Jun 09 2006
Ethnicity, Nationalism: Notes
Hobsbawm:
Nationalism as the right-wing ideology: Germany Above All Others (p142) 1880-1914: natioanlism took a dramatic leap forward.
Nationalism: identity, political P143
Marxists struggle with nationalism p144 The assumption, quite foriegn to the liberal phase of national movements, that national self-determination up to and including the formation of independent soverign states applied not just to some … but to any and all groups which claimed to be a nation. .. national self-determination could not be satisfied by any form of autonomy less than full state independence.
145: nations considered “unhistorical”: Finns, Slovaks, Poles? whom hardly anybody except folklore enthusiasts had previously thought at all …
Cases of non-ethnic initiated nationalism: Irish/Gaelic and Basues 146
Lingustic nationalsim was the creation of people who read and wrote, not of people who spoke 147
territorial nationalism: physical bond–not imagined community p148 state usurp the concerpt
State need nationalism to replace religion in secular society and to replace authority in democracy (submitting spontaneously to their social superiors…) p149
nationalism and colonialism p151-152
Again ranting against “imaginary community” p154
Nationalism as a “neo-traditionalism”: defensive or conservation against modernity. p155
The peasantry also showed only a faint interest in nationalism. p155 Neither was capitalists.
Nationalism as the product of “petty-bourgeois”: language purity, the political power to anoint national language (hence total sovereignty) “more political pressure was needed to overcome this built-in hadicap … what was needed was political power” 157 e.g. Hungary teaches Magyar for the sake of teaching it, “even though every educated Hungarian … knew perfectly well that a knowledge of at least one internationally current language was essential …” –the petty-ness of nationalism: for the sake of language, the solution is secession as to retain all the power to keep the language alive.
No doubt almost all, were so deeply imbued with the fundamental racism of nineteenth century civilization that they were also indirectly vulnerable to the tempations … p 160
It is not enough to descdribe nationalism as some kind of political expediency: in its relation to religion, etc. p161-2