Een Engelse samenvatting van het boek 'National Thought in Europe. A Cultural History' van Joep Leerssen voor het vak 'Nationaal Denken in Europa' of 'National Thought in Europe.'
Nationaal denken: National thought in Europe
Wilderness, Exoticism and the State’s order: Medieval views (blz.
25-35)
- Tendency of modern national thought to hark back to ancient or medieval
roots and continuities
- The nation was not a thought-out concept. It referred for example to
people sharing a notion of common descent or to the fellow-inhabitants of
a shared region.
- Nationality and national character were certainly not the basis of a
systematic division of mankind, let alone the basis for a territorial division
of the world by nation-state.
- Medieval world order: opposition between civilized culture and wild nature;
‘In the Middle Ages the great contrast was not, as it had been in antiquity,
between the city and the country, but between nature and culture’.
- Bull of the pope: Ireland too savage to govern itself, had to be placed
under the rule of the English crown (it had a rich monastic life).
- Henry VIII’s policy (1541) in Ireland was to rely on appointed officials
and a bureaucratic administration, involving sheriffs and a Privy
council. Irish territory was shared as ‘plantations’ (colonial holdings)
among English adventurers or undertakers (colonists).
- Cultural policies were sharpened: policy of Anglicization
- Uniformity of language and culture mirrored uniformity of law
- 1612: law > formally abolishing the existence of an inimical Irishry
- Foreshadowing of what was to become a European colonial policy in the
world at large, also views in the ‘plantation’ of the rebellious Ulster
counties with Scottish undertakers marks the beginning of the ethnic
and religious tensions which have dominated political relations in the
north of Ireland ever since.
- Archaic imaginative patterns are important.
The Renaissance and democratic primitivism (blz. 36-70)
- Fifteenth and early sixteenth century: re-classicization of Europe after the
previous chivalric-Gothic centuries. Rediscovered not only classical civility,
but also classical primitivism.
- A new form of tribal nomenclature and self-identification in the emerging
states of theperiod
- Western Schism = the division of the Western church between competing
popes and anti-popes
- The spreading influence of Latinate learning and humanism in the early
fifteenth century would gradually replace older, biblically-derived models
of ethnic descent.
- Tacitus is the classical author who owes most to humanism. A number of
Roman reflections on North-European societies came to the attention. He
echoes the implicit primitivism and adds a dose of cultural pessimism.
- The escalating Lutheran conflict marks the beginning of Europe’s first
successful anti-papal Reformation:
* 1517: Luther nails 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg (trade in
indulgences)
, 1520: Papal bull threatens Luther with excommunication unless he
recants
1521: Luther is excommunicated; defends himself at Worms, he is
declared an outlaw > hides > translates the New Testament into
German
- What unites Luther and Arminius? ‘Gegen Rome’
- Tacitus’s impact in Holland: The Protestant Reformation effected the Low
Countries: Philip II = distant, centralist monarchy. Autocratic rule
religious conflict Inquisition revolt: Provinces became self-governing.
Stadhouder filled the absence of a monarch: William of Nassau. The
Estates General forswore Philip = revolutionary. 1581: Act of
Abjuration. Seven provinces maintained their independence,
acknowledged in 1648: Treaty of Westphalia
Tacitus had not only provided modern Germany with a role model from
classical antiquity, he had done the same for the Dutch Republic.
- From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, British politics were
dominated by a power struggle between Crown an Parliament > led to two
constitutional crises civil war: 1640’s (Britain became a Commonwealth
(Republic) for a while, late 1680’s; James II was ousted from the throne and
Parliament installed his daughter and son-in-law: Mary and William III.
- Royal powers and ambitions were seen as a ‘French’ type of government,
Parliament as a native ‘Gothic’ institution ‘Gothic liberty’ against
‘Norman yoke’
- France was represented as the modern successor to Ancient Rome:
sumptuously elaborate court, catholic religion, military power and
aggressive foreign policy.
- Francois Hotman: argued that royal absolutism (which he criticized
because it led to religious intolerance) had no roots in the nation’s history
and stood at odds with the primal French tradition of Gaulish virtus.
- Everywhere in Europe national myths sprang up to glorify the manliness of
primitive tribes.
- Function myths: 1. To anchor the newly emerging state in history, by
showing that the territory as it had been inhabited by Roman times already
prefigured the modern situation. 2. To profile the emerging state against
possible hegemonic conquerors from outside. 3. To show that the state
embodied a moral collective, linked by traditions, institutions, virtues and
values.
- The nation was now seen as a tribe (no longer as a reference to
regional-territorial background or to a social layer; all the ‘subjects’ under
the obedience of a given lord). 1. nations could be vested with their own
character or collective culture. 2. Sovereigns of Europe linked as nations
could be seen as the carriers of virtues, traditions and customs that made
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