Historians often narrate the history of their nation and state in terms of isolated nation-states, erasing the imperial imprint of the nation-state and the "prehistory" that overlaps and entangles with the empire, so as to serve the practical needs of nationalist politics. However, in recent years, historical research has attempted to examine the history of various nation-states in the East and the West in the global historical network, and questioned, reflected and challenged the "methodological nationalism" that relies too much on the perspective of the nation-state.
The article is an "Introduction" to The Imagination of Empires: Civilizations, Ethnic Groups and Unfinished Communities
Originally published in Reading Magazine, May 2023
Is the twentieth century the century of nation-states?
Text | Liang Zhan
In June 1917, the Jewish-British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. To escape the uneasiness of foreigners caused by the storm of Egyptian nationalism, his mother took the two-year-old to her hometown of Trieste in Austria-Hungary on the Adriatic Sea, a scenic port city recently occupied by Italy. A few months later, the family moved to the outskirts of Vienna, where Hobsbawm spent his mixed childhood. Although he did not have the opportunity to witness the political tragedy of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the political, cultural, and linguistic conflicts between the Germans, Slavic and Magar ethnic groups and Jews who lived together in the empire were not far away.
"If the 'national principle' laid down in the nineteenth century triumphed at one point, it was at the end of the First World War," Hobsbawm said, half a century after leaving Vienna, with distant childhood memories. The reason why nationalism reached its climax in 1918-1950 was probably due to the collapse of the great multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. Before and after the Versailles Peace Conference, US President Woodrow Wilson and the Bolsheviks unveiled the banner of national self-determination, and the wave of nationalism surged until the nineties of the twentieth century. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire soon became history, the British and French colonial empires were greatly damaged, and the Soviet Union finally failed to escape the fate of disintegration; Correspondingly, in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia, Africa and Latin America, new nation-states have sprung up, a sight that makes the twentieth century seem like a "century of nation-states."
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012)
Historians often narrate the history of their nation and state in terms of isolated nation-states, erasing the imperial imprint of the nation-state and the "prehistory" that overlaps and entangles with the empire, so as to serve the practical needs of nationalist politics. However, in recent years, historical research has attempted to examine the history of various nation-states in the East and the West in the global historical network, and questioned, reflected and challenged the "methodological nationalism" that relies too much on the perspective of the nation-state. Sebastian Conrad pointed out that in previous historical narratives, empires and nation-states were clearly distinguished, but it is not entirely historical to see empires as the result of the expansion of nation-states for economic development and population growth. In fact, for the nation-state, empire is both a catalyst and an obstacle to be overcome: on the one hand, imperial oppression fosters a common national consciousness among the oppressed, which connects "ethnic, religious, linguistic, and regional differences with the interests of uniting people against foreign domination." Anti-colonial nationalism was made possible by means of imperial institutions and infrastructure for the purpose of exchange and exchange, and in turn, the imperial center as a political hub fostered anti-colonial nationalism; If the latter are to take root and blossom, they must overcome the barrier of empire that stands before them. However, "ironically, this belief (i.e., national prosperity-induction) is precisely the core of imperial ideology," and the "civilized mission" of the "backward nations" at home often enabled the empire to foresee its own slow decline. Therefore, the twentieth century is not so much the century of the nation-state as it is the history of the entanglement of the nation-state and empire.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire has always been regarded as a "prison for all peoples", and this political slogan did play an irreplaceable role in political mobilization in the historical context of the time. However, in the historical narrative centered on the nation-state, the catalytic role of the neutral imperial governance method on the development of domestic ethnic groups has been ignored to varying degrees. For example, on April 5, 1897, Imperial Chancellor Badney's language decree violated the interests of the German community, and a huge protest that broke out had to end in Badney's resignation. However, in Judison's view, the Bardiney crisis involved more and more ordinary people in Austria-Hungary in the discussion of national decision-making, and it also showed that the influence and importance of the central government in Vienna over the two major ethnic groups of Bohemia had been weakened, and Bohemia became another imperial center besides Vienna. It can be seen that empire not only does not constitute an obstacle to the development of nationalism, but is the cradle of nationalism.
In terms of the oppression of internal nationalism, the suppression of the 1916 Easter Irish National Uprising by the British Empire was more brutal than that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The uprising resulted in the death of 485 civilians, including 260 civilians, the wounding of 2,200 civilians, the arrest of more than 3,500 rebels and the execution of 154 leaders. Conversely, faced with a similar situation, the last emperor of Austria-Hungary was tolerant. In the autumn of 1918, in Graz, the capital of Styria, a group of businessmen and workers formed the "Styrian Public Welfare Committee" in order to solve the problem of the supply of local daily necessities, and they called Vienna, determined to break the ties with Austria-Hungary. Emperor Karl not only agreed to these nationalists' demands for autonomy, but also ordered the governor to transfer all powers involving local supplies and intra-imperial trade to the council.
In the late Austro-Hungarian period, language was often used as a criterion for identifying a person's national identity and measuring his loyalty to his or her own ethnic group. In places where ethnic groups are mixed, language becomes the "front line" of political struggle. In Moravia and Bohemia, however, the historian Judison meticulously observed that local peasants refused to translate linguistic divisions into differences in self-identity and even ethnic loyalty, instead "the phenomenon of bilingualism, disregard for national identity, and speculation through the use of national identity express the basic logic of the local culture of bilingual regions, which neither radical nationalists nor the so-called modernization process can destroy." Judison concluded that the identification and belonging of ethnic or national identity is only one of many ways people see the world, and that national identity is not a natural fact inherent in a person, but has a strong contingency: the factors that determine a person's choice of national identity are not physical or linguistic characteristics, but the political, historical, cultural and specific life situations in which he or she lives.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated after World War I
It is generally believed that the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the result of political conflicts between ethnic groups within the empire. By contrast, Judison argued that the elaboration of a "national concept" was precisely the basic way in which Austria-Hungary expressed the legitimacy of its rule. The reason for the collapse of the empire was not ethnic politics, but two other factors: first, military management measures formulated by officers during the war and supported by the emperor and senior government officials seriously eroded the legitimacy of the pre-war system that was once widely embraced; Second, the empire's governance network was on the verge of collapse, especially the ability of the imperial center to communicate directly with ordinary people beyond the leaders of the local political elite (who themselves were often nationalists).
Historians centered on nation-states mostly use the terms "empire" and "imperialism" as pejorative. However, these two concepts have been given very different meanings in different historical periods and countries. For example, between 1895 and 1914, conservatives and liberals in Britain engaged in a heated political debate over the impact of the two Boer Wars on the fate and future of the empire. In this debate, the dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society George Bernard Shaw pointed out that Britain had become a parasite that depended solely on the colonial economy and foreign labor, and that if it had survived, the British Empire would have ceased to exist like the Roman Empire in history. Therefore, he advocated social welfare reform internally, and insisted externally that "the national flag must fly everywhere civilization and trade go." Like the liberal imperialists, George Bernard Shaw advocated benevolent management of overseas colonies such as India, and for maintaining Britain's strength and image as a civilized race by raising the civilizational hierarchy of the local "backward race". After returning from the South African war, Hobson, in his famous book Imperialism, for the first time proposed that the driving force for overseas expansion of imperialist countries was the idea that capitalists wanted to seek overseas markets and investment opportunities.
An army stable in South Africa, photographed during the Second Boer War
The Second Boer War prompted the British Empire to change its past brutal methods and improve the civilization level of the colonized in the name of exercising the "civilization mission" of the empire, and then it became its mainstream colonial governance method. Thus, after the strong cannon, came the forms of colonial knowledge created by the British Empire since the eighteenth century, such as political economy, political geography, and ethnography. Obviously, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Western studies accepted by the Chinese intellectuals who were still in a semi-colonial state were by no means a so-called "neutral", "objective" and "universal" knowledge, but the result of the operation of colonial power in the Foucault sense. For example, Kang Youwei's Book of Datong blended Western eugenics with Confucian college students' theories, thus formulating a scheme of ostensibly perfect nation-state modernity for China. However, his idea of "colonizing Brazil and rebuilding a new China" made this plan imperial, and the anti-colonialist turned into an imperialist thinker. As the Czech thinker and the first president of Czechoslovakia, Masalik, put it, the post-Habsburg nationalists justified their new state with a language that rejected the imperial legacy, but they were silently replacing the Habsburg state with the newly established empire.
Kang Youwei's "Book of Datong"
Hegel regarded the Slavic peoples of Asian origin, such as Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania, which were still under the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg dynasty, in his time, as "the remnants of broken barbarism", "the vanguard of the war between Christian Europe and non-Christian Asia... Part of the Slavic nation has been conquered by European reason." In Hegel's view, like Africa, they are "without history and uncivilized", "still bound by the spirit of nature, and must only be pushed forward by the waves of world history". As for India, on the one hand, Hegel was attracted to his ancient philosophical spirit; On the other hand, he sees the caste system as a fetter to the free spirit, pointing out that the latter is the root cause of the "stagnation" of Indian thought. Thus, India cannot form a "realistic form in which the individual fully enjoys freedom", that is, a well-governed state.
More than a hundred years before Hegel was born, François Bernier, a learned French traveller and thinker, came to India along the newly opened trade routes. Today, his Travels to the Great Mughal Empire is not a history of letters, but rather the author's inconsistent view of the commercial and political conditions of the Mughal Empire is due to the fact that this historical narrative ultimately serves his critique of the mercantilism pursued by Louis XIV and Colbert in France; His praise of Marx's view that there is no private ownership in Indian society, and his appreciation of Emperor Aurangzeb's enlightened thoughts, aimed at persuading the rulers of France to respect private property and pursue benevolent politics, thus paving the way for the development of capitalism in France; His status as a commercial spy for the Kingdom of France reflects the colonialism of Western humanists in the seventeenth century. In 1687, Bernier also expressed his appreciation for the ancient Chinese political system in the manuscript "Confucius, or the Science of Monarchy, Including Chinese Religious Principles, Unique Morality, and Political Management of Ancient Emperors and Monarchs", which translated the Confucian classic "Four Books" (except Mencius). This suggests that in Bernier's time, discourse on India and China had not yet become the shaping of Said's "Oriental" discourse or colonial power, and that the political systems of the Mughal and Chinese empires that Bernier witnessed, or at least imagined, were precisely the source of the ideal enlightened autocracy of Western Enlightenment thinkers.
In 1688, Bernier met an emissary from the French East India Company in Surat on his way home, and Colbert's fleet soon after set up a trading house there, but the French colonization of the subcontinent was interrupted by the failure to secure a strong trading post. As we all know, from the sixteenth century, the French successively opened colonies in New France, the Andean Islands, Madagascar and other colonies in the Americas and Africa; It conquered Algeria, Indochina, Senegal and Polynesia in the Pacific, and for a time became the second largest colonial empire in the world after the British Empire. Although the 1789 Revolution established the French nation-state model in the modern sense, the French ruling elite never gave up the cause of colonizing overseas. If the expansionist policy of the Ancien Régime was to highlight the glory of the dynasty and get rid of the financial and commercial crisis of the dynasty, then the post-revolutionary France continued to expand overseas in order to get rid of the social crisis caused by the conflict of interests of different classes at home, highlight the advantages of French civilization, and then enhance its international influence and strengthen the French national identity. Like other nationalism on a global scale, the reality of the French nation-state cannot be separated from the imperialism.
Since ancient times, ethnic wars between the Gauls, Romans and Franks have been going on on the land of France. Michel Foucault argues that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the ancient discourse of race wars went through a process of emergence in Europe from its emergence to its transcribing many times. In the time of Louis XIV, the driving force of war was racial and linguistic differences, as well as differences in strength, vitality and violence, the essence of which was "the conquest and enslavement of one race to another", and its invasion into the social body resulted in social conflict as a conflict between two races. From the beginning of the French Revolution, the race wars were translated into national movements in Europe, national revolts against the large state apparatus (as shown in the case of Austria-Hungary and Russia) and colonialist politics in Europe; By the early nineteenth century, warfare at the social level "erased all traces of ethnic conflict and was defined as class struggle." The Central and Eastern European historian István Dick once said: "I do not think that there was any dominant nation in Austria-Hungary. There are only dominant classes, hierarchies, institutions, interest groups and professions. It is true that the Germans and Magar constitute the majority of these dominant classes in society, but they have attained a position of superiority that the lower classes of their own ethnic group do not enjoy. This view is more appropriate for analysing the internal political struggles in France between 1848 and 1852, to which Marx attached great importance. On the eve of Louis Bonaparte's establishment of the Second Empire, political struggles broke out between the Republican and Conservative factions, and petty-bourgeois intellectuals of this period, such as Chenu, Cossidier, and Baudelaire, were lost on the streets of Paris, joining republican radical organizations and engaged in barricade battles against the dynasty with the aim of changing the fate of society and individuals, but they were forced to work for the old police at the same time, acting as their informants and spies. They were obsessed with the instantaneous overthrow of government by conspiracy, and some of them even reached the point of rebellion for the sake of rebellion, revolution for revolution's sake, so that, like Baudelaire, they gave "heroic" character to the ordinary landscapes and things in front of them, and indulged in all kinds of unrealistic illusions.
February Revolution in France in 1848
The Second French Empire, established by the coup d'état, ended the political turmoil that had prevailed in 1848, and "some people do say empire is war, but I say empire is peace," Louis Bonaparte told the French public. At the same time, in keeping with St. Simeon's ideas, bridging the gap with the Catholic parties in the country, and with the support of an army dominated by its peasant supporters, Bonaparte consolidated his colonial rule over Algeria, dug the Suez Canal, and occupied Indochina in Asia, thus tripling the area of France's original colony. Colonial and diplomatic successes brought glory to the French nation-state and ultimately led to the fall of the Second Empire. In July 1870, the Bonaparte government provoked war with Prussia. After the defeat at Sedan, Bonaparte was captured and Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to Prussia, which brought the liberal thinker Ernest Renant, who had endorsed Bonaparte's imperial ideals, back to the position of political nationalism. In What is a nation? In his essay (1882), Renan argued that the criterion for identifying a people was not race and language, but rather that people had a common memory of the past and "the desire to continue living together and the will to carry forward a shared tradition." Race in the biological sense, although excluded from the national standard, did not prevent Lenan from being racist and colonialist like another Republican, Victor Hugo. At the end of the Second Empire, Renan still said, "It is no surprise that one lower race is conquered and ruled by another higher race." The British colonization practices in India were beneficial to India and all mankind, as well as to itself", and "the conquest of the same races is to be condemned, but the degradation of the lower races and the interbreeding of the higher races is a matter of course."
Benedict Anderson invokes Lernan's famous definition of nation at the end of the second edition of his Imagined Community (1992), calling on Indonesians entering the post-Suharto era to forget the history of fratricidal killings and embark on a common nationalist path. However, he was unaware of Lernan's arrogance towards the colonized and the national pain caused to the latter by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, but instead taught the post-colonial powers and colonizers mutual understanding, cooperation and even union as an emissary of Western civilization. In today's world, the liberal imperialist ideology embodied in Anderson has degenerated into a tool to deny the unique development path of post-war colonial countries and justify American hegemonism, as its extreme expression, Scottish-American historian Neil Ferguson even advocates giving a positive evaluation of the colonial behavior in the history of the British Empire and the "empire" of Americans today. In contrast to Kafka's vision of the "Great Austrian Empire" in which all ethnic groups could live together in spiritual harmony, this is a new "imperial imagination" that follows the old imperialist ideas of the West.
The Empire's Imagination: Civilizations, Races, and Unfinished Communities
Liang Zhan
Life, Reading, New Knowledge Triple Bookstore 2023-7
ISBN: 978718075345 Price: $49.00
With the end of the First World War, the wave of nationalism that began in the 17th and 18th centuries quickly swept across the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, and the collapse of empires and the process of nation-state construction went hand in hand, and it was not until the early 90s of the 20th century that it showed its decline. However, the 20th century is not so much the century of the so-called nation-state as the history of the entanglement of empires and nation-states.
Starting from the perspective of global history, this book selects several cases that occurred in this long historical process, and uses a combination of theory and history to reveal many complex literary imaginary factors that make up today's popular nationalist and imperial theories, as well as the strong colonial and liberal imperialist colors hidden behind these theoretical discourses.