The Dangers of Ethnic Nationalism

ETHNIC NATIONALISM, the desire for one’s race to be pure and to exclude others from one’s claimed territory, can in extreme cases cause ethnic cleansing, as we saw in the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s. To think of ourselves as having a monochrome nationality, a primary marker to distinguish ourselves from others, can result in an antagonistic view of identity—British versus Irish, Croat versus Serb, and so on. This can lead to nations, in the name of a false sense of historical coherence, behaving badly.

Engels referred to the “unhistoric races” of Europe, peoples who had hardly ever ruled themselves, hardly ever owned their own territory, hardly ever defined their own boundaries, and hardly ever gained international recognition. (The Kurds and Gypsies are still in this situation today.) As the nineteenth century progressed these subjugated races, for example, the Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats and other Slav nations, Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, and various Celtic entities, saw the creation of a national history for themselves as the first step on the road to future nationhood. National feeling was generated by Indo-European philologists, who republished early documents, and established a standard written language, and by poets who amplified past national myths into modern form. Both wished to inspire a passion for national identity in their people. Races yearning to resurrect themselves desired the outward signs of nationhood: ethnic coherence, security, a defined area, their own language, culture, and their own rulers, free from imperial domination.

Creating a national history, though a necessary narrative, can become a danger if taken too literally. Nationalist leaders identified a time, usually in the period after the collapse of Roman empire (c.400–900 AD), when their people first arrived at their homeland and formed themselves into an identifiable unit. Historians rather portentously call this “the moment of primary acquisition”; more colloquially it is the claim that “we got here first”. Then later some great defeat— Kosovo for the Serbs, Mohacs for the Hungarians, Camlann for the Romano-Celts in Britain, the sacking of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD for the Jewish people—was invoked to explain how the entity was dispersed, and led a subterranean existence for a millennium or more. Now they were awaking again, as in Arthurian, Barbarossan and Ossian legends of the sleeping once and future king.

Historians of the later Roman empire, conscious of the disasters extreme ethnic nationalism have visited on the Balkans and other places, have demonstrated the misleading nature of many nationalist histories. To give one example: the word “Croat” (Hrvati) was originally not an ethnic description at all, but a type of class or rank, and is found across Europe from Germany to Greece. In The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2002) the US historian Patrick Geary points out that many purported national histories

assume, first, that the peoples of Europe are distinct, stable and objectively identifiable social and cultural units, and that they are distinguished by language, religion, custom and national character, which are unambiguous and immutable … After these moments of primary acquisition, according to this circular reasoning, similar subsequent migrations, invasions, or political absorptions have all been illegitimate. In many cases, this has meant that fifteen hundred years of history is to be obliterated.

In reality European races are fluid, and the history of the continent has been one of continual migration, disruption and mingling, which continues today. Geary’s book utilises recent researches contained in two major books: Herwig Wolfram’s The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples (1990) mainly on Western Europe, and Florin Curta’s The Making of the Slavs (2001) on Eastern Europe.

One of Wolfram’s great insights is that when Huns, Avars, Lombards, Franks, Allemani, Goths and Visigoths, Vandals and others moved into parts of the old Roman empire, they didn’t bring with them people who were 100 per cent ethnically Goth or Vandal or Lombard or whatever:

The formation of a barbarian tribe was a political and constitutional process that involved the most diverse ethnic elements. When such a “people in arms” migrated, an extraordinary social mobility prevailed in its ranks. Any capable person who had success in the army could profit from this mobility, regardless of his ethnic and social background.

Starting as a small tribe with often a charismatic leader, and a group of dominant men, the band gathered up on the way as it moved conquered people, camp followers, local inhabitants, female companions, adventurers, opportunists who wanted to be on the winning side, and so on, so that when for example the Vandals eventually reached Andalusia in southern Spain, there might have been only 10 per cent or less ethnically Vandals, whatever that meant, among them. This was true even of the Huns, whose small bands may not have been closely related in the regions to the east from where they came. This explodes nationalist myths of racial homogeneity and purity. The novelist Anthony Burgess shocked everyone into realising this when he pointed out that English is a creole language.

Curta’s book shows that the notion of the “Slav” was first popularised by writers from Byzantium, who named these tribes after one branch, the Sclavenes. There were many other “Slavic” tribes such as the Antes, but all the local “Slavic” tribes were bundled together from the Byzantine perspective as Slavs, though they themselves did not describe themselves as such, and may not have all spoken an early Slavic language. The description “Germania” arose similarly, through Frankish and Roman use, as an umbrella term for the disparate tribes on the other side of the Rhine. Tribes were not ethnically pure, but consisted of a mixed group with leaders imposing their “race” and customs on those they took over. Written accounts of the time often use an all-encompassing tribal label which hides the diversity underneath these newly forming alliances.

New races appeared on the edges of the old Roman empire not usually because of invasions but because of sporadic raiding parties and migration, and even migration was often caused by simply mixing with adjacent peoples, intermarriage and assimilation. The scribes of the conquered peoples, like Gildas in England on the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, naturally wrote up the coming of a new people as a catastrophic invasion and destruction of all that they had known, but this was not always the case. We retain the image of terrifying Hun invasions. The Huns did invade, but they were not typical. A relatively small number of conquerors could impose their customs and language on local people, but did not obliterate them, and were usually absorbed by them.

Curta shows that the Slavic homeland was not, as previously thought, in the marshes in south-eastern Poland, from where Slavic invaders were alleged to have moved south over large distances in great forays. From Roman times there were Slavs just north of the Danube limes. The Slavs moved south into the Balkans more by migration and intermixing as citizens and mercenaries (foederati) than by direct invasion. A tribe would typically appear on the edge of the empire, fight a battle with the Romans, then sign a treaty (foedus) with them, perhaps to fight other tribes with Roman support, and with their warriors part of the Roman forces. As the empire disintegrated further, these tribes set up within the empire as a state within a state. These processes over decades and even centuries produced new Romano-barbarian amalgams. Wolfram titles his book The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples to make this point—he believes the Germanic tribes neither destroyed nor restored the Roman empire, but made a home in it.

LANGUAGE AND RACE did not always go together, as we have previously thought. “Slavs” may not always have spoken a Slavic language. Those who spoke a Celtic language may not always have been a “Celtic” people. Language is not necessarily the defining characteristic of a nation, as the nineteenth-century language scholars thought, in comparison with locality, culture or religion. There are many examples of the non-primacy of language; for example, Serbs and Croats have a shared language, the crucial difference is religion. Conversely the non- Slavic Bulgars, originally an Asiatic steppe people, now speak a Slavic language which they have acquired. Geary concludes:

The names of peoples were thus less descriptions than claims—claims for unity under leaders who hoped to monopolize and to embody the traditions associated with these names … The history of peoples in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is not the story of a primordial moment but of a continuous process … It is a history of constant change, or radical discontinuities, and of political and cultural zigzags, masked by the repeated re-appropriation of old words to define new realities … The Serbs who came into existence in the decaying remains of the Avar Empire were not the people defeated at the battle of Kosovo in 1289, and neither were they the Serbs called to national aggrandizement by Slobodan Milosevic.

Those two well-known madmen of last century, Hitler and Stalin, were themselves devotees of nineteenth- century ideas of race and nationalism, which led in their hands to ethnic cleansing. As well as eliminating the Jews, Hitler wished to clear the Slavs out of eastern and southern Europe and settle Germans there, using as his excuse the fact that Germans had settled some of these areas historically.

To give one out-of-the-way example which involves both dictators: Hitler was intrigued by the Goths of the Crimea, who had been there for 1300 years since the third century AD until they were diluted almost into extinction by the Ottoman Turks by the mid-sixteenth century, though a Gothic language continued to be spoken for another 100 years. As Neal Ascherson explains in his wonderful book Black Sea:

The fantasy of an ur-German Crimea was retrieved by the Nazi mind—that drain-filter of broken, discredited and putrescent ideas—and recycled into a new version of pseudo-history and political legitimation. Crimea must be reconquered and the Gothic realm restored.

In 1941 Hitler planned the “Gotland” project, in which Tatars, Jews and Russians would be cleared out of the Crimea, and Germans settled there to reestablish a Gothic Crimea. Sevastopol was to be called Theodor-ichshafen. But another annihilator had got there just before him. Stalin’s specialty in the early days of the Soviet Union was as “nationalities expert”, a euphemism for ethnic cleanser. Half the Crimean Tatars had already been killed or deported by him via his 1930s famines and purges. So some Tatars naturally welcomed the arrival of the German army in 1941, though others opposed it. After the Russian army took over in 1944, the Tatars were unfairly accused of collaborating with the Nazis, and Stalin, like Hitler, continued his ethnic cleansing by expelling the whole Crimean Tatar population to central Asia. This is just one example of the murderous madness that nineteenth-century ethnic nationalism eventually led to.

The Second World War itself caused massive ethnic cleansing. Poland had a 40 per cent non-Polish population before the war, but after it with Jews, Volksdeutch, Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, White Russians and others now gone, Poland was now much “purer”— almost everyone was an ethnic Pole. This had not been intended by the Poles, but was caused by Nazi and communist policies. Similarly in the Czechoslovak lands. So the dangerous nineteenth-century view of one “pure” people on its own land speaking one language and governed by itself was actually coming into existence. After Tito’s death the artificial supranational structure called Yugoslavia was quickly demolished in a frenzy of desire to create pure nations, for example the idea of a Greater Serbia to include all Serbs, including those in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. At the same time a larger artificial supranational structure, the Soviet Union, disappeared with similar results.

THE CONCLUSIONS of historians working on continental Europe provisionally confirm the insights gained from using DNA in analysing the populations of the British Isles. An example is Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story (2006) (reviewed by Robert Murray in Quadrant, July-August 2006). The standard view of the populating of the British Isles is that Celts from central Europe invaded about the third century BC, and took over the original population. When the Roman occupation disintegrated, the Romano-Celt population in England was in turn taken over by invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes who decimated the existing population and formed a new entity, Anglo- Saxon England, until later Viking and Norman invasions.

The new view from DNA plus other evidence is that as a general pattern from much earlier times, the British Isles had two separate populations—all except the area we now know as England was settled by peoples coming from the Atlantic littoral of the Iberian peninsula. The province of England, as distinct from Ireland, Wales and Scotland, was settled by Friesians, Angles, Saxons, other Germanic peoples and Scandinavians, also from very early times. These people may have spoken an early Germanic language. There is no evidence for a great Celtic invasion of the British Isles about 300 BC. Some must have come to transmit their language and customs, but the “Celts” of the British Isles are not genetically related to the Celts of the central European Celtic heartland. Celtic was probably not spoken over the whole of England— there is no substratum of Celtic words in the English language, which one would otherwise expect, though there are Celtic place names in England.

New research suggests England was not invaded in the fifth century by massive waves of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who subsequently comprised much of the population. They came as a smallish ruling group and intermarried and imposed their language and customs on the existing local Germanic-Scandinavian-Friesian-derived peoples. Thus the Anglo-Saxons may have come to an England already speaking some kind of Germanic language, though this is an inference which lacks conclusive objective evidence. They did not dominate and obliterate the local population, as written accounts had it but, small in numbers, eventually merged with it. The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon “invasions” of the British Isles can now be seen to be more like the Roman, Viking and Norman ones: few came and though they ruled, the majority population remained the same and over time assimilated the outsiders. The revolutionary advances in research produced by DNA analyses, though fascinating, must at the moment be treated as provisional.

Just because present nations don’t have the genetic continuity they believed they had should not deter them from celebrating their history and being attached to it in a sensible way. We needn’t go to the other extreme—genes aren’t everything. There has been over two millennia of continuous Celtic and Slavic and Germanic culture. This in itself is as great a determinant as genetics.

Recent findings should also make us realise that there are few if any purely victim nations nor purely dominant ones—all have had their ups and downs, all have moved and displaced others and been displaced in their turn. In southern Spain, for example, Spanish Catholics under Ferdinand and Isabella finally took over from the Muslims, who had taken over from the Visigoths and Vandals, who had taken over from the Romans, who had taken over from the Carthaginians, who had displaced the original inhabitants. Seeking revenge for victim status has been the cause of bloodletting as well as imperial domination.

These findings are consoling in another way. We do not individually have a monochrome personal identity. We are all composed of many disparate layers, which have been deposited over time. In place of the conflict model of nationalism, it is much more fruitful to think of ourselves on the archaeological analogy of stratigraphy. Our personalities and our nations are like layers, each containing deep sediments going back over many generations and incorporating many diverse experiences. We may see only the top layer, the most visible and recent one, in our case the Australian one, but this is to neglect the variegated layers underneath.

Jung described our personalities as like the storeys of a building, the upper storeys being the most recent ones and the basement going back to Roman times or beyond: “everything is alive, and our upper storey, consciousness, is continually influenced by its living and active foundations”. Our task is to retrieve, as best as possible, remnants from deposits in our past, and to reconcile our multiple identities and allegiances into a meaningful whole, not to set them at odds with each other. Thus we each form our own private myth. But to exaggerate one strand and consequently diminish all the others is dangerous, and can lead to civil strife.

National identity is similarly an amalgam of all that has gone before it. With exclusive or oppositional nationalism, links to one country or one group are held to preclude links to any other. This sets up a false antithesis. Of course as citizens we give pre-eminence in our civic life to our country of allegiance. Below that we make our private adjustments and reconciliations. But just as we do not privilege the overt layer, nor should we privilege minority layers, the fatal mistake of multicultural ideology, which gives inner permission to immigrant cultures to assert themselves against the host nation.