Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality PDF
Preview Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
Nations and nationalism since iy8o Programme, myth, reality SECOND EDITION E.J. HOBSBAWM jj CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS cambridge university press Cambridge,NewYork,Melbourne,Madrid,CapeTown,Singapore,S~aoPaulo, Delhi , Mexic o City CambridgeUniversityPress TheEdinburghBuilding,Cambridgecb28ru,UK PublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmericabyCambridgeUniversityPress,NewYork www.cambridge.org Informationonthistitle:www.cambridge.org/9781107604629 ©E.J.Hobsbawm1990 Thispublicationisincopyright.Subjecttostatutoryexception andtotheprovisionsofrelevantcollectivelicensingagreements, noreproductionofanypartmaytakeplacewithout thewrittenpermissionofCambridgeUniversityPress. Firstpublished1990 Reprinted1990,1991 Cantoedition1991 Secondedition1992 20thprinting2013 PrintedandBoundbyCPIGroup(UK)Ltd,Croydon,cr04yy AcataloguerecordforthispublicationisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary Libraryof CongressCataloguinginPublicationdata Hobsbawm.E.J.(EricJ.),1917– Nationsandnationalismsince1780:programme,myth,reality/ E.J.Hobsbawm.–2nded. p. cm. Includesindex. isbn0521439612(paperback) 1.Nationalism–History.1.Title. jc311.h577 1992 320.5(cid:2)4–dc20 92–14949 cip isbn-13 978-1-107-60462-9Paperback CambridgeUniversityPresshasnoresponsibilityforthepersistenceor accuracyofURLsforexternalorthirdpartyinternetwebsitesreferred tointhispublication,anddoesnotguaranteethatanycontenton suchwebsitesis,orwillremain,accurateorappropriate. Contents Preface page vii Introduction 1 t i The nation as novelty: from revolution to liberalism 14 2 Popular proto-nationalism 46 3 The government perspective 80 4 The transformation of nationalism 1870-1918 101 5 The apogee of nationalism 1918-1950 131 6 Nationalism in the late twentieth century 163 Maps (following page 119933) 1 National conflicts and frontier disputes, 1919-1934 Source: The Times Concise Atlas of World History (adapted with permission) 2 Peoples, languages and political divisions in the nineteenth century: the East European linguistic jigsaw Source: The Times Concise Atlas of World History (adapted with permission) 3 Nationalities of the Habsburg empire c. 1910 Source: The Penguin Atlas of World History, vol. 11 (adapted with permission) Index 1 99 Preface This book is based on the Wiles Lectures which I had the honour to give at the Queen's University of Belfast in May 1985. The location suggested the topic. For the sake of convenience the somewhat concentrated contents of the four lectures to which the Lectureship commits the visitor have been spread out. There are now five chapters of unequal length, an introduction and some concluding reflections. The manuscript has also been revised, partly to take account of some later material, but mainly in the light of the discussions with the invited group of experts, which is one of the chief attractions of the Wiles Lectures for those fortunate enough to give them. I am grateful to all those who organized the lectures and those who took part in the discussions, and in particular to Perry Anderson, John Breuilly, Judith Brown, Ronan Fanning, Miroslav Hroch, Victor Kiernan, Joe Lee, Shula Marks, Terence Ranger and Goran Therborn, for criticism and stimulation and especially for making me think further about non-European nationalism. However, I have concentrated mainly on the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, when the subject is rather Eurocentric or at any rate centred in the 'developed' regions. Since I have been some time talking and asking questions about nations and nationalism, there are many others who have given me ideas, information or refer ences to books I would not otherwise have known about. At the risk of unfairness I single out Kumari Jayawardene and the other South Asian scholars at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, and my colleagues and students at the New School for Social Research in New York, who have heard and discussed some of this material. Much of the research for this Vlll PREFACE book was made possible by a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, and I should like to express my appreciation for the generous assistance thus provided by the Leverhulme Trust. The national question' is a notoriously controversial subject. I have not sought to make it any less controversial. However, I hope that these lectures in their printed form will advance the study of the historical phenomena with which they attempt to come to grips. London 1989 The last chapter has been extended and largely rewritten to take account of events since the text of the first edition was completed. London, March 1992 Introduction Suppose that one day, after a nuclear war, an intergalactic historian lands on a now dead planet in order to enquire into the cause of the remote little catastrophe which the sensors of his galaxy have recorded. He or she -1 refrain from speculating on the problem of extraterrestrial physiological reproduction - consults the terrestrial libraries and archives which have been preserved, because the technology of mature nuclear weaponry has been designed to destroy people rather than property. Our observer, after some study, will conclude that the last two centuries of the human history of planet Earth are incomprehensible without some under standing of the term 'nation' and the vocabulary derived from it. This term appears to express something important in human affairs. But what exactly? Here lies the mystery. He will have read Walter Bagehot, who presented the history of the nineteenth century as that of 'nation-building', but who also observed, with his usual common sense: 'We know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot very quickly explain or define it.'1 This may be true for Bagehot and for us, but not for extragalactic historians who have not the human experience which appears to make the idea of the 'nation' so convincing. I think it would today be possible, thanks to the literature of the past fifteen to twenty years, to provide such a historian with a short reading list to help him, her, or it with the desired analysis, and to supplement A. D. Smith's 'Nationalism: A Trend Report and Bibliography', which contains most references in the field up to that 1 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London 1887), pp. 20-11. 2 NATIONS AND NATIONALISM SINCE 1780 date.2 Not that one would wish to recommend all that much that was written in earlier periods. Our reading list would contain very little that was written in the classic period of nineteenth-century liberalism, for reasons which should become clear later, but also because very little other than nationalist and racist rhetoric was being written then. And the best work produced at that time was actually very brief, like John Stuart Mill's passages on the subject in his Considerations on Representative Government and Ernest Renan's famous lecture 'What is a nation?'3 The reading list would contain some historically necessary, as well as some optional reading from the first major effort to apply dispassionate analysis to the subject, the important and under estimated debates among the Marxists of the Second International on what they called 'the national question'. We shall see later why the best minds in the international socialist movement - and it contained some extremely powerful intellects - applied themselves to this problem: Kautsky and Luxemburg, Otto Bauer and Lenin, to name but a few.4 Probably it would contain some of Kautsky, certainly Otto Bauer's Die Nationalitatenfrage, but it would also need to contain Stalin's Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, not so much for its modest, but not negligible - if somewhat derivative - intellectual merits, but rather for its sub sequent political influence.5 2 A. D. Smith, 'Nationalism, A Trend Report and Bibliography' in Current Sociology xxi/3, The Hague and Paris 1973. See also the bibliographies in the same author's Theories of Nationalism (London, 2nd edn 1983) and The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford 1986). Professor Anthony Smith is at present the main guide in this field for readers of the English language. •' Ernest Renan, Qu'est ce que c'est une nation* (Conference faite en Sorbonne le 11 mars 1882) (Paris 1882); John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London 1861), chapter xvi. 4 For a convenient introduction, including a selection of writings by the chief Marxist authors of the time, Georges Haupt, Michel Lowy and Claudie Weill, Les Marxistes et la question nationale 1848-1914 (Paris 1974). Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitatenfrage unddie Sozialdemokratie (Vienna 1907, the second edition of 1924 contains an important new introduction), appears, unaccountably, not to have been translated into English. For a recent attempt, Horace B. Davis, Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism (New York 1978). 5 The 1913 text was published together with later writings in Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London 1936) in a volume which had considerable international influence, not only among communists, especially in the dependent world. INTRODUCTION 3 It would not, in my judgment, deserve to contain much from the age of those who have been called 'the twin founding fathers' of the academic study of nationalism, after World War I: Carleton B. Hayes and Hans Kohn.6 Nothing was more natural than that the subject should attract attention in a period when the map of Europe was, for the first - and as it turned out for the only - time redrawn according to the principle of nationality, and when the vocabulary of European nationalism came to be adopted by new movements of colonial liberation or Third World assertion, to which Hans Kohn at least paid considerable attention.7 Nor is there any doubt that the writings of this period contain a mass of material drawn from the earlier literature, which can save the student a good deal of primary reading. The chief reason for the obsolescence of so much of it is that the main innovation of the period, which had inci dentally been anticipated by the Marxists, has become common place, except among nationalists. Nations, we now know - not least through the efforts of the Hayes-Kohn era - are not, as Bagehot thought, 'as old as history'.8 The modern sense of the word is no older than the eighteenth century, give or take the odd predecessor. The academic literature on nationalism multiplied, but did not advance greatly in the following decades. Some would regard the work of Karl Deutsch, who stressed the role of commu nication in the formation of nations, as a major addition to it, but I would not regard this author as indispensable.9 It is not altogether clear why the literature on nations and nationalism entered so fruitful a phase about twenty years ago, and indeed the question only arises for those who believe that it did so. This is not yet a universally established view. The problem will be considered in the final chapter, though not in great detail. At all 6 Carleton B. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York 1931) and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. A Study in its Origin and Background (New York 1944) contain valuable historical material. The phrase 'founding fathers' comes from the valuable study in philological and conceptual history, A. Kemilainen, Nation alism. Problems Concerning the Word, the Concept and Classification (Jyvaskyla 1964). 7 See his History of Nationalism in the East (London 1929); Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East (New York 1932). 8 Bagehot, Physics and Politics, p. 83. 9 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication. An Enquiry into the Foun dations of Nationality (Cambridge MA 1953).
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