Class 2: The Genesis of Nations (3)
from their local traditions
and forces them into a kind of melting pot in the city
where the lowest common denominator might be their language.
And so on the basis of their language
and feeling alienated because they're uprooted,
they might seem to think, okay, we're part of a nation
or they'd be vulnerable to politicians
who made that argument.
They also said the modernizing state,
the modernizing state is going to make people literate.
This is what the modernizing state does.
It educates people. It makes people literate.
At the end of the 19th century, early 20th century
in European countries, you go from very low literacy
to very, very high rates of literacy very quickly.
But literacy can also mean
not identifying with an imperial center,
but identifying with a nation
because you're reading perhaps in your own language
or you learn to read in one language,
then you learn to read in a different language.
And so these guys made this argument,
which was then repeated in the 1980s
by a number of national theorists
or these kinds of arguments were made in the 1980s
by some important interesting national theorists
called Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson.
Who also said that the nation is not ancient,
but it's a result of certain kinds of modernization.
So that's the short course on the theories
of where nations come about.
What I'm trying to say is that this argument
about the theory of how nations come about,
goes back almost as far as the nation, right?
So the position that nations aren't old, they're new.
People have been saying that for more than a hundred years.
National theorists will generally say
oh, everyone who talks about the nation, they're stupid.
They're unaware of the fact
that it's politically constructed.
No, no, no.
There's been awareness
that it might be politically constructed
for almost as long as there's been the nation itself.
This discussion that we're having now has been going on
for almost as long as the nation has existed.
Oh, by the way, this Kelles-Krauz guy.
I mention him partly because
he gives two interesting examples for his argument
that the nation is all about modernity
and not about tradition.
And his examples are the Jews and the Ukrainians.
So at the time when he was writing,
which was the early years of the 20th century,
he died in 1905.
So the very early years of the 20th century,
the idea that Jews were a nation
was generally seen as absurd
because they lacked what were thought of then
as the objective attributes of a nation.
For example, territory.
And so Jews can't be a nation.
Ukrainians were thought not to be a nation
because they lacked another objective attribute,
which was a historical political class.
So if your theory of the nation
is that there is certain durable stuff,
like land or like a political class,
and that those make up the nation,
then you look at the Ukrainians and the Jews in 1904
and you'd say, no, they're not nations.
The Hungarians maybe, the Poles maybe,
the Germans certainly, but not the Ukrainians and the Jews.
What Kelles-Krauz said is think about it in a different way.
Bracket what you think about the past,
look at the way modernization affects people right now
and it turns out it doesn't matter he argues,
whether or not there are these
"objective attributes" or not.
All that matters is that modernization
is gonna generate the processes, the alienation,
the urbanization, which are gonna lead people
to these new forms of solidarity.
And so when he said that the Jews and the Ukrainians
were gonna be modern nations in the early 20th century,
that was a very radical argument,
but it was consistent with the theory of the nation,
which says that the nation is a result of modernization.
So that ends the part about the theory of the nation.
I want to close by talking about
how some of our Ukrainians thought about the nation.
So we've talked about the nation in general,
we've talked about theories of the nation.
Now we're gonna talk about
some of how the Ukrainians thought about the nation.
And it's important to be clear
that this whole thing is a very self-conscious process.
The people who made nations knew what they were doing.
They knew what they were doing.
The way they talked about it might be a little different
than how we would talk about it,
but no one slept-walked into nationhood.
That didn't happen that way.
There were larger processes in the background, I think.
We can keep talking about this.
I think the modernization people are right,
that larger processes in the background like urbanization,
like capitalism, like literacy made it likely
that some new form of solidarity would emerge.
But where, and for whom?
Where and for whom?
Why these nations and not other nations?
So again, going back to the point I made at the beginning,
nations mess with the past.
Once they're created, they mess with the past.
They make it very hard for people to process the past.
It's like the periodic table's invented
and then it says everybody do alchemy.
They mess with the past.
And one of the ways the nations mess with the past,
maybe the most profound one is that they convince everyone
that their own existence is self-evident.
So if you're in Poland
and you grow up in the Polish educational system,
many things might be uncertain,
but the existence of Poland is not called into question.
Even in the United States
where there's so many obvious contingencies.
So many obvious contingencies.
It's very difficult to argue that the United States,
that the revolution of 1776 had to happen
or that the Americans had to win
or in 1812, they had to win.
I mean, they should have lost in 1812.
We, sorry, should have lost in 1812.
You know, the Louisiana Purchase.
All this stuff, it obviously didn't have to happen,
or the border with Canada, totally arbitrary.
I don't mean that in an aggressive way,
if there are any Canadians out there.
It's cool. It's cool.
It's fine with me.
But even if you come to an American school system,
the existence of America
isn't gonna be called into question, right?
The first class, the teacher's not gonna say, "By the way,
America didn't have to be.
Maybe it shouldn't have been. Maybe that would've been cool.
What if the British Empire had been here longer?
Maybe that would've been better."
I'm gonna guess that didn't happen
in any of your classes, right?
All right. So we'll find out where you went to school.
But the basic idea is the nation makes itself self-evident.
But it isn't, right? It isn't.
So when we study Ukraine,
we're gonna be studying the formation of a political nation.
But what I don't want to think is,
wow, Ukraine is really special 'cause it's political
and all the other nations are real.
That's a lesson that I don't want you to draw.
I want you to think 'hah, this is interesting'
how the Ukrainian nation
is maybe a little more self-consciously political
or maybe it's been forced into circumstances
which reveal the political character of the nation
to our eyes a little more clearly
than with the French or the Americans or whatever.
But I don't want you to think,
oh yeah, the Ukrainians are kind of funky,
but everyone else has a rock solid tradition.
I don't want you to think that.
I want you to think, oh,
as we've studied the Ukrainian nation,
we're gonna see patterns which maybe actually help us
to understand the Poles better or the Russians better,
or even the Americans and the British and the French better.
So how did the Ukrainians think about themselves?
In the 19th century,
the main move in the Russian Empire and don't worry,
this is all gonna become clear
when the Russian Empire starts and when it ends and so on.
For now I just need you to know that in the 19th century,
most people who spoke the Ukrainian language
were in the Russian Empire.
And in the Russian Empire in the 19th century,
the second half, there was this idea of going to the people
which was called populism.
So not populism in the sense that you're used to,
populism now means, I don't know what it means, honestly,
but it means something like if you...
Okay, I'm not gonna go down that road.
When people say populism, they generally mean something
that's not liberalism that we don't like.
But populism in this sense meant going to the people
and trying to figure out who the people were.
It was an urban movement in the Russian Empire
associated with the science of what was then called
ethnography that we now call anthropology.
Very influential in literature.
Dostoevsky starts out being this way
and then goes to prison and actually meets people
and changes his mind about how great they are,
which is an interesting story.
So going to the people
and so one source of the Ukrainian national identity
is this empirical contact with the people
in the Russian Empire where you realize,
huh, their folklore and their songs
and their language are different.
They're different.
They just are different than the peoples further north,
the people who we now call the Russians.
And so you go to the people
and you discover that the society,
if you take it on its own terms,
is just a little bit different
and you start thinking about that.
That populism leads to something
which we now call social history,
where you locate the nation.
That's the Ukrainian historian who did this,
where you locate the nation in its own self-understanding,
in its customs, in its songs,
in its stories, in its language.
So in the 19th century, that's a very strong movement.
And so you then say, okay, the nation has always been there
or it's been there for a really long time,
but it's not politically represented and that's the problem.
That's the problem.
So you're replacing the kinds of
legitimating political stories we talked about before
with a different political legitimating story.
So it's not the czar or the Polish landlords
who should control politics, it should be the people
because they've been here for a long time
and look how numerous they are.
And if you look at their customs,
you can see that they're in fact a unity.
That's populism, that's social history,
that's going to the people.
And of course Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi
wrote the very, very long history which justifies all this.
There's a stage in the 19th century
where you have to write a very long history
in order to esta--
I don't mean to make it sound like a joke,
'cause it's not easy, but you have to write a long history
to document the continuity of the people
where social history is in the foreground
and the political history is in the background
and that's a radical reversal.
Until then, generally you could write history
with just the politics
and the people didn't have to be present really at all.
Now, the weakness of this or a tendency within this
is that it will tend to move you
towards an ethnic understanding of what the nation is.
Because where you're identifying the nation
is in its customs and its language and so on.
Well, what if there are other people,
I've already mentioned the Greeks and the Jews,
there are probably others in Ukraine, we'll get to them.
But what if there are other people
who don't speak the same language
or who have markedly different customs?
What do you do with them?
That's the problem of ethnicity.
That if you define the nation in terms of customs,
then that always is going to raise the question