Ethnic nationalism is one of the most diseased and obnoxious ideas contrived by human beings, rivaled only by Marxism and religious fanaticism in its potential for creating human suffering. The stage was set for the horrors of the twentieth century by the passionate ethnic hatreds of the 19th century. It was in this era that collective loyalties among Europeans shifted from obsessions with God to obsessions with Race and Nation. And it was in this era that most of the “national identities”, which now seem so fixed, were concocted.
This book deals with the process of manufacturing “national identity” in Bohemia, a process which involved the co-opting and polarizing of people who previously felt no special collective “oneness”. For example, language seems to have been regarded as nothing more than a convenient medium of communication in most of Bohemia, until the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy turned it into a critical qualification for political and social status. In 1880, the Hapsburgs’ imperial census demanded that everyone in the empire identify themselves by language, of which they could only choose one.
Millions of people who were bilingual or multilingual, who might use Czech to gossip with a neighbour, German at work, Hungarian to talk to a brother-in-law, and Slovak in bed with their spouse, suddenly had to define themselves like a species of insect by one, and only one of these languages. A Jewish shopkeeper might speak Yiddish at home, Moravian with his Customers, and read German newspapers and books. Czech nationalists insisted that he be considered a German, and German nationalists insisted that he was not. His rabbi claimed him as neither. The only opinion that carried no weight was his own. Up until then, in most of rural Bohemia, a given person would have said, “I am from such-and-such a village”, not “I am Czech” or “I am German”. Most Bohemians lived in this multi-cultural and multi-lingual reality, and had done so for centuries, but the census demanded that everyone be labeled ethnically under a single language, assumed to be identical with some inherent biological species.
To intellectuals and political activists, the resulting statistics and manufactured ethnicities became the tools for power struggles. National Defense Leagues, and parliamentary power-blocks used them in the pursuit of advancement, usually with blatant economic motives. The Nationalist mentality demanded not only the advancement of one’s “own” schools, celebrations, statues, and job opportunities, but the extermination of everyone else’s. Infantile vandalism, violence, and riots over statues, beer brands, and songs characterized life in late 19th Century Bohemia. Mobs attacked theatres that dared to perform a play in the Other language. The founding of a Czech-language university in Brno met violent opposition. Mobs of Czechs destroyed stores with German signs in their windows. Germans demanded boycotts of beers brewed by Czechs. History was rewritten into absurd fantasies of heroes and villains exemplifying the “superior” culture of Us and the perfidy and barbarity of Them. The old religious issues were not forgotten — they were merely re-shaped and twisted to amplify ethnic ideologies. And, of course, the age-old hatred of Jews thrived in such an atmosphere, and was used as strategic leverage.
So it was that when the Republic of Czechoslovakia emerged from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after World War I, ethnic nationalism acted as a slow poison to weaken and corrupt a society that initially offered considerable hope. Between the two wars, Czechoslovakia was Europe’s “model democracy”, at least in structural and constitutional terms. But in retrospect, it is clear that as long a the ethnic idea saturated the intellectual zeitgeist, the promise of that democracy could never be fulfilled. The ever-growing power of the Nazis and the Communists could rely on this childish notion to subvert the democratic process, and corrupt its morality, paving the way for the victory of totalitarianism. Today, after two totalitarian regimes gave way to a second republic, the same old nonsense manifests itself in prejudice against the Roma and immigrant Asians. The slow poison is still there.
None of the contending groups come off well in this story. It’s a sad one for me to contemplate, because I have a deep affection for that region of Europe. Nobody who has wandered through the meadows and forests of Bohemia, delighted in its artistic and architectural heritage, or listened to Dvořák’s music with attention could fail to form that affection. But it seems to me that ethnic nationalism is a pathetic travesty of real love for a country. There is no love of anything in ethnic nationalism, only blindness and stupidity.
This study is unfortunately written to a pedantic “post-modern” formula. But the facts are there, even if rather blandly recited. It provides a caution for Canadians, whose own democracy developed on the premise that ethnicity was irrelevant to nationhood, and is defined instead by shared geography. There are always intellectuals who wish to infect us with the old virus of ethnic nationalism, and they should be scorned by thoughtful Canadians. Reading this book will help them to understand why.
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