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FCO HISTORIANS

OCCASIONAL PAPERS

No. 12

Nationality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe

since the 18th Century

Foreignand CammonucalthOffice Febniaiy 19%

 FOREWORD

The idea of the `nation' is very old. Nationalism, which has made of the
nation, whether identified with state or ethnic community, the primary focus
of political loyalty, belongs very definitely to the modern era. During the
nineteenth century the principle of nationality contradicted earlier notions
of political legitimacy in international relations, and nationalism was often
regarded as a liberating force, reuniting ancient peoples and challenging
alien rule and long-established dynastic empires. But it was also used both
to fuel expansionist designs and to win popular support for authoritarian
regimes, and it became a potent source of tension and inter-communal strife
in the multinational states of central and eastern Europe. The Paris Peace
Conference which followed the First World War sought, in redrawing
Europe's frontiers, to apply the doctrine of national self-determination, and
in some instances granted statehood to nations whose past was almost as
uncertain as their future. National minorities, nevertheless, remained an
important feature of Europe's political geography, and their grievances
helped breed further crises and conflicts. The Second World War and the
accompanying Völkerwanderungled to the emergence of more homogenous
states in the lands east of the Elbe, and during the subsequent Cold War the
ethnic politics of the region lost much of their former significance. Recent
developments have, however, demonstrated that in post-communist Europe
nationalism is still alive, kicking and killing. A powerful vehicle for achieving
political change and social cohesion, it has, especially in the Balkans,
contributed to the resurrection of a disorderly and murderous past.

During the autumn of 1994 the FCO's Historians organised a series of

lectures on nationality and nationalism in east-central Europe since the
eighteenth century, the texts of which are published in this volume of
Occasional Papers. Each of the speakers addressed a particular issue of
national identity in its historical and international context. Professor
Norman Davies thus began the series by looking at Poland, an example of
what he terms `an extremely precocious national consciousness'. The
product of an advanced and well-developed national culture and embraced
by a large and educated nobility, Polish nationalism was shaped by the late
eighteenth-century partitions and the clash of national identities that
followed in the provinces absorbed by Prussia and Russia. But Professor
Davies maintains that the social expansion of the Polish national identity
from the aristocracy to the burgher classes, and eventually the peasantry,
brought with it the fragmentation of that identity on ethnic lines. The rise
of an exclusive integral nationalism, as expounded by Roman Dmowski,
alienated non-Catholics and other minorities within the historic Polish
lands, and was mirrored in the Zionism of Poland's large Jewish community.
In practice, it also served the ends of Poland's communist masters in the
half-century that followed the Second World War.

A similar pattern of rival nationalisms feeding off each other was also
observable in the former Habsburg provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, the
territories of the modern Czech Republic. There, for the best part of a
hundred years, Czech and German-speakers were locked in what ultimately
amounted to a struggle for supremacy. Dr Mark Cornwall traces the history
of this troubled relationship from 1848, when, as in 1918, some Bohemian
Germans looked to the creation of a Greater Germany as a solution to their
problems, through until the inter-war years, when the Czechs first
dominated the newly-formed Czechoslovakia and then fell victims to Nazi
occupation and persecution. Finally, he considers the significance of the
reversal of the Munich settlement and the tragic expulsion of the Sudeten
Germans from their homeland. The contest between Czechs and Germans
was until 1918 essentially a domestic problem of the multinational Habsburg
empire; thereafter it had broader international implications. Much the same
could be said of relations between the Hungarians, their neighbours and
subject peoples. The paper by Ian Roberts, who lectured on the persistence
of nationalism in Hungary, explores Hungary's position within the Austrian
and Austro-Hungarian empires, the endeavours of Hungarians to assert
their independence, policies of Magyarisation, and the difficulties which
beset the truncated Hungary that emerged from the peace settlements
which followed both world wars.

The centralising policies pursued, first by the Habsburgs, and then by the
Hungarians, did much to stimulate the growth amongst their Croat and
Slovene subjects of the South-, or Yugo-, Slav idea. In her paper Dr Wendy
Bracewell explains how, in the nineteenth century, the Croats looked first to
Illyrism and then to Yugoslavism as a means of asserting their national unity
and winning allies amongst other Balkan Slavs. By contrast, the Serbs, with
their own state and stronger sense of national awareness, only gradually
came to accept the Yugoslav idea as it became apparent that it might be a
way towards absorbing all Serbs and assimilating Croats, Slovenes and
Muslims in a Greater Serbia. The result was that both the highly-centralised
Yugoslavia of the inter-war years, and the federalised republic which
emerged from the Second World War, were rent by competing
interpretations of the meaning of Yugoslavism. The very flexibility of the
idea became, according to Dr Bracewell, a `source of conflict because of the
very different expectations which the Yugoslav peoples brought to their
union'.
One consequence of the collapse of Yugoslavia has been the establishment
of an independent state in Macedonia, a land which must be one of the
oldest geographical entities in Europe, but whose very name, let alone its
nationhood, is still disputed. Dr Richard Crampton's contribution surveys
Macedonia's complex history from the birth, in the 1870s, of the
`Macedonian Question' to the emergence, initially within Yugoslavia, of a
separate Macedonian nation with its own church, language and political
institutions. As Dr Crampton makes clear, the evolution of modern
Macedonia cannot be disentangled from the politics of the Ottoman
empire, the competing claims of Albanians, Bulgars, Greeks and Serbs, and
domestic developments in the former Yugoslavia. Macedonia's assertion of
its nationhood is evidence of the durability of the idea of the nation in
European history; but, as has so often been the case elsewhere, the
formation of a separate national identity in Macedonia can only be
understood by reference to the tensions generated by the rival nationalisms
of neighbouring peoples.

Keith Hamilton
Library and Records Department
 Foreign & Commonwealth Office

HISTORIANS

Occasional Papers

No. 12 February 1996

CONTENTS

Lectures presented in the series Nationality and Nationalism in East-Central

Europe since the 18th Century at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
October-December 1994

Page

The Polish Nation, 1793-1921: The Survival of an Idea and 3-10

an Ideal
Norman Davies
Czechs and Germans: Identities in Conflict, 1848-1948 11-23
Mark Cornwall
The Hungarian Nation: The Persistence of Nationalism, 24-38
1848-1956
Ian Roberts
The Yugoslav Idea: Origins and Development, 1830-1992 39-48
Wendy Bracewell
Macedonia, 1878-1992: National Rivalries and the Birth of 49-68
a Nation
Richard Crampton
Note on Contributors 69

Copies of this pamphlet will be deposited with the National Libraries

FCO Historians,
Library & Records Department,
Clive House, Petty France, London SW1H 9HD

Crown Copyright

ISBN 0 903359 62 6
 THE POLISH NATION, 1793-1921:
THE SURVIVAL OF AN IDEA AND AN IDEAL

Norman Davies

`Poland is not a nation, it's a conspiracy. '

A Russian diplomat of the 19th century

Before talking about Poland, I should mention two or three background

issues which are relevant to the general subject of nationalism. The first
relates to theories of nationalism. You probably know that the profession
of political scientists has invented a typology which contrasts western
nationalisms with eastern nationalisms. I think you can safely forget this,
as I looked into this at some point and decided the most typical nationalism
of the east European type was in fact in Ireland, which happens to be the
most westerly country of Europe. A second general comment is that there
is a school of thought which explains nationalism and nationalisms and the
theory of the nation largely in terms of economics. I once heard Eric
Hobsbawm talk for an hour on nationalism without mentioning anything
other than the economic motor which gave rise to modern nationalism.
He drew all of his examples to illustrate his theme from eastern Macedonia,
which was an excellent ruse, because nobody in the room could possibly
contest anything he said except for those people like himself who had free
holidays from the Bulgarian government in Eastern Macedonia. The third
general point concerns the fashion, I think that's the right word, of talking
about the resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe since the collapse
of communism. I believe you should be somewhat cautious of this fad of
the media for there are endless conferences about it and people rush off
to Moldova or Bosnia or wherever and spot the resurgence of nationalism.

Now the point here is that a very extreme form of nationalism was a basic
ingredient of Stalinism and of all the communist regimes which modelled
themselves on Soviet communism. People who think that Eastern Europe
was run by left-wing regimes of course never spent a year or two in Poland
and other countries. Someone like Ceausescu, for example, was an extreme
nationalist blended with various other communist ideas, and many of the
people who are now complaining about the resurgence of nationalism belong
to the older camp of chauvinists who lost power in the 1980s. The other
thing which strikes me is that the most virulent and the most dangerous
form of current nationalism - what Lenin called great Russian chauvinism
is of course to be found in Russia. And that is a much more serious topic
-
than the dangers to Europe from the extreme nationalism of Slovenia or
other major powers people seem to concentrate on. But that is somewhat

3
beyond my brief, I
since was asked to talk to you about the Polish nation
and nationalism in Poland from the end of eighteenth century until 1921.

Poland was an example of an extremely precocious national consciousness.

Scholars who know their Polish literature are recording expressions of
national ideas even nationalist ideas from the 1760s onwards, of the poetry
of the confederation of Barl, if that means anything to you. The late 1760s
are really the beginning of the corpus of nationalist sentiment in Poland,
in other words before the French revolution, before any sign of economic
changes which in many parts of Europe were taken to be the motor of
modern nationalism. I could think of many reasons why this precocity should
have occurred. One is obviously because Poland possessed a very advanced
and developed culture. The Polish language was a language of state, which
had been developed over many centuries. It was not like many of the languages
of Eastern Europe something which essentially had to be invented or
-
reinvented like Czech in the course of the nineteenth century. Polish
literature was highly developed, far more developed in the middle of the
eighteenth century than German literature or Russian literature, which had
hardly got off the ground. Polish literature starts with the Renaissance and
there was a formidable corpus of Renaissance and Baroque literature which
had fed the sense of a Polish community well in advance of many
neighbouring countries both to the west and to the east.

A second reason for this precocity was the extreme size and large numbers
of the Polish nobility, the culture-bearing class or estate. The Polish nobility
probably accounted for at least 10% and possibly 15% of the population
whereas in this country barely 2% of the population would be counted as
forming the gentry and peerage. The sheer number of this educated Polish
nobility was four or five times greater than the nobility of any other country
in Europe. The nearest competitor was the Spanish nobility which I think
reached something like 5% at its maximum. So there was a great pool of
politically conscious and in most cases educated noble families who reflected
the ideas of the nation. Indeed they thought of themselves as the nation:
the nation in the late eighteenth century was the noble community.

The third reason for Poland's precocious nationalism or national

consciousness was deprivation. There is nothing like taking something away
from people to make them conscious ofwhat they have lost, and in the three

I The Confederation of Bar was a league of Polish nobles and gentry, formed at the fortress
of Bar in Podolia in 1768, to defend by insurrection the privileges of the Catholic Church
and the independence of Poland against the encroachments being made by the Russian
Government through its ambassador in Warsaw, Prince Nikolai Repnin.

4
partitions of 1773,1793 and 1795 a historic state, the Republic of Poland/
Lithuania was totally destroyed. It was a state which not too long before
had been the largest state in Europe, larger than the Russian state in the
fifteenth and sixteenth century, and yet this historic political and cultural
community was wiped off the map. Hence this act of deprivation and of
partition had promoted an awareness of what Poland had lost. This had
nothing to do with economics, it was a political act with great cultural and
psychological consequences.

Let me turn briefly to the typology of nationalisms which makes most sense.
The most practical is the division between state-sponsored nationalism and
popular nationalism. State-sponsored nationalism is something which you
should be very familiar with here because British nationality is something
which has been created by the state. I know a lot of English historians think
the British and English are the same and that England was a national state
early on, but this was part of our mythology. Britain is not a nation state,
Britain is a state of multiple national identities: some of them popular
-
Scots, Irish, Welsh and some extent English identities
-but also state-sponsored
permeating ideas of a new British nation from the top downwards. All states,
all governments do this to some extent or other. All of them wish that
citizens share at the very least a common political culture, all wish them
to have a common language, all of them wish their identity to be a centre
of solidarity in society. The British and even more so the Americans have
created artificially from the eighteenth century onwards a state-sponsored
identity.

On the continent of Europe itwas much more common for national identity
to come from the bottom upwards, from popular grass-roots nationalism.
Germany is an obvious example, also Italy, where the pressures of popular
nationalism forced the creation of a national state in the second half of
the nineteenth century. Poland, however, was a battle ground between two
sources of national identity. On one hand were the ruling empires who had
partitioned the old Polish state, namely Russia, Austria and Prussia, who
attempted to impose a new national identity on their Polish subjects. On
the other were the Polish subjects who had this ancient identity very deeply
engrained in their minds and who sought not only to resist the identities
being imposed from above but also to promote and expand the sense of
Polishness from below. This battle focused above all on education
- who
was going to educate the new generation, in what loyalties, in what language
and with what values? In Prussia, for example, where 40% of the population
from the beginning of the nineteenth centurywas actually Polish, the question
was whether theywere to be Germanised and to become Germans orwhether

5
they could be allowed to remain loyal subjects of the King of Prussia but
with separate Polish culture and identity.

In Russia, the question was whether the Tsar would be content as he was
in the beginning of the nineteenth century to have loyal Polish subjects
or whether as at the end of the nineteenth century there would be a campaign
to turn all the Poles, Jews and Ukrainians of the Polish land into Russians.
Religion was another important issue -whether, for example, in the Russian
empire the Polish Roman Catholics were to be allowed to maintain their
religion orwhether (as in the late nineteenth century) they had to abandon
their religion and become orthodox. For instance, you could not be a
diplomat or a high ranking civil servant or a military officer in the Russian
empire unless you were officially orthodox by religion. So Poland was a
country where state-sponsored nationalism, the Germanisation campaign
from Berlin and the Russification campaign from St Petersburg, was battling
against the popular nationalism of the Polish subjects of those empires. I
don't think one has to say who won in this battle. The state-sponsored
nationalisms, particularly in Prussia, promoted exactly the opposite effect
to those intended. In fact, the critical period at the end of the nineteenth
century during the Kulturkampfwhich the German imperial state launched
against its Catholic subjects was the period where Polish identity was most
strongly impressed on the new masses who were being educated for the
first time.

Let me mention three processes which were operating throughout the

nineteenth century. The first process is something I would call the social
expansion of national identity. What I mean by this is that starting at the
end of the eighteenth century it was really only the nobility, this numerous
Polish nobility which was conscious of belonging to a national community.
When they talked about the nation, they meant themselves. The serf was
not a citizen, let alone a member of the nation. In the course of the period
we are talking about, however, this narrow social definition of the nation
expanded to include the burgher estate, the merchants and the urban
population. The Polish constitution of May 1791, which was incidentally
the first constitution in Europe (earlier than the French by just 4 months),
extended citizenship, i. e. membership of the political community, to the
burgher estates and to the property classes of the cities. Hence, by the time
the Polish republic was destroyed, the social constituency of the national
community was beginning to expand.

The really major expansion however took place through the emancipation
of the serfs. Poland no longer ruled, but the Russian part of Poland was
absolutely the last corner of Europe in which the serfs were emancipated

6
in 1864. As a result of that emancipation the serfs could move, they could
leave the land and probably most important for our topic, they could be
educated. Thus this great peasant mass moved into the sphere of education
and once again the questions were raised in what language were they to
be educated, in what political loyalties and so on? At the end of the nineteenth
century you get the beginnings of industrialisation. The Polish city of Lodz,
for example, was the largest industrial city in the whole Russian empire,
and this new industrial proletariat, the urban masses, were moving into the
sphere of education and through education into the problems of language
and a national identity. So over the nineteenth century this narrow noble
nation expanded until theoretically at least it embraced the whole Polish
population.

The second process is what I would call the rise of integral nationalism.
This is nationalism, the brand of ethnic identity as exemplified in Action
Franfaise in France in the 1890s which was of course very widespread in
Germany. In Germany the slogan was Blut und Boden, the blood and the
soil, the idea that there was a territorial reserve or a national land which
by for one of the historic nations Europe
was rights reserved of - as opposed
to the unhistoric nations which were in those days expected to fade away.
Now the slogan of this integral nationalism was `Poland for the Poles' but
it applies to all national movements. They all have this fanatically intense
variety of national consciousness which is not merely concerned with
promoting Polish education, Polish culture, Polish literature, but is actively
opposed to all the other nationalities of the country. Integral nationalism
is xenophobic. Ukraine for the Ukrainians means slitting the throats of any
unfortunate Poles, Russians, Jewswho happen to live in the Ukraine. Russian
integral nationalism is equally xenophobic, driving out the nationalities
who mistakenly inhabit the Russian soil and so on. I have no doubt there
is integral nationalism on the British National Front side which has the same
primitive view of other ethnic groups and nationalities.

In the case of Poland this integral nationalism developed in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Its premier spokesman was one Roman Dmowski
and its prime characteristic conviction was that in order to count as a Pole
you had to be a Polish speaker and a Roman Catholic. Their newspaper
which appeared in the early 1900s was called Polak Katolick and this brand
of Polish nationalism was bound up with the whole question not only of
national identity but also of religious identity. This brand of nationalism
contrasted very much with the older, the historic sense of national identity
of the old noble nation where religion and language played very little part.
You could, for example, be a Ukrainian, nobleman, and member of the
orthodox church, or of the uniate church but you were still a nobleman

7
of the rzeczpospolita. In any case the common language then was Latin, Latin
culture was the dominant culture and the lingua franca of the multi-cultural
noble nation. You could be a Lithuanian, you could be a German, you could
be Jewish and still be a Pole. The integral nationalist 100 years later rejected
all the national minorities, those ethnic groups who did not conform to
their particularview of the nation. Integral nationalism thus became a source
of conflict between the Poles and the Jews, between the Poles and the
Ukrainians, Poles and Germans, Poles and Russians, Poles and Lithuanians
and so on.

I would describe the third process at work as the ethnic contraction of the
national identity. By this I mean that whereas at the beginning of the
nineteenth century national identity belonging to this noble community
had little to do with ethnic connections, by the end of the century it had
everything to do with ethnic connections. Therefore a large segment of
the population of the Polish lands, at least one third possibly more, e. the i.
Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Jews and so on withdrew
from the Polish national community. Polish identity was being narrowed,
being contracted, and each ethnic group or national minority developed
their own brand of integral nationalism which was just as xenophobic and
exclusive as the Polish model. If we take the Lithuanians as an example,
their national movement only came into being in the 1840s under the
sponsorship of the Polish Bishop of Vilna, in order to counteract attempts
by the Tsarist government to educate Lithuanians in the Cyrillic alphabet
and to draw them eventually into the orthodox religion. In order to counteract
this the Polish Catholic Bishops set up the very first schools for learning
the Lithuanian language and writing in the Latin alphabet and imitating
in its early stages the much more developed Polish cultural model. This
Lithuanian national movement, initially sponsored by the Polish Bishops,
gradually became more and more anti-Polish so that today the Lithuanians
are the most extreme example of integral nationalism. In fact, they see the
Poles as more of a threat than the Russians simply because in their eyes
Polish culture is more developed, more attractive and a greater threat than
communism and Russianism.

Similarly, Ukrainian nationalism starts off in the mid nineteenth century

imitating the Polish model, operating in Galicia under Austrian rule. Galicia
was an Austrian province run by Poles where Polish culture was allowed
to flourish, so that when the Ukrainians of Galicia launched their national
movement they felt even more deprived than the other communities and
became more and more xenophobic. They were extremely anti-Russian but
equally anti-Polish and anti-Jewish.

8
The Jews of Poland are a very interesting example. Historic Poland had
by far the biggest Jewish community in the world. There were no Jews in
Russia before Russia took over the eastern provinces of Poland and there
was no such thing as a Russian Jew before the eighteenth century. 80% of
Jews today trace their origins to Poland, but the Jewish community is like
the wider Polish community, divided into three. Some of them drifted into
the German sphere, like the Jews of Danzig or Posen and of Breslau. Some
Galician Jews drifted like Freud's family to Vienna via Budapest or Prague
while the Jews of the eastern provinces began to think of themselves as
Russian Jews. However, within the Jewish community there arises in this
same era an integral nationalism, an integral Jewish nationalism known
today as Zionism, which has all the features of the other integral nationalisms
in being xenophobic, anti-Russian, anti-Polish, anti-Ukrainian and so on.
These Jewish nationalists complain that everybody else is anti-semitic and
that they are being persecuted but that they are not persecuting others.
Hence someone like Menachem Begin or Mr Shamir are arch-products of
Poland, Jews of an extreme integral nationalist conviction who are mirror
images of the Polish nationalists from whom they learned their political
creeds.

We see therefore that in Poland the social expansion of national identity

goes along with the fragmentation of national identity along ethnic lines
and this is very typical of Mitteleuropa. By the beginning of the twentieth
century Polish attitudes to national identity, to the Polish nation, were
embodied in two figures who dominated Polish political thinking from then
almost until now. I have already mentioned Roman Dmowski the nationalist,
the other was Josef Pilsudski. Pilsudski was on the left wing of Polish politics,
being both a socialist and above all a sponsor of the view that Polish identity
could embrace Jews, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Catholics,
Orthodox, or Protestants. Polish politics divided on the issue of nationalism.
Dmowski was the spokesman of `Poland for the Poles', Polak Catholic and
away with all other aliens, foreigners and Jews. The other faction headed
byPilsudski believed in amulti-cultural, multi-national view of Polish identity.
In fact Pilsudski used to say `I am not a Pole, I am a Lithuanian: I happen
to be a Lithuanian of Polish language. ' Pilsudski had left the Catholic church
to join the Protestant church and this caused problems when people found
out in 1918 after he had become the head of the Polish state. WhetherJews,
Ukrainians, Germans, Pilsudski welcomed all to the organisations sponsored
by him.

These two traditions have stayed locked in combat right up to the present
day. In the inter-war period it is interesting that Dmowski's integral Polish
nationalism lost out all along the line. I will not go into the misinformation

9
circulated by most text books that Pilsudski was a right-wing dictator, he
was on the left, and on this national issue he prevented the Polish nationalists
getting a grip on state policy. It was only in the years 1935-39, after Pilsudski
died, that the so called regime of the Colonels began to take on some
xenophobic and nationalist coloration. When the communists came along
they adopted Dmowski's nationalism, and rather than being left wing, they
became right wing nationalists.

In fact after 1945, they put into effect Dmowski's dream of a Poland for
the Poles, a Poland in which there were no more Jews because the Nazis
had killed them, there were no more Germans because the Germans in
their millions were forcibly deported, and there were no more Ukrainians
because the Ukrainians were either deported or excluded by the change
of frontier. So the communists actually brought about the pre-war right-
wing nationalist view of what Poland should be and that's the Poland we
have today. So when the communist regime collapsed the right wing parties,
the right wing nationalist catholic parties were not taken seriously because
their point of view had been tarred by fifty years of promotion by the
communists.

I conclude with a simple historical fact. In 1797, after dividing up the country,
the three partitioning powers, Russia, Austria and Prussia, signed a treaty
in which they agreed to obliterate the name of Poland for ever. Their clear
intention was to eliminate not only the state of Poland but the Polish nation,
and Polishness from the European community. However, 200 years on from
that notorious treaty there is no such place as Prussia left, it disappeared
once and for all in 1947; there is no Austrian empire, it having disappeared
in 1918; somewhere called Russia still exists but whether or not the Russian
empire is gone is a matter of debate at the present time; yet in spite the
200 years of this intense battle over identity something called Poland still
remains.

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