Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (Writing the Nation)
Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. A Very Short Introduction. Revolution and Other Writings. Social History of Art, Volume 3. A World to Win. The Nature of Fascism. Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion. Considerations on Western Marxism. The History of the Idea of Europe. Jan van der Dussen. The Making of Modern Greece.
Fifty Key Thinkers on History. A Companion to Intellectual History. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe. Silencing the Past 20th anniversary edition. The Limits of Loyalty. Remembering the Road to World War Two. Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. The Closed Commercial State. A History of German Literature. The Debate on the English Reformation.
The Limits of History. European integration and transnational labor markets. Promises, paradoxes, limits pp. Basingstoke, UK and New York: Heretics into National Heroes: Historians as Nationbuilders in Modern Europe pp.
Reward Yourself
Theory, Practice, and Policy, pp. The flexibilization of the Dutch labour market: The impact of globalization on the life course and inequality. The interruption of myth. Towards a Sociology of Generational Change: Foreign Policy Analysis meets Social Theory. What's reality television got to do with it? Talking politics in the net-based public sphere. Challenging the Primacy of Politics pp.
Why brand the future with the past? The roles of heritage in the construction and promotion of place brand reputations. From the 18 th to the 20 th Century pp. Comment is free, facts are sacred: Journalistic ethics in a changing mediascape. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe pp. Writing the Nation; No. The sway of the negative. A large-scale investigation of scalar implicature. From experiment to theory pp. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Reading the Book of Life pp. Hybridization of MNE subsidaries: Institutions, communication and values.
A History , still present a rather uncritical national narrative. In most essays, the author first shows the inconsistencies of a specific influential current-day theory and then comes in with his own perspicacious observations and counter-arguments. Eisenstadt asserts that currently there are a number of cultural and political models that do not conform to the Western standards, and which even tend to become more prominent.
By assuming the existence of multiple modernities, he aims to substitute older modernization theories that presupposed that the world would converge around a single, Western model of modernity. Brubaker, however, argues that in order to define societies, models or ideas as modern — even if there are multiple variants — one needs to have a clear criterion to define what all forms of modernity share.
So paradoxically one again ends with a single modernity. But Brubaker also disagrees from a more historical or sociological perspective by focusing on nation-states and nationalism as central elements in the interpretation of modernity. The nationalist package has proven to be flexible and adaptable enough to be adopted in many different circumstances. Whereas Tilly argues that exploitation and social closure — the exclusion of outsiders from a specific profession or resource — often occurred along ethnic or gender lines, Brubaker makes clear that they do not depend on categorical differences.
Join Kobo & start eReading today
Moreover, by taking the nation-state as his unit of analysis, Tilly and many other social theorists overlook the main instrument of social closure in the current meritocratic world: In another chapter Brubaker deals with the implications of the rise of the nation-state model during the last two centuries. This model presupposes that the borders of the state overlap with those of the nation and that a national culture is dominant within the territory of the state, but stops at its borders. Moreover, all residents should be citizens and participate in the same national culture. Although probably not a single state totally conforms to this ideal type, it constitutes the norm and as such has enormous consequences.
The nation-state became a fluid space of internal geographic and social mobility. This generally results in politics of belonging, which can have an enormous impact on those who should be included or excluded, and can even affect those fellow nationals who happen to live outside of the border. Should a migrant first become a member of the culturally defined nation before he or she can acquire citizenship? And, to provide a concrete case, do ethnic Germans from Russia have a greater right to obtain German citizenship than children of Turkish migrants who have been born and raised in Germany?
Equally lucid is the essay on the ways in which language and religion are intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. Brubaker asserts that in premodern societies language was a private matter that was of no concern to the state, whereas the authorities often imposed religious uniformity. In present-day liberal societies, in turn, religion is a private issue, whereas the state imposes one specific language or sometimes allows several by making it the official medium of communication which is used in education and by institutions. Moreover, by taking the nation-state model as the norm, states generally only award official status to those minority languages that are long established within the country and not to the languages of immigrant communities.
The use of a standard language in the public sphere has become so pervasive that immigrant communities rapidly adopt the dominant language of their place of residence, while the reproduction of minority languages requires sustained efforts by the state, or the limitation of the language options for specific parts of the country, as has happened in Belgium, Switzerland and Spain. Religion, on the other hand, is routinely passed on from one generation to the next, while in most states various religious denominations have become institutionalized.
- The Vegetarian Epicure?
- Bestselling Series!
- Lor de leur corps (French Edition)!
- Account Options.
As a consequence, language has lost most of its mobilizing potential, while religion, with its comprehensive set of norms, increasingly affects the public realm. Nationalizing Empires , edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, aims to redefine the relationship between empires and nation-states, while overcoming the strict divide between colonial history and the study of the West.
Moreover, new nation-states such as Germany and Italy rapidly began their own colonial project. In order to be respected, a nation-state needed to have an overseas empire. On the other hand, nationalism also strongly affected the cores of the continental empires in Eastern Europe. Berger and Miller thus rightly conclude that most nations emerged within empires, that nation-building generally happened within an imperial context and that nation-building and empire were closely entangled.
The impact of nationalism in the core of ten of these empires is analysed in individual chapters. As the timeframes of these chapters also do not exactly match, it is difficult to compare the trajectories of each of these empires. However, by adding five more thematic and comparative chapters by foremost specialists on imperial history, the final result is a very rich and dense patchwork that explores new ground. Almost all the chapters provide fascinating new insights. Thus, Robert Aldrich makes clear how direct links between, for instance, Brittany, Corsica, Lyon and Marseille and specific parts of the French colonial empire stimulated the integration of these regions and cities into the French nation.
Stefan Berger argues that the racialization of national discourse in the German Empire was related to both the treatment of the Polish and Jewish minorities at home and that of colonial subjects and mixed offspring overseas.
Writing the Nation Series
Alexei Miller emphasizes that in the Russian Empire there was not much overlap between the traditional nation-building policies of the Tsar, focusing on religion and dynastic loyalty, and those of more liberal elites who were in favour of political participation. The most surprising contributions deal with the Napoleonic Empire and Denmark. National identities, defined by language and culture, did not yet play a major role.
Since Frederick VI remained faithful to his alliance with Napoleon until the very end, he had to cede Norway to Sweden in As a consequence, the dominance of the Nordic part of the population in the Empire of the Oldenbourg dynasty became weaker, but even until the s German liberals from Schleswig-Holstein were united with their Danish counterparts in their opposition to royal absolutism.
Only in did nationalist tensions between the two main remaining parts of the European core of the Empire Denmark also had small colonial outposts in India, Africa and the Caribbean increase. However, in , it was the military intervention by Prussia and Austria that forced Denmark to relinquish its German-speaking territories. In fact, this is complicated because these regions were part of nation-states and as a consequence the inhabitants were citizens with voting rights. Nevertheless, the authors — most of whom are connected to Irish universities — clearly show how nation-building policies were experienced as enforced assimilation by many inhabitants of peripheral regions.
Instead of uniting the nation, the measures taken by the central government often led to discontent, active opposition and in some cases even organized resistance, and as a consequence were largely counterproductive. Therefore, most authors conclude that in their case the situation does not totally fit the classical definition of colonialism.
- Nationalizing the past : historians as nation builders in modern Europe - Ghent University Library.
- For All We Know.
- Monument to Murder (DCI Kate Daniels Book 4).
Probably the main exception was Bosnia-Herzegovina, which came close to being a full-blown colony of the Austrian Empire. In fact, this edited volume takes the nation-state as standard, even in a normative sense.
A New Dawn in Nationalism Studies? Some Fresh Incentives to Overcome Historiographical Nationalism
Consequently, the authors criticize those instances in which the nation-state ideals were violated on the ground. Thus, contrary to Nationalizing Empires , this volume does not provide an alternative to the hegemony of the nation-state in the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, but implicitly confirms it.
The books that have been discussed so far not only show us new approaches or underexplored territories for the study of nationalism, nation-building and nation-state formation, they should also stimulate us to fundamentally revise our ways of writing history. First of all, there is still ample work to do for historians interested in these topics. Although the debate on the supposed modern origins of nationalism remains heated, dispassionate investigations such as that of Stefan Berger on history writing or Michael Broers on the Napoleonic era can shed more light on the transformation in the meanings of the term nation and its importance during the early modern period.
Specifically, his somewhat schematic theories and models will profit from empirical case studies that can validate or fine-tune some of his conclusions. Another topic that deserves attention is the impact of nationalism on everyday life, which has not yet been thoroughly researched for the past.
Social scientists have already employed new concepts and approaches, while unearthing many instances of mundane forms of nationalism in the past. However, by largely ignoring the temporal dimension, it is not clear when exactly more mundane forms of nationalism arose and how more obvious forms became banalized over time. It has also become clear that the nation-state is not the only possible state form in the modern world, but a quite specific product of historical developments. Moreover, it did not become dominant right away.
Even in Europe most states were empires or aspired to become one. Nonetheless, it was only in the s that most Western powers began to dissolve their colonial empires, while the Soviet Empire lasted until the early s. Moreover, after the autonomous nation-state was also increasingly weakened by neo-liberal policies, such as large-scale privatizations and the curtailing of the welfare state, while at the same time it was eroded from the outside by the globalization of the economy, the rapid increase of travel, tourism and migration, the growing power of transnational companies and supranational organizations such as the European Union, and by the rise of Internet.
Thus, one could argue that the nation-state was only truly hegemonic during a very brief period between the s and the s.