Category Archives: language

by | 20 January 2025 · 6:05 am

Discovering the Atlantic Gyres

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 114-116:

The North Atlantic Gyre was a major find, but it turned out to be only half of the story. In the 1470s, the Portuguese crossed the equator and stumbled on a second gyre in the South Atlantic. Once again, it was necessity that prompted the discovery of this second great wheel of winds and currents. As the Portuguese sailors could not make any further progress in their Atlantic explorations by staying close to the African coast, on account of the contrary elements, they were forced again into the open Atlantic, this time venturing in a counterclockwise direction, away from the continent until practically crossing the entire ocean and nearing the coast of Brazil. This detour enabled Portuguese vessels finally to catch the southward-moving Brazil current and eventually to double back east toward the tip of Africa. This volta around the South Atlantic—a maneuver similar to the one in the North Atlantic but longer—could take up to three months of sailing without sight of land.

As early as 1500, Vasco da Gama, the great discoverer of the sea route from Portugal to India, penned a concise but unmistakable characterization of this second volta in the instructions that he left to his successor: “You should always go around the sea until reaching the Cape of Good Hope.” The recipient of such sound advice was Pedro Álvares Cabral, who followed da Gama’s words so closely that he drifted to the coast of Brazil, where he spent a few days before continuing eastward to India. Over the years, Portuguese seamen became familiar with the contours of the South Atlantic Gyre, as is evident in the so-called roteiros (derroteros in Spanish, rutters in English, routiers in French, and so on), or sailing instructions, occasionally penned by pilots to facilitate the task of future navigators. The South Atlantic roteiros alerted pilots to approach the coast of Brazil well to the south of Cabo de Santo Agostinho; otherwise they risked being knocked off course by the currents and pushed into the Caribbean, a disastrous turn of events that could delay the voyage by several months. Farther south along the Brazilian coast, pilots were warned to steer clear of the Abrolhos, a group of islands and reefs off the present-day state of Bahia. (“Abrolhos” comes from abre olhos, or “open your eyes” in Portuguese.) Once the fleets doubled back toward the tip of Africa, the only intervening land was Tristan da Cunha, a group of remote islands in the South Atlantic, first sighted in 1506, precisely during the early exploration of the South Atlantic Gyre.

Sixteenth-century navigators probably did not understand that Earth’s rotation is what causes the ocean gyres. It would not be until the early nineteenth century when Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis worked out the mathematics of the forces in a rotating system. Yet five hundred years ago, Portuguese pilots clearly referred to the ventos gerais (general winds) to distinguish them from more localized and variable winds. They also knew that these ventos gerais formed two rotating systems on either side of the equator. “When you have passed the equator and reached the general winds, you need to go with them for as long as possible,” a pilot named Bernardo Fernandes counseled in 1550, “because with them you will reach the Cape of Good Hope latitude.” Evidently seamen like Fernandes had a clear mental image of the gyres.

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Filed under Africa, Brazil, Europe, language, migration, Portugal, science

by | 18 January 2025 · 6:56 am

New Spain Demographics, 1500s

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 89-91:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

Lope Martín was from Lagos, an old port near Portugal’s southwestern tip that had historically served as a stepping-stone from Europe to Africa. In the summer of 1415, a powerful fleet had gathered there before crossing the Mediterranean to capture Ceuta. In later years, Lagos had turned into Prince Henry the Navigator’s base of operations. Famous local pilots included Alvaro Esteves (who charted the “gold coast” of Africa) and Vicente Rodrigues (one of the foremost pilots to India). As Portuguese fleets had traced the contours of western Africa, Black slaves had flowed back into Lagos, giving rise to a sizable slave and free population of African ancestry. This contingent did much of the work around the city, in the harbor, and aboard the ships of exploration. Many of the apprentices and sailors in Lagos were Black slaves whose salaries were pocketed by their masters or free Blacks engaged in the harsh life of the sea.

Lope Martín was, as we have seen, a free mulatto, that is, a person of mixed Afro-Portuguese descent. Although little is known about his early years, he must have cut his teeth aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration, carrying sacks of flour and climbing ratlines to the top of the mast. The fleets outfitted all along the southwestern coast of Iberia, on both the Portuguese and Spanish sides, constantly required fresh recruits like him. Towns like Huelva, Moguer, and Palos de la Frontera had supplied Columbus with a crew willing to risk their lives across the great ocean in 1492. Less than one hundred miles in length, this stretch of Portuguese-Spanish coast was at the time the preeminent maritime region in the world. Somewhere in this exploited and often brutal milieu, where knife fights could erupt over insignificant incidents, Lope Martín went from page (children of eight to ten) to apprentice (older and more experienced) to mariner (twenty and older and in possession of a certificate), all the while voyaging to Africa, the Americas, and perhaps as far as Asia. Lope Martín’s passages likely ended in different Portuguese and Spanish ports. These comings and goings must have taken him away from his native Lagos, well inside Portugal, toward the Spanish border, and finally to Seville, the only Spanish port open to trade with the New World.

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Filed under Africa, language, Mexico, migration, Philippines, Portugal, religion, slavery, Spain

by | 7 January 2025 · 6:00 am

Wiretapping the Japanese Consulate, 1941

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 59-60:

Warrant Officer Theodore “Ted” Emanuel didn’t join the Navy to be an undercover operative. His job as chief ships clerk is dedicated to keeping internal records, reports and correspondence. But now that he’s assigned to the 14th Naval District Intelligence Office, Emanuel is capturing another nation’s communications in yet another undercover assignment.

Today he’s on the streets of Honolulu dressed as a telephone repairman, unhurriedly working on the junction box near 1742 Nuuanu Avenue—the Japanese Consulate. As SAC Shivers is working on getting clearance from his FBI bosses to bug the consulate phones, Captain Hart goes ahead and just does it.

The hardest part of setting up a wiretap is knowing the right circuits to target, but in this case that’s easy. After that, it’s as simple as scraping the insulation from a segment of the two wires required to make a telephone circuit. A receiver is attached to the exposed portions with metal clips and extension wires. This is known as “cutting in” on a telephone circuit and can be done at a streetside phone junction box.

Emanuel finishes up and casually drives away. The taps he’s placed cover half a dozen of the consulate’s telephone lines. It’s a tightly compartmentalized operation. The calls, about fifty a day, will be translated and summarized at the Young Hotel by Denzel Carr, the master linguist. When he doesn’t have the time, he’ll rely on Douglas Wada to handle the workload.

The US Navy has some ears inside the consulate. Now it’s up to the staff inside to make an indiscreet phone call.

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Filed under Japan, language, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 4 January 2025 · 6:15 am

FBI Threat Assessments, Oahu, 1939

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 31-33:

FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Shivers arrives in Honolulu with a full plate and a small staff. His job is enormous: to stand up the first Honolulu FBI office and use it to assess the loyalty of 160,000 people: 125,000 American citizens of Japanese origin and 35,000 Japanese citizens. Yet his office at the Dillingham is staffed with just two agents and a stenographer.

SAC Shivers is a serious man with a solid pedigree. He served as an Army sergeant in the ordnance supply of artillery during the Great War. He only graduated high school, but the FBI accepted him in 1923, after which he rose through the ranks. During the 1930s, Shivers served as a special agent in charge of various stations around the country, gaining the ear of director J. Edgar Hoover along the way by targeting bootlegger gangs and the Ku Klux Klan.

…

The G-man’s mission starts with cleaning up the “pickup lists” of those to be arrested in the event of war. The idea of mass detentions inside the United States has been part of military planning for decades; establishing “concentration camps” for those arrested has been specifically mentioned in Roosevelt administration documents since at least 1937.

The FBI has a list of 125 suspects on their list. The Army has given the names of more than two hundred, and there’s nearly as many on the list generated by the Office of Naval Intelligence, curated by naval reservists Lieutenant William Stephenson and Lieutenant Commander Cecil Coggins, an obstetrician with a budding talent for spycraft.

…

Finding sedition in Honolulu isn’t easy. Japanese ultranationalists are even more rare in Hawaii than the mainland, favored only by a slender percentage of Issei immigrants. But it doesn’t take actual disloyal behavior to land on the official Navy suspect list.

The FBI has developed a tool for its agents to classify local intelligence threats. They call it an “evaluative matrix,” and it ranks suspect organizations into three categories: A, B and “Semi–Official and Subversive Japanese firms in the United States.” According to the Navy, A-designated organizations “constitute an actual threat to the internal security of the United States. All officers and members, whether full or associate, of these organizations should be given serious consideration before employment in any position of confidence or trust in this country.” Class A threats are to be detained immediately upon the outbreak of war. Class B threats are judged by their potential to do harm. They haven’t crossed any lines, but if they did, their community influence could cause major havoc. The final C designation is reserved for Japanese commercial interests with possible ties to the Japanese government, like steamship companies, banks and newspapers.

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Filed under Japan, language, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 3 January 2025 · 6:52 am

First AJA as ONI Agent, 1938

From Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. (Harper Select, 2023), Kindle pp. 37-39:

In 1938, Douglas Wada became the first American of Japanese ancestry (or “AJA,” as they came to be known in Hawaii) to serve as an ONI agent. He was commissioned by the Navy at the same time, commissioned (to his happy surprise) as a lieutenant. That also makes him the first AJA to be commissioned as a US naval officer. His achievements are known by nearly no one, but the pressure of it is a daily reality.

The 14th DIO is changing, getting more serious as diplomatic relations with Japan steadily deteriorate. Some of the faces are different too: Walter Kilpatrick left the 14th District Intelligence Office in 1938, replaced by Capt. W. H. Hart Jr. But Ringle is still here, and that means Wada has a steadfast champion.

Wada hoped that the small-time work would ease when he became an agent, but he’s quickly tasked with working with the military policemen of the Shore Patrol. The pressing need is for someone, anyone, in the Navy to help collect statements from Japanese-speaking storeowners who have run afoul of drunken sailors.

However, he’s also afforded an opportunity to conduct fieldwork. He has a cover established as a customs inspector, tasked with scouring passenger luggage for incriminating documents about the US Navy. He’s happy to see a fellow Nisei in the office, Noboru “Hunchy” Murakami. The pair board passenger ships from the Nippon Yusen Kaisha and comb through the suitcases and parcels when the passengers can’t watch. They use passenger lists to target some luggage for special scrutiny, including those who have lived in Japan for extended periods of time. People like Douglas Wada. Murakami and Wada quickly become friends and confidants. Besides Murakami, the other inspectors think Wada reports to the local police, not the Navy.

In September 1939, news comes to the Shore Patrol of an impending visit to Honolulu by the Japanese Navy, a stopover on the way to California and the first one in two years. It’s to be stocked with top-tier officials, part of a diplomatic effort to ease tensions between the nations even as war rages in Europe and China. The city’s United Japanese Society is taking the lead on demonstrating some local hospitable goodwill, holding planning meetings months in advance at the city’s chamber of commerce.

This trip also seems to be a good way for the Imperial Navy to look at the most westward parts of America, including its military facilities in Hawaii. Feeling that turnabout is fair play, Wada has been tasked with taking a look at the Japanese fleet on the quiet behalf of Naval Intelligence, using his established Shore Patrol cover.

“Wada!” calls Shore Patrol Capt. George Dickey. Wada’s here to serve as translator when he speaks with the officers in command of the Japanese ships, who even now are approaching like walking statues. This is the Shore Patrol’s first courtesy call with the head of this flotilla, Vice Admiral Yurio Samamoto, who arrives with the Yakumo’s captain, Shigeaki Yamasaki.

Wada fixes his face with respectful seriousness before he turns away from the railing. The Japanese officers and Shore Patrol exchange polite bows before Dickey delivers his greeting, which Wada dutifully translates. “Welcome to Honolulu, sir. I understand you have a full itinerary, but should anything unexpected come up, please do not hesitate to contact us. In the meantime, we can help orient you to the island’s landmarks, several of which we can see from here . . .”

The Japanese ships stay in Oahu for six days, filling Wada’s schedule with receptions, tours, speeches and meetings. At least once, Wada comes back to the Shore Patrol office drunk enough for officers there to notice.

“I just had a few,” he explains lamely.

After the six days are over and the ships are headed for Hilo, Wada reads a positive editorial about the Japanese military visit in Nippu Jiji. “Training cruises are important in many ways. They afford an opportunity for the Japanese navy men to extend consolation to Japanese abroad. They enable the cadets to gain knowledge of the places they visit and make friends, all of which gives them better understanding of the countries visited when they become officers of the navy.

“Such fleet diplomacy will go a long way toward promoting better relations between Japan the United States.”

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Filed under Japan, language, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 15 November 2024 · 2:51 pm

Down the Danube: Bulgaria

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Bulgaria was at Vidin, one of its oldest riverside towns. Our morning excursion was to the old mountain fortress of Belogradchik (‘Little Belgrade’) and its impressive rock formations, with steep hillsides to climb. In the afternoon we walked along the waterfront, to the old Ottoman post office, a mosque, an orthodox church, and a memorial to the victims of communism. We didn’t make it as far as the synagogue because we fell into a long conversation with a talkative schoolboy fluent in English. The captain of our Viking Ullur cruise ship was Bulgarian.

The next morning we stopped at Ruse, famous for its baroque architecture and the Friendship Bridge to Giurgiu, just across the Danube in Romania. But our daylong excursion took us south to Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria’s old capital, and the nearby Ottoman merchant city of Arbanasi, now a major tourist attraction, where we visited an Ottoman-era merchant’s house and an orthodox church hidden in a barn. We ate lunch at the Hotel Izvora (= Spring), built in traditional Bulgarian style, and with a waterwheel-driven rotisserie. On the way back to the bus, we passed two classic Russian cars, a Lada and a Moskvitch.

We passed many large farms on our bus excursions. The wheat and maize had been harvested before our October visit, but fields of young green rapeseed (canola) plants were also visible. After the fall of communism, large collective farms were broken up and given to the families who worked them, but many new owners who lacked the resources to farm their own land have leased it back to large agribusinesses. Bulgaria also has valuable specialty crops, the most famous of which are from the centuries-old Rose Valley. (We first heard of it, under the name Valea Trandafirilor, during our sojourn in Romania in 1983-84.)

After Russia attacked Ukraine’s Black Sea grain-storage ports, including Ismail in the Danube Delta, much of Ukraine’s huge wheat exports now come by thousands of trucks through Romania, across the Friendship Bridge, and back to the Bulgarian port of Varna on the Black Sea.

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Filed under Bulgaria, economics, language, nationalism, religion, Russia, travel, Turkey, Ukraine, war

by | 10 November 2024 · 6:33 am

Interwar Croats vs. Yugoslavia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 377-379:

The elections of 1919 produced stunning majorities in Croatia for the Croat Peasant Party, led by the mercurial, charismatic, popular, and erratic but principled Stjepan Radić, who decided to boycott the meetings that drafted the new state’s constitution. He told other Croat politicians before they rushed off to join the Serb Kingdom in 1918 that they were acting like “drunken geese in fog,” having learned nothing from the fall of Emperor Wilhelm in Germany a few weeks earlier. Like the fallen emperor, they were in a hurry to impose power on the people, rather than fostering self-governance by involving the people. No one had asked Croats if they wanted to belong to the new state, and that was an irrational, imprudent, and as time would show, self-defeating act.

Radić then led Croats in boycotting Yugoslav political institutions, and was arrested frequently, once for seeking support for Croat independence in Moscow (an act considered seditious). The other major political forces in Yugoslavia—Serbs from the old kingdom (Radicals), Serbs from Habsburg lands (Democrats), Muslims from Bosnia, and Slovene Catholics—thus ruled the new state without the Croats. Things seemed to change for the better in 1925, when Radić suddenly agreed to take a post as education minister and King Alexander made his first visit to Zagreb. Yet because of incompatibilities of the leaders, this relative harmony only lasted for just over a year.

The differences between Serbs and Croats in political vision proved unbridgable. Croat leaders insisted that Croatia must be guaranteed local autonomy in recognition of centuries of Croatian state’s rights that had been respected even under Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs had no tradition of federal rule. Having borne the costs of liberating Yugoslav territory from the Austrians—while Croats were fighting for Austria—Serbs claimed a moral right to rule the new state from the center. The determination to rule was reflected in a stranglehold Serbs established on institutions of state that lasted until 1941. Yet Serbs also argued compellingly that Yugoslavia had not been a Serb idea in the first place, and their political elite had acceded to unity in response to the urgent wishes of Croat politicians, first at Corfu in 1917, then in Belgrade with the delegation that appeared the following December. Without Serb backing, much of Croatia would have been divided between Hungary and Italy.

Nikola Pašić, the respected leader of the Serb Radical Party, died in 1927, and the parliamentary deputies in Belgrade sank into a routine of lobbing insults across the lines of ethnicity. In June 1928, Radić called Montenegrin deputies “apes,” and the next day, the Serb Radical Puniša Račić shot Radić on the floor of parliament along with two other Croat deputies. The two deputies died immediately, but Radić held on for several weeks, finally succumbing to complications from an operation in early August. The king reputedly offered to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia, but Radić refused, perhaps anticipating the difficulties of separating Croats from Serbs in the old military frontier (krajina) in Croatia and fearing Italian domination of the rump state that would be left.

In the end, Radić also acknowledged the basic need for a state that could secure the peaceful coexistence of the peoples on Yugoslav territory. Yet in contrast to Serb elites in Belgrade, his hope, and the hope of his deputy and successor Vladko Maček, was a federal Yugoslavia, perhaps even a Serb-Croat sharing of rule akin to the 1867 agreement between Austria and Hungary. One sign of hope was that since 1926, his Croatian Peasant Party worked in coalition with the Independent Democrats, a mostly Serb party from former Habsburg areas led by Svetozar Pribićević, also a target of the assassination in June 1928.

But with Radić’s death, the king felt a compulsion to act, and in January 1929, he declared a royal dictatorship, hoping simply to keep the state together. Parliament had proved a “hindrance to any fruitful work in the state” and to permit it to continue its work would expose Yugoslavia to the predations of its neighbors.49 In a modernizing frenzy meant to force Yugoslavia to become a state, Alexander made historic borders irrelevant and divided the country into nine banovine, or districts, named after rivers and with little relation to any district that had ever existed. Bosnia and Croatia simply disappeared from the map. In the army he abolished all insignias and standards that were attached to historic Serbia, thus alienating many Serbs. The country was now officially Yugoslavia and no longer the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Perhaps the king’s scheme was not so outlandish. After all, the very idea of a united South Slav state went against all prior history, and to some extent all interwar Eastern European politics involved creation of new units in disregard of old ones. And he was not a nationalist: far from a tool of the Serb bureaucracy, Alexander acted to reduce Serb predominance. (As we will see, like the region’s other intemperate centralizer, Joseph II, he failed in almost everything he attempted.)

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Filed under Austria, democracy, economics, Hungary, language, nationalism, religion, Yugoslavia

by | 9 November 2024 · 9:36 am

“Imperialist” Founding of Czechoslovakia

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 346-347:

Basic agreements were made about Czechoslovakia during the war years, far away from the would-be country’s territory or population, by Czechs and Slovaks in exile, but also by Western statesmen. In 1915 representatives of Czechs and Slovaks in Cleveland agreed to form a common state, and in May 1918, Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians gathered in Pittsburgh and agreed on the formation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia. The agreement said that Slovakia would have its own administration, parliament, and courts, and some Slovaks believed that implied autonomy. In October 1918, Tomáš G. Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s existence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and neither he nor his followers doubted that the state would be governed from Prague, just as France was governed from Paris.

Czech statesmen and their Slovak supporters were resolute on this point because they feared that anything short of unanimity might cost them support in Western capitals. They also worried about the dangerous examples that would be set by any talk of autonomy or regionalism. If Prague accorded the Slovaks self-rule, then demands for the same would pour in from Germans, Magyars, and Ruthenians. Slovakia itself was highly heterogeneous, with Magyars dominating cities and the southern edge, and three large German “islands” in the west, center, and northeast. Some Slovak politicians hoped there might be a chance at a later date to negotiate the details of local rule, but in the meantime, they had to act to counter demands from Hungary. A new ideology of Czechoslovakism (of one people in two tribes) papered over doubts, and the constitution of 1920 referred to “a Czechoslovak” language. In practice, that meant that Czech administrators in Slovakia felt free to use Czech, which Slovaks understood almost perfectly. Yet by doing so they began grating on local sensitivities, creating a sense of differences that had never before existed, because the two peoples did not know each other.

Yet there was also a practical side to this “Czech imperialism.” Because the Hungarian administration had stifled the development of Slovak elites for generations—in 1910, of 6,185 state officials at all levels in Slovakia, only 154 were Slovaks—educated and skilled Czechs were needed to build schools, create jobs, form the networks of cultural institutions, and simply run the state. For example, in the capital city of Bratislava (called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German), as late as 1925 there were 420 Czechs to 281 Slovaks in the police directorate. But the Czechs also exported condescension. Slovaks were a small population, foreign minister Beneš said, “insufficient to create a national culture on their own.” Tomáš G. Masaryk, though his father was Slovak, insisted that

there is no Slovak nation. That is the invention of Magyar propaganda. The Czechs and Slovaks are brothers.… Only cultural level separates them—the Czechs are more developed than the Slovaks, for the Magyars held them in systematic unawareness. We are founding Slovak schools.

Uncomfortable facts were swept under the rug. Masaryk had attended the Pittsburgh agreement promising Slovaks some kind of autonomy, yet he failed to regard it as binding. And when the constitution was drafted, representatives of the German, Polish, Magyar, and Ruthene communities—one-third of the new state’s population—had no part in it. The Slovak delegates in the assembly were not elected but chosen by Vávro Šrobár, the Slovak chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, a physician active in Slovak politics who happened to know Masaryk. Šrobár and the Slovak delegates came from the Protestant minority, which was more enthusiastic about union with the Czechs than was the Slovak Catholic majority. They assented to a centralized state because the largely illiterate Slovak population was not “mature” enough for local autonomy and also because the threat of a return of Magyar power seemed to necessitate close cooperation with the Czechs.

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Filed under Czechia, democracy, education, Germany, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Slovakia, U.S., war

by | 7 November 2024 · 11:40 am

Romanianizing “Greater Romania”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 347-349:

Superficially, Transylvania had much in common with Slovakia and Croatia. Here, too, troops and administrators arrived from a neighboring kingdom (in this case, Romania) intent on swallowing new territories and including a population with whom they had never lived in a common state. But ultimately, the union succeeded without major problems.

Romanians in east and west shared the same language and alphabet, and for the most part, the same Orthodox religion, whereas beyond the basic Štokavian form of Serbo-Croatian which they happened to speak, most Croats and Serbs were separated by alphabet, religion, and regional language. Disputes lasted from the beginning to the end of Yugoslavia about whether Croat or Serb variants of the common tongue would be standard, and in our day, the separate states are cultivating what they call separate languages. In “Greater Romania,” however, everyone took for granted that the standard Romanian language extended from Moldavia into Transylvania. And religion united rather than divided: in December 1919, Orthodox bishops from the old kingdom (the Regat) as well as Transylvania formed a common synod and elected the Transylvanian Miron Cristea as their leader. In 1925, he became the first Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Like counterparts elsewhere, the Romanian state-builders claimed that unity was natural; they were returning to the arrangement of 1600, when Michael the Brave acted as ruler of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia for several months. Their agenda of unity had been part of Romanian political discourse for generations, extending back to the 1840s, when one Transylvanian spoke of the stages in which transformation would be completed: democratic, social, and finally, national. Each stage depended on the others: without a social revolution in which they received land, peasants would remain slaves of a “few individuals.” The new state responded quickly to this need by instituting the most radical land reform in Eastern Europe, aided by the convenient fact of land ownership by alien groups. In Transylvania, Romanian peasants got land that had belonged to Magyars and Germans.

Romanianizing what had been Magyarized space proved the deepest source of common purpose for Romanians from the Regat and Transylvania. State administration as well as schools had to be made Romanian, and then schools had to be employed as vehicles of upward mobility for Transylvania’s Romanian intelligentsia. A condition of becoming literate and professional was no longer becoming Magyar.

Yet a smoldering low-level dissatisfaction set in because the new state was ruled centrally from Bucharest. The December 1918 mass meeting at Alba Iulia had demanded inclusion in Romania but had also asked that Transylvania’s rights be respected in a federal arrangement. Complaints soon multiplied that policy makers in Bucharest were not respecting this agreement, because, like counterparts in Belgrade, Prague, and Warsaw, they regarded the divisions of federalism as inadmissible. Transylvanian Romanians felt in some ways they possessed a distinct and superior political culture, were proud of having drawn leaders from the common people and of supposedly belonging to a more honest and competent “Central European” civilization, whose practices stood in contrast to those of their theatrical and “Mediterranean” compatriots in the Regat. The Transylvanians also objected to the appointment of officials from across the border who had grade-school education at best, complained of acts of humiliation and persecution, and of previously unknown corruption. By the 1930s, the flooding of administrative posts with nonnatives caused locals to speak of “colonization.”

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Filed under education, Hungary, language, nationalism, religion, Romania, Slovakia, Yugoslavia

by | 5 November 2024 · 5:35 am

Evolution of Polish Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 287-289:

In much of East Central Europe, landowners or bosses were of a foreign nationality, and nationalists exploited a sense of economic oppression to spread national consciousness to the masses. For example, in the Czech lands, owners of factories or manors tended to be German, and the Czech movement accordingly defined Czech identity as anti-German. In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim; in Slovenia, German; and in much of Croatia, Hungarian. In 1800, Prague and Brno, but also Budapest, Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, were German-speaking cities. The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced from culture, business, politics, and all traces of the new standard version of the national language.

In central Poland, the landowners as well as peasants were Polish-speaking. The cities and towns, however, had mixed populations, mostly Polish, but there were also many Jews, who spoke their own language and pursued walks of life that were distinct: trade, commerce, money-lending, and small crafts. Jews often bought cattle and grain, made credit available to peasants, or ran the local inn. Nationalists thus had an opportunity: they could use anti-Semitism to convince village folk that Jews were foreign, and that as ethnic Poles, the villagers belonged to the same nation as Polish townspeople and gentry. They told poor villagers that their problem was not lack of land, education, or farming implements but the “alien” Jewish presence in nearby towns. As restrictions on Jewish ownership eased from the 1870s, Jewish families began competing with small farmers to buy up the land of impoverished gentry, and by 1912, they controlled 20 percent of the agricultural land in Galicia. Arguments that presented these inroads as unfair Jewish advantages in the economy convinced peasants that they shared a common identity with Polish landlords.

Gradually the national idea caught on among peasants, even those who had been alienated from all talk of nation and felt that the court in Vienna was their protector. Beginning in the latter decades of the century, peasants participated more actively in local self-government and took a stronger role in national life, and that also meant heightened circulation among them of nationalist arguments. Catholic priests contributed a debased and opportunistic reading of their faith to serve the cause. One wrote that a Pole who was not an anti-Semite “has no right to call himself a good Catholic or a good Pole, and cannot be a good patriot.” The Polish national movement created “Christian” institutions to strengthen “Polish” ownership in the economy (the equivalent of the Bohemian nationaler Besitzstand was polski stan posiadania), and soon there were Christian shops, Christian lending institutions, and Christian pubs, all of which had the function of linking Poles across classes in village and city and promoting upward social mobility for co-ethnics.

But even so, the inculcation of Polish nationalist narratives in the village was not easy. Before World War I, many peasants still uttered curses when the name Poland was mentioned because they associated Poland with the “lords.” And when they embraced national consciousness, peasants and their political movements claimed to do so in a way all their own, saying that national culture was unspoiled in the villages, in contrast to the towns, where the gentry had absorbed foreign ideas about states and laws. In the early twentieth century, leading Polish intellectuals bought those arguments and developed their own cult for the genuine Polishness of villagers, even seeking peasant brides.

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