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Lecture notes National thought in Europe
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National thought lecture notesLecture 1 12/9 week 1
Introduction
- Destructive side and progressive side are influences of nationalism
- Perspective of the idolisation of nationalism, can be combined with imperialism
- Nationalism is also a form of liberation.
Nowadays
- Hardcore left-wing extremists vs hardcore nationalists cause of the platforms you use.
- Nowaday spreading information is far more doable than back in the day
- You can cause a revolution in no time.
- France was a very strong example of central nationalism, but there are still strong feelings and
movements in regional parts of france.
- You will be confronted with nationalism in your life. Even though you are a very liberal
person. It is important to think about history, what has shaped someone's national identity
- ‘Where you were born forms your perspective on nationalism’
- The institutions of nations don't go away, E.G. U.N. and E.U.
‘You can’t use methods from the past to solve problems in the 21th century because globalization
made that impossible’
- We are a more diverse society. In order to make it work in the 21th century you have to
know: history
- Problem with national politics: they use the past tense as an argument, but you cannot always
use the past for the present ‘you need to come up with new ideas because society changes all
the time’
- There is no such thing as “the good ol’ days”, The past is never dead and history never repeats
itself
The National Thought ‘what do nationalist believe?’
- “humankind is naturally divided into cultural communities called nations”
- “one’s primary political loyalty is towards one’s nation”
- “national concord is the states strongest foundation”
- “a state containing various nations is weak”
- “a nation divided over different states is unnatural”
→ One similar point of view in nationalism; the nation is not of the privileged anymore, but of
the masses of the country.
Nationalism
-”there should be a 1-on-1 congruence between nation and state: 1 state for each nation, 1 nation for
each state”
-”state borders should be mapped onto cultural (ethnolinguistic) frontiers”
-”ethic conflict is to be solved by territorial division”
Lecture 2 14/9
,Borders and frontiers
- State borders: sharp demarcations, reflect changeable power relations
- Cultural frontiers, transitional cones, reflect transgenerational private lifestyles
→ Humans are primarily loyal to their closest relatives or perhaps their tribes. Nations however
presuppose loyalty to a large number of unknown people belonging to the same nation. The
nation uses the metaphor of family, but in reality most people belonging to the same nation
never met each other, do not know each other, yet they feel a bond with each other because of
their shared language, values, traditions and historical consciousness.
This sense of shared heritage has been consciously shaped by artists, historians and national
institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. People share nationalism in a form of
geographic sense, and the constant reminder for example of the same struggles within their
borders. → nationalism does not equal tribalism
- New borders create new problems, as cultural borders are more vague than political borders:
former multi-ethnic empires were often more tolerant than modern nation-states
- The idea of a nation has been created by news, language and music connected to a certain
surrounding: a shared sense of the present, time, history and common concerns.
- There is nothing natural about a nation
19th century consequences
- a single cultural community divided over various states: the divided nation attempts to unite
A single state containing various cultural communities
- the state attempts a “tame” cultural diversity (centralism)
- the states control is challenged (separatism) → in all these cases the loyalty has to be
shifted
In the 19th century nationalism was almost left wing→ at the end of the 19th century and during
the 20th century, nationalism became ethical and racist.
Examples of:
- Centralism: France
- Unification: Germany and France
- Separatism: Belgium, Ireland
Sons of Noah
- Because of the bible it was thought that the world only had 27 languages
- According to the bible: Sons of Noah; inherited the earth
Sons of Noah
- Sem = Asia
- Japhet = Europe
- Cham (the bad son) = Africa
,→ Cham was the bad son and he needed to serve his two brothers, this was an excuse for slavery
and racism.You were allowed to have slaves from africa because of the bible, being racist was
aloud because of the biblical ideology. (racism starts in antiquity)
- Racism (antiquity) is much older than nationalism (19th C), but in the 20th C. they came
together to form facism and nazism
Alphabets
- Latin (western) - Catholic Europe
- Greek and Cyrillic- Orthodox Europe (used for Greek and for some Slavic languages)
- Arabic - Islam (North Africa, Iberian emirates, Ottoman Empire)
- Hebrew- Jewish world (both Hebrew and Yiddish)
→ Alphabets have to do with culture and religion
The alphabet of today’s western alphabet was created by Italian humanists, however protestant
countries were not willing to adopt this alphabet.
‘Language borders are historically stable and political borders are historically unstable’
‘Cultural borders: geographically vague but historically stable’
Language patterns
(almost) all:
- Mother as m*(d)*r
- My/mine as m*(n)
- two as (d)
- The story in the Old Testament about the world having 72 languages (Hebrew was thought to
be central and origin of all European languages) led in the 16th and 17th century to the
realisation that languages were more closely related than others.
→ led to the indo-European model by Sir William Jones 1780 who spoke of Indo-European
languages, because he saw patterns in different groups of languages. European languages are
more alike to Sanskrit than to Hebrew. (discovery from William “oriental” Jones)
- ‘Grimm's laws’ contributed more to the scientific footing.
→This indo-European model coincided with the rise of Nationalism
Family tree of Indo-European languages :
Slavic languages:
● Westen; polish, czech, slovak
● Southern; slovene, bosnian/croatian/serbian, bulgarian, macedonian
● Eastern; russian, belarusian, ukrainian
Germanic
● Scandinavian (Nordic group): Swedish, danish, norwegian, icelandic, faroese
● The others: English, Frisian, Netherlandic, german
● Smaller variants: Yiddish, plattdeutsch, luxembourgish
Celtic
● Irish gaelic and scots gaelic
● Welsh and breton
, ● Galvish
Romance
● Latin
● France
● Italian (and its variants)
● Spanish
● Portuguese
● Romanior
● Catalar
● Glaciar
● Sardinian/ Corsican
● Walloon
● Vlach
Others
Indo-European:
● Greek
● Albanian
● Lithuanian/Latvian
● Roma/Sinti
Non Indo-European:
● Hebrew
● Turkish
● Maltese
● Basque
● Hungarian
● Finnish/Estonian
- When is something a dialect or a language? → there is no hard measure
- Several times in history there was a shift of opinion as to whether certain close languages
should be seen as different languages or as two dialects of a single language
- Language= official means of communication of a state, a wide currency, and a regulated
standard taught in schools (A long-standing record in its written form and a body of literature,
vehicles of communication of a public sphere)
- Dialect= non-official means of communication for a community or region, it has limited
currency and is passed on without educational institutions, in the informal privacy of the
home situation (Often oral and rarely written. shifting variations within a given language)
→ A consequence of the two is social distinction, leads to language revival movements,
regionalist/national movements
-Modern Nationalism crucially considers language the very core of ethnicity and results in linguistic
frontiers and borders
-Linguistic discrimination: f.e., flemish and the dutch
Religions
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