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History Notes Nationalism Notes

Nationalism Notes

Updated Nationalism Notes

Nationalism Notes

Nationalism

Approximately 10 pages

Brief notes on the concept of nationalism and the idea of a national history....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Nationalism Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Nationalism

Contents

  • Past questions

  • Quotes

    • Nationalism

  • Nationalism

    • Nature

    • History

    • Invention and uniqueness

    • National peculiarities

    • Comparing national histories

Quotes

Nationalism

  • ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members’.

    • Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.

  • That ‘a people dissatisfied with the present will grasp at any version of the past’.

    • Angus Macintyre.

  • ‘Un passé qui ne passe pas’

    • Eric Conan on Vichy France.

  • ‘In 1817, motivated by the burning desire to contribute to the triumph of constitutionalism, I set about searching in history books for proofs and arguments that would support my political ideas’.

    • Augustin Thierry.

  • Marxism-Leninism is ‘the unified materialistic theory of social development’.

    • Peter Bollhagen.

  • ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.’

    • Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain.

  • “The “Hungarian rock surrounded by the Teutonic-Slavic sea”.

    • The poet Mihály Vörösmarty.

  • “We must admit that by ourselves we are not a great state.”

    • Francis Déak.

  • “[T]he Slavs are not fit to govern, they must be ruled”.

    • Count Julius Andrássy.

  • “What is certain is that he was neither a Czech nor a German… For this reason, Count Taaffe was to a certain degree objective and unbiased with regard to national strivings”.

    • A journalist.

  • Be tough! The Czech skull is impervious to reason, but it is susceptible to blows.”

    • Theodor Mommsen during the Badeni crisis.

  • “Our citizens of the non-Magyar tongue must… become accustomed to the fact that they belong to the community of a nation-state, of a state which is not a conglomerate of various races”.

    • Stephen Tisza, Hungarian PM in 1913.

  • That “the history of the world ought to go before the history of England”.

    • John Morley.

  • I am “an enemy of modern France”.

    • Hippolyte Taine.

Nationalism

Nature

  • The question of what a nation actually is has tormented historians.

    • Establishing objective criteria is next to impossible.

      • Stalin’s definition is perhaps the best known.

      • For him, a nation was an historical entity with a community of language, territory, economic life, and culture.

      • But constant exceptions can be found.

    • Eric Hobsbawm simply opts for the vague definition of a large number of people who think themselves to be a nation.

      • Hobsbawm has focused on invented traditions that underpin nationality.

    • Nationalism holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.

  • Benedict Anderson described a nation in Imagined Communities as an imagined political community.

    • Imagined because none of its members will ever meet everyone in the nation.

      • ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members’.

      • Or understand everything in it.

      • All communities larger than face-to-face villages are imagined.

      • They exist only in people’s heads.

    • He points out that nations do not create states and nationalism.

      • But that states and nationalism creates nations.

  • For Ernest Gellner, the nation is a total invention.

    • Not the awakening of a nation to self-consciousness.

      • But the invention of a nation that does not exist.

  • The question is whether writing about the nation-state legitimises it.

    • Making historians, perhaps unwittingly, propaganda agents for nationalism.

      • Their choice of historical framework is inescapably political.

History

  • Robert A Rosenstone has argued that the historian is part of history.

    • He has led an understanding of self-reflexivity.

      • Incorporating the nature of a historian’s present into their craft.

    • At once a recorder of the past.

      • And a manifestation of the present.

      • Shaped by his own cultural, and therefore national, circumstances.

      • A reflection which should be acknowledged in the works.

      • Not a scientist, as Leopold von Ranke and the German school insisted.

  • The nineteenth century saw the impact of this German school of history.

    • Which prized the scientific merits of an exercise.

      • Over the literary merits traditionally heralded.

    • Historians were forced to remain patriotic, but write non-partisan histories.

      • Marc Bloch, a leading Annales figure, admitted his own patriotism.

      • But insisted it had no influence over his own historical writing.

      • He had close links with Germany and a deep fascination with German history.

    • This separation between politics and scholarliness was a typically specious bit of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rhetoric.

      • Impartiality was an unobtainable idea.

      • National historians fall prey to various myths.

      • Historians such as Guizot moved easily into politics.

  • In the nineteenth century, professional history writing was closely institutionalised.

    • Historians were controlled by the state.

      • Appointing them to posts.

      • Promoting them to research institutes.

      • Therefore creating a high standard of conformity.

      • This was particularly true of Germany.

  • Walter Bagehot presented the history of the nineteenth century as one of nation-building.

    • But Bagehot conceded the difficulty of defining exactly what the nation was.

  • National historians have had to account for particular national phenomena.

    • The Papacy in Italian history.

    • The Revolution in French history.

    • Parliament in British history.

    • Racialisation in German history.

    • Germany and Italy have looked to their own cultural superiority.

      • Britain and France tend to look politically.

      • France has focused on the idea of the citizen.

      • Britain has looked to parliament.

      • Germany has had a very biological view of history.

  • Marxist historians have tended to look critically at nationalism and national histories.

    • They struggled to understand ‘the national question’ as they called it.

    • Yet Marxists states and revolutions have tended to define themselves in national terms.

      • As Eric Hobsbawm observes.

      • Tom Nairn observed in The Break-up of Britain: ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.’

    • Marxists have...

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