Nationalism reframed
Nationhood and the national question
in the New Europe
Rogers Brubaker
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Introduction
Europe was the birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism
at the end of the eighteenth century, and it was supposed to be their
graveyard at the end of the twentieth. If we take 1792, when war and
nationhood were first expressly linked and mutually energized on the
battlefield of Valmy,1
as symbolizing their birth, we might take 1992 as
symbolizing their anticipated death, or at least a decisive moment in their
expected transcendence. Chosen by Jacques Delors as the target date for
the completion of the ambitious program of the Single European Act,
"1992" came to stand for the abolition of national frontiers within
Europe; for the free movement of persons as well as goods and capital;
for the emergence of a European citizenship; and - with the signing of the
Treaty of Maastricht in 1991 - for the prospect of a common European
currency, defense, and foreign policy. Just as Europe took the lead in
inventing (and propagating) nationhood and nationalism, so now it
would take the lead in transcending them; and "1992" served as a
resonant symbol of that anticipated transcendence.
Deeper and more general forces, too, were seen as undermining the
nation-state and rendering nationalism obsolete. Nationalism, discredited
by the "Thirty Years War" of the first half of the century,
seemed to have been dissolved in Western Europe by the subsequent
thirty years of prosperity - "les trentes glorieueses," as they are called in
France. Moreover, the organization of political space along national
1
On September 20, 1792, at Valmy, in northeastern France, the ragtag French army,
under fire from the much better trained and better equipped Prussian infantry, held its
ground to the revolutionary battle-cry of "Vive la Nation." This led Goethe, who was
present at the battle, to declare - notwithstanding the immediate military insignificance
of the battle - that "this date and place mark a new epoch in world history." See
Francois Furet and Denis Richet, La Revolution frangaise (Paris: Hachette, 1965),
p. 185; Albert Soboul, "De l'Ancien Regime a l'Empire: probleme national et realites
sociales," L 'Information historique (1960), 58.
1
2 Nationalism reframed
lines seemed increasingly ill-matched to social, economic, and cultural
realities.2
The nation-state was seen as simultaneously too small and too
large: too small to serve as an effective unit .of coordination in an increasingly
internationalized world, too large and remote to be a plausible and
legitimate unit of identification. Global financial integration, dense global
networks of trade and migration, a global communications infrastructure
purveying an incipient global mass culture, the global reach of transnational
corporations, the border-spanning jurisdictions of a host of
other transnational organizations, and the inherently transnational
nature of terrorism, drug trafficking, nuclear weaponry, and ecological
problems all reinforced the conviction that the world was moving beyond
the nation-state. The drive toward institutionalized supranationality
symbolized by "1992" may have been unparalleled outside Europe. But
since underlying forces were seen as working in the same direction
elsewhere, an incipiently post-national Europe was seen as showing the
rest of the world "the image of its own future."
The future displayed recently by Europe to the world, however, looks
distressingly like the past. The first half of the 1990s has seen not the
anticipated eclipse but the spectacular revival and rebirth of the nationState
and the national idea in Europe. "1992" was rudely preempted by
1991, when war, once again entwined with powerfully mobilizing myths
of nationhood, broke out in Europe. Other developments, too, have
conspired to chasten the heralds of supranationality and to place the
scheduled transcendence of nationalism and the nation-state on hold.
Not only was "Europhoria" shattered by the unforeseen resistance to
the Maastricht treaty, by the currency crisis of 1992-93, and by the
ignominious failure of a common European response to the Yugoslav
crisis. Not only has immigration sparked a major revival of nationalist
rhetoric in most European countries. Not only has German unification
in the heart of the continent - unification predicated on a conception of
state-transcending nationhood - engendered concern about a revival
of German nationalism. Most important, the spectacular reconfiguration
of political space along national lines in Central and Eastern Europe and
Eurasia has suggested that far from moving beyond the nation-state,
history - European history at least - was moving back to the nation-state.
The "short twentieth century"3
seemed to be ending much as it had
begun, with Europe entering not a post-national but a post-multinational
2
See for example David Beetham, "The Future of the Nation-State," in Gregor
McLennan et al, eds., The Idea of the Modern State (Milton Keynes, UK and
Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1984).
3
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914—1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994).
Introduction 3
era through the wholesale nationalization of previously multinational
political space.
Yet currently faddish sweeping pronouncements about the resurgence
and ubiquity of nationalism, like earlier sweeping declarations of its
demise and obsolescence, obscure more than they reveal. Rather than
engage in an unproductive debate about nationalism and the nation-state
in general, this book grapples with the "actually existing nationalisms" of
a particular - and particularly volatile - region. The region can be
roughly defined as the vast and variegated swath of Central and Eastern
Europe and Eurasia that (along with pans of the Middle East and North
Africa) was occupied in the nineteenth century by the Habsburg,
Ottoman, and Romanov Empires. Their loosely integrated, polyethnic,
polyreligious, and polylinguistic realms sprawled eastward and southward
from the zone of more compact, consolidated, integrated states of
Northern and Western Europe. As the category "nation" diffused eastward
in the second half of the nineteenth century as a salient "principle
of vision and division" of the social world, to use Pierre Bourdieu's
phrase, these imperial realms were increasingly perceived, experienced,
and criticized as specifically multinational rather than simply polyethnic,
polyreligious, and polylinguistic, and the "principle of nationality" - the
conception of states as the states of and for particular nations - became
the prime lever for reimagining and reorganizing political space.
Beginning with the gradual erosion of Ottoman rule in the Balkans in
the nineteenth century, but occurring mainly in a concentrated burst of
state-creation in the aftermath of World War I, the great multinational
land empires were reorganized along ostensibly national lines. This
massive reorganization of political space, to be sure, remained incomplete:
the Soviet Union was reconstituted, largely within the frame of the
Romanov territories, as an expressly multinational state; and Yugoslavia
and Czechoslovakia, although constituted as national states, that is, as
states of and for putative triune "South Slav" and diune Czechoslovak
nations respectively, came increasingly to be understood and experienced
as multi- and binational, respectively. Today, however, with the
breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, the last
of the region's avowedly multinational states have disappeared. Everywhere,
political authority has been reconfigured along putatively national
lines.
Yet nationalism remains central to politics in and among the newly
created nation-states, just as it remained central to politics in and among
the newly created (or enlarged) nation-states that issued from the postWorld
War I settlement. Far from "solving" the region's national
question, the most recent nationalizing reconfiguration of political space,
4 Nationalism reframed
like its early twentieth-century analog, has only reframed the national
question, recast it in a new form.4
It is this refraining of nationalism that
I explore in this book.
II
Nationalism has been both cause and effect of the great reorganizations
of political space that framed the "short twentieth century" in Central
and Eastern Europe. But the forms of nationalism that have resulted
from the nationalization of political space are different from - and less
familiar than - those that helped engender it. The nationalist movements
that preceded and (in conjunction with a variety of other factors)
produced the redrawing of political boundaries have been intensively
studied. By contrast, the nationalisms that (again in conjunction with a
variety of other factors) were produced by this redrawing of political
boundaries have received much less attention. This book addresses the
distinctive forms and dynamics of these latter nationalisms, those that
have emerged in the wake of the nationalization of political space.
These nationalisms are interlocking and interactive, bound together in
a single relational nexus. This can be characterized on first approximation
as a triad linking national minorities, the newly nationalizing
states in which they live, and the external national "homelands" to which
they belong, or can be construed as belonging, by ethnocultural affinity
though not by legal citizenship.
This triadic nexus involves three distinct and mutually antagonistic
nationalisms. The first are the "nationalizing" nationalisms of newly
4
Like the nationalization of political space, the other elements of the "triple transition"
in the region - marketization and democratization - have also failed to attenuate
nationalist tensions. Focusing on Romania, for example, but considering other
countries in post-Communist Eastern Europe as well, Katherine Verdery has shown
how privatization, electoral democracy, and other elements of "transition" have
aggravated rather than alleviated nationalist conflicts. See her essay "Nationalism and
National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania," Slavic Review 52 (Summer 1993),
184ff. On the connections between marketization, democratization, and nationalism,
see also Jack Snyder, "Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State," Survival
35, no. 1 (1993), 14ff. On the "triple transition" - the simultaneous transformations of
state identities, political regimes, and economic systems - see Claus Offe, "Capitalism
by Democratic Design - Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East
Central Europe," SocialResearch 58, no. 4 (1991) and "Das Dilemma der Gleichzeitigkeit:
Demokratisierung, Marktwirtschaft und Territorialpolitik in Osteuropa," in Offe, Der
Tunnel am Ende des Lichts: Erkundungen der polilischen Transformation im neuen Osien
(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1994). For a sustained analysis of democratization and
nationalism, see Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), especially chapters 2, 19, and 20.
Introduction 5
independent (or newly reconfigured) states. Nationalizing nationalisms
involve claims made in the name of a "core nation" or nationality,
defined in ethnocultural terms, and sharply distinguished from the
citizenry as a whole. The core nation is understood as the legitimate
"owner" of the state, which is conceived as the state of and for the core
nation. Despite having "its own" state, however, the core nation is
conceived as being in a weak cultural, economic, or demographic
position within the state. This weak position - seen as a legacy of
discrimination against the nation before it attained independence - is
held to justify the "remedial" or "compensatory" project of using state
power to promote the specific (and previously inadequately served)
interests of the core nation.
Directly challenging these "nationalizing" nationalisms are the
transborder nationalisms of what I call "external national homelands."
Homeland nationalisms assert states' right - indeed their obligation - to
monitor the condition, promote the welfare, support the activities and
institutions, assert the rights, and protect the interests of "their"
ethnonational kin in other states. Such claims are typically made when
the ethnonational kin in question are seen as threatened by the nationalizing
(and thereby, from the point of view of the ethnonational kin,
de-nationalizing) policies and practices of the state in which they live.
Homeland nationalisms thus arise in direct opposition to and in dynamic
interaction with nationalizing nationalisms. Against nationalizing states'
characteristic assertion that the status of minorities is a strictly internal
matter, "homeland" states claim that their rights and responsibilities
vis-a-vis ethnonational kin transcend the boundaries of territory and
citizenship. "Homeland," in this sense, is a political, not an ethnographic
category. A state becomes an external national "homeland" when
cultural or political elites construe certain residents and citizens of other
states as co-nationals, as fellow members of a single transborder nation,
and when they assert that this shared nationhood makes the state
responsible, in some sense, not only for its own citizens but also for
ethnic co-nationals who live in other states and possess other citizen-
ships.
Caught between two mutually antagonistic nationalisms - those of the
nationalizing states in which they live and those of the external national
homelands to which they belong by ethnonational affinity though not by
legal citizenship - are the national minorities. They have their own
nationalism: they too make claims on the grounds of their nationality.
Indeed it is such claims that make them a national minority. "National
minority," like "external national homeland" or "nationalizing state,"
designates a political stance, not an ethnodemographic fact. Minority
6 Nationalism reframed
nationalist stances characteristically involve a self-understanding in
specifically "national" rather than merely "ethnic" terms, a demand
for state recognition of their distinct ethnocultural nationality, and the
assertion of certain collective, nationality-based cultural or political
rights. Although national minority and homeland nationalisms both
define themselves in opposition to the "nationalizing" nationalisms of the
state in which the minorities live, they are not necessarily harmoniously
aligned. Divergence is especially likely when homeland nationalisms are
strategically adopted by the homeland state as a means of advancing
other, non-nationalist political goals; in this case ethnic co-nationals
abroad may be precipitously abandoned when, for example, geopolitical
goals require this.
The triadic relational interplay between national minorities, nationalizing
states, and external national homelands has not been confined to
Europe. One of the most important instances, for example, has involved
the overseas Chinese, the nationalizing southeast Asian states in which
they live, and China as external national homeland.5
Within Europe,
moreover, the triadic nexus existed before the great twentieth-century
reconfigurations of political space: thus in the final "dualist" phase of
the Habsburg Empire, when Hungary was (in the domestic sphere)
virtually an independent state, there was a tense triadic relation between
Hungarian Serbs as national minority, Hungary as nationalizing state,
and the Kingdom of Serbia as external national homeland.
The locus classicus of the triadic nexus, however, was interwar East
Central Europe. The post-World War I settlements, though ostensibly
based on the principle of national self-determination, in fact assigned
tens of millions of people to nation-states other than "their own" at the
same time that they focused unprecedented attention on the national or
putatively national quality of both persons and territories. Most fatefully,
millions of Germans were left as minorities in the region's new or
reconstituted (and strongly nationalizing) states, especially Poland and
Czechoslovakia. They belonged by citizenship to these new states but
by ethnic nationality to an initially prostrate but obviously still
powerful external national homeland. Similarly, more than three million
Hungarians suddenly became national minorities in Romania,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, linked by shared ethnicity to their
openly irredentist "homeland"; while substantial Bulgarian and
Macedonian minorities, assigned to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Romania,
5
For an overview, see Milton Esman, "The Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia," in
Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas in International Politics (London and Sydney:
Croom Helm, 1986).
Introduction 7
were linked by shared (or in the case of Macedonians, putatively shared)
ethnic nationality to equally irredentist Bulgaria. Some 6 or 7 million
Ukrainians and Belarusians in the eastern borderlands of nationalizing
Poland were linked to larger co-ethnic populations in the Soviet
Union who possessed their own nominally sovereign (and in the 1920s,
culturally quite autonomous) "national states" in the Soviet federal
scheme.
The post-Communist reorganization of political space has had similar
consequences. Again, tens of millions of people became residents and
citizens of new states conceived as "belonging to" an ethnic nationality
other than their own. Most dramatically, some 25 million ethnic
Russians have been transformed, by a drastic shrinkage of political space,
from privileged national group, culturally and politically at home
throughout the Soviet Union, into minorities of precarious status,
disputed membership, and uncertain identity in a host of incipient nonRussian
nation-states. But many other groups in the region - including
large numbers of Hungarians, Albanians, Serbs, Turks, and Armenians
- found themselves similarly "mismatched," attached by formal citizenship
to one state (in most cases a new - and nationalizing - state) yet by
ethnonational affinity to another.
Ill
This is a book of essays, not a monograph. The essays are linked by
a common concern with the recasting of nationalist politics in postCommunist
Europe and Eurasia, but they approach this subject from
a number of distinct angles. The book is in two parts. My theoretical
argument is developed in most sustained fashion in the first part. The
opening chapter argues that the upsurge in nationalism should not lead
us to reify nations. Nationalism can and should be understood without
invoking "nations" as substantial entities. Instead of focusing on nations
as real groups, we should focus on nationhood and nationness, on
"nation" as practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent
event. "Nation" is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) a
category of analysis. To understand nationalism, we have to understand
the practical uses of the category "nation," the ways it can come to
structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize
discourse and political action.
Chapter 2 takes up this challenge in relation to the Soviet Union and
its successor states. Drawing on "new institutionalist" sociology, it
analyzes the unique Soviet system of institutionalized multinationality
and its unintended political consequences. The Soviet regime repressed
8 Nationalism reframed
nationalism, of course. But this does not mean (as is often assumed) that
it repressed nationhood and nationality. Quite the contrary: in fact
the regime went to remarkable lengths, long before glasnost and
perestroika, to institutionalize both territorial nationhood and ethnocultural
nationality as basic cognitive and social categories. Once
political space began to expand under Gorbachev, these categories
quickly came to structure political perception, inform political rhetoric,
and organize political action. They made claims to national autonomy,
sovereignty, and secession conceivable, plausible, and ultimately
compelling. And they continue to orient political understanding and
political action in Soviet successor states today.
Chapter 3 develops a dynamic and relational approach to nationalism
in post-Communist Europe and the former Soviet Union, focusing on
the potentially explosive interplay, sketched above, between national
minorities, the newly nationalizing states in which they live, and the
external national "homelands" to which they belong by ethnocultural
affinity though not by legal citizenship. National minority, nationalizing
state, and external national homeland are bound together in a single
relational nexus, linked by continuous mutual monitoring and interaction.
Moreover, the three "elements" in the triadic relation are
themselves not fixed entities but fields of differentiated and competing
positions, arenas of struggle among competing stances. The triadic
relation between these three "elements" is therefore a relation between
relational fields, as it were; this is part of what makes it unstable and
potentially explosive. This chapter illustrates the dynamics of the
triadic relational nexus with a sustained discussion of the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
The three essays comprising Part II develop historical and comparative
perspectives on the national question in the "New Europe." They take as
their point of departure a basic structural analogy between the interwar
period and the present. Then, as now, a set of new states, conceived as
nation-states, arose from the rubble of multinational empires. Then too
the boundaries between states and nations did not coincide. Then
too states with ethnic kin living as minorities in neighboring states
presented themselves as the "homelands" of those minorities and sought
to "protect" (and often to incorporate) them. Then too an elaborate
international machinery was set up to monitor and protect the rights of
national minorities. In the interwar period, national tensions contributed
significantly to the outbreak of war. Without making prognoses, the
historically informed chapters in Part II bring the past to bear on
the present, focusing on key aspects of the national question today that
have striking parallels in the interwar period.
Introduction 9
The literature on nationalism has focused on state-seeking nationalisms,
neglecting the "nationalizing" nationalisms of existing states.
Chapter 4 reverses the emphasis, addressing what I call "nationalizing
states." These are states that are conceived by their dominant elites as
nation-states, as the states of and for particular ethnocultural nations, yet
as "incomplete" or "unrealized" nation-states, as insufficiently
"national" in a variety of senses. To remedy this defect, and to compensate
for perceived past discrimination, nationalizing elites urge and
undertake action to promote the language, culture, demographic
preponderance, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the core
ethnocultural nation. The new states of post-Communist Eurasia, like
the new states of interwar Europe, can usefully be conceptualized as
nationalizing states in this sense, although there is of course great
variation among states (and even within states: over time, across regions,
among political parties, between government agencies) in the intensity
and modalities of nationalizing policies and practices. This chapter
analyzes one particular nationalizing state - interwar Poland - in detail in
order to work out an analytical vocabulary for the comparative analysis
of contemporary nationalizing nationalisms.
Chapter 5 takes as its point of departure the striking - and unsettling
- similarities between Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia. These
include loss of territory; a "humiliating" loss of status and standing as a
Great Power; the retention of preponderant economic and military
power vis-d-vis a neighboring zone of incipient and extremely weak
states; deep economic crisis; incipient, fragile, and only weakly legitimate
democratic institutions; and concerted mobilization by the radically
nationalist extreme right. This chapter focuses on one further similarity:
on the presence of millions of aggrieved and vulnerable co-ethnics in
neighboring nationalizing states, more precisely on the responses to their
predicament in Weimar Germany and contemporary Russia. I conceptualize
those responses as variants of a distinctive form of nationalism,
oriented to noncitizen co-ethnics in other states. The chapter probes the
homeland nationalism of Weimar Germany in order to gain analytical
leverage and comparative perspective on the homeland nationalism that
has become so salient in post-Soviet Russia.
The final chapter analyzes post-imperial migrations of ethnic
unmixing in historical and comparative perspective. Political reconfiguration
always has important consequences for migration. This is true
both for the expansion and for the contraction of political space. The
expansion of political space - for example through the creation of empire
- regularly induces large-scale migrations. By creating a political roof
over a large multiethnic population, empires often promote the mixing of
10 Nationalism reframed
peoples. Much of the world's ethnic heterogeneity - and many of its
severest conflicts - can be traced to movements of peoples under
imperial regimes. But if empires tend to promote the mixing of peoples
through migration, the shrinkage of political space in their aftermaths
tends to promote unmixing. This chapter examines the post-Soviet
reflux of ethnic Russians to Russia in the light of the migrations of other
once-dominant "new minorities" engendered by transitions from multinational
empire to incipient nation-states: Balkan Muslims during and
after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hungarians after the
collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and Germans after the collapse of
the Habsburg Empire and the German Kaiserreich.
rv
This book is not about the resurgence of nationalism. Nationalism is not
a "force" to be measured as resurgent or receding. It is a heterogeneous
set of "nation"-oriented idioms, practices, and possibilities that are
continuously available or "endemic" in modern cultural and political
life.6
"Nation" is so central, and protean, a category of modern political
and cultural thought, discourse, and practice that it is hard indeed to
imagine a world without nationalism. But precisely because nationalism
is so protean and polymorphous, it makes little sense to ask how strong
nationalism is, or whether it is receding or advancing.
My concern in this book is not with the resurgence but with the
reframing of nationalism, not with how much nationalism there is but
with what kind, not with die strength but with the characteristic structure
and style of nationalist politics in post-Communist Europe and Eurasia.
These old-new nationalisms, while strikingly similar in some respects to
those of interwar Central and Eastern Europe, differ sharply from the
state-seeking and nation-building nationalisms on which most theories of
nationalism have been built. To attend seriously to the distinctive forms,
dynamics, and consequences of these old-new nationalisms will be a key
challenge for the study of nationalism in the next decade. This book is
offered as a preliminary step toward meeting that challenge.
6
I place "nation" in quotation marks to signal that I am talking about practices and discourses
oriented to a putative nation, or invoking the category nation, and to refrain from
treating the putative nation of nationalist practice and discourse as a real entity, a substantial
collectivity. See Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and Ethnicity," Annual Review
of Sociology 19 (1993); Katherine Verdery, "Whither 'Nation' and 'Nationalism'?,"
Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993); and Chapters 1-3 below.
Rethinking nationhood: nation as
institutionalized form, practical category,
contingent event
Most discussions of nationhood are discussions of nations. Nations are
understood as real entities, as communities, as substantial, enduring
collectivities. That they exist is taken for granted, although how they exist
- and how they came to exist - is much disputed.
A similar realism of the group long prevailed in many areas of
sociology and kindred disciplines. Yet in the last decade or so, at least
four developments in social theory have combined to undermine the
treatment of groups as real, substantial entities. The first is the growing
interest in network forms, the flourishing of network theory, and the
increasing use of network as an overall orienting image or metaphor in
social theory. Second, there is the challenge posed by theories of rational
action, with their relentless methodological individualism, to realist
understandings of groupness.1
The third development is a shift from
broadly structuralist to a variety of more "constructivist" theoretical
stances; while the former envisioned groups as enduring components of
social structure, the latter see groupness as constructed, contingent, and
fluctuating. Finally, an emergent postmodernist theoretical sensibility
emphasizes the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed
forms and clear boundaries. These developments are disparate, even
contradictory. But they have converged in problematizing groupness,
and in undermining axioms of stable group being.
Yet this movement away from the realism of the group has been
uneven. It has been striking, to take just one example, in the study of
class, especially in the study of the working class - a term that is hard to
use today without quotation marks or some other distancing device.
Indeed the working class - understood as a real entity or substantial
1
In this tradition, the collective action literature, from Mancur Olson's The Logic of
Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971) through Michael Hechter's Principles of Group Solidarity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), has been particularly important in
challenging common-sense understandings of groupness and group-formation.
13
14 Rethinking nationhood and nationalism
community - has largely dissolved as an object of analysis. It has been
challenged both by theoretical statements and by detailed empirical
research in social history, labor history, and the history of popular
discourse and mobilization.2
The study of class as a cultural and political
idiom, as a mode of conflict, and as an underlying abstract dimension of
economic structure remains vital; but it is no longer encumbered by an
understanding of classes as real, enduring entities.
At the same time, an understanding of nations as real entities continues
to inform the study of nationhood and nationalism. This realist,
substantialist understanding of nations is shared by those who hold
otherwise widely diverging views of nationhood and nationalism.
At one pole, it informs the view of nationalism held by nationalists
themselves and by nationally minded scholars. On this view, nationalism
presupposes the existence of nations, and expresses their strivings for
autonomy and independence. Nations are conceived as collective
individuals, capable of coherent, purposeful collective action. Nationalism
is a drama in which nations are the key actors. One might think that
this sociologically naive view has no place in recent scholarship. But it
has in fact flourished in recent years in interpretations of the national
uprisings in the former Soviet Union.3
But the realist ontology of nations informs more sober and less
celebratory scholarship as well. Consider just one indicator of this.
Countless discussions of nationhood and nationalism begin with the
question: what is a nation? This question is not as theoretically innocent
as it seems: the very terms in which it is framed presuppose the existence
of the entity that is to be defined. The question itself reflects the realist,
substantialist belief that "a nation" is a real entity of some kind, though
perhaps one that is elusive and difficult to define.
The treatment of nations as real entities and substantial collectivities is
not confined to so-called primordialists, meaning those who emphasize
the deep roots, ancient origins, and emotive power of national attach-
2
The great book of E. P. Thompson on The Making of the English Working Class (New
York: Vintage, 1963) marked the beginning of this process. While stressing on the one
hand that class is not a thing, that "'it' [i.e. class understood as a thing] does not exist,"
that class is rather "something . . . which happens," a "fluency," a "relationship"
(pp. 9-11), Thompson nonetheless ends up treating the working class as a real entity,
a community, an historical individual, characterizing his book as a "biography of the
English working class from its adolescence until its early manhood," and summing up
hisfindingsas follows: "When every caution has been made, the outstanding fact of the
period from 1790 to 1830 is the formation of the working class" (pp. 9-11, 194).
3
It mars even the work of so eminent a specialist on Soviet nationality affairs as Helene
Carrere d'Encausse. See The End ofthe Soviet Empire: The Triumph ofthe Nations (New
York: Basic Books, 1993).
Nation as form, category, event 15
ments.4
This view is also held by many "modernists" and "constructivists,"
who see nations as shaped by such forces as industrialization,
uneven development, the growth of communication and transportation
networks, and the powerfully integrative and homogenizing forces of the
modern state. Nor is the substantialist approach confined to those who
define nations "objectively," that is in terms of shared objective characteristics
such as language, religion, etc.; it is equally characteristic of
those who emphasize subjective factors such as shared myths, memories,
or self-understandings.
Paradoxically, the realist and substantialist approach informs even
accounts that seek to debunk and demystify nationalism by denying the
real existence of nations. On this view, if the nation is an illusory or
spurious community, an ideological smokescreen, then nationalism must
be a case of false consciousness, of mistaken identity. This approach
reduces the question of the reality or real efficacy of nationhood or
nationness to the question of the reality of nations as concrete communities
or collectivities, thereby foreclosing alternative and more
theoretically promising ways of conceiving nationhood and nationness.
The problem with this substantialist treatment of nations as real
entities is that it adopts categories ofpractice as categories of analysis. It takes
a conception inherent in the practice of nationalism and in the workings
of the modern state and state-system - namely the realist, reifying
conception of nations as real communities - and it makes this conception
central to the theory of nationalism. Reification is a social process, not
only an intellectual practice. As such, it is central to the phenomenon of
nationalism, as we have seen all too clearly in die last few years.5
As
4
I stress that I am not simply criticizing primordialism - a long-dead horse that writers
on ethnicity and nationalism continue to flog. No serious scholar today holds the view
that is routinely attributed to primordialists in straw-man setups, namely that nations
or ethnic groups are primordial, unchanging entities. Everyone agrees that nations are
historically formed constructs, although there is disagreement about the relative weight
of premodern traditions and modern transformations, of ancient memories and recent
mobilizations, of "authentic" and "artificial" group feeling. What I am criticizing is not
the straw man of primordialism, but the more pervasive substantialist, realist cast of
mind that attributes real, enduring existence to nations as collectivities, however those
collectivities are conceived.
5
As Pierre Bourdieu's work on the symbolic dimensions of group-making suggests,
reification is central to the quasi-performative discourse of nationalist politicians which,
at certain moments, can succeed in creating what it seems to presuppose - namely, the
existence of nations as real, mobilized or mobilizable groups. Bourdieu has not written
specifically on nationalism, but this theme is developed in his essay on regionalism,
"L'identite et la representation: elements pour une reflexion critique sur l'idee de
region," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (November 1980), part of which
is reprinted in Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991), pp. 220-8; see also the conclusion to "Social Space and the
Genesis of Classes" in that same collection (pp. 248-51).
16 Rethinking nationhood and nationalism
analysts of nationalism, we should certainly try to account for this social
process of reification - this process through which the political fiction of
the nation becomes momentarily yet powerfully realized in practice. This
may be one of the most important tasks of the theory of nationalism. But
we should avoid unintentionally reproducing or reinforcing this reification
of nations in practice with a reification of nations in theory.
To argue against the realist and substantialist way of thinking about
nations is not to dispute the reality of nationhood.6
It is rather to reconceptualize
that reality. It is to decouple the study of nationhood and
nationness from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities,
or communities. It is to focus on nationness as a conceptual variable, to
adopt J. P. NettPs phrase,7
not on nations as real collectivities. It is
to treat nation not as substance but as institutionalized form; not as
collectivity but as practical category; not as entity but as contingent
event. Only in this way can we capture the reality of nationhood and the
real power of nationalism without invoking in our theories the very
"political fiction" of "the nation" whose potency in practice we wish to
explain.8
We should not ask "what is a nation" but rather: how is nationhood as
a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states?
How does nation work as practical category, as classificatory scheme, as
cognitive frame? What makes the use of that category by or against states
more or less resonant or effective? What makes the nation-evoking,
nation-invoking efforts of political entrepreneurs more or less likely to
succeed?9
6
Here I differ from those who, finding "nation" inadequate or hopelessly muddled as a
designator of a putative real entity or collectivity, avoid engaging the phenomenon of
nationhood or nationness altogether. This was the case notably for the influential work
of Charles Tilly and his collaborators, The Formation ofNationalStates in Western Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). As Tilly wrote in the introductory essay
to that volume, "'nation' remains one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in
the political lexicon" (p. 6). Tilly shifted the focus of analysis from nation to state,
marking a deliberate break with the older literature on nation-building. The adjective
"national" appears throughout the book; yet it is strictly a term of scale and scope,
meaning essentially "state-wide"; it has nothing to do with the phenomenon of
nationhood or nationness.
7
See J. P. Nettl, "The State as a Conceptual Variable," World Politics 20 (1968).
8
On nation as political fiction, see Louis Pinto, "Une fiction politique: la nation," Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales 64 (1986), a Bourdieuian appreciation of the studies of
nationalism carried out by the eminent Hungarian historian Jeno Szilcs.
9
For suggestive recent discussions of nationalism that avoid treating "the nation" as a
real entity, see Richard Handler, "Is 'Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?," in
John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994); Katherine Verdery, "Whither 'Nation' and 'Nationalism'?,"
Nation as form, category, event 17
This might seem an unpropitious moment for such an argument. The
collapse of the Soviet Union, the national conflicts in the successor
states, the ethnonational wars in Transcaucasia and the North Caucasus,
the carnage in the former Yugoslavia: doesn't all this - it might be asked
- vividly demonstrate the reality and power of nations? Doesn't it show
that nations could survive as solidary groups, as foci of identity and
loyalty and bases of collective action, despite the efforts of the Soviet
and Yugoslav states to crush them?
In a context of rampant ethnonationalism, the temptation to adopt a
nation-centered perspective is understandable. But the temptation
should be resisted. Nationalism is not engendered by nations. It is
produced - or better, it is induced - by politicalfieldsof particular kinds.10
Its dynamics are governed by the properties of political fields, not by the
properties of collectivities."
Take for example the case of Soviet and post-Soviet nationalisms. To
see these as the struggles of nations, of real, solidary groups who somehow
survived despite Soviet attempts to crush them - to suggest that
nations and nationalism flourish today despite the Soviet regime's
ruthlessly antinational policies - is to get things exactly backwards.
Nationhood and nationalism flourish today largely because o/the regime's
policies. Although antinationalwf, those policies were anything but antinational.
Far from ruthlessly suppressing nationhood, the Soviet regime
pervasively institutionalized it. The regime repressed nationalism, of
course; but at the same time, as I argue in detail in Chapter 2, it went
further than any other state before or since in institutionalizing territorial
nationhood and ethnic nationality as fundamental social categories. In
doing so it inadvertently created a political field supremely conducive to
nationalism.
The regime did this in two ways. On the one hand, it carved up the
Soviet state into more than fifty national territories, each expressly
defined as the homeland of and for a particular ethnonational group. The
top-level national territories - those that are today the independent
Daedalus 122, no. 3 (1993), and Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and Ethnicity," Annual
Review of Sociology 19 (1993).
10
Not only political fields but economic and cultural fields too can generate nationalism.
See for example {Catherine Verdery, "Nationalism and National Sentiment in PostSocialist
Romania," Slavic Review 52 (1993) for an argument about the nationalismgenerating
power of post-socialist economic restructuring.
" I develop this line of analysis in detail in Chapter 3, using "field" in a sense broadly akin
to that developed by Pierre Bourdieu. For a particularly clear exposition of the concept,
see Pierre Bourdieu and Loi'c Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 94ff.
18 Rethinking nationhood and nationalism
successor states - were defined as quasi-nation states, complete with
their own territories, names, constitutions, legislatures, administrative
staffs, cultural and scientific institutions, and so on.
On the other hand, the regime divided the citizenry into a set of
exhaustive and mutually exclusive ethnic nationalities, over a hundred in
all. Thus codified, ethnic nationality served not only as a statistical
category, a fundamental unit of social accounting, but also, and more
distinctively, as an obligatory ascribed status. It was assigned by the state at
birth on the basis of descent. It was registered in personal identity
documents. It was recorded in almost all bureaucratic encounters
and official transactions. And it was used to control access to higher
education and to certain desirable jobs, restricting the opportunities of
some nationalities, especially Jews, and promoting others through
preferential treatment policies for so-called "titular" nationalities in
"their own" republics.
Long before Gorbachev, then, territorial nationhood and ethnic
nationality were pervasively institutionalized social and cultural forms.
These forms were by no means empty. They were scorned by Sovietologists
- no doubt because the regime consistently and effectively
repressed all signs of overt political nationalism, and sometimes even
cultural nationalism. Yet the repression of nationalism went hand in
hand with the establishment and consolidation of nationhood and
nationality as fundamental cognitive and social forms. Under glasnost,
these already pervasively institutionalized forms were readily politicized.
They constituted elementary forms of political understanding, political
rhetoric, political interest, and political identity. In the terms of Max
Weber's "switchman" metaphor, they determined the tracks, the
cognitive frame, along which action was pushed by the dynamic of
material and ideal interests. In so doing, they contributed powerfully to
the breakup of the Soviet Union and to the structuring of nationalist
politics in its aftermath.
I have argued that we should think about nation not as substance but
as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, not
as entity but as contingent event. Having talked about nationhood as
institutionalized form, and as cognitive and sociopolitical category, I
want to say a few words in conclusion about nationness as event. Here
my remarks will be even more sketchy and programmatic. I want simply
to point to a gap in the literature, and to suggest one potentially fruitful
line of work.
In speaking of nationness as event, I signal a double contrast. The first
is between nation as entity and nationness as a variable property of
groups, of relationships, and of what Margaret Somers has recently
Nation as form, category, event 19
called "relational settings."12
The second contrast is between thinking of
nationhood or nationness as something that develops, and thinking of it as
something that happens. Here I want to focus on this second contrast,
between developmentalist and eventful perspectives. I borrow the latter
term from a recent paper by William Sewell, Jr.13
We have a large and mature developmentalist literature on nationhood
and nationalism. This literature traces the long-term political, economic,
and cultural changes that led, over centuries, to the gradual emergence
of nations or, as I would prefer to put it, of nationness. The major works
of the last decade on nationhood and nationalism - notably by Ernest
Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, and Eric Hobsbawm14
are
all developmentalist in this sense.
By contrast, we lack theoretically sophisticated eventful analyses of
nationness and nationalism. There are of course many studies of
particular nationalisms geared to much shorter time spans than the
decades or centuries characteristic of the developmentalist literature. But
those conducted by sociologists and political scientists have tended to
abstract from events in their search for generalized structural or cultural
explanations, while historians, taking for granted the significance of
contingent events, have not been inclined to theorize them.15
I know of no sustained analytical discussions of nationness as an event,
as something that suddenly crystallizes rather than gradually develops, as
a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating, and precarious frame of vision
and basis for individual and collective action, rather than as a relatively
stable product of deep developmental trends in economy, polity, or
culture. Yet a strong theoretical case can be made for an eventful
12
Margaret R. Somers, "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking
English Working-Class Formation," Social Science History 16 (1992), 608ff. For an
anthropological approach to the study of nationness as something produced and
reproduced in everyday relationships, see John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see also Verdery, "Whither 'Nation'
and 'Nationalism'?," 41.
13
William Sewell, Jr., "Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology," forthcoming
in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
14
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, revised edn, 1991); Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins
of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15
Sewellj "Three Temporalities"; cf. Marshall Sahlins, "The Return of the Event, Again:
With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between
the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa," in Aletta Biersack, ed., Clio in Oceania: Toward a
Historical Anthropology (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991), p. 38.
20 Rethinking nationhood and nationalism
approach to nationness. As Craig Calhoun has recently argued, in a
paper on the Chinese student protest movement of 1989, identity should
be understood as a "changeable product of collective action," not as its
stable underlying cause.16
Much the same thing could be said about
nationness.
A theoretically sophisticated eventful perspective on nationness and
nationalism is today urgently needed. To make sense of the Soviet
and Yugoslav collapse and their aftermaths, we need - among other
things - to think theoretically about relatively sudden fluctuations in the
"nationness" of groups and relational settings. We need to think
theoretically about the process of being "overcome by nationhood," to
use the poignant phrase of the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic.
Drakulic was characterizing her own situation. Like many of her postwar
generation, she was largely indifferent to nationality. Yet she came against
her will - to be defined by her nationality alone, imprisoned by
an all-too-successfully reified category.17
As predicaments go, in the
former Yugoslavia, this one is not especially grave. But it illustrates in
personal terms a more general and fateful occurrence - the relatively
sudden and pervasive "nationalization" of public and even private life.
This has involved the nationalization of narrative and interpretative
frames, of perception and evaluation, of thinking and feeling. It has
involved the silencing or marginalization of alternative, non-nationalist
political languages. It has involved the nullification of complex identities
by the terrible categorical simplicity of ascribed nationality. It has
involved essentialist, demonizing characterizations of the national
16
Craig Calhoun, "The Problem of Identity in Collective Action," in Joan Huber, ed.,
Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991), p. 59.
17
"Being Croat has become my destiny . . . I am defined by my nationality, and by it
alone... Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood
- not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national
homogenization within Croatia itself. That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us
to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that
whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character - and,
yes, my nationality too - now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not
a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats . . . I am not in a position to choose
any longer. Nor, I think, is anyone else . . . something people cherished as a part of their
cultural identity - an alternative to the all-embracing communism . . . - has become
their political identity and turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. You may feel
the sleeves are too short, the collar too tight. You might not like the colour, and the
cloth might itch. But there is no escape; there is nothing else to wear. One doesn't have
to succumb voluntarily to this ideology of the nation - one is sucked into it. So right
now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat" (Slavenka
Drakulic, The Balkan Express: Fragmentsfrom the Other Side of War [New York: W. W.
Norton, 1993], pp. 50-2).
Nation as form, category, event 21
"other," characterizations that transform Serbs into Chetniks, Croats
into Ustashas, Muslims into Fundamentalists.
We know well from a variety of appalling testimony that this has
happened; but we know too little about how it happened. This is where
we need an eventful perspective. Following the lead of such thinkers as
Marshall Sahlins, Andrew Abbott, and William Sewell, Jr., we must give
serious theoretical attention to contingent events and to their transformative
consequences.18
Only in this way can we hope to understand
the processual dynamics of nationalism. And it is the close study of
such processual dynamics, I think, that will yield the most original and
significant work on nationalism in the coming years, work that promises
theoretical advances as well as a richer understanding of particular
cases.19
I began with the question: how should we think about nationhood and
nationness, and how are they implicated in nationalism? Reduced to a
formula, my argument is that we should focus on nation as a category of
practice, nationhood as an institutionalized cultural and political form,
and nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from
using the analytically dubious notion of "nations" as substantial,
enduring collectivities. A recent book by Julia Kristeva bears the English
title Nations without Nationalism; but the analytical task at hand, I submit,
is to think about nationalism without nations.
Ours is not, as is often asserted, even by as sophisticated a thinker as
Anthony Smith, "a world of nations."20
It is a world in which nationhood
is pervasively institutionalized in the practice of states and the workings
of the state system. It is a world in which nation is widely, if unevenly,
available and resonant as a category of social vision and division. It is
a world in which nationness may suddenly, and powerfully, "happen."
But none of this implies a world of nations - of substantial, enduring
collectivities.
18
SahlinSj "The Return of the Event, Again"; Andrew Abbott, "From Causes to Events:
Notes on Narrative Positivism," Sociological Methods and Research 20 (1992); Sewell,
"Three Temporalities."
19
Here the study of nationalism might fruitfully draw on the recent literature on
revolution, with its attention to transformative events and processual dynamics. See
for example the debate in Contention between Nikki Keddie, "Can Revolutions be
Predicted? Can their Causes be Understood?" (1, no. 2 [1992]) and Jack Goldstone,
"Predicting Revolutions: Why We Could (and Should) have Foreseen the Revolutions
of 1989-1991 in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe" (2, no. 2 [1993]). Although
Keddie and Goldstone disagree about the predictability of revolution, they agree about
the importance of transformative events, complex interactions, and rapid changes in
ideas, stances, and behavior.
20
Anthony Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 176
22 Rethinking nationhood and nationalism
To understand the power of nationalism, we do not need to invoke
nations. Nor should we, at the other extreme, dismiss nationhood
altogether. We need, rather, to decouple categories of analysis from
categories of practice, retaining as analytically indispensable the notions
of nation as practical category, nationhood as institutionalized form, and
nationness as event, but leaving "the nation" as enduring community to
nationalists.
Nationalizing states in the old "New
Europe" - and the new
Nationalism can be understood as a form of remedial political action. It
addresses an allegedly deficient or "pathological" condition and proposes
to remedy it. The discourse that frames, and in part constitutes,
nationalist political action - and the subdiscursive sentiments which
nationalist political stances seek to mobilize and evoke - can be
conceived as a set of variations on a single core lament: that the identity
and interests of a putative nation are not properly expressed or realized
in political institutions, practices, or policies.
This allegedly deficient condition comes in two basic forms: a nation
may be held to lack an adequate polity, or a polity may be held to lack an
adequate national base. Two corresponding types of nationalism may be
distinguished: polity-seeking or polity-upgrading nationalisms that aim to
establish or upgrade an autonomous national polity; and polity-based,
nation-shaping (or nation-promoting) nationalisms that aim to nationalize
an existing polity.'
The literature on nationalism as a form of politics - leaving aside the
broader literature on nationalism as an idea, or sentiment, or state of
mind - has focused on polity-seeking nationalist movements, paying
much less attention to the nationalization of existing polities. This
chapter reverses the emphasis. It develops aframeworkfor the analysis of
what I call "nationalizing states." These are states that are conceived by
their dominant elites as nation-states, as the states of and for particular
nations, yet as "incomplete" or "unrealized" nation-states, as insufficiently
"national" in a variety of senses to be explored below.
Almost all of the twenty-odd new states of post-Communist Eurasia
' This and the previous paragraph are based on my "East European, Soviet, and PostSoviet
Nationalisms: A Framework for Analysis," in Frederick D. Weil, ed., Research
on Democracy and Society, vol. I (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993), p. 354. Since
writing that article, I have discovered a similar distinction, between the "politicization
of ethnicity" and the "ethnicization of the polity," in anthropologist Ralph Grillo's
Introduction to "Nation" and "State" in Europe: Anthropological Perspectives (London:
Academic Press, 1980), p. 7.
79
80 The old "New Europe" and the new
can be understood as nationalizing states in this sense, although there
is a great deal of variation in the strength and forms of nationalizing
policies and practices. Without directly analyzing developments in these
incipient states - a difficult task when so much is still in flux - this
chapter seeks to develop an analytical vocabulary for addressing contemporary
projects and processes of "nationalization." It does so by way of a
sustained examination of one particular nationalizing state - the newly
resurrected Polish state - during the interwar period. The chapter begins,
though, with a more general analytical discussion of nationalization.
Nation-building and nationalization
Although the literature on nationalist politics has focused on stateseeking
nationalisms, one developed body of literature has addressed
policies and processes of nationalization within the frame of existing
states. This is the literature on "nation-building" and "national
integration" that developed in the 1960s, stimulated by die emergence of
new states in the former colonial territories of Asia and Africa. The
central idea of this literature is that the population of die state - the
citizenry - is progressively welded into a "nation" in the crucible of a
bounded and relatively homogeneous transactional and communicative
space, a space defined and delimited by the state and by state-wide social,
political, economic, and cultural institutions and processes. In place of
a welter of more parochial loyalties and identities, the citizenry is progressively
united, through the gradually assimilative workings of these
state-wide institutions, processes, and transactions, by a common
"national" loyalty and identity.
Although analytically sophisticated in at least some of its variants,
notably those developed by Karl Deutsch and Stein Rokkan and some of
their followers,2
much of this literature is flawed by a teleological model
of development toward "full" national integration. Moreover - and
particularly relevant for the present analysis - "nation" and "national"
are conceived in this literature as definitionally coextensive with the
citizenry and widi the territorial and institutional frame of the state. The
"nation" is simply the citizenry, to the extent that it becomes a unit of
2
See among many other works Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication
(Cambridge, Mass, and New York: The Technology Press of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and John Wiley, 1953); and Stein Rokkan, "Dimensions of
State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations
within Europe," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation ofNational States in Western Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Nationalizing states 81
identity and loyalty - to the extent, that is, that citizens recognize one
another as "belonging together" in a subjective, "internal" sense rather
than as simply belonging to the state in a formal, external sense.
Similarly, "national" is primarily a term of scale and scope: it often
means no more than "state-wide." In this perspective, as a result,
"nation-building" and "national integration" are axiomatically inclusive.
Articulated during the high noon of modernization theory, and deeply
influenced by its assumptions, much of the early nation-building
literature either ignored ethnicity or conceived it, like other local and
particularistic attachments, as progressively attenuated by the multiple
solvents of modernity, in particular by such universalizing, homogenizing,
and thereby nationalizing social forms and forces as markets,
bureaucracies, armies, cities, school systems, transportation and
communication networks, and so on.3
Nationhood, by contrast, was
seen as strengthened, indeed constituted, by these modernizing forces.
Ethnicity and nationhood were understood as definitionally antithetical,
and as operating at different levels of social and political process. The
resilience of ethnicity in modernizing contexts, to be sure, soon came to
be widely appreciated; and a sophisticated literature on ethnic conflict in
postcolonial states developed, culminating in major synthetic works by
Crawford Young, Donald Horowitz, and others.4
Yet the definitional
opposition between ethnicity and nationhood persisted. Ethnicity could
be understood as a potentially serious impediment to nation-building
and national integration, but was not easily conceptualized as a major
component of these processes.
This prevailing opposition, in studies of postcolonial states, between
the definitionally state-oriented category of the "nation" and the
definitionally sub-national category of ethnicity reflects the striking and
consistent territorialism of anticolonial nationalisms and postcolonial
states. Especially in African colonies, territorial boundaries - as established
by the colonial powers, and accepted, for the most part, as
legitimate by anticolonial nationalists - were not even approximately
congruent with cultural boundaries. For this reason it has been nearly
impossible to equate, even approximately, an ethnocultural group with
a potentially sovereign "nation." The "nation" in the name of which
sovereignty over those territories could be claimed by anticolonial
For an influential critique of this modernizationist understanding of ethnicity, see
Walker Connor, "Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying," World Politics 24 (1972).
Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1976); Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985).
82 The old "New Europe" and the new
nationalists was therefore almost universally conceived in territorial
terms.5
In other settings, however, "ethnicity" (more precisely ethnolinguistically
or ethnoreligiously embedded culture) is understood and
experienced as constitutive of nationhood, not as opposed to it. In these
cases, the dynamics of nationalization are quite different. Yet they have
not been adequately explored. There is of course a large literature on
ethnic nationalism; but it chiefly concerns polity-seeking nationalism,
directed against the framework of existing states, rather than "nationalizing"
nationalisms within the framework of an existing state. The
literature on "nationalizing nationalisms," on the other hand, has
focused on nationalization in a territorial rather than an ethnocultural
mode, concentrating on two classes of cases: postcolonial states, and the
"advanced" states and societies of northwestern Europe and North
America, conceived (at least by the early wave of nation-building and
national integration theorists) as models and exemplars for the postcolonial
states.
This selective focus is understandable. It reflected the emergence of
the nation-building literature in the early 1960s, at a moment of high
political confidence in Western models of political development and
their transferability to the developing world,6
sustained by robust
epistemological confidence in a generalizing style of social science
capable of discovering universal patterns of social and political development
and of validating policies aimed at promoting such development.
At this forward-looking conjuncture, there was every reason to be
interested in the territorial nation-building projects of the newly
independent states of Asia and Africa, and to seek to analyze, and
further, the "development" of those states along Western lines then
widely accepted - in accordance with the intellectual and political spirit
of the time - as normative for political development generally. There
was, on the other hand, no reason to be especially interested in the more
ethnocultural modes of nationalization prevalent in the earlier wave of
new states that had emerged in the rubble of the great multinational land
empires - Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov. To the extent that they
were considered at all, these programs and practices of ethnocultural
nationalization, together with so much else of interwar Europe, could
be dismissed as marginal, as vestiges of a past peculiarly ridden with
5
For a succinct account of "territorialism" as one of the chief distinctive features of anticolonial
nationalisms in Africa, see Anthony Smith, State and Nation in the Third World
(New York: St. Martin's, 1983), pp. 50ff.
6
For this conjuncture and its subsequent eclipse, see Young, The Politics of Cultural
Pluralism, pp. 7ff.
Nationalizing states 83
putatively ancient and singularly intractable ethnonational conflicts, or
as pathological symptoms of the failure to modernize.
Today, however, the experience of the new nation-states of interwar
Europe - itself, at the moment of its creation, a much-heralded "New
Europe" - does not seem so marginal. As a point of comparative
reference for the analysis of today's new nation-states - the twenty-odd
states that have succeeded to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and
Czechoslovakia - the new states of interwar Europe seem far more
relevant than the postcolonial states of midcentury or the old statenations
of Western Europe, on which the nation-building and national
integration literatures have focused.
Far from being vestigial or unmodern, the dynamics of ethnocultural
nationalization in the new nation-states of interwar Europe represented
a distinctively modern form of politicized ethnicity, pivoting on claims
made, in the name of a nation, to political control, economic well-being,
and full cultural expression within "its own" national state. Similar
claims are being made today. This chapter therefore approaches today's
newly nationalizing states by way of a reconsideration of one of the newly
nationalizing states of the interwar period - the newly reestablished
Polish state.
The old "New Europe": nationalizing states in the
interwar period
The new states that emerged from the decay and disintegration of the
Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires were all created as nationstates,
legitimated by their claim to be the states of and for particular
nations. All, moreover, were not only nation-states but nationalizing
states. The politics and processes of nationalization varied widely in form
and intensity in these states, but they characteristically involved the
following elements: (1) the existence (more precisely the conceived or
understood or "imagined" existence) of a "core nation" or nationality,
defined in ethnocultural terms, and sharply distinguished from the
citizenry or permanent resident population of the state as a whole;
(2) the idea that the core nation legitimately "owns" the polity, that the
polity exists as the polity of and for the core nation; (3) the idea that
the core nation is not flourishing, that its specific interests are not
adequately "realized" or "expressed" despite its rightful "ownership" of
the state; (4) the idea that specific action is needed in a variety of settings
and domains to promote the language, cultural flourishing, demographic
predominance, economic welfare, or political hegemony of the core
nation; (5) the conception and justification of such action as remedial or
84 The old "New Europe" and the new
compensatory, as needed to counterbalance and correct for previous
discrimination against the nation before it had "its own" state to safeguard
and promote its interests; (6) mobilization on the basis of these
ideas in a variety of settings - legislatures, electoral campaigns, the press,
associations, universities, the streets - in an effort to shape the policies or
practices of the state, of particular organizations, agencies, or officials
within the state, or of non-state organizations; and (7) the adoption - by
the state, by particular state agencies and officials, and by non-state
organizations - of formal and informal policies and practices informed by
the ideas outlined above.
This sketch is deliberately drawn in broad and general terms. This is
partly because it attempts to capture features common to a variety of
nationalizing states. But it also reflects the fact that state-based, nationpromoting
nationalisms - the post-independence nationalisms of
nationalizing states - are inherently more diffuse than state-seeking
nationalisms. Central to the latter are distinct movements with clear
goals. Even where nationalisms are not unambiguously state-seeking but
(as is often the case) split between movements for independence and
movements for increased autonomy within an existing state, there are
still distinct movements with definite, if contested, goals. "Nationalizing"
nationalisms within the frame of independent states, by contrast,
do not usually involve distinct movements with clear and specific goals.
Consequently, it is harder to pinpoint what is specifically "nationalist"
about politics in such states.7
In such settings, nationalism becomes
an "aspect" of politics - embracing both formal policies and informal
practices, and existing both within and outside the state - rather than a
discrete movement. It is that diffuse and pervasive yet nonetheless
distinctive aspect of politics that I want to analyze here, by way of a
discussion of the politics of nationalization in the region's most populous
state, the newly reestablished Polish state.
Interwar Poland as a nationalizing state
The Polish state that was resurrected in the aftermath of the First World
War differed radically from the old Polish Commonwealth that had
7
As John Breuilly put it, "once a nationalist. . . opposition takes control of the state the
specifically nationalist character of politics tends to diminish. Competing groups all
proclaim their paramount concern with the 'national interest'. In such a situation
nationalism as a specific form of politics becomes meaningless. Again, where all foreign
policy is justified in nationalist language it is difficult to identify a specific form of
foreign policy which could be called nationalist" (Nationalism and the State [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985], p. 221).
Nationalizing states 85
disappeared from the map of Europe in the late eighteenth century after
being thrice partitioned between Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The old
Commonwealth had never been a nation-state or nationalizing state. It
was a loosely integrated polity whose great ethnolinguistic heterogeneity
was not seen as problematic. "The nation" in the old Commonwealth
was defined by social and political status (membership in the ruling
szlachta or gentry), not by language or ethnicity; it was conceptually
located above non-privileged status groups (above all the Polish-speaking
and non-Polish-speaking peasantry) in the same territory rather than
alongside other coordinate nations.
During the century and a quarter of partition, however, Polish nationhood
was redefined in ethnolinguistic terms.8
This redefinition had two
aspects, which one might designate as "social deepening" and "ethnic
narrowing" respectively. On the one hand, the eclipse of the statusbound
notion of the "gentry nation" reflected the democratization or
popularization or "social deepening" of the concept of nation throughout
Europe that began in the late eighteenth and continued through the
nineteenth century; everywhere "nation" was reconceived in a "populist"
idiom that expressly included all social classes or strata. On the other
hand, the increased salience of language as a nation-bounding diacritical
marker reflected the experience of prolonged statelessness, which
prevented the development of a state-oriented, state-framed, "civic" or
"territorial" understanding of nationhood. This ethnonational selfunderstanding
was reinforced by the prevailing narrative of the
nineteenth-century Polish national movement, which presented this
movement as the oft-martyred Polish ethnonation's heroic struggle for
independence, and by the armed struggles of 1918-21 that accompanied
the formation of the new state, pitting Poles against Germans in
Poznania and Upper Silesia, Poles against Ukrainians in eastern Galicia,
and Poles against the Red Army (represented by the Polish nationalist
Right as a "Judeo-Bolshevik" force) in the eastern borderlands.9
The new Polish state, therefore, was conceived as the state of and for
the ethnolinguistically (and ethnoreligiously) defined Polish nation, in
part because it was seen as made by this nation against the resistance of
Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews. A clear distinction was universally
drawn between this Polish nation and the total citizenry of the state. By
official count, which clearly overstated the relative predominance of
8
Peter Brock, "Polish Nationalism," in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds.,
Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994 [1969]),
p. 316.
9
I am indebted for this last point to Dariusz Stola.
86 The old "New Europe" and the new
Poles, the citizenry included large numbers of Ukrainians (14% of the
population in 1921), Belarusians (4%), Germans (4%), and Jews (8%).10
Not that the boundaries of the Polish nation were thought to be fixed.
Ukrainians - especially outside of Galicia - and Belarusians were
considered candidates for membership in the Polish nation; policies
toward them tended therefore to be assimilationist. The assimilation of
Germans and Jews, however, was generally viewed as unlikely (in the
case of Germans, especially those living in territories ceded by Germany
after the war) or undesirable (in the case of Jews). Policies toward them
were therefore more "dissimilationist" or "differentialist," based on
differential treatment by ethnocultural nationality among citizens of the
Polish state. Thus nationalizing policies and practices varied sharply.
Broadly speaking, in eastern rural districts the aim was to nationalize the
borderland East Slav population; in the cities and in the west, the aim
was rather to nationalize the territory and economic life, by replacing
Germans and Jews with Poles in key economic and political positions,
and by encouraging their emigration.
Nationalizing the western borderlands
Ethnic Germans, particularly those in the long German-ruled western
borderlands of the new state,11
were trebly vulnerable to nationalizing
programs and practices. To begin with, the borderland regions had for
the preceding four decades been subjected to harsh, although ineffective,
nationalizing policies by their Prussian and German rulers. These
10
Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1974), pp. 34ff.; Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 35ff.
1
' The western borderlands had been ruled by Prussia since the late eighteenth-century
partitions of Poland (in the case of East Upper Silesia since the mid-eighteenth
century), and had belonged to the unified German state for half a century. Besides the
perhaps 1.4 million ethnic Germans of these previously German-ruled western
borderlands (a number soon sharply diminished by heavy emigration), there were some
half million Germans living in the formerly Russian part of Poland and another
hundred thousand in the formerly Austrian part. As Richard Blanke has argued, these
are fundamentally different cases. Germans in the formerly Russian and formerly
Austrian pans of Poland did not suffer so dramatic a reversal in status; they were not
regarded as so dangerous by Poles; and they did not, consequently, bear the brunt of
programs and practices of nationalization. I neglect them in this account. See Richard
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1993), pp. 3-4. On the size of the German population in
interwar Poland, see ibid., p. 31, and Walter Kuhn, "Das Deutschtum in Polen und
sein Schicksal in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit," in Werner Markert, ed., Polen (Cologne
and Graz: Bohlau, 1959), pp. 140-2.
Nationalizing states 87
policies had succeeded only in stimulating national solidarity and
stiffening nationalist resistance among Poles. Nonetheless, the sustained
(and openly acknowledged) German efforts to nationalize the
German-Polish borderlands during the Kaiserreich provided a
convenient rationale for analogous Polish measures after the First
World War. It permitted such measures to be presented as remedial and
compensatory, as needed to reverse the political, economic, cultural,
and ethnodemographic legacy of the decades-long policy of Germaniz-
ation.
Furthermore, Germans in the restored Polish state had the misfortune
to "belong," by ethnocultural nationality, if not legal citizenship, to a
powerful neighboring state with unconcealed revisionist ambitions.12
Under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923
until his death in 1929, Weimar Germany achieved a rapprochement with
Western powers, but it continued to make border revision in the east albeit
peaceful, negotiated border revision - a top foreign policy priority.
The border with Poland, particularly the "Polish corridor" that cut off
East Prussia from the rest of Germany, was universally viewed as an
insupportable "national humiliation," unjustly imposed on a prostrate
Germany.13
Poles just as universally - and no doubt correctly - perceived
borderland Germans as favoring, even if not actively supporting, a
restoration of German rule in the borderlands. Thus Germans were
perceived from the beginning as a dangerous "fifth column," stimulating,
by their very existence, revisionist claims in Germany and unlikely, in any
crucial test, to prove loyal to the Polish state.
Germans' third vulnerability lay in their preeminent economic position
in the western borderlands - especially since this could be attributed to
privileges they had enjoyed under a nationalizing German regime.14
In
Poznania and Pomerania, at the end of the period of German rule,
Germans monopolized the civil service, held a disproportionate share
of large landed estates and medium-sized farms, and were also disproportionately
represented among professionals, merchants, and artisans.
In Upper Silesia, Germans predominated among owners, managers, and
workers of industrial enterprises.15
This favorable economic position, like
12
On interwar German homeland nationalism vis-d-vis ethnic Germans in western
Poland, see Chapter 5.
» Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1993), pp. 20Iff.
14
On "privilege" as a motif in Polish historiography, explaining German economic preeminence,
and justifying remedial Polish nationalizing efforts, see Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, pp. 6-7.
15
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 51-3.
88 The old "New Europe" and the new
that alleged to be occupied by Jews, would be a focus of nationalist
concern throughout the interwar period.16
These three features conditioned Germans' immediate vulnerability,
in the new Polish nation-state, to a politics of nationalization. But what
kind of nationalization? To characterize it, as is often done, as an effort
at "Polonization" is insufficient. For Polonization can refer to two
different, even antithetical processes. On the one hand, it can designate
an attempt to remake the human material of the state, to nationalize the
citizenry by turning Germans, and others, into Poles. In this sense,
nationalization is a form of assimilation, that is, of "making similar":
it involves making a target population similar to some reference population,
whose putative characteristics are conceived as normative for the
citizenry as a whole. On the other hand, nationalization can be directed
at spheres ofpractice rather than groups ofpeople. In this sense it involves
dissimilation rather than assimilation. Far from seeking to make people
similar, it prescribes differential treatment on the basis of their presumed
fundamental difference. Instead of seeking to alter identities, it takes them
as given. Assimilationist nationalization seeks to eradicate difference,
while differentialist nationalization takes difference as axiomatic and
foundational.
Vis-a-vis Germans, nationalization was dissimilationist rather than
assimilationist. There was no attempt to transform Germans into Poles.
Many Germans, to be sure, did acquire Polish citizenship, as most
residents of the ceded territories were entitled to do by the Versailles
Treaty.17
But they did not understand themselves (nor were they understood
by Poles) as having thereby acquired Polish nationality. Citizenship
and nationality, legal membership of the state and ethnocultural
membership of the nation, were seen as sharply distinct by Germans and
Poles alike (and were indeed seen as sharply distinct throughout East
Central and Eastern Europe). There was no attempt to transform
Germans' nationality, to make Germans into Poles in an ethnocultural
sense. This was viewed as unrealistic. Much cultural assimilation - in
both directions - had indeed occurred over the centuries in the GermanSlav
borderlands. But by the late nineteenth century, a hardening
16
On the economic dimensions of nationalizing states, Hans Jurgen Seraphim,
"Wirtschaftliche Nationalitatenkampfe in Ostmitteleuropa," Leipziger Vieneljahrsschrift
fur Siidosteuropa 1, no. 4 (1937-38), is an analytically sophisticated statement.
17
The entitlement to formal citizenship, granted to those who had been born in the ceded
territories or had resided there since 1908, was not undisputed, for Poland construed
the residence requirement as strictly as possible - in a manner ultimately invalidated
by the Permanent Court of International Justice - so as to minimize the number of
eligible Germans (Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 65-6).
Nationalizing states 89
national struggle in the eastern districts of Prussia, in the context of an
overall increase in social mobilization, led to the intensification of
national identifications on both sides, and to their extension to strata
formerly indifferent to, or only tenuously aware of, nationality.18
In this
new context of struggle between mobilized nationalities, assimilation was
much less likely to occur. It continued to occur in some regions outside
the focus of the national struggle, for example among Poles who had
migrated from eastern Prussia to the Ruhr industrial districts. And
certain zones of mixed, fluid, and ambivalent national identification
remained, notably Upper Silesia, where political orientation and
language often did not coincide.19
But on the whole the trend since the
1880s had been toward a sharper crystallization of boundaries between
ethnonational groups. In this context it was implausible to think that the
new Polish state might assimilate its German minority, highly mobilized
and strongly conscious of its distinct ethnocultural nationality.
Nor was there a serious attempt to cultivate the political loyalty of
Germans to the Polish state - to assimilate them politically while
tolerating their ethnocultural Germanness. Such an attempt would have
presupposed (1) an understanding of Germans' political loyalty and
identity as open and contingent, and (2) an understanding of the Polish
state as the state of and for all its citizens, not merely the state of and for
Poles. But neither was forthcoming. Germans were widely perceived as
unremittingly hostile to the Polish state and as sympathetic to German
irredentism. And the Polish state was widely understood as "belonging"
specifically to the Polish nation and existing to further its particular aims
and interests. Given these prevailing understandings of German hostility
towards, and Polish "ownership" of, the state, attempts to cultivate the
political loyalty of Germans were condemned in advance as futile.
Policies and practices of nationalization thus were directed neither at
the ethnocultural assimilation of Germans nor at turning them into loyal,
if culturally unassimilated, citizens of the Polish state. They were
directed at the nationalization not of Germans, but of Polish territory
and of political, cultural, and economic life within it. They were differentialist,
not assimilationist. By virtue of their distinct ethnic nationality
- and in spite of their common citizenship - the ethnically German
citizens of the new state were to be treated differently from ethnically
Polish citizens. Nationalizing initiatives sought to build the Polish state
as a specifically Polish state, that is, as a state that would embody and
18
Geoff Eley, "German Politics and Polish Nationality: The Dialectic of NationForming
in the East of Prussia," East European Quarterly 18 (1984).
19
See Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 28; Kuhn, "Das Deutschtum in Polen," p. 143.
90 The old "New Europe" and the new
express the will and interests of the Polish nation. Such initiatives sought
to Polonize the borderlands, the civil service, the professions, the industrial
base of Upper Silesia, the school system, and so on, not by making
Germans into Poles, but by displacing or excluding Germans from
certain key positions and, more generally, by weakening Germans as
an organized group, diereby preventing them from exercising undue
influence over the political, cultural, or economic life of the new state.
The most visible form assumed by ethnic nationalization in the early
years of the restored Polish state - indeed in anticipation of the
restoration of Polish statehood - was a large-scale migration of ethnic
unmixing, as Germans fled to Germany from the Prussian borderlands
that were ceded to Poland.20
Some two-thirds of the roughly 1.1 million
ethnic Germans in these territories (not including Upper Silesia) had left
by the mid-1920s, including 85 percent of the urban German population
and 55 percent of rural Germans.21
The main towns of Poznania and
Pomerania, almost all majority German before the war, now contained
only small German minorities. The exodus, to be sure, cannot be
attributed solely, or even primarily, to the nationalizing policies of the
new state. Some migration was to be expected, notably on the part of
those civil servants and military personnel who had no roots in the
borderland region and had been sustained there only by the Prussian and
German state, and on the part of those who, regardless of the anticipated
policies of the new Polish state, preferred to cast their lot with the more
economically and politically powerful and culturally familiar German
state. Furthermore, large-scale migration began before die new state was
even established. Yet even this early migration - occurring in anticipation,
rather than as a result, of the transfer of sovereignty - reflected a
dynamic of nationalization: departing Germans anticipated (correctly)
that the transfer of sovereignty would reverse the dynamic of nationalization,
substituting Polonization for Germanization. Moreover, die
migration was certainly welcomed, indirectly fostered, and on occasion
explicidy demanded, by Polish officials.22
Migration was also encouraged
20
For a comparative discussion of migrations of ethnic unmixing in the aftermath of
empire, see Chapter 6.
21
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 49; Hermann Rauschning, Die Entdeutschung Weslpreussens
undPosens (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1930), pp. 338ff., esp. 348-9
22
In 1919, for example, Stanislaw Grabski, then chairman of the Sejm committee on
foreign affairs, and later Minister of Culture, articulated the ruling National
Democrats' view of the German-Polish borderlands: "We want to base our relationships
on love, but there is one kind of love for countrymen and another for aliens. Their
percentage among us is definitely too high; Poznania can show us the way by which the
percentage can be brought from 14 percent or even 20 percent down to 1.5 percent.
The foreign element will have to consider whether it will not be better off elsewhere;
Nationalizing states 91
by popular anti-German demonstrations, including some violence
against Germans.23
The most thorough, and most detached, recent study
of the migration concludes that "Poland's basic policy, at least during
the period of National Democratic influence to 1926, was simply to
encourage as many Germans as possible to leave the country."24
This
does not mean that the migration was "forced," as many Germans
claimed.25
It does mean, however, that the anticipated and actual
nationalization of life in restored Poland was a major cause of the mass
migration (keeping in mind, of course, that this nationalization followed,
and mirrored, two generations of rule by a nationalizing Prussian/
German state).26
A less visible, but equally important, dimension of nationalization
involved efforts to displace Germans from key positions in the economy.
Central to economic nationalization throughout East Central Europe in
the interwar period, for example, was land reform. By "expropriating]
ethnically 'alien' landlords," while sheltering landlords of the "correct"
ethnic nationality from the brunt of agrarian reform, states sought to
defuse an explosive social issue at minimal political cost.27
Not only
German but also Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and other
landlords whose estates lay outside "their own" nation-state found themselves
expropriated in this manner.28
In Poland the most conveniently
expropriable "alien" landlords were Germans in the western borderlands
(though there were also some Russian as well as a few Ukrainian and
Lithuanian estate owners in the eastern borderlands). Although policies
formally applied to estates owned by Poles as well as to those owned
Polish land for the Poles!" (quoted in Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p . 63 and in
Rauschning, Die Entdeutschung Westpreussens und Posens, p . 45). See also Blanke,
Orphans of Versailles, pp. 63-5.
23
Although violence is generally a crucial determinant of migrations of ethnic unmixing
(see Chapter 6), it does not appear to have been central in this case. Violence between
Germans and Poles was much greater in Upper Silesia in 1919-21 than in Poznania
and Pomerania; yet emigration was heavier from the latter regions. One reason for the
lesser migration from Upper Silesia is that the disposition of this territory was not
settled until October 1921, when the territory was divided between Germany and
Poland following a plebiscite in March of that year in which 6 0 % (including a substantial
fraction of Polish-speakers) had voted for the territory to remain with Germany.
On the immediately postwar years in Upper Silesia, see Bogdan Koszel, "Nationality
Problems in Upper Silesia," in Paul Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International Relations
(Aldershot, U K and N e w York: Dartmouth Publishing Company and N e w York
University Press, 1991); and Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 2 6 - 3 1 .
24
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p . 64.
25
On the limited analytical usefulness of the concept of forced migration, see the
discussion in Chapter 6, esp. pp. 168, 171.
26
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 40-3, 63-5.
27
Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, p . 1 5 .
28
Seraphim, "Wirtschaftliche Nationalitatenkampfe in Ostmitteleuropa," pp. 47-50.
92 The old "New Europe" and the new
by members of national minorities, in practice land reform was
implemented most vigorously vis-d-vis Germans.29
Distribution of the
expropriated land, too, was guided by ethnopolitical considerations - a
point that especially aggrieved the desperately poor Ukrainian and
Belarusian peasants in the east, who saw Poles resettled on lands
expropriated from Russian estate owners. Apart from land reform, state
officials used administrative discretion to pursue a nationalizing agenda
through such techniques as the selective denial of licenses required to
practice certain professions, the exclusion of German firms from state
contracts, the nationalization of the civil service, and pressure on industrial
firms (especially in the strategically crucial heavy industrial district
of Upper Silesia) to Polonize their managerial staffs and their labor
force.30
A final dimension of nationalization can be broadly characterized as
cultural, although in this sphere too specifically cultural concerns were
intertwined with geopolitical and security concerns and with economic
interests. Here questions of language were central. Polish was made the
sole official language of the state. From 1924 on, Polish officials were
instructed not to accept any communications in German, and postal
authorities would not deliver mail using the German spelling of place
names.31
But the main arena of language politics - and of cultural
nationalization in general - was the school system. The Minority
Protection Treaty obliged Poland (like other East Central European
states) to provide elementary education in minority languages where
minorities formed a "considerable proportion" of the population.32
The
latitude allowed governments in interpreting these provisions, coupled
with a cumbersome and ineffective enforcement procedure, made them
easy to circumvent. The number of German-language schools dropped
29
A confidential memorandum of 1929 from the wojewode of the Polish province of
Pomorze clearly indicated the underlying ethnopolitical rationale of land reform. In
undertaking land reform, he argued, one must consider the "loyalty of the affected
citizens, their nationality, their religion, and their general attitude toward the vital
interests of the state." Especially the strategically vital "Polish corridor," the main
target of German irredentism, "must be cleansed of larger German holdings" and
"settled with a nationally conscious Polish population" (quoted in Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, p. 113).
30
Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 116-20. T h e initiative did not always come from the
state. Nationalist associations in the borderlands, drawing their membership heavily
from such state-dependent groups as teachers and civil servants, "staged anti-German
rallies, organized boycotts of German businesses, [and] pressured employers to give
preference to ethnic Poles" (ibid., p. 94).
31
Ibid, p. 67.
32
C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University
Press, 1934), p. 505.
Nationalizing states 93
sharply, even after the end of mass German out-migration, declining in
Poznania and Pomerania from 1250 in 1921-22 to 254 in 1926-27 (by
which time mass emigration had ended) to 60 in 1937-38.33
In the
German schools that remained, the administration and teaching staff as
well as the curriculum were increasingly Polonized. These measures
seem to have aimed less at assimilating German schoolchildren than at
preventing Germans from controlling - and from using toward ends
inimical to the Polish nation-state - the powerful organizational and
ideological resources of "their own" school system. In this respect Polish
school policy reinforced other measures aimed at inhibiting, hindering,
or controlling the associational and organizational life of Germans, and
thereby at hindering the organizational articulation and expression of
specifically German interests.
Nationalizing the urban economy
Toward Jews, as toward Germans, the nationalizing policies and practices
of interwar Poland were dissimilationist rather than assimilationist.
Yet while the dissimilationist stance toward Germans reflected the
general belief that Germans could not be assimilated, the dissimilationist
stance toward Jews reflected the prevailing view that Jews should not be
assimilated. Rather than seeking to assimilate Jews, or to cultivate the
loyalty of acculturated though unassimilated Jews, policies and practices
of nationalization sought on the whole to displace Jews from their all-toovisible
positions in the urban economy and, especially after the Nazi
seizure of power in Germany, to encourage their emigration.
The identities of Jews - their religious, cultural, and political selfunderstandings
- were exceedingly varied and intensely contested among
Jews themselves in interwar Poland. There were deeply rooted political,
cultural, economic, and demographic differences between Jews of
Galicia, Congress Poland, and the eastern borderlands. And throughout
Poland, Jews were torn between the Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew
languages, between religious and secular identities, between socialist and
antisocialist ideologies, between Zionists and their opponents (both
secular and religious). Consequently, generalizations about Polish Jews
as a whole are exceedingly hazardous. Still, it seems safe to suggest that
unlike Germans, and precisely because of the great flux in Polish Jewish
self-understandings, a substantial minority of Jews were potentially
"available" as members of the Polish nation during the interwar period,
and more would have been or become available if the new Poland had
" Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 79; Kuhn, "Das Deutschtum in Polen," p. 147.
94 The old "New Europe" and the new
not been the "most anti-Semitic state in Europe" at the beginning of the
interwar period.34
Most Jews, to be sure, were linguistically and culturally unassimilated
when the Polish state was reestablished. But this was a period of great
mobilization, rapid acculturation, and linguistic assimilation, especially
for the younger generation. Even at the beginning of the period, about
a quarter of those who identified their religion as Jewish in the 1921
census identified their nationality as Polish rather than Jewish.35
Yet
apart from the Polish Left, which favored the assimilation of Jews, Poles
generally did not encourage assimilation. While the Left remained a
strong oppositional force throughout the interwar years (distinguishing
Poland from most other East European countries), the predominant
nationalizing policies and practices in interwar Poland were emphatically
not those of the Left. So while a substantial fraction of Poland's Jewish
population either already identified with Polish nationality or might
have come to identify with it, Jews were excluded from that nationality
by prevailing Polish understandings of nationhood and practices of
nationalization (and of course also tended to exclude themselves from
that nationality in response to those understandings of nationhood and
practices of nationalization).
Germans in the west and Ukrainians and Belarusians in the east
were borderland minorities. All were concentrated in areas adjacent to
neighboring states that contained large populations of their ethnonational
kin, that claimed (across the boundaries of state and citizenship)
to protect and represent their interests, and that harbored unconcealed
34
The quotation is from Ezra Mendelsohn, the leading historian of European Jews in the
interwar period; see Mendelsohn, "A Note on Jewish Assimilation in the Polish
Lands," in Bela Vago, ed., Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview, 1981), p. 145.
35
Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 23, 29. These figures for selfidentified
nationality of Jews are suggestive, and reveal strong regional variation in
Jewish identification with Polish nationality (this being strongest in Galicia, where
Jewish assimilation to the dominant Polish language and culture had been strong under
Habsburg rule, and weakest in the eastern borderlands). However, the artifactual
character of these figures must be borne in mind. The 1921 census obliged all
respondents to identify their nationality, regardless of whether nationality was a meaningful
category of self-understanding for them. Clearly, for many Jews, nationality was
not a meaningful category: many Jews, perhaps the majority, identified neither with
Polish nationality nor with Jewish nationality; they defined their Jewishness not in
national terms but in traditional religious terms. But my point here is that this
traditional, non-national self-understanding was eroding and in flux as a result of
pervasive processes of mobilization and acculturation, and that this process of
reidentification in national terms created the potential for membership in the Polish
nation.
Nationalizing states 95
irredentist designs on the borderland territories they inhabited. Polish
nationalizing stances toward these borderland minorities were determined
by the felt need to Polonize (though in different ways,
dissimilationist in the west, assimilationist in the east) the ethnic
borderlands and thereby secure them against the irredentist designs of
Germany and the Soviet Union.36
This, of course, was not the case of Jews, whose external national
homeland - for those who considered it such - was still in the making,
a homeland distant not only in space but also (given British limits on
Jewish immigration to Palestine) in time. The absence of a proximate,
putatively irredentist homeland, to be sure, did not prevent Polish
nationalists from questioning the loyalty of Jews. Indeed, suspicions of
Jewish disloyalty were behind the outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence,
including several major pogroms, that accompanied struggles against
Ukrainian nationalists, the incipient Lithuanian state, and the Red Army
over contested borderland regions of the new state in 1918-20.37
But
the territorial dimension of nationalizing policies and practices, so
pronounced in the case of borderland minorities, was missing in the case
of the Jews. Vis-d-vis territorially concentrated, rooted, homeland-linked
Germans and East Slavs, Poles sought to nationalize the edinic borderlands;
vis-d-vis Jews, they sought instead to nationalize the urban
commercial and professional economy.38
Jews were indeed prominent in Polish cities, and predominant in
commerce and certain professions. In terms of demography and socioeconomic
structure, the contrast with the population as a whole was
sharp. Jews constituted nearly a third of the urban population of Poland
in 1921, and half of the urban population in the backward eastern
borderlands, while comprising just over 10 percent of the population as
a whole. While 60 percent of the total population depended on agriculture
for their livelihood in 1931, this was true of only 4 percent of
Jews. In 1921, Jews comprised over 60 percent of those employed in
36
This is an instance of the triadic relational nexus, analyzed in Chapter 3, between
nationalizing states, national minorities, and the external national "homelands" to
which the minorities belong by shared ethnic nationality though not by legal citizenship.
This relation is examined from the point of view of the German "homeland" in
Chapter 5.
37
Mendelsohn, TheJews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 40-1.
38
By emphasizing here Polish efforts to "nationalize" the urban and commercial
economy, I am not suggesting that Polish anti-Semitism was somehow essentially
economic. Indisputably, it had deep cultural roots; but they are beyond the scope of
this discussion, which is concerned not with the origins of anti-Semitism but with the
nature of interwar nationalizing practices and policies.
96 The old "New Europe" and the new
commerce; in 1931, they accounted for more than half of the doctors, a
third of the lawyers, and substantial shares of other professions. In fact,
the large majority of Polish Jews were very poor, and the single most
striking economic fact about Polish Jews in the interwar period was their
progressive pauperization. Nearly four-fifths of Jews active in commerce
were self-employed, and did not employ other workers: "the typical
Jewish 'merchant' was a small shopkeeper, or owner of a stall in the local
market, working alone or with the help of his family." Yet the visible
ethnic division of labor and statistics such as those given above "were
interpreted by Polish anti-Semites as proof that Polish cities were dominated
by 'foreigners,' against whom a holy war must be waged by the
native middle class."39
Economic nationalization vis-d-vis Jews was both governmental and
extra-governmental. Jews were systematically excluded from statecontrolled
sectors of the economy. They were not hired in the civil
service, municipal administration, state hospitals, schools, or universities
(where, even without an official numerus clausus, the proportion ofJewish
students declined by two-thirds). Credit and work licenses were
distributed differentially. Sunday work was forbidden, putting religious
Jews who could not open their shops Saturdays at a competitive
disadvantage. Governmental anti-Semitism was checked in the late
1920s under Pilsudski, but pressure on Jews intensified again with
the onset of the Great Depression. After Pilsudski's death in 1935, the
government, declaring it only "natural that Polish society should seek
economic self-sufficiency," and openly endorsing "economic struggle
[against the Jews]," renewed its campaign of economic nationalization.
Governmental nationalization from above was complemented by extragovernmental
nationalization from below. Right-wing students harassed,
humiliated, and physically attacked Jews in universities. Centrist as well
as right-wing parties campaigned against the economic position of Jews.
The centrist Peasant Party, for example, even while rejecting violence
and professing to endorse equal rights for Jews, blamed Jews - an
unassimilable, "consciously alien nation within Poland" - for the alleged
fact that "the Poles have no middle class of their own," and concluded
that it was vital that "these middle-class functions shall more and more
pass into the hands of the Poles." In the second half of the 1930s, a largescale
boycott of Jewish businesses was organized; and direct violence,
39
Mendelsohn, TheJews ofEast Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 23-9 (the
quotations are from pp. 28 and 23 respectively); Joseph Marcus, Social and Political
History of theJews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), pp. 29-31; Polonsky,
Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 42-4.
Nationalizing states 97
unchecked by the state, was increasingly employed against Jewish shopkeepers
and craftsmen.40
If nationalizing policies and practices vis-d-vis Jews sought in the short
term to exclude them from the professional and commercial economy,
the long-term aim was to promote Jewish emigration. Here the Polish
government and right-wing nationalists made common cause with
Zionist organizations. "If Zionism meant Jewish emigration to
[Palestine], no one was more Zionist than Poland's leaders in the late
1930s." And as both economic crisis and anti-Semitism intensified,
many Jews were willing to emigrate. Precisely in the late 1930s, however,
the British government sharply curtailed Jewish immigration to
Palestine, the number of Polish Jews immigrating dropping from a peak
of 30,000 in 1935 to about 4,000 per year in the late 1930s. It was thus,
ironically, against the wishes of Poland's virulently anti-Semitic government
that the vast majority of Polish Jews remained in Poland to face the
unimaginable catastrophe that would soon follow.41
Nationalizing the eastern borderlands
The eastern borderlands presented yet another picture. To the east, the
territory of the Polish state extended far beyond that of the Polish
language, including a nearly 200-mile-wide strip in which the language
of the countryside was Belarusian (in the northeast) and Ukrainian (in
the southeast).42
Outside the cities, Belarusians and Ukrainians comprised
large local majorities in these borderlands, and they formed over
20 percent of the population of the state as a whole.43
40
Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 4 2 - 3 and
69-74 (the quotations are from pp. 71 and 72); Rothschild, East Central Europe Between
the Two World Wars, pp. 40-1; Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 465ff.
41
Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 71,
79-80 (the quotation is from p. 71); Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 467-8.
42
Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1993), p. 131. What constituted a "language" rather than a
"dialect" was of course a matter of dispute. The prevailing Polish view (like the
prevailing pre-Revolutionary Russian view) was that Ukrainian and Belarusian were
dialects rather than languages, and that the speakers of these dialects did not constitute
distinct nations but were rather a kind of "ethnographic raw material" capable of being
molded into Poles (or Russians). See Jerzy Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodow
(Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1985), p. 96.
43
Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, p. 36. Census figures for
1921 on religion showed 21.7 percent of the population were Uniate or Orthodox,
almost all of whom were East Slavs; in addition, some Belarusians were Catholic.
Census figures for 1921 by nationality showed the Ukrainians as more than three times
as numerous as Belarusians, but this almost certainly exaggerated the disparity of size
between the groups, since Catholic Belarusians were classified as Polish by nationality.
98 The old "New Europe" and the new
The economic and social condition of Belarusians and Ukrainians
contrasted sharply with that of Germans and Jews. While Jews were
80 percent urban, the East Slavs were almost 95 percent rural (Germans
were initially mixed but became heavily rural as a result of disproportionately
heavy urban emigration).44
Belarusians and Ukrainians
occupied no desirable economic or political positions from which there
was any interest in excluding them. They were recognized - while
Germans and Jews were not - as autochthonous; no one sought to
encourage them to emigrate.
As territorially concentrated borderland minorities, linked to large
populations of co-ethnics in neighboring states, the East Slavs did of
course share certain features with the Germans. But the national
question in Poland's eastern borderlands was more complex than it
was in the west. In the west, Germans and Poles faced one another as
mobilized and opposed nationalities. There were, to be sure, zones of
mixed settlement and others of uncertain national identity. But the
contending identities were clearly profiled and deeply rooted even well
before the reestablishment of Polish statehood.
In the eastern borderlands, the contours of national identity were more
indeterminate. Between the Poles and Russians lay a vast zone extending
from the Baltic to the Black Sea where national movements had
developed only in the last few prewar decades, and where incipient
national identities, articulated and propagated by a small urban intelligentsia,
had yet to acquire a substantial social base among the still
overwhelmingly peasant populations.
The major exception to this eastern pattern was in eastern Galicia.
Unlike the rest of this zone, which had belonged to the Russian Empire,
Galicia had been a Habsburg province, with Poles predominating in
its western, Ukrainians in its eastern half. There, for half a century
before the First World War, conditions for cultural and even political
nationalist mobilization were much more favorable than they were in
the more authoritarian Romanov territories. Consequently, a strong
Ukrainian nationalist movement developed, led, as everywhere, by an
urban intelligentsia, but mobilizing the peasantry as well, and generating,
by the outbreak of the First World War, a more deeply rooted sense of
national identity.
The collapse of Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires in
the First World War as well as the postwar turmoil associated with the
44
Ewald Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitaten in den Slaaten Europas: Sammlung von
Lageberichten (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumiiller, 1931), p. 57, reporting results of the 1921
Nationalizing states 99
Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war left the political fate of
diese regions radically uncertain. These turbulent years witnessed a
welter of competing political projects for the region, sponsored by
Germans, Poles, Bolsheviks, and various native intelligentsias, supported
or undermined by a succession of armies, and ranging from creation of
new sovereign states through various federalist and confederalist
schemes to proposals for outright incorporation by larger powers.45
In the immediate postwar years, there were two contending Polish
visions of the eastern borderlands. One, associated with Pilsudski and
the Left, favored an expansive federal Poland that would incorporate the
extensive eastern territories of the historic Commonwealth, grant their
incipient nationalities wide autonomy, and encourage them to develop
their national individuality - all as a buffer against Russia, presently
prostrate, but likely, on this view, to revive and constitute the main future
threat to Poland. The second vision, associated with Dmowski and the
rightist National Democrats, favored a more compact state (though still
one extending well beyond ethnographically Polish territory) whose East
Slav-inhabited territories (albeit less extensive than those envisioned by
Pilsudski) would be incorporated into a unitary Polish state, and whose
East Slav inhabitants would be expected to assimilate.46
It was the latter, nationalizing approach to the eastern borderlands that
prevailed.47
Pilsudski's federalist scheme came to naught, as Lithuania
insisted on - and was able to sustain - full independence and as the
Belarusian-Ukrainian borderlands, following the Polish-Soviet War of
1920, were partitioned, their western parts incorporated integrally into
the Polish state. East Galicia too, which Polish troops had occupied
in 1918-19, crushing the "West Ukrainian People's Republic" that
had been proclaimed in November 1918 and driving out its army, was
45
O n the Ukrainian lands, see Geoff Eley, "Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary
Upheaval, and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923," in Howard Aster and
Peter J. Potichnyi, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 2nd edn
(Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1990). On
the mobilization of Ukrainian ethnic identity under conditions of war, revolution, and
imperial collapse, see Mark von Hagen, "The Great War and the Mobilization of
Ethnicity in the Russian Empire," manuscript (1995).
46
On the historical background of these competing visions of the eastern lands of historic
Poland, see Brock, "Polish Nationalism."
47
More generally, the National Democrats established the basic parameters of interwar
Poland's nationalizing policies and practices. Pilsudski himself, to be sure, returned to
power in a 1926 coup and remained in power until his death in 1935. Yet although he
made certain conciliatory gestures towards minorities, he did not depart from the
nationalizing course set by the National Democrats. See for example Pawel Korzec,
"The Minority Problem of Poland, 1918-1939," in S. Vilfan, ed., Ethnic Groups and
Language Rights (Aldershot, UK and New York: Dartmouth Publishing Company and
New York University Press, 1993), pp. 205, 210.
100 The old "New Europe" and the new
incorporated in unitary fashion into Poland, despite the autonomy that
had been promised by the Polish legislature in order to win Allied
approval for Polish claims to sovereignty there.48
While it was widely believed that Germans could not and Jews should
not be assimilated, the assimilation of Belarusians and Ukrainians was
seen as both possible and desirable, even as necessary. As leading
National Democrat Stanislaw Grabski put it, referring to the eastern
borderlands, "the transformation of the state territory of the Republic
into a Polish national territory is a necessary condition of maintaining
our frontiers."49
Outside eastern Galicia, where Ukrainian national
consciousness was strong, the prospects for assimilation in the eastern
borderlands were indeed relatively favorable. These areas were extremely
underdeveloped economically and culturally. Under tsarist rule, they had
lacked nearly completely the educational and cultural facilities that
could support a public sphere through which national consciousness
could develop and diffuse.50
The nationalist intelligentsia was tiny and
lacked any substantial constituency. The Belarusian and Ukrainian
inhabitants were overwhelmingly rural; their concerns were overwhelmingly
economic, not national. Their identities were seldom, and then only
weakly, articulated in national terms. Some identified themselves simply
as tuteshni ("from here"). Others - notably Catholic Belarusian speakers
in the area around Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius) - already identified themselves
as Poles.
Yet far from furthering the assimilation or even securing the loyalty of
borderland East Slavs, Poland's inept nationalizing policies and practices
in the interwar period had just the opposite effect, producing by the
end of the period what had not existed at the beginning: a consolidated,
strongly anti-Polish Belarusian and - to an even greater extent Ukrainian
national consciousness. This happened through heavyhanded
efforts to nationalize the land, the schools, and the churches
of the region, and through the harsh repression of Belarusian and
Ukrainian nationalist and social-revolutionary movements.
Although it had assimilationist aims, the new state's land policy in the
eastern borderlands employed differentialist, discriminatory means. Just
48
Hans Roos, "Polen zwischen den Weltkriegen," in Markert, ed., Polen, pp. 22-30;
Pawel Korzec, "The Ukrainian Problem in Interwar Poland," in Paul Smith, ed.,
Ethnic Groups in International Relations.
49
Quoted in Jerzy Tomaszewski, "The National Question in Poland in the Twentieth
Century," in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Europe in
Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 229.
50
Eley, "Remapping the Nation," pp. 211, 226-7.
Nationalizing states 101
as the nationalizing German Kaiserreich had sought to Germanize the
lands of its predominantly Polish eastern borderlands by promoting
ethnically German at the expense of ethnically Polish landowners through
state sponsorship of what was forthrightly called "colonization"
and state control over land sales - so the nationalizing Polish state
pursued similar policies vis-d-vis Belarusians and Ukrainians, settling
soldiers and other Poles from western territories on estates in the eastern
borderlands; indeed Poles were well aware of the parallels between the
national struggles in the German-Polish and those of the Polish-East
Slav borderlands.51
Yet just as the German colonization program
provoked sustained Polish opposition (and was in any event ineffective),
so too the Polish colonization efforts, while only marginally affecting
ethnic demography and land ownership, powerfully antagonized the
local, land-starved Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants.52
This antagonism
was compounded by the failure of the Polish state to carry out a
radical land reform; but such a reform was unthinkable, for it would have
meant expropriating Polish landlords (who held the great majority of
large estates in the eastern borderlands) for the benefit of non-Polish
peasants - precisely the reverse of the situation that made radical land
reform politically profitable (and a perfect instrument of nationalization)
elsewhere in East Central Europe, where ethnically alien landlords
could be expropriated for the benefit of "national" peasantries.53
The
embittered agrarian situation allowed Belarusian and Ukrainian agitators
to interpret economic grievances in national terms, and thereby
contributed to the "nationalization" of the East Slav populations - but in
a sense opposite to that intended by the Poles.
In the spheres of education, culture, and religion, policies toward the
two East Slav nationalities initially differed. Before the war, the
Belarusian national movement had been directed against Russia and
Russification, while the most vigorous part of the Ukrainian national
movement (in Austrian eastern Galicia) had been directed against Poles
(who were dominant in Galicia as a whole). At first (before the triumph
of the unitarist, assimilationist National Democrats), the new state
sought to take advantage of this anti-Russian orientation of Belarusian
nationalism. It therefore not only tolerated but actively supported
Belarusian school and cultural institutions, seeking to further the sense
of Belarusian distinctiveness from Russia and thereby to secure the
51
Brock, "Polish Nationalism," p. 344.
52
Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland 1921-1939, p. 140; Rothschild, East Central
Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 42-3; Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitdten in den
Staaten Europas, pp. 62-3, 134-5.
53
Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 12-13, 67.
102 The old "New Europe" and the new
loyalty of the Belarusian population. Within a few years, however, this
support was withdrawn and assimilationist policies were adopted
throughout the eastern borderlands. Belarusian and Ukrainian schools
were replaced with nominally bilingual but in fact predominantly Polish
ones, and the activities of Belarusian and Ukrainian cultural organizations
were restricted in a variety of ways. The Ukrainian university that
had been envisioned when Poland was seeking Allied approval of its
claims to Galicia was not established, and the existing Ukrainianlanguage
chairs at Lwow (Lviv) University were abolished. In the 1930s,
attempts were made, sometimes with force, to convert Orthodox
Ukrainians (i.e. those living outside Galicia, where Ukrainians were
Uniate Catholics) to Roman or Uniate Catholicism, and numerous
Belarusian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches were closed down, or
pressed to use Polish liturgical texts.54
In terms of their own objectives, the exclusionary, dissimilationist
nationalizing policies and practices of interwar Poland towards Germans
and Jews can be said to have "succeeded," at least in part. By contrast,
the assimilationist nationalizing stance towards Belarusians and
Ukrainians failed conspicuously on its own terms. Far from being
absorbed into the Polish nation, Belarusian and Ukrainian speakers
in the Polish borderlands developed much stronger Belarusian and
Ukrainian national identities during the interwar period. Worse still,
from the Polish point of view, whatever feelings of loyalty they might
have had, or developed, toward the Polish state were replaced by
hostility. When Poland was partitioned in 1939 between Germany and
the Soviet Union, few Belarusians or Ukrainians regretted the end of
Polish rule, though worse, by far, was in store for them under Soviet rule,
and though the attractiveness of the Belarusian and Ukrainian national
"republics" within the Soviet Union - considerable in the 1920s, when
Belarusification and Ukrainization were vigorously promoted - had long
since been spoiled by news of the purges, collectivization, and famine of
the 1930s.
This draining of loyalty from the borderland population, to be sure,
cannot be blamed solely on Poland's nationalizing policies and practices.
More important, probably, was the government's harshly repressive
response to the strong social-revolutionary and radical nationalist movements
that developed in the borderlands; for the repression touched not
54
Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1956), pp. 121ff., 128-32; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, ed. Volodymyr
Kubijovyc, 5 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984-93), vol. IV, pp. 81,
108, 248-50; vol. V, p. 633.
Nationalizing states 103
only the extremists, who openly espoused and practiced terror against
Polish officials, but fell heavily on moderate nationalists and apolitical
villagers as well.55
But the state's nationalizing policies and practices were
crucial in generating and aggravating the grievances that provided a
fertile seedbed for borderland militancy.
Coda: nationalizing states in the new "New Europe"
Can the model of a nationalizing state sketched above, and illustrated with
reference to interwar Poland, help us think about today's new nationstates,
the incipient successor states to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and
Czechoslovakia? A sustained discussion of this question is beyond the
scope of this chapter. But a few general observations can be offered.56
A caveat is required at the outset. I do not try here to draw lessons from
the Polish case. As has been shown in detail, Polish nationalizing policies
and practices were shaped by the specific (and internally varied)
political, geopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts that framed the
relations between Poles and minorities. To say anything specific about
nationalizing policies and practices in the new states, and about how they
might resemble or differ from those of interwar Poland, would require
sustained attention to their formative contexts - contexts that differ
sharply from those that shaped nationalizing stances in interwar Poland
(and that vary considerably from one new state to the next). To address
these varied contexts is impossible here. My concluding remarks are
necessarily on a much more general level, and take as their point of
departure not the detailed discussion of Poland but the general model of
the nationalizing state presented toward the beginning of the chapter.
A nationalizing state, I have suggested, is one understood to be the
state of and for a particular ethnocultural "core nation" whose language,
culture, demographic position, economic welfare, and political
hegemony must be protected and promoted by the state. The key
elements here are (1) the sense of "ownership" of the state by a particular
ethnocultural nation that is conceived as distinct from the citizenry
or permanent resident population as a whole, and (2) the "remedial" or
55
Vakar, Belorussia, pp. 125ff.; Roos, "Polen Zwischen den Weltkriegen," pp. 42, 51.
56
For initial appraisals of nation-building in the Soviet successor states, see Ian Bremmer
and Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post Soviet-Nations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1996); Juan J. Linz and Alfred
Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South
America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), especially chapters 2, 19, and 20; and Paul Kolstoe, "NationBuilding
in Eurasia," forthcoming in Journal of Democracy (1996).
104 The old "New Europe" and the new
"compensatory" project of using state power to promote the core
nation's specific (and heretofore inadequately served) interests.
In the new states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union,
these key elements are clearly present. The new states (with the partial
and ambiguous exceptions of Bosnia-Hercegovina, rump Yugoslavia,
and the Russian Federation) are closely identified with particular
ethnocultural nations. This is the legacy of their prior incarnation as the
major ethnoterritorial units of nominally federal multinational states, in
which they were already defined as the (nominally sovereign) states of
and for the particular ethnocultural nations whose names they bore. The
Soviet regime, as I argued in Chapter 2, deliberately constructed its
constituent republics as national polities "belonging" to their respective
eponymous nations, while at the same time severely limiting their
powers of rule; the Yugoslav and (to a lesser extent) Czechoslovak
regimes, following the Soviet model, did the same. Today, the
institutionalized sense of ownership and ethnonational entitlement
persists, but is now coupled with substantial powers of rule. Successor
state elites can use these new powers to "nationalize" their states, to
make them more fully the polities of and for their core nations.
In almost all of the new states, the ethnoculturally defined, state"owning"
core nation is sharply distinct from the citizenry as a whole;57
and the core nation has been represented by its elites - or at least an
important segment of its elites - as weakened and underdeveloped as a
result of previous discrimination and repression. Even the dominant
nations in the preceding multinational states, Russia and Serbia, have
been represented in this light. To compensate for this, the new state
is seen as having the right, indeed the responsibility, to protect and
promote the cultural, economic, demographic, and political interests of
the core nation.
Indisputably, then, the conceptual and ideological foundations for
programs and policies of nationalization are in place. To be sure,
alternative models of the state are available as well. There are three
principal alternative models in circulation. First, there is the model of the
57
Exceptions include the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Armenia, where the overwhelming
majority of the population belongs to the core nation; and Belarus and
Ukraine, where the boundary between the respective core nations and Russians, who
comprise the largest minority in both states, is blurred. In Estonia (and to a lesser extent
in Latvia), the citizenry is relatively homogeneous, but the total population of the state
is not; this discrepancy is the product of a politics of nationalization that, in the name of
protecting the interests of the core nation, has so far excluded the bulk of the nonEstonian
and non-Latvian population from citizenship. I have addressed the question
of citizenship in "Citizenship Struggles in Soviet Successor States," International
Migration Review 26 (1992).
Nationalizing states 105
"civic" state, the state of and for all of its citizens, irrespective of their
ethnicity. Second, there is the model of binational or multinational
states, understood to be the states of and for two or more ethnocultural
core nations. Note that these alternative models differ sharply from one
another: ethnicity or ethnic nationality has no public significance in the
former, yet major public significance in the latter; the constituent units
of the polity are individuals in the first case, ethnonational groups in the
second. Finally, there is the hybrid model of minority rights: die state is
understood as a national, but not a nationalizing, state; members of
minority groups are guaranteed not only equal rights as citizens (and thus
protected, in principle, against differentialist nationalizing practices) but
also certain specific minority rights, notably in the domain of language
and education (and are thus protected, in principle, against assimilationist
nationalizing practices).
In my view, neither the civic nor the binational-multinational model
has much chance of prevailing in the new states of Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union. The civic model has considerable international
legitimacy; as a result, civic principles have been incorporated into some
constitutional texts and evoked in some public declarations (especially
those directed towards international audiences). But these civic principles
remain external. It is hard to imagine a civic self-understanding
coming to prevail given the pervasively institutionalized understandings
of nationality as fundamentally ethnocultural rather than political, as
sharply distinct from citizenship, and as grounding claims to "ownership"
of polities (which, after all, were expressly constructed as the
polities of and for their eponymous ethnocultural nations). For the same
reason, it is hard to imagine a binational or multinational understanding
of die state coming to prevail. Ironically, the civic model - where
ethnicity and nationality are not supposed to have any public significance
- may have the best chances of working in the states that most closely
approximate ethnically homogeneous nation-states, notably in the Czech
Republic and Slovenia. The best chance for the binational or multinational
model would occur if two or more successor states were to
merge into a wider federal or confederal state, defining the new unit
as binational or multinational, but preserving their own "national"
character internally.
The prospects of die minority rights model might seem better. It has
even greater international legitimacy than the civic model, and international
organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European
Union, and the Organization for (formerly Conference on) Security
and Cooperation in Europe have pressed the new states to adopt and
implement minority rights legislation. As a result, all new states are
106 The old "New Europe" and the new
formally committed to nondiscrimination and to protecting minority
rights. But this was true of the new states of interwar Europe as well, all
of whom were subject to League of Nations Minorities Treaties that
expressly required equal treatment, protected the use of minority
languages, and obliged the state to provide minority-language primary
education in regions with substantial minority populations. These
treaties did little to hinder the dynamic of nationalization; formal
guarantees of minority rights failed to impede substantive nationalization.
It remains to be seen whether internationally sponsored minority
rights regimes will be more successful today.
Almost all of the new states, in my view, will be nationalizing states to
some degree and in some form. Already, various nationalizing policies,
practices, and stances have been adopted in domains such as language
policy, education, mass media programming, constitutional symbolism,
national iconography, migration policy, public sector employment, and
citizenship legislation; significant elements of nationalization can be
found even in states that have presented themselves as models of
interethnic harmony, notably Ukraine and Kazakhstan.58
But this does
not mean that the new states will be as consistently, or counterproductively,
nationalizing as was interwar Poland. There is and will
continue to be great variation between states - and within states (over
time, among parties, across regions, between sectors of the government,
and so on) - in the extent to which and the manner in which nationalizing
agendas are articulated and implemented. Moreover, in all states
nationalizing agendas must compete with other social, political, and
economic agendas for attention, support, and commitment - not so
much with agendas that repudiate nationalization as with those that
bypass or ignore it and thereby make it seem less urgent, compelling, or
relevant to the problems of the day. The question is therefore not whether
the new states will be nationalizing, but how they will be nationalizing and
how nationalizing they will be.
58
See Dominique Arel, "Language and Group Boundaries in the Two Ukraines," and
Ian Bremmer, "Russians as Ethnic Minorities in Ukraine and Kazakhstan," both presented
at the conference on "National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External
National Homelands in the New Europe," Bellagio Study and Conference Center,
Italy, August 1994; Anatoly Khazanov, After the USSR (Madison, Wis.: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1995), chapter 5; and Robert Kaiser and Jeff Chinn,
"Russian-Kazakh Relations in Kazakhstan," Post-Soviet Geography 36 (1995).
Nationalizing stances have been weakest in Belarus, where, in a May 1995 referendum,
large majorities favored increasing economic integration with Russia, making Russian
a "state language" alongside Belarusian, and restoring Soviet state symbols; see Ustina
Markus, "Lukashenko's Victory," in Transition 1, no. 14 (1995), 77-8.