The Undivided Past Page 7

  TWO

  Nation

  Love your country. Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascent to Him.

  —Giuseppe Mazzini, quoted in W. V. Byars, ed.,

  The Handbook of Oratory: A Cyclopedia of Authorities on Oratory as an Art

  Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and humanity.

  —James Bryce,

  University and Historical Addresses: Delivered During a Residence in the United States as Ambassador to Great Britain

  THE FIRST VOLUME OF General Charles de Gaulle’s peacetime memoirs begins with his return to power in France in 1958, and offers an eloquent and emotional evocation of national history, geography, “genius,” and identity. “France,” de Gaulle writes, “has emerged from the depths of the past. She is a living entity. She responds to the call of the centuries. Yet she remains herself through time.” Accordingly, although somewhat paradoxically, “her boundaries may alter, but not the contours, the climate, the rivers and seas that are her eternal imprint.” For, he insists, “her land is inhabited by people who, in the course of history, have undergone the most diverse experiences, but whom destiny and circumstance, exploited by politics, have unceasingly moulded into a single nation,” which “comprises a past, a present and a future that are indissoluble.” As a result, “the state, which is answerable for France, is in charge at one and the same time of yesterday’s heritage, today’s interests and tomorrow’s hopes.” Across a millennium and a half, de Gaulle believed, these obligations had been discharged in the name of the French people by the Merovingians, the Carolingians, the Capetians, the Bonapartes, and the Third Republic, whereupon he himself was twice invested with “supreme authority” as he sought to “lead the country to salvation” by offering his compatriots “no other goal” but that of the summit and “no other road but that of endeavour.” Such, for de Gaulle, was the uniquely “enduring character” of the French nation, embracing “countless generations” of the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn: the ultimate embodiment of the most significant and long-lasting form of collective human solidarity.1

  Charles de Gaulle was born in 1890 and died in 1970, and his life virtually coincided with what has often been described (and sometimes deplored) as “the apotheosis of the nation state.”2 From the signing of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, so this argument runs, the religious identities (and antagonisms) of faith were gradually superseded by the secular identities (and antagonisms) of “the nation.” Hence the Great Powers that dominated Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; hence the creation of the United States as “a new nation,” soon followed by the Latin American republics to the south; hence the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that unleashed across Europe the pent‑up forces of romantic nationalism; hence the “nation-making” that characterized the continent across the nineteenth century, culminating in the First World War; hence the Treaty of Versailles, which reorganized Europe according to the principle of “national self-determination”; hence the Second World War, when nations in Europe, Asia, and North America went into battle with each other all over again; hence postwar decolonization, when new, independent countries were created across the globe as the European empires were dismantled; and hence, two decades after de Gaulle’s death, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence (or reemergence) of many old-new nations in eastern Europe and in Asia.3 From this perspective, it seems clear that initially across Europe and subsequently around the world, people have increasingly thought of themselves as, and organized themselves in, “nationalities.” The result, according to the Australian transnational historian Ian Tyrrell, is that in modern times collective human identities, “though multiple,” have become “primarily national ones.”4

  During the years between the death of Charles de Gaulle and the breakup of the Soviet Empire, his compatriot Fernand Braudel began a multivolume work, The Identity of France, that aimed to uncover, explore, and celebrate a nation whose “entire history” was that of “the process of creating or recreating itself.” Combining mysticism, exceptionalism, and nationalism in an elegiac, epic narrative, Braudel’s last work, left incomplete, was a Gaullist account of the French national past, beginning in “the mists of time” and ending with a disparagement of the Vichy regime and homage to the wartime Resistance.5 “I have never ceased,” the author wrote in his introduction, “to think of a France buried deep inside itself, a France flowing along the contours of its own age-long history, destined to continue, come what may.” Inspired by a sense of civic duty and a long-pent‑up patriotism, this enterprise was Braudel’s belated declaration of his love for France, which he admitted was “a demanding and complicated passion.” And in writing this “age-long history” of the nation he understood “almost instinctively,” Braudel defined his subject in the familiar appositional terms essential to the formation and articulation of any collective identity: it was France against the world, “nous vis-à-vis the others, a bit like the sportscaster of an international match unable to conceal in myriad small ways his predilection for his nation’s team.” Here was a history of France’s national identity that was also intended to reinforce its present and future sense of itself, for “to define France’s past,” Braudel explained, “is to place the French people within their own existence.”6

  Yet Braudel’s extended, unfinished love letter to the identity and exceptionalism of France represented the late-life endeavor and declaration (or, alternatively, the misguided recantation and apostasy) of a scholar who had made his reputation by denouncing and transcending what he once disparaged as “the usual framework of national histories, in which every historian worthy of the name has long ceased to believe.”7 Inspired by such innovative Annaliste scholars as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Braudel had spent most of his career proclaiming that history should no longer be written along exclusively national lines, and in his most famous book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, he furnished a pioneering and bravura example of how to approach the past in a very different way, in deliberate opposition to the “frankly traditional historiography” of nationalist historians such as Leopold von Ranke. For Braudel was convinced that the bounded territorialities, parochial differences, and petty quarrels of nation-states were too narrow a field and too constrained a subject; he dismissed them as “l’histoire événementielle,” the flotsam and jetsam of superficial happenings and transient episodes, insignificant compared to the more deep-rooted patterns, trends, and developments concerning the environment, climate, demography, production, and consumption, which formed “the essentials of man’s past.”8 From this very different viewpoint, history was not the pious handmaid of national identity, but its implacable enemy, for “nations per se were abstractions if not accidents, radically disjointed and epitomized versions of an infinitely more complex whole.”9

  The zeal, energy, commitment, and self-contradiction of Fernand Braudel’s move from one position to its polar opposite suggests both the strengths and the weaknesses, the attractions and the limitations of regarding “the nation” as the most significant focus and resonant form of collective identity (and hostility) in the secular, Great Power world that allegedly came into being in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia. In his earlier, iconoclastic days, Braudel was not only reacting against the prevailing belief in the nation as the ultimate unit of historical action and group awareness, but was also signaling his hostility to the role of historians, past and present, in the deliberate creation of these often adversarial national identities.10 Indeed, by refusing to analyze the past in what he regarded as such parochial and chauvinistic terms, Braudel was suggesting that national identity was not the only form of collective human solidarity that mattered, nor even w
as it necessarily the most significant. Yet in his later and more traditional phases, Braudel did argue that national identity was a more important and long-lived phenomenon than had been claimed by those who argued it had only begun in 1648 (or in 1789 or even later); by then, he seemed to imply that the nation-state, and national identities, were the most important form of collective association, indeed the culmination of all human history. The late-life conversion of so strong and unconventional an historian as Braudel to this commonplace and highly sentimentalized perspective on “the nation” well attests to the seductive power of its claim to being the preeminent category of human identity; but it also opens the way to seeing the contradictions, limitations, and ambiguities of that claim.

  THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL IDENTITIES

  As in the case of Charles de Gaulle, most recent attempts to define national identities focus on the history, geography, territoriality, and language of collective allegiances and antagonisms, and on the alignment of a national culture and the nation-state; but they have also been conceived to fit and describe what is believed to be the rise of nation-building (and national confrontation) that took place in Europe from the eighteenth century onward, and that since then has spread across the world.11 In the last twenty years or so, this “modernist” interpretation of national identity has received new impetus following the collapse of the Soviet Empire into many separate nations, and it has been persuasively and influentially advanced by such scholars as Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly, Ernst Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm.12 All of them sought to treat the subject in historical terms, but they have done so over a relatively circumscribed time span, and as none of them were friendly to the idea of national identity, they all treated it as though it were a recent and ephemeral phenomenon already on the wane.13 Yet such a view of the nation as an upstart and transient focus of human identity and conflict is not necessarily correct, and in recent years, historians of the medieval and early modern periods have insisted that it is mistaken to associate “national identity” only with “modernity.” Indeed, one scholar has gone so far as to urge that it is “the similarities between medieval and modern expressions of national identity that are fundamental, and the differences that are peripheral.”14 That may be overstating it, but the “fundamental similarities” between the solidarities of national identity, and also as regards the limitations to those solidarities, are well worth investigating.

  While de Gaulle and Braudel believed the French nation first began to take shape in the nebulous “depths of the past,” historians have been unwilling to accept that such collective identities can be discerned so vaguely, or so far away in time. Egypt under the pharaohs may have resembled a nation, with a shared sense of history and a precise territorial attachment, but there was no accompanying sense of public culture or collective identity. As for the ancient Greeks, their limited pan-Hellenic aspirations, embodied in their shared language, Homeric epics, and Olympic games, foundered on the disputatious reality of their fiercely independent city-states. Similar objections have been made to claims that the Sumerians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Philistines, the Hittities, and the Elamites were ancient nations, or that the Sinhalese, the Japanese, or the Koreans might be so described during the first millennium of the Common Era.15 Only in the case of Israel does it seem plausible to discern a recognizably ancient nation, with its precise (though disputed) territoriality, its creation and ancestry myths, its shared historical memories of the Exodus, the Conquest, and wars with the Philistines, its strong sense of exceptionalism and providential destiny, its self-definition against a hostile “other,” and its common laws and public culture. These were, and are, essential themes in the unfinished history of the Jews, but this example has also furnished ever since “a developed model of what it means to be a nation.” From this perspective, the Bible was not just concerned (in the New Testament) with the collective religious identities (and confrontations) of the saved and the damned; it also provided (in the Old Testament) the prototype for the self-imaginings and collective identities (and confrontations) that were essential to becoming and being a nation.16

  Notwithstanding Israel’s subsequent defeats, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the resulting dispersals and diaspora of the Jewish people, their vivid and compelling narrative of the making and maintenance of “the original nation” furnished a powerful biblical precedent for what would become, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the peoples and polities of medieval Christian Europe.17 As strains of national consciousness emerged from new communities forming across the continent, the example of Israel was constantly invoked, and by the thirteenth century different groups of people were being referred to in terms of their specific national identities.18 When the emperor Frederick II wrote to his fellow rulers in 1241 warning of the Mongol threat, he enumerated the qualities of the varied continental peoples—or nations—as follows: Germany was “fervent in arms”; France was “the mother and nurse of chivalry”; Spain was “warlike and bold”; and England was “fertile and protected by its fleet.” He also distinguished the lands at the extremes of what was then the known world, describing “bloodstained Ireland, active Wales, watery Scotland and glacial Norway.” These stereotypes may have exaggerated the autonomy and territoriality of these nascent nations, but they suffice to suggest that such identities were already in the thirteenth century an important element in a ruler’s relation to his subjects, and in the assertion of power over his neighbors.19 Nor was this sense of secular solidarity exclusively confined to those who governed; it was also a collective sentiment, with medieval peoples expressing the belief that they belonged to nations and using the words “people” and “nation” in their Latin forms (“gens” and “natio”) interchangeably.20

  Such was “the medieval construction of the world,” of which the chronicler Regino of Prüm had claimed as early as 900 CE that “the various nations differ in descent, custom, language and law.”21 Distinctiveness may not have been everywhere so pronounced, but it was certainly present in England by the reign of Alfred the Great when the joining of the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia meant that one collective identity of Englishness first came recognizably into being. Promoted by the monarch, who drew on the precedents of ancient Israel, as well as a shared sense of the past, a common religion and language, and opposition to the pagan and predatory Danes, this English national solidarity was readily and widely shared.22 And despite the traumas of the Norman invasion of 1066, it would reassert itself soon after, being fully reestablished by the fourteenth century. Just as Alfred the Great had drawn on the Venerable Bede’s revealingly entitled Ecclesiastical History of the English People (or Nation), as well as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in promoting a shared sense of English national identity, so twelfth century writers lent historical validation to the same development, among them William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Newburgh, and Geffrei Gaimar, who created an interpretation of the past that was “triumphantly English and almost teleologically English-centred.” They would be followed by Geoffrey Chaucer, who was “the first writer in English explicitly to claim status as a national poet,” and by growing declarations that English was the natural national language. The result was that by the early fourteenth century more Englishmen than ever before felt themselves to be part of a national community.23

  By then, the continental analog to this revived English sense of “collective solidarity” and “national feeling” existed in many of the medieval realms.24 In France, Kings Louis VI and Louis IX were able to draw on a growing sense of national consciousness, reinforced by the historical claim that all the Franks traced a common descent from the Trojans, which was also expressed in their great national epic Chanson de Roland. The same was true among the Germans, many of whom shared a common kingdom (as well as their own Trojan ancestors) and also took pride in their superior national cultural achievements. As the poet Walther von der Vogelweide put it around 1200, “I have seen many countri
es, and I liked to observe the best of them,” but Germany was “above all of them. From the Elbe to the Rhine and from there to the frontier of Hungary certainly the best people live whom I have been acquainted with in all the world.”25 The “collective character” known as the nation, often reinforced by mythical accounts of common origins, could likewise be found in medieval Poland and Denmark, and by the late thirteenth century the word “patria” had acquired a recognizably modern meaning, denoting not only a delineated national territory but also a loyalty to it as one’s fatherland.26

  As with King Alfred’s battles against the Danes, these burgeoning national identities were often forged, defined, and strengthened as the result of conflict with an aggressive enemy or “other.” In the case of England, it was the wars against the Welsh and the Scots that produced the most strident, abusive, and self-congratulatory writings in praise of Englishness. “The English,” remarked one contemporary author, “like angels are always conquerors.… As though a swine should resist the valour of the lion, the filthy Scots attack England.” “The two nations,” commented Archbishop FitzRalph of Armagh, “are always opposed to one another from traditional hatred, the Irish and Scots being always enemies of the English.”27 Demonizing the enemy has always worked wonders at galvanizing self-identity, and during the twelfth century this solidarity morphed into what later became a characteristic mixture of “superiority and xenophobia” on the part of the English nation.28 And it was in response to such arrogance and hostility that in 1290 the Treaty of Birgham insisted that Scotland was “separate and divided from England,” and that in 1320 the Scots proclaimed their collective identity against the English in the Declaration of Arbroath. Made on behalf of the whole Scottorum nacio, it was an eloquent affirmation of the Scots’ solidarity and distinctiveness, as one people under their own king.29