How to Think of Ethnolinguistic Nationalism in Central Europe? (or the Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State) Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews Euro-Visions: IIIS/TLRH Public Lecture Series Trinity College Dublin February 14, 2013, Thur, 18:15-19:45
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How to Think of Ethnolinguistic Nationalism in Central Europe? (or the Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State) Tomasz Kamusella University.
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How to Think of Ethnolinguistic Nationalism in Central Europe?
(or the Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State)
Tomasz KamusellaUniversity of St Andrews
Euro-Visions: IIIS/TLRH Public Lecture SeriesTrinity College Dublin
February 14, 2013, Thur, 18:15-19:45
Nationalism• What is nationalism? (The standard state- and group-building
ideology in the [late] modern world)• Hans Kohn: Western vs the Rest (Eastern) nationalism, 1940s• Absence of nationalism in the West (But > Michael Billig: ‘banal
nationalism,’ 1995)• John Plamenatz: ‘good’ Western vs ‘bad’ Eastern nationalism, 1970s• ‘Ancient hatreds’ in the East vs ‘reason and rationalism’ in the West• Ethnic vs civic nationalism: Is it a dichotomy at all?• What about nationalism across the globe?
- Hans Kohn The Age of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History, 1962
- Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities, 1983• Most books on nationalism draw examples from CE Europe and
generalize on their basis• Is it rational and justified to generalize on nationalism on the basis
of ‘bad ethnic Eastern’ nationalism?
What is Ethnic Nationalism?• What is ethnicity: A difficult question with many answers
(Totality of all the cultural markers employed for distinguishing a group from others?)
• But if CE Europe widely considered home of ethnic nationalism: What are the nationalism’s practices?
• In most cases language is of paramount importance for the region’s nationalisms
• Is it then ‘ethnolinguistic nationalism’?• I propose to define ethnic (ethnolinguistic) nationalism
through the observed practices of state- and people-building steeped in language
• Where is Central Europe? In turn the territorial extant of such practices could define the region
What is a Language? (1)• The distinction between ‘language’ and ‘a language’• ‘Language’ is studied by linguists, but ‘a language’ is a socio-political
phenomenon, more determined by extralinguistic forces than linguistic ones
• Hence, ‘languages’ in plural should be researched more by social scientists
• Leonard Bloomfield’s 1926 linguistic definition of ‘a language’ and dialect (mutual in/comprehensibility)
• But: mutually incomprehensible dialects of Arabic or Chinese are dialects of these languages
• But: exactly the same Moldovan and Romanian, and almost the same Bulgarian and Macedonian are different languages
• But: Low German is NOT a dialect of Dutch with which it is mutually comprehensible, but of German with which it is largely incomprehensible
• What about: asymmetrical incomprehensibility between Spanish and Portuguese, or among Scandinavia’s Germanic languages
What is a Language? (2)• Who decides when a dialect / language is a language?• ‘Imagined language’ ≈ nation as an ‘imagined community’?• Nation = ethnic and/or other human group(s) imagined to be
a nation• A language = dialect(s) imagined (through dictionaries,
grammars, official use, educational system, army, state offices and other state institutions, mass media, enterprises, cyberspace, etc) to be a language in its own right
• Breakup of Yugoslavia (1991-2008)• Breakup of Serbo-Croatian > Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian,
Serbian
Practices of ‘Really Existing’ Nationalism
1: The speakers of a language constitute a nation (ergo, the language is a national one)2: The territory inhabited by this language’s speakers should be made into the nation’s nation-state3: The nation’s national language cannot be shared with any other nation or polity4: No autonomous regions with official languages other than the national one can exist in the nation’s nation-state5: By the same token, no autonomous regions with the nation’s language can exist in other polities(NB: Disjunction between ideology and reality on the ground)‘Serious’ name for the practice: Normative Isomorphism of Language, Nation and State
All That Began in the Balkans? From Religion to Language
Year Isomorphic States Number of Isomorphic States
1864 Greece 11866 Greece, Romania 21878 Bulgaria, Romania 2 Greece1905 Bulgaria, Norway,
Romania3
1913 Albania, Bulgaria, Norway, Romania
4
WW I: Isomorphism Moves NorthYear Isomorphic States Number of
Isomorphic States1916 Albania, Bulgaria, Norway, Romania 41917 Albania, Bulgaria, Norway, Ukraine 4 Romania
Mount Athos, Russian Federation, Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dheleia, Transnistria
[4]
35 40% 77%
Fine Tuning: Populations in 2007Population of the states fulfilling the isomorphism
Population of the states aspiring to fulfill the isomorphism
Population of other ethnolinguistic states
Population of the non-ethnolinguistic states
Population of all the analyzed polities
Percentage of the population of the isomorphic states out of the total population of the analyzed polities
Population of the isomorphic states and of the states aspiring to fulfill the isomorphism combined, expressed as a percentage of the total population of the analyzed polities
112.53m 245.16m 23.29m 35.07m 416.32m 27% 86%
Isomorphic Languages in 2007Slavic languages
Baltic languages
Finno-Ugric languages (non-Indo-European)
Germanic languages
Romance languages
Isolate Indo-European languages
Bulgarian (C), Czech (L), Macedonian (C), Montenegrin (C & L), Polish (L), Slovak (L), Slovenian (L)
[7]
Latvian (L), Lithuanian (L)
[2]
Estonian (L), Hungarian (L)
[2]
Norwegian (L)
[1]
Romanian (L)[1]
Albanian (L)[1]
[1] The parenthetical remark ‘(C)’ indicates that the language is written in Cyrillic.[2] The parenthetical remark ‘(L)’ indicates that the language is written in Latin characters.
Scope for Wider-Ranging Comparisons: Isomorphic States Outside Central Europe in 2007
• W Europe: Iceland (Icelandic)• C Asia: Turkmenistan (Turkmen) 1• S Asia: Bhutan (Dzongkha), Maldives (Maldivian) 2• SE Asia: Cambodia (Khmer), Indonesia (Indonesian),