Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T13:25:55.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The “National Question” Revisited: Reflections on the State of the Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Dennison Rusinow
Dennison Rusinow
Affiliation:
Research Professor in East European Studies and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I am often asked, by students, colleagues, and friends, why and how I came to devote my professional life to the study of Central and Southeastern European history and current events and, in the process, how I came to spend thirty years living in the area. I have two stock answers, both of them true.

Type
Fifteenth Annual Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 31 , January 2000 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 London, 1957, 260.

2 For brevity and convenience—but distortingly—restricted to works written or published in English.

3 Paul Robert, Magocsi, in the introduction to his History of the Ukraine(Seattle, 1996).Google Scholar

4 An exception that I encountered only many years later is Hans, Kohn, A History of Nationalism in the East (New York, 1929). The focus (eastern and southern Asia) and date document Kohn's precocious early interest in nationalism as also a non-European phenomenon.Google Scholar

5 Elie, Kedourie, Nationalism (London, 1960).Google Scholar

6 The most often cited proponent and probable originator of this distinction is Hans, Kohn, particularly in The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944). Kohn is also one of the earliest historians to attempt a systematic investigation of the phenomenon.Google Scholar

7 The term used by Michael, Hechtner, which he contrasted to nationalism as also a “luminous force” (see below), in his plenary address at the Center for Austrian Studies symposium at which this lecture was also presented.Google Scholar

8 Both Renan's essay and Weber's on the nation are frequently reprinted, inter alia in Nationalism, ed. John, Hutchinson and Smith, Anthony D. (Oxford, 1994), 17–18, 21–25. This very useful Oxford Reader and the same editors' follow-up, Ethnicity (Oxford, 1996), include extracts from many of the authors and works cited below and anticipate a number of my reflections.Google Scholar

9 Possibly the best of this period genre (and prior to Kohn among early attempts to examine the subject systematically) is Carlton, Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931).Google Scholar

10 Elie, Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London, 1970).Google Scholar

11 Whether phenomena that can persuasively be described as (“modern”) nations and nationalism in Africa and Asia also preceded or were always products of European imperialism (thus of diffusion plus imperial policies plus anti-imperialism) has been an important subtheme of discourses on nationalism since as early as the 1950s—from, for example, Thomas, Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London, 1956),Google Scholar to Crawford, Young, “Ethnicity and the Colonial and Post-Colonial State in Africa,” in Ethnic Groups and the State, ed. Paul, Brass (London, 1985).Google Scholar

12 Important early and general works by these writers (all historians) include Carr, , Nationalism and After (London, 1945):Google Scholar Kohn, , History of Nationalism;Google Scholar Cobban, , The Nation State and National Self-Determination, rev. ed. (London 1969);Google Scholar Shafer, , Nationalism: Muth and Reality (New York, 1955),Google Scholar significantly expanded to include the world in Faces of Nationalism: New Realities and Old Myths (New York, 1977); and Snyder, , The Meaning of Nationalism (New York, 1954).Google Scholar

13 Later works by Shafer, Snyder, Cobban, and others cited above provide good cases in point.

14 InNathan, Glazer and Patrick, Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass, 1975), itself among the pioneering multiauthor, multidisciplinary works in this field, the editors begin their introduction with the blunt statement: “Ethnicity seems to be a new term.” (They then note that its first usage recorded in the 1972 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary is by David Riesman in 1953.)Google Scholar

15 Merely one example, which includes a number of my own studies and writings beginning in the 1960s, is provided by the presently still growing body of case studies of changeable and nesting ethnic and/or national identities (often including competing nationalist elites as significant actors) in Slavic-German and other linguistic and cultural “borderlands.”

16 AsEric, Hobsbawm notes in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990), 11.Google Scholar

17 London, 1977.

18 In revising these reflections I learned that Boyd Shafer also “discovered” this concept and found it useful at approximately the same time (Shafer, Faces of Nationalism, xiii)

19 Usually traced to the work of Tom, Nairn, especially The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and NeoNationalism, 2nd ed. (London, 1977). As a writer and journalist working outside the academy, Nairn is hard to classify in terms of social science discipline.Google Scholar

20 See especially Partha, Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J., 1993).Google Scholar

21 Especially Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, 1953).Google Scholar

22 Silvert, Kalman H., ed., Expectant Peoples: Nationalism and Development (New York, 1963) and Discussion at Bellagio (New York, 1964).Google Scholar Compare Reinhard, Bendix's almost simultaneously published (and today also largely forgotten) Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York, 1964), with its similar but less central interest in the relationship between development and nation building.Google Scholar

23 From Thought and Change (London, 1964) to and beyond Nations and Natinalism (Oxford, 1983).Google Scholar

24 One early example isGeorge de, Vos and Lola, Romanucci-Ross, eds., Ethnic Identity: Cultural Communities and Change (Palo Alto, Calif, 1975), with the editors' calim that “one relatively neglected dimension of pluralistic societies, traditional as well as modern, is ethnicity.”Google Scholar

25 Fredrik, Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Bergen, 1969).Google Scholar An outstanding early and still frequently cited product of this approach is Cole, John W. and Wolf, Eric R., The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (New York, 1974).Google Scholar For Hobsbawm's concept of “protonations,” see his “Popular Proto-nationalism,” chap. 2 in Nations and Nationalism since 1780.Google Scholar

26 See Clifford, Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York, 1963), 107–13 and passim.Google Scholar

27 I am here considering Chatterjee and company as practitioners of political anthropology.

28 Berger, and Luckmann, , The Social Construction of Reality (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

29 What may be counterevidence is provided by the work of Bendix in Nation-Building and Citizenship and the number of sociologists among the contributors to Glazer and Moynihan, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, but the latter (and others) were concerned with ethnicity, not nations and nationalism.

30 For example, in Pierre van den, Berghe, “Race and Ethnicity: A Sociobiological Perspective,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, no. 4 (1978).Google Scholar

31 Three of Smith's, most important books are Theories of Nationalism (London, 1971), The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World (Cambridge, 1981), and The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar

32 Particularly associated with the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers and their critics.

33 London, 1983.

34 In Hutchinson, and Smith, , eds., Nationalism, 362.Google Scholar

35 See Maria, Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997);Google Scholar Larry, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif, 1994);Google Scholar Gerard, Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London, 1995);Google Scholar Eric, Hobsbawm and Terence, Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983—the same year as Anderson's Imagined Communities);Google Scholar and George, Schöpflin and Nancy, Wood, eds., In Search of Central Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).Google Scholar

36 Leonard, Doob, Patriotism and Nationalism: Their Psychological Foundations (New Haven, Conn., 1964).Google Scholar

37 As described by Hutchinson and Smith in Nationalism, 362, citing the introduction and collected essays in Bhabha, , ed., The Nation and Narnation (London, 1990).Google Scholar

38 Stanford, Calif., 1976; the date and Weber's subtitle, The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, are both significant for my argument.

39 Chicago, 1997

40 Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).Google Scholar

41 Washington, D.C., 1995.

42 Gale, Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe (Oxford, 1997).Google Scholar

43 Remarks introducing the symposium, my notes and emphases.