On Feb. 28, 2018, the New York Times put out a five-minute “explainer” video of the concept of nationalism. “Nationality is weird,” the New York Times’s Max Fisher intones as the video starts, soon explaining that this is “because national identity is made up.” The thrust of the video is to set up the forces of 19th-century nationalism against a countervailing idea of a cosmopolitan community of values: “Today, we are fighting over whether to keep that kind of national identity,” Fisher says, before admitting that constructing an equally alluring alternative is proving to be challenging.
On the surface, Fisher’s argument seems to toe the line of the so-called modernist nationalism scholars, who argue that national identity has been “constructed” top-down and that this construction is mostly a product of economic development and industrialization. But it overlays that work with a kind of progressive optimism that badly distorts both the scholarship and our broader understanding of history. It concludes that since national identities are constructed, they are essentially superfluous. They may be alluring and deeply embedded in our psyches, but they can and should be overcome.
John Connelly’s new book, From Peoples Into Nations, takes aim at just this kind of breezy postmodernism. It is an ambitious work that both embraces existing thinking on nationalism and seeks to extend and complicate it. The book argues that nationalism, rather than being simply “invented” and thus somehow external to history, is, in fact, the terrain upon which history plays out. Connelly’s argument is not that nationalism is some kind of eternal, unchanging force — he agrees with the modernist scholars insofar as they insist that national identity was constructed, largely by elites in the 19th century, and is more often than not based on a common language. He is more skeptical, however, about the claim that industrialization is the main driver in this process and the attendant conclusion that nationalism is or ought to be a spent force. Indeed, he denounces the conceit that “had things gone differently, humans might have imagined no national communities at all.”
From Peoples Into Nations is a rich narrative history of Central and Eastern Europe rather than a work of political science. Its many examples refract kaleidoscopically against each other in ways that often frustrate easy generalizations. But what seems key for Connelly’s overarching theory is the agonistic element: Modern nationalist movements grew out of a perceived threat to a group’s existence. It is in this sense that nationalism distinguishes itself from ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, communism, or fascism. Nationalism is something much more fundamental and basic. “As soon as patriots created national languages,” Connelly writes, “nationalism itself became the language of politics, and no one who wanted power could avoid speaking it.”
Against the strict “modernist” theory, Connelly points to the existence of coherent national identities that stretch back into the medieval period. He singles out the Serbs, with their tradition of epic poetry, as an iconic example often glossed over in the theoretical literature. “The ballads created a firm sense of identity among villagers who could not read or write, telling them they were Christian, Serb, and ‘virtuous’” in contrast to the occupying Ottomans (and their Islamicized Slavic brethren). Modern Serbian nationalism, which would start to develop more fully in the 19th century (and which was indeed driven by elites), readily drew on these deep preexisting reservoirs of identity.
Further north, Connelly notes, a different kind of premodern identity developed among various geographically bounded aristocracies. Language didn’t tightly bind the Polish or Croatian nobles together — they tended to speak French or Latin, like nobles across the European continent. But they did feel a kind of political cohesion born of both a shared cultural history and privilege. Peasants, however, did not count. “The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity,” Connelly writes.
Both of these two types of premodern national identity were shaped “against” an other, but neither focused on language as something to unify around. And by the time language finally did come to play a role, it did so as a threat. A more recognizably modern Hungarian nationalism was aroused among the Magyar aristocracy in 1781, when the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II decided to impose German as the official language of the realm, displacing Latin. Fearing that German-speaking administrators would soon arrive and leave them at a permanent disadvantage, Hungarian patriots began resuscitating the vernacular Hungarian language, which most of them didn’t even speak that well. In Bohemia, where the aristocracy was both weaker and more thoroughly Germanized, the reaction was more muted. Visitors noted “murmurs and ostentatious use of Czech in the court in Vienna, a language [the nobles] spoke to stable boys and not in good company.”
Connelly pays ample attention to the role German Romanticism played in the development of national culture in Central Europe, but only to underline how the logic of agonism was already unavoidable by that time. Many of the “awakeners” from across the Habsburg Empire who excavated local languages and cultural myths felt they were laboring largely alone and feared that their national project would die with them. Connelly wryly points out that the fact that similar “zealots” popped up in almost every country he writes about proves that there were plenty of people willing to do the “hard work” of nationalism. By the mid-19th century, nationalism was emerging across the European continent in opposition to some kind of cultural hegemony, whether French, German, Austrian, or Ottoman.
This sense of threat cuts in poignant ways across Connelly’s sprawling narrative. Austria-Hungary’s nervous overextension into Bosnia in 1878, in a bid to prevent the rise of irredentism that might rile up its own Slavs, ended up fueling a radical Serbian nationalism that ultimately destroyed the empire. Otto von Bismarck’s decision to exclude Austria from a unified German Reich created the circumstances under which resentful Germans from Bohemia (later interwar Czechoslovakia) became eager foot soldiers for the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. Theodor Herzl’s encounter in 1895 with Karl Leuger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna and future inspiration to a young Adolf Hitler, finally convinced him that only a Jewish state could ensure the survival of the Jewish people. The genocidal Ustashe in Croatia, like their counterparts in Romania and Slovakia, embraced an especially vicious kind of violent racism as their governing ideology precisely because they were weak and politically illegitimate. It’s not that Connelly is in any way callous or glib about the immense human costs and cataclysmic consequences of modern nationalism. Rather, he conceives of nationalism as a substrate for history itself. To wish that things had worked out differently is to indulge in ahistorical fantasy.
The book ends, a bit abruptly, in the present moment, with a dry description of the violent Balkan Wars in the 1990s that segues into an account of the rise and faltering of the postnationalist European Union. Though Stalinism partially co-opted nationalism in creating vassal states in the Soviet Union’s periphery, it never fully triumphed. By 1989, communist economic policies created such a prosperity gulf with the rest of Europe that once the Iron Curtain lifted, most Eastern Europeans prioritized growth over almost anything else. The EU held out great promise for the impoverished countries of the East. Its early success at coaxing many of these countries into far-reaching reforms convinced many that the postnational project had legs. Since 2008 and the global financial crisis, however, the EU has taken serious hits to its credibility. The migrant crisis of 2015, in particular, created anxieties that no adroit politician could afford to ignore. And European nationalism is once again raising its head — and not just in the East.
It’s in understanding the current moment that From Peoples Into Nations proves most useful. A bien-pensant reader of the New York Times might see the return of nationalist forces across the continent as a throwback to more barbarous times. The stubborn deplorables backing Viktor Orban in Hungary and Law and Justice in Poland simply haven’t been educated out of their parochial attachments to “imagined communities.” For close readers of Connelly, however, seeing things this way is a category error. The return of nationalism to Europe is indeed troubling, as the forces it has the potential of unleashing can be profoundly destructive. But rightly understood, nationalism is the natural language of the politics of insecurity. To focus on intellectually overcoming it, rather than looking for the reasons for its reemergence, would be a waste of time.
Damir Marusic is the executive editor of the American Interest and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
