Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Review of From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe by John Connelly

Ever since I met a Croatian priest in 1978, I have at turns been fascinated and repelled by the passions of East Europeans. An otherwise affable man, on the subject of Serbia he was driven by an implacable rage, combining religion, language, political systems, and his experience of repression and personal humiliation. Connelly’s book offers the best summation in historical context of what drove him. It is a reading experience that only a master writer and historian can provide – riveting, informative, and controversial.

The book begins during the slow wind down of the Ancien Régime in France, when the aristocratic order was giving way to a more inclusive, sometimes democratic, impulse. The East European peoples at that time were under the jurisdiction of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, or Ottoman Empires, circulating relatively freely within each and co-existing with both tolerance and tensions. The result was a massive commingling of minority ethno-linguistic groups, most particularly Slavs, Jews, Germans, and Hungarians. Upwards of 90% of them were peasants supporting aristocrats in leisure (about 5% of the population) and the rest were the “managers” of the aristocrats’ assets.

In the aftermath of Napoleonic conquests, which swept away many traditional institutions and power arrangements, the rural population began to assert their rights as equal participants in modern industrializing societies. The notion of ethno-linguistic “nations” emerged; it was closely related to the Romantic movement, i.e. the unique “genius” of every language and people was supposed to claim legitimacy. The principal themes of the book are what happened after this.

This initiated a frantic effort to “save” the minority languages, often writing them down for the first time or reviving them after long domination that had eliminated them from administrative officialese. As in Russia with Pushkin, they invented entire vocabularies to describe concepts and emotions that aristocrats had preferred to express in French. When there was a dominant language group controlling government, administration, and commerce, this led naturally to a perception of cultural oppression, both economic and civilizational in that they feared their native cultures were “dying”.

These sentiments fed a nascent nationalism, as supported by Enlightenment critics such as Johann Gottfried Herder, one of the precursors of Romanticism. This involved the search for, and outright creation of, founding myths to bind disparate people together who had never conceived that there was any kind of unity or citizenship beyond the ten-mile radius from their farms.

Suddenly, it became imperative to develop a literature or to find “epics” and “histories” of glories that were supposedly suppressed during the empire building of the last few centuries. During much of the 19^th century, the nationalists tended to be city dwellers who had almost no idea of the needs and desires of their presumed compatriots in the country. This is the reason why the democratic “revolutions” of 1848 failed: peasants felt threated by urban elites whose ideas struck them as alien, hence they allied themselves with reactionary forces loyal to distant sovereigns, legitimate largely through religion.

During this time, explosive economic development - in trade, mercantilism, manufacturing and later industrialization - generated a rush to urbanization. As cities grew by offering unimagined opportunities to peasants, the aristocratic order came under severe strain. New conceptions of rights and obligations arose in nascent ideologies, most importantly that of liberal capitalism in the early 19^th century, according to which the “market” would distribute goods in the most efficient fashion. With infrastructure development, trains increased mobility as well as communications.

With their privileges in peril, the ruling classes attempted to deflect popular rage onto their own managerial class, many of whom were Jews. This generated new tensions, in particular adding modern anti-Semitic form to ancient prejudices. Suddenly, rage was directed at Jews and innumerable “others”, who were portrayed as foreign, even unnatural while making up to 30% of the population in some areas.

Prior to the Great War, popular rage was also directed against the representative ethno-linguistic groups associated with the Imperial powers. Germans became the enemy to Czech nationalists in Prague, just as Austrians were in Serbia and Hungarians in Romania. Connelly stresses that none of this was inevitable and that, with more prudent policies and some luck, multi-national entities may have been able to evolve in more inclusive, perhaps democratic, directions. In hindsight, I do think this is a bit too optimistic.

In the aftermath of World War I, espousing the droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes, or “self determination”, President Wilson and the allies broke up the enemy Empires in favor of smaller nation-states in Central Europe. Unfortunately, they did so with little understanding of the complexities under the surface of the entities they were creating, cobbling together groupings of peoples who were unprepared to function as unified polities.

Take Yugoslavia. Croats had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and were Catholic, urban, often highly educated; meanwhile, Serbs had been vassals of the Ottomans and Russians; they remained largely rural, less educated, and often served as cannon fodder. Moreover, Bosnians, if Slavs, were Moslem. Even though they spoke mutually comprehensible dialects of the same language, throwing them together proved a disastrous mistake as Serbs, with their martial organization, dominated the new state.

In terms of ethno-linguistic boundaries, the new entities were a mess. Only half of Czechoslovakia spoke their official language – the rest were German, Hungarian, and Ruthenian. Thus, the problems associated with Empire remained largely unresolved, in effect producing mini-empires on the model of the old ones. This was only partially resolved by ethnic cleansing during and after World War II – at horrific human cost. (Connelly is very clear about the complicity of the various states in the Holocaust, with a few notable exceptions, such as Czechoslovakia.)

Once they fell under the Soviet sphere of influence in the post-war period, Eastern Europe completed the industrialization process in accordance with Stalinist war-economy methods: heavy industry, raw material production, and de-emphasis on consumption. This resulted in very high levels of growth by econometric measures, but by the mid-1950s, it led to discontent and eventually, serious unrest. After Stalin’s death, the USSR attempted to re-orient economies to consumer goods.

Finally, the communist regimes were unsuccessful in building viable economies and societies. By the 1970s, as growth slowed, the Soviet satellites began to borrow money from the west, placing their societies in a debt bind from which they were unable to emerge. Their goods could not compete in terms of quality or price and their raw materials (e.g., mines) were running out. Moreover, their political structures proved inflexible, with numerous experiments such as the Prague Spring crushed by the USSR for security considerations. When the regimes attempted to lower the living standards of their populations to pay down foreign debts, combined with the relative opening of Gorbachev’s reforms, the system collapsed in the late 1980s with a rapidity that shocked the world.

While Connelly attempts to bring developments up to date with the recent rise of authoritarian regimes, his book pretty much ends with the collapse of communism. He does cover the breakdown of Yugoslavia very well, a catastrophic eruption of viciousness and mayhem that were avoided in its neighbors to the north.

This book is a great pleasure to read. It masterfully covers complexities the likes of which are hard for Americans to grasp. For me, it was a great sumup and review of issues I have followed my entire adult life. Every page is dense with political detail, narratives, and historical context. I reveled in the intricacies of Transylvania, Bessarabia, Slovakia, to cite a few examples.

That being said, it does not adequately cover the Ottoman Empire, unlike the other imperial players. Certain countries are also neglected, such as Bulgaria and Macedonia. I would have liked more about culture. These are minor criticisms – the scope of the book is so vast that it is more than a full intellectual meal.