The specter of nationalism is stalking post-Communist Europe. People experience a massive and multifaceted identity crisis, not unlike the one which followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Hearts beat strongly, while minds remain lazy and crowds cling anxiously to newly recalled collective subjects. Their revival promises to provide final salvation so that they would not, laboriously, uncertainly and through their own efforts, have to free themselves from the ties with the recent past. Although almost everyone feels greatly relieved at escaping the crushing embrace of the unloved totalitarian power, it is as though they had become orphaned. A vacuum is left by the demise of the authority to which many had become accustomed, however unwillingly.
Consequently, representatives of the new power face a surprising dilemma. Either they will find the courage to overcome the intuitive expectations of their fellow citizens that the new authority will care for them in a better way than the old one, or the lure of success will make them forget what they revolted against only yesterday and lead them to rule flamboyantly from the abandoned throne. Certainly, it is not necessary to stress that only the first option can lay the foundation for a truly free civic society.
Without the yoke of superior authority, too many people feel beside themselves. Instead of experiencing the dizziness of freedom, they remain beset by a feeling of being threatened. This is multiplied, but not necessarily caused, by unfavorable economic conditions. They cling to everything that still remains their own, e.g., their anxieties and inferiority complexes. They enclose themselves within their intolerant egos, the alpha and omega of their being. They are, indeed, under threat, but what is threatening are not the forces of the past but an invasion of all the substantial problems tabled until recently. In turn, these imply the challenge to apply to their solution the measures of a civic society, that is to say, approaches different from those of the clan, custom-bound community, or similar traditional bodies.
NATION
Among the reclaimed fundamentalisms that have emerged in this situation, the most dangerous appears to be national fundamentalism. Independently of reality, it tends to unite symbolically what is heterogeneous in order to constitute vast horizontal groupings which overlap particular egoisms. The fictitious "we" is always being set against "them", something foreign that becomes all too easily an embodiment of the enemy. This explains how conflicts erupt easily between nations who have had essentially identical experiences with the old power regime and whose revolts against that system were carried out in similar ways.
The patterns on the basis of which large groups of people identify themselves as nations are comprised of heterogeneous components that can be integrated only through a unifying interpretation. Such interpretation is mostly historical or history-related; it selects only some from among the possible identities, arranging them into grand narratives (grand recit). These come to facilitate collective identification through the suggestion that national identification is something given almost naturally, something that realizes itself in a long historical process with which one can either concur or wantonly betray.
Modern grand narratives have two roots: 1) the emotional energy of the homeland, or the longing for it, is transformed into a fiction of the homeland common to everybody; or 2) the idea of a civic society descends from a universal human horizon into the seemingly natural boundaries of particular ethnic groups. Both methods replace real interests and values with the fiction of a unified notional collective.
It has not always been as self-evident as it may seem that we have been Czechs--or what has identified us as such. But even the Germans, in our own and adjacent realms, have not had less difficulties with their national identity. That may be the reason why they find the slogan Deutschland einig Vaterland (Germany is one Fatherland) so emotionally appealing, although they come from the same tribe as Goethe or Beethoven. Only a truly mysterious act can integrate Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, Rhinelanders and Swabians into a union of blood and soil. Why were the German-speaking Swiss and most of Austrians excluded? And who were our Germans-- those living in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia? Why did they sometimes feel as patriots of the Land (for instance, Böhmen deutscher Zunge, that is to say, German Czechs), sometimes as Austrians, and then again sometimes as Germans? Over the last two centuries, we could have recorded several such transformations; since 1848 this has occurred even several times in one generation.
Then there is the wavering between German and Czech identities among the educated strata and later also among the social groups thrown into the melting pot of modern nationalization. It was a matter of decision, as the Czech philosophers of the interwar period constantly kept reminding us. As family names, as well as other circumstances show, many of today's Czech families used to be German, and the other way around, and many contemporary Slovaks used to be Hungarian, and vice versa. These variations and combinations can be justifiably extended to include Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovenians, Croatians, Lusatians, Serbs, in part also Italians and Romanians. This applies, of course, also to Jews, most of whom were exterminated regardless of whether they had become Czechs, Germans, Hungarians or Israelites (both in the sense of religious faith and of nationalist Zionism).
Seen from this perspective, Central Europe begins to look more idiosyncratic than it does in its geographical or political definitions. In the heart of Europe, modernist homogenization, associated with the transformation of small regional societies into large, general social structures, has not been realized to the extent achieved elsewhere. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers--Czech, German, Austrian, Jewish, Hungarian, Northern Italian or Polish--despaired of this. On the basis of catastrophic prophecies, they did not even hesitate to call that period of their lives the laboratory of the world's end. If we do not succumb to nationalist suggestions, however, we can find an outstanding advantage in this. The monotony of the modern has sharpened our appreciation of small, but real, differences. Life in multiplicity has become the chance that cannot be created artificially. Thanks to a happy circumstance, we have inherited multiplicity; we can enrich ourselves through it, and we can pass it on as a gift to others.
Central European diversity does not consist so much of national differentiations as of instability of national identifications. Various compensations of this uncertainty have, as is well-known, hypertrophied into particularly monstrous forms of chauvinist, anti-Semitic and other forms of socially destructive aggression. This leads some interpreters to an easy demonization of Central European peculiarities. When we look closer, we can recognize that it is not the work of the mysterious Mephisto, but rather a clumsy circus. Unfortunately, this makes the resulting illusion no less powerful. Today, anyone can orate to enthusiastic crowds about nations and their eternal characteristics, as if such things have existed since times immemorial. Speakers talk like this about nations which nobody knew about until relatively recently. The grand nationalist narrative assembles the illusion of the macrosubject from heterogeneous elements.
IDENTIFIERS
State
The state is undoubtedly a very strong identifier, particularly as an idea. Czechs had had an historic state with a long and continuous past. It is no wonder that this perspective played an important role during their search for national identity in the nineteenth century. Advocacy for the continuity of Czech statehood constituted an integral part of Czech politics at that time.
These attempts to forge Czech statehood were in conflict not only with the conservative, but also with the modernizing tendencies within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. There was a further complication as the defense of Czech statehood was permeated also by both trends as well. It was conservative in the sense that it was a defense of the Czech kingdom against Viennese centralism and was carried on mainly by traditional representative structures. It was also modernizing in the sense that this was pursued by nontraditional representatives and initiatives. More and more, each was differentiated along national lines.
The second basic problem was that the possibility for a truly national state as a means of transfer from medieval to modern statehood was denied to Czechs. National statehood could not exist in the Central European region. As a matter of fact, the idea of national states has stood in the way of civic state.
The idea of a national state proved to be fruitful only under circumstances which negated its realization; it could retain its distinctively emancipatory features only through its encouragement of economic and cultural initiatives. The notion that national and social emancipation could be realized solely through a national state oriented productive energies too unilaterally in a political direction, which as a result was emptied of its meaning. This notion harkened back to the pre-civic context and its ideal of good lord or king. The paternalist state was believed to be, or presented as being, good for the nation only if it was a national state and if nobody could deprive us of its benefits. This is why the rhetorical formulas associated with this secularized form of pre-civic state metaphysics used to be so sacred to our grandfathers; they had absorbed the longing to move from below to above, from subordination to control.
Despite its being a powerful identifier, the state is also a very problematic identifier. Poor foundations for the idea of statehood and arbitrary substitutions of the national state for the civic state have led to a "weakening of respect for statehood, as well as for law and order. Like similar nationalist movements, the Czech political tradition from the second half of the nineteenth century showed a tendency toward a utilitarian understanding of state forms and a superimposition of nationalist views and interests over legal principles.
Ethnicity
The Ethnos has been used frequently and extensively as an identifier. Only recently has the notion developed that two ethnic principles--the Slavic and the Germanic---have competed against each other in the Central European region for centuries, if not millennia, and that their struggle there has formed history and its purposes. The idea has not been derived from real history, but merely taken over as a finished product of French and English romantic historians and writers. Its original version, known to historians from Thierry's work on the Norman invasion of England and to lay readers from the historical novels of Walter Scott, explained the origins of feudalism as the conquest and subjugation of one ethnos by another.
Ideologically, the embellishment of this scheme with "national character" has been most important for according to this an emancipatory civic program was encoded into the character of the subjugated people. Where conquest of one ethnos by another could not be proven historically, the act of suppression was styled as a battle of nationally characterized principles. Thus, for instance, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, a liberal German historian, saw the purpose of German history in the struggle of freedom-loving Germanism against expansively universalist Romanism. The Reformation then appeared to be a key victory of the genuinely German spirit that anticipated the liberal ideals of Gervinus' generation. Czech national historian Frantisek Palacky transferred this scheme to Czech history, arguing, of course, that love of freedom is the Czech national characteristic while the German influence brought to Bohemia only feudal imperiousness. The Hussite Reformation was the climax of Czech history to Palacky for the same reason that German reformation was important to Gervinus.
We do not want to deny that, on the territory of the Czech state there lived the Czech and the German peoples, besides Jews, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen and others, depending upon the historical period, government, and international circumstances. Consistently, the largest groups were Czechs and Germans. To distinguish between them, however, is not as easy as it might seem from national opinions and ideas. Learned ethnographers have concluded that nymphs and sprites and similar water-bound creatures are of Slavic origin while other monsters are German. Archeology, into which much money and hope has been invested, can reliably distinguish Slavs from Germans at the time of the movement of the peoples (third-fourth century). Later, particularly in the most recent centuries, differences in appearance, behavior and culture ceased to exist, and regional and social contrasts became more notable than national differences. This is why complete sets of images associated with the development of the national spirit could be freely imported from one context into another.
Language
The only aspect to provide a clear difference is language. However, even language identification has not been reliable for a long time. The Josephine reforms in the second half of eighteenth century had brought, aside from modernizing impulses, also haziness regarding the language situation. All education, not only at the highest levels but also at the lower level was provided in German only. This Germanization was complete and peaceful; it did not have nationalist overtones and forced no one to lose his or her national identity. In itself, it was a process of delatinization of education and state administration, and it has remained unfinished even today. In this situation, language-based differences had as little meaning as at the time of medieval Latin universalism, whose pervasive integrity the Josephine Germanization did not reach.
It is often believed that his Germanization gave advantage to Germans at the cost of everyone else. Direct evidence has to be taken carefully, however, for nationalist feelings frequently hide social frustrations painfully felt by boys of peasant and even lower origins who found themselves in new urban environments. Young Czech men, from Jungmann to Masaryk, gave this frustration a nationalist meaning. Jewish and German students called it differently though the content of their experience is the same. Everyone had to learn the standard literal form of the German language--even the Germans--like the Czech students who later had to learn standardized literary Czech.
In the nineteenth century, Czechhood and Germanhood in our lands had become a matter of choice. This selectivity cannot be derived from historical determinants. The dilemma had to be faced at first by small circles of intellectual and social elites (mainly the landed nobility, a part of which, logically, supported the Czech orientation). With the progress of modernization and the development of both national movements, ever-widening population groups were confronted by the need to choose. In the end, the lack of national identity or national uprootedness took the form of a character flaw and was often ascribed to Jews. Bilingualism without reliable national preference, however, existed elsewhere, although always as a more or less hidden exception. These islands of universalism could be found in religious circles (for instance, in the tolerant atmosphere of the Augustinian monastery in Brno, students would sign up for courses in genetics, as well as in the Communist Manifesto), among the high bureaucracy, in the officer corps, among artists and, of course, in extremist anarchist and revolutionary circles. The working classes, textbook Marxism notwithstanding, mostly did not resist nationalist polarization.
THE NATIONAL VS THE CIVIC: JUNGMANN VS BOLZANO
While learned interest in Slavic studies during the Enlightenment period could have taken place outside the German context, the decision of Jungmann and his followers in favor of Czech nationalism cannot be imagined without it. This is due to the asynchronic development of German and Czech modernization trends. The foundations of national culture in Germany were fully constructed before other elements of social life could be modernized. A Czech, educated in the German language anyway, personally could provide a unique example of how to create a truly new culture instead of deriving it from the continuity of the past.
Herderian nationalist visions directly encouraged attempts to usurp the universalist and civic aspects of social life. Language is not merely an expressive system facilitating communication, but, as Vladimír Macura showed in his book Znamení zrodu (Sign of Birth), 1983, language in the nationalists' conception creates and establishes reality.
Jungmann's argument of 1806 looks very "democratic". It requires that the Czech intelligentsia not stray from the Czech peasantry. The elites should be capable of communicating with the people. Although it sounds wonderful, it can have nonrepressive meaning only within the Herderian vision that the national spirit lives most fully in the language, and the language in its people. This vision has saved many beautiful folksongs and children's stories as its supporters tried to divine the future from the bequest of past witnesses. When Jungmann says that it will be easier to raise one hundred Czech writers than to Germanize the Czech countryside, he gives hold to the Czech language. Far from underestimating Czech literature, he demands that it prepare itself for competition with German literature. Such demand was not dictated by enthusiasm for the Czech cause, but by sheer necessity, for most of those capable of reading then were educated and well-read only in German. Was Jungmann's national dream realistical, was it practical?
Jungmann's seemingly democratic argument established the Czech tradition demanding that the elites communicate with the people first with regard to language, thought its many realizations proved the argument to be undemocratic. Characteristically, Jungmann sought reasons for his romantic national dream, not in political utopias but in realistic appraisals of concrete interests. Instead of definitions of human and citizens' rights, he talked realistically of the Czech countryside.
This idea bothered Jan Patoka a great deal. His essay, "Dilema v naem národním programu: Jungmann a Bolzano" (Dilemma in Our National Program: Jungmann and Bolzano), 1969, is still well-remembered today. Nevertheless, its impact was small and the response negative, as were the responses to Rádl's antinationalist polemics from the interwar period. Patoka considered Bolzano's vision of civic emancipation in bilingual (or multilingual) political nations consisting of free individuals to be a valuable, though neglected, alternative to language-based traditionalism.
This neglect was not absolute, however. There was the delayed attempt at realizing Bolzano's conception in the form of the Czechoslovakist First Republic (1918-1938). Undoubtedly, it would have had much greater chance to succeed if it had clearly addressed itself to all citizens, that is to say, not only to Czechs and Slovaks but, in equal measure, also to Germans, Hungarians and all others.
Czechoslovakism has not failed because it was based on the idea of a civic (political) nation, but because it made concessions to nationalist feelings. It remained faithful to Bolzano only in terms of the practical arrangement regarding language parity between Czechs and Slovaks, and in its theoretical formulation and practical application of gradual social equalization, for which it had created in Slovakia at least the educational prerequisite. Those who like to speak about the quasi-colonial supremacy of the Czech bourgeoisie in Slovakia (and who are perhaps right regarding some important details), cannot deny the Czechoslovakists' unquestionable language tolerance, support for education in the Slovak language, and social empathy.
The application of Czechoslovakism as a theory of a majoritarian and state-making nation was contrary to Bolzano. This justified Czech expansion into the power vacuum left in Upper Hungary after the dissolution of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire with its ideology of self-determination. Lessons can be drawn from both approaches. It is possible to gain from the demythologization of differences in language and customs--and to take heed of the price exacted by the demon of nationalism from those who joined to his game with the vain expectation that it would be only a temporary educational compromise over which they would retain full control.