose owners, Professor Sterie (Sterica) Stinghe, had written a few books about the history of Brasov, and whose wife, named Lucia I think, had the habit of strutting around haughty and elegant, the tapping of her high heels audible from far off.

I lived on Customs Street, I believe, until around 1928–29, when I finished primary school, thus eight or nine years, maybe ten. The fact is, I cannot recall exactly when we moved from Spitz Palace, just as I cannot remember exactly when we left Prundul Florilor.

But I have some vivid memories of the building, which during the early years did not yet have electric lights. I recall those autumn days when Mr. Stroescu, the father of my primary school classmate, Elena Stroescu, used to set up his machine in the Graft Valley, beyond the walls, and cut whole cartloads of wood, which after being chopped up was hauled into the cellar on a kind of wooden stretcher by backwoodsmen hired by the day, who at lunchtime would pull out of their knapsacks “pită şi slană” [bread and fatback, usu. slănină] eating slowly and silently.

I recall going with the maidservant to the first silent films I saw at the movie theatre Modern (a wooden shack sitting on the site they later made into the city park), where I enjoyed watching Lia Mara, Maciste, Zigoto, Fatty, Harry Piel, Pat and Patachon, with little Patachonel, and then returning at nightfall to find at the entrance to our apartment dozens of galoshes and overshoes belonging to the “students” at the night classes Father used to teach in the years after unification [of Transylvania and other territories with the Old Kingdom of Romania]: bank directors, officials, attorneys, merchants, who were keen to learn Romanian in those first years of Greater Romania. About that time, Zeidner Books had come out with a grammar of Romanian for foreigners, whose authors were Father and Michael Teutsch. It was a bit slapdash, of a type the Saxons called Zwinkelmisch [lit. ‘twinklemix’], but it sold well and was reprinted several times.

After the students left, Father used to amuse himself by telling stories about the mistakes his “students” would make. Carved in my memory are words like “Berger-leţkia” (lecţia) [lesson], or “tratavitele” in place of tratativele [‘negotiations’], which the Hungarians and Saxons had trouble pronouncing, as they did â as opposed to a. Other friends that I remember from the age of 4 or 5, besides Puiu Borescu and Valerica Negrila, were the sisters Takáts, Tony and Baba, somewhat older than me.

On the Promenade, where I went with the maidservant, I had “friends” who seemed at that time to be over a hundred years old, if not older: “Old Man Snow,” gone completely white, who talked with me as if I was his age, whom they used to call Cipu (Cipariu) or Ţipu, and who I believe was a judge on “penzie” [pensie ‘pension’]. One “friendship” that my parents did not regard well was that with the doctor of law, Aurel Olteanu, who wore a shiny clip on his tie, patent leather shoes with laces, and a long, sturdy cane, with whose handle he would hook my calf, while glaring at me with bulging eyes and shouting: “I’ve got you, you knave! I’ve got you, you bandit!” To me, the words were amusing, as I knew what bandit meant (Tomescu and Munteanu were famous bandits at the time), but I had no idea what knave [şnapan] meant and my parents showed themselves to be less than enchanted by this “enrichment” of vocabulary. The third “friend” was a little, or rather a short, elderly man, Patruţ Pop, wrapped summer and winter in a long overcoat, something between a blanket and a frock, wearing a black hat, who would stroke my head without saying a word. I vaguely remember having heard that Patruţ Pop was from the family of someone who had played a leading role on the Field of Liberty, at Blaj [in 1848]. As I grew and entered primary school, I lost track of those friends of my early childhood.

NOTES: Baciu spelt cearşaf ‘sheet’ as cearceaf—it’s just the difference between English sh and ch. A “Şagunist” is a student at Andrei Şaguna High School. After failing to find clipici in my dictionaries, I translated it ‘slapdash’ (after considering ‘rush job’), despite its relation to a clipi ‘to wink, blink’ (and its Saxon equivalent, Zwinkelmisch). The hardest phrase to translate in this passage was de moţi tocmiţi cu ziua, which didn’t make sense until I found that Moţi designates people from the Western Mountains (Munţii Apuseni) of Transylvania, sometimes known as Ţara Moţilor, known for their pre-Roman features, archaic customs, isolated settlements, and fierce independence—sort of the West Virginians of Transylvania. An explanatory translation like ‘men from Munţii Apuseni hired by the day’ was too long-winded, while ‘hillbilly day-laborers’ was too pejorative. I almost went with ‘itinerant woodcutters’ before settling on ‘backwoodsmen’.

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Filed under Austria, Hungary, language, Romania

by | 22 June 2008 · 5:24 pm

How Modernism Feeds Tribalism

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 154-157:

African societies of the pre-colonial era – a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires – were formed often with shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances. Identities and languages shaded into one another. At the outset of colonial rule, administrators and ethnographers endeavoured to classify the peoples of Africa, sorting them out into what they called tribes, producing a whole new ethnic map to show the frontiers of each one. Colonial administrators wanted recognisable units they could control. ‘Each tribe must be considered as a distinct unit,’ a provincial commissioner in Tanganyika told his staff in 1926. ‘Each tribe must be under a chief.’ In many cases, tribal labels were imposed on hitherto undifferentiated groups. The chief of a little-known group in Zambia once ventured to remark: ‘My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. [District Commissioner] told us we were.’ When local government was established under colonial rule, it was frequently aligned with existing ‘tribal areas’. Entirely new ethnic groups emerged, like the Abaluyia or Kalenjin of western Kenya, formed from two congeries of adjacent peoples. Some colonial rulers used tribal identities to divide their subjects, notably the British in southern Sudan and the French in Morocco. Chiefs, appointed by colonial authorities as their agents, became the symbol of ethnicity.

Missionary endeavour added to the trend. In the process of transcribing hitherto unwritten languages into written forms, missionaries reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each helping to define a tribe. The effect was to establish new frontiers of linguistic groups and to strengthen the sense of solidarity within them. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many others were formed in this way.

Missionaries were also active in documenting local customs and traditions and in compiling ‘tribal’ histories, all of which were incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools, spreading the notion of ethnic identity. African teachers followed suit. In southern Nigeria, young men from Ilesha and Ijebu who attended school in Ibadan or Oyo were taught to write a standard form of the Yoruba language and to identify themselves as Yoruba – a term previously reserved for subjects of the Oyo empire. As mission stations were largely responsible for providing education, educational achievement tended to depend on their locality and thus to follow ethnic lines.

Migration from rural areas to towns reinforced the process. Migrants gravitated to districts where fellow tribesmen lived, hoping through tribal connections to find housing, employment or a niche in trading markets. A host of welfare associations sprang up – ‘home-boy’ groups, burial and lending societies, cultural associations, all tending to enhance tribal identity. Certain occupations – railwaymen, soldiers, petty traders – became identified with specific groups which tried to monopolise them.

It was in towns that ethnic consciousness and tribal rivalry grew apace. The notion of a single Igbo people was formed in Lagos among the local ‘Descendants’ Union’. The Yoruba, for their part, founded the Egbe Omo Oduduwa – a ‘Society of Descendants of Oduduwa’, the mythical ancestor of the Yoruba people; its aim was ‘to unite the various clans and tribes in Yorubaland and generally create and actively foster the idea of a single nationalism throughout Yorubaland’. Ethnic groups became the basis of protest movements against colonial rule.

In the first elections in the postwar era in Africa, nationalist politicians started out proclaiming nationalist objectives, selecting party candidates regardless of ethnic origin. But as the number of elections grew, as the number of voters expanded, as the stakes grew higher with the approach of independence, the basis for campaigning changed. Ambitious politicians found they could win votes by appealing for ethnic support and by promising to improve government services and to organise development projects in their home area. The political arena became a contest for scarce resources. In a continent where class formation had hardly begun to alter loyalties, ethnicity provided the strongest political base. Politicians and voters alike came to rely on ethnic solidarity. For politicians it was the route to power. They became, in effect, ethnic entrepreneurs. For voters it was their main hope of getting a slice of government bounty. What they wanted was a local representative at the centre of power – an ethnic patron who could capture a share of the spoils and bring it back to their community. Primary loyalty remained rooted in tribal identity. Kinship, clan and ethnic considerations largely determined the way people voted. The main component of African politics became, in essence, kinship corporations.

The formation of one ethnic political party tended to cause the formation of others. In Nigeria the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the first modern political organisation in West Africa launched in 1944, started out with the aim of establishing a broad-based national movement, but after tribal dissension it became an Eastern regional party, dominated by Igbo politicians. Yoruba politicians left to form the Action Group, building it around the nucleus of Egbe Omo Oduduwa. In Northern Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani, while disdaining the nationalist cause which Southerners espoused, nevertheless formed in 1949 the Northern People’s Congress as a political offshoot of a predominantly Hausa cultural organisation, Jam’yyar Mutanen Arewa – Association of the Peoples of the North. In a more extreme example, in the Belgian Congo rival tribal parties were launched by the score. In most countries, political leaders spent much time on ‘ethnic arithmetic’, working out alliances that would win them power and keep them there.

Few states escaped such divisions. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere was helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the fact that the population was divided among 120 tribal groupings, none of which was large enough or central enough to acquire a dominant position. He benefited too from the common use of the Swahili language, spread initially by Arab traders, then taken up by the Germans and the British as part of their education system. Other states had to contend with a variety of languages, sometimes numbering more than a hundred. In all, more than 2,000 languages were in use in Africa.

There was a widespread view at the time of independence that once the new states focused on nation-building and economic development, ethnic loyalties would wither away under the pressure of modernisation. ‘I am confident’, declared Nigeria’s first prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, during a 1959 debate over the motion to ask for independence, ‘that when we have our own citizenship, our own national flag, our own national anthem, we shall find the flame of national unity will burn bright and strong.’ Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea spoke in similar terms in 1959. ‘In three or four years, no one will remember the tribal, ethnic or religious rivalries which, in the recent past, caused so much damage to our country and its population.’ Yet African governments were dealing not with an anachronism from the past, but a new contemporary phenomenon capable of erupting with destructive force.

It doesn’t seem all that different in kind, only in degree, from what happened in Europe with the spread of vernacular literacy, Protestantism, historical and comparative linguistics, and the scientific subclassification of everything and everyone on earth—and what continues apace in modern universities, prisons, and other political/protective patronage networks that privilege race/ethnicity over social class, religion, or other more mutable cross-cutting categories.

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Filed under Africa, democracy, education, Europe, language, nationalism

by | 13 June 2008 · 9:25 pm

Fates of Resistance to the Partition of Africa

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 3-4:

Scores of African rulers who resisted colonial rule died in battle or were executed or sent into exile after defeat. Samori of the Mandingo was captured and died in exile two years later; the Asantehene, King Agyeman Prempeh, was deposed and exiled for nearly thirty years; Lobengula of the Ndebele died in flight; Behazin of Dahomey and Cetshwayo of the Zulu were banished from their homelands.

In the concluding act of the partition of Africa, Britain, at the height of its imperial power, set out to take over two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and incorporate them into the British Empire, assuming that a war of conquest would take at most a matter of months. It turned into a gruelling campaign lasting three years, required nearly half a million imperial troops to finish it, and left a legacy of bitterness and hatred among Afrikaners that endured for generations. Faced with guerrilla warfare for which they were unprepared, British military commanders resorted to scorched-earth tactics, destroying thousands of farmsteads, razing villages to the ground and slaughtering livestock on a massive scale, reducing the Boers to an impoverished people. Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps, where conditions were so appalling that some 26,000 died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them under the age of sixteen. All this became part of a Boer heritage passed in anger from one generation to the next, spawning a virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold of South Africa.

Small-scale revolts against colonial rule continued for many years. The Baoulé of Côte d’Ivoire fought the French village by village until 1911; the Igbo of Nigeria were not fully defeated until 1919; the Jola of Senegal not until the 1920s; the Dinka of southern Sudan not until 1927. In the desert wastelands of Somaliland a fiery Muslim sheikh, Muhammad ’Abdille Hassan, dubbed by his adversaries the ‘Mad Mullah’, led Dervish warriors in a holy war against the British for twenty years until his death in 1920. Bedouin resistance against Italian rule in Libya ended only in 1931 after nine years of guerrilla warfare. By the 1930s, however, the colonial states of Africa were firmly entrenched; they had, moreover, acquired a legitimacy in the eyes of their inhabitants.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, France, Italy, nationalism, Netherlands, war

by | 12 June 2008 · 9:34 pm

European Horsetrading for Backwaters

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 1-2 (reviewed here, here, and here):

During the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent. At meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals, European statesmen and diplomats bargained over the separate spheres of interest they intended to establish there. Their knowledge of the African hinterland was slight….

As the haggling in Europe over African territories continued, land and peoples became little more than pieces on a chessboard…. Britain traded the North Sea island of Heligoland with the Germans for Zanzibar, and parts of northern Nigeria with the French for fishing rights off Newfoundland. France exchanged parts of Cameroon with Germany in return for German recognition of the French protectorate over Morocco. By the time the Scramble for Africa was over, some 10,000 African polities had been amalgamated into forty European colonies and protectorates.

Thus were born the modern states of Africa.

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by | 28 May 2008 · 6:34 pm

Inciting Backlash in Spain, 1931

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 128-129:

The newly elected left-Republican and Socialist coalition in June 1931 further provoked the religious with controversial articles in the new Constitution, Spain’s first experiment in democracy. This went much further than a legal separation of Church and state. It extruded the Church from education, restricted its property rights and investments, and dissolved the Jesuits, who played a role in liberal and leftist mythology equivalent to that of freemasons, Jews and Marxists in the demonology of their opponents. This last measure was a bitter pill to swallow in the homeland of St Ignatius Loyola. Civil marriage and divorce were legalised, while the agreement of the authorities was henceforth necessary for any public celebration of religion – another indigestible measure in a society where religious processions were a highly developed art form. A supplementary law in 1933 nationalised all Church property, including secularising the cemeteries by putting them under local authority control and dismantling the walls which separated the dead religious from their non-believing fellows. Having nationalised Church property, thereby ignoring the wishes of those who had donated it, the government then taxed the clergy who used it. Measures against Church charities simply hurt poor people. The government also closed all religious schools, which since they educated 20 per cent of Spanish children, and were not replaced by secular alternatives, sat oddly with the Republic’s expansion of education.

Although these measures were implemented with varying local intensities, there can be no doubt that preventing the ringing of church bells, removing religious symbols from classrooms, and bureaucratising the procedures for those wanting religious funerals grievously irked many Catholics. Officious insistence that dying people fill out forms to get the send-off they wanted failed to charm their friends and relatives. These measures were condemned by Pius XI in the forceful 3 June 1933 encyclical Dilectissima nobis, which, while carefully professing indifference to forms of government, stressed the hypocrisy of these measures in terms of ‘those declared principles of civil liberty on which the new Spanish regime declares it bases itself’. These laws were the product of ‘a hatred against the Lord and His Christ nourished by groups subversive to any religious and social order, as alas we have seen in Mexico and Russia’. Republican Spain had become part of a ‘terribile triangolo’ whose object was the eradication of religion. Anticlericals in the Cortes responded in kind, with snide remarks about the ‘Mercantile Society of Jesus’, while the Socialist leader Azaña crowed that with these 1931–3 measures Spain had ceased to be Catholic.

Of course, things had been tending that way far longer than the wave of measures introduced in 1931–3 may suggest. In 1881 the Churches had lost control of the universities. In 1901 religion had become optional within the curriculum leading to the school leavers’ certificate. In 1913 non-Catholic parents could exempt their children from religious instruction. With a few exceptions, the arts and intelligentsia were dominated by secular-minded people. The Catholic presence among the urban working class and the southern rural poor was also exiguous. In 1935 a Jesuit calculated that, taking the eighty thousand parishioners of a Madrid working-class suburb, 7 per cent attended mass on Sundays; 90 per cent died without the benefit of the sacraments; 25 per cent of children were unbaptised; and of couples marrying, 40 per cent could not recite the Lord’s Prayer. Similar levels of indifference and ignorance were revealed in studies of Bilbao and Barcelona. The Church was also like an alien presence in the villages of Andalucia, with anarchist and Socialist activists converting peasant indifference or quasi-pagan superstition into outright hostility. Churches were falling into disrepair, when they even existed, and priests were poorly paid with government stipends equivalent to the lowest grade of janitors. The priesthood was not an attractive career option, with recruitment for seminaries falling by 40 per cent between 1931 and 1934.

Is the lash or the backlash the driving force of history? Who was the Prime Lasher?

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by | 23 May 2008 · 5:54 pm

The Rise of Salazar in Portugal

From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 140-142:

In contrast to Spain, where the presence of Catholics on both sides of a vicious civil war dictated a cautious response by the Vatican, there were two countries where Pius XI’s vision of a ‘golden mean’ between invasive totalitarianism and weak democracy was apparently being realised by authoritarian governments. The first was Portugal, where in 1911 the new Republican regime had introduced some of the most anticlerical legislation in Europe. The Church was an easier target for urban radicals, many of whom were freemasons, than either the army or the large landowners of the south. Church property was nationalised, the university of Coimbra’s famous theology faculty was abolished, and feast days were restored to the world of work. Foreign priests and Jesuits were expelled, and both civil marriage and divorce were introduced. Religious teaching was prohibited in all schools. Both women and the 65 per cent of the population who were illiterates were disfranchised to destroy any potential Catholic voting base. Virtually the entire hierarchy were either exiled or expelled and in 1913 the Republic broke off diplomatic relations with Rome.

The fight-back against the efforts of a radicalised minority to impose French-style laicisation began among students in the devoutly Catholic north, and particularly among students at Coimbra. Two leaders emerged, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira and Antònio de Oliveira Salazar, of the Academic Centre for Christian Democracy, out of which developed a political party called the Portuguese Catholic Centre Party. Circumstances enabled this moderate party to make its influence felt. During the First World War, the Republic needed the Church to provide chaplains to its army of Catholic soldiers, while missionaries became crucial to the retention of a vast overseas empire at a time when the military was overstretched. By 1919 the Republic and the Vatican had restored diplomatic relations.

Initially, Salazar, an academic economist, subscribed to democracy as ‘an irreversible phenomenon’, but by the 1920s he and many others had become disenchanted with what was a highly corrupt local version of it. When he was elected to parliament in 1921, his revulsion for the opening session was so great that he walked out and returned to university teaching the same day. Between 1911 and 1926 Portugal had eight presidents, forty-four governments and twenty attempts at coups or revolution.

In 1926 the parliamentary republic was finally overthrown by general Manuel de Oliveira Gomes da Costa. Within two months, he was in turn deposed by general Carmona. Since Carmona had few ideas of his own, he depended upon conservative lay Catholics, including Salazar, who was twice brought in to right Portugal’s parlous finances. Salazar was careful to separate his political ambitions from his Catholicism, even if this meant tensions with his old student friend Cerejeira, who had become archbishop of Lisbon. When Salazar told the latter that he represented ‘Caesar, just Caesar, and that he was independent and sovereign’, Cerejeira shot back that he represented ‘God … who was independent and sovereign and, what’s more, above Caesar’. Salazar’s dictatorship retained the Republic’s separation of Church and state.

Restoring the Portuguese economy at a time when the world was sliding into depression lent Salazar a wizardly mystique, which he used to civilianise the military dictatorship from within. In 1930 he proclaimed a new National Union, an authoritarian nonparty whose primary purpose was to demobilise opinion. One of its first casualties was the Catholic Centre Party, which, Salazar argued, would impede the march to dictatorship. Thereafter Catholic Action became the main vehicle for the Church’s plans to reconquer Portuguese society for Catholicism.

President Carmona appointed Salazar premier in July 1932. He proclaimed the New State a year later. Catholic corporatist teachings, however misunderstood, were combined with a form of integral nationalism derived from Charles Maurras. The quiet professorial dictator, who avoided public speaking and staffed his regime with numbers of fellow academics, faced one remaining challenge. Portuguese disillusioned with the low-key tone of Salazar, and suffering under his austere economic policies, turned to the National Syndicalist Blue Shirts, who modelled themselves on the Fascists and Nazis. Salazar dealt with this radical Fascist threat deftly. He co-opted its more opportunist members into the regime, and then in July 1934 dissolved the remainder. This hostility to the National Syndicalists was similar to that of the Portuguese Catholic hierarchy. Referring to their desire for a ‘totalitarian state’ he asked: ‘Might it not bring about an absolutism worse than that which preceded the liberal regimes? … Such a state would be essentially pagan, incompatible by its nature with the character of our Christian civilization and leading sooner or later to revolution.’

Salazar saw little difference between the Communists, Fascists and Nazis, all of whom were wedded to a totalitarian ideal ‘to whose ends all the activities of the citizen are subject and men exist only for its greatness and glory. Portugal had no imperial ambitions – its empire was already the world’s fourth largest – and the regime dissociated itself from Nazi antisemitism, welcoming Jewish refugees fleeing their oppressors. The regime’s object was to entrench and intensify conservative Catholic values rather than to experiment with a ‘new man’ or woman. That lack of ambition, which extended to an aversion to modernising the nation’s economy, may partly explain why Salazar remained in power in this backwater until 1968.

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