The modern definition of the ‘nation’ emerged in eighteenth century Europe. Before that there were kings and rulers, there were kingdoms and they had their boundaries, but there was no nation. If you take Europe for instance, you had the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, which had almost half of central Europe under it, the British Empire, which spanned a large part of the world outside England. You had the French and Germans who fought over Europe repeatedly. There was no concept of a nation. Each empire had as its boundaries, and various religious groups who fought each other – Catholics opposed Protestants, Protestants opposed Catholics. Both opposed the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Ottomans oppressed everybody. The concept of nations, as we understand it now, emerged in the eighteenth century, as a part of the process of defining what Karl Marx called the economic boundary of the market under Capitalism. This is the basis of the modern nation-state.
The nation-states organised themselves around certain common cultural parameters, which people in the nations could identify with. Most commonly, it was language, which emerged as a part of the process of the consolidation of a national identity. The languages, by which we identify most countries in Europe today – English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. -- became dominant in a particular country through a long history of struggles and conflicts. A number of languages were lost or were termed as dialects of the (what emerged as) the dominant language. For example in Spain the people in Catalonia (surrounding Barcelona) argue that the Catalan language is different from Spanish, yet, it continues to be categorized as Spanish. Thus the process of the making of the nation was not a simple one by which, suddenly, a national identity emerged. The nations emerged as part of a much larger cultural exchange and, quite often, violent conflicts. Side by side with the establishment of the capitalist market, we also saw the establishment of a language and a ‘national’ identity.
But the definition of what we mean by a nation, and nationalism, was understood in two different ways. While both versions were defined by a territory or a geographic boundary for the nation, one focussed on the people, the other focussed on the land. The idea of civic nationalism draws its inspiration from the French Revolution, and define that all people who live within the boundary of the nation are full citizens of France: the nation essentially is its people . Hence all citizens were seen as equal before the law, therefore the slogan – liberty, equality and fraternity. Any citizen of the French State was a full citizen. The French revolution not only overthrew the ruling aristocracy, it also gave full citizenship rights to all people residing in France, including, for example, for instance Jews who were persecuted in most of Europe.
In this period of European history, another concept of the nation was also emerging. This was the ‘blood and race’ concept of the nation that arose in Germany. This was intimately connected to the land – those who belonged to the land were the ones who belong to this nation. It introduced the concept that the original inhabitants of the land were the true inheritors of the nation, and all others would be viewed as being outside this nation.
Those who advanced this notion argued for a Germany nation composed only of those who drew their ancestry from people who lived in the imagined past of Germany. It was based on an imagined past as we know that no country in the world is populated by just one kind of people, as for tens of thousands of years people migrated across the face of the earth and mixed with existing populations. This concept of the ‘pure’ German nation was based on the myth that it is possible to identify a particular ‘race’ with very similar 'racial characteristics' as being the original inhabitants of a nation. This is exclusionary nationalism: it includes one set of people based on some arbitrary characteristic while excluding all the others.
The last three hundred years of European history has been a reflection of these two contentious ideas of the nation. The effort to create such homogenous blood and race nations led, for example, to expulsions of Protestants from France, Catholics from Denmark and Norway. Europe went through hundreds of years of war to try and create such “homogenous” nations. This is the bloody history of European nationalism: wars, massacres, ethnic cleansing and mass deportation of minorities.
The ‘blood and race’ concept of a nation led ultimately to fascism in Germany. Whoever does not belong to the ‘pure’ German nation, defined by their supposed ancestry, will have no place in Germany -this was Hitler’s basic position. On this basis he proceeded to kill the Jews and gypsies in Germany, and we all know about the horrendous effects of the rise of fascism in Germany that culminated in the Second World War.
Contrary to what Hitler and other fascists in Germany proposed, it is important to understand that nations as we know them today did not have their origins in a mythical past. They have been constructed, over hundreds and thousands of years through interactions between people. It has led to the emergence of a shared culture, a shared language (or languages in many countries) and a shared purpose as a nation. The interactions leading to the emergence of of European nations was largely accompanied by bloody conflicts.
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