Daily Times

The Finnish — one of the two languages spoken in Finland and an official minority language in Sweden — speaking people were actually divided into two classes. The lower class, familiar as ‘Fennoman’, spoke Finnish while the language of the elite was ‘Svecoman’ and they advocated the two-nation theory based on class with language as its major pretext. “Basque nationalism” as Hobsbawm tells us, “developed 30 years after the Catalan movement. Their linguistic-racial arguments were sudden and due to safeguarding the ancient feudal privileges. In 1894, less than 20 years after the end of 2nd Carlist war (the 19th century civil wars of Spain for power) Sabino Arana founded his Basque National Party, reinventing the Basque name for the country, which had hitherto never existed.”

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, 33 new states have emerged on the global map. This has apparently reinforced the concept of the nation state. Chris Herman has succinctly pointed out: “The talk of ‘a new world order’ and ‘the end of history’ may not have lasted long but what has replaced it does not seem to have been class politics, but rather the rivalry of reborn — or sometimes completely new — nationalisms.” It is unlike the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’. For the dominance of capitalism it was an objective necessity. Not that the Soviet Union itself was successful in eliminating the national question or religion for that matter but with the help of an ectopic form of state capitalism, which combined a few features of self-styled socialism, it managed to overwhelm them with another gigantic and real question, one related to class. The bureaucracy, however, was as indifferent to the ‘class’ phenomenon as any capitalist country. In the Soviet Union, admittedly, the illusionary sun of religion and nationhood continued to revolve around man since the conditions that created the illusion did not vanish. For multiple reasons, the revolution was lost in the wilderness and dusted into the bin of history. The theory of ‘socialism in one country’ was the stumbling block, the leading anathema, which turned its hue into social fascism. If capitalism has an international character, socialism — its antagonist — cannot be confined to one state. Real freedom, the freedom from want and objectified alienated labour too had remained unaddressed.

Today, those who are ardent advocates of the nation are facing an uphill task to define what makes up a nation — language, culture, ethnicity or territory? The aforementioned examples — especially of the Balkans — exclude both territory and language as criteria of a nation since they retained their respective territory while sharing a common language. Creation and imposition of an official language requires the presence of an overzealous middle class, which could assist the bourgeoisie to create a state. Without having a state, a language cannot be imposed as an official instrument upon the citizens. For example, during the French Revolution of 1789, merely 50 percent of people (in France) knew French. During the revolution, instead of ‘nation’, the word used was ‘people’. Italy, in this respect, performed even worse. Only two and a half percent of the populace actually spoke the Italian language. Massimo D’Azeglio, the Italian statesman, artist and novelist, while addressing the first united parliament of Italy, imputed his historic statement, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed is considered to be the novel that “created Italian as the national language of prose fiction”. In everyday life, Manzoni himself did not speak Italian and communicated with his wife in her language, which incidentally was French. It is widely believed that he was better off in French than in Italian. With the rest of the people he preferred to communicate in Milanese, the language that left its traces in the first edition of his novel. In 1842, as he put it, “after washing his vocabulary on the banks of the Arno”, he revised the language of his novel.

The violence of language did not spare the people of India. Through the Hindi Sahitya Samuelan (HSS), the Hindustani language — a sanitised version of a regional dialect — was imposed upon them by Gandhi and the Indian ruling elite. Differences cropped up. The big names resigned but HSS, till its success, continued its work. The case with Hebrew is no different. A dead and interred language was, in Dickens’ words, “recalled to life” as a fulcrum to create nationalism around it. It is a classical case of creating and maintaining hegemony in the name of language where even religion was not found to suffice to fulfil the requirements of a ‘nation state’. Lewis Glinert says, “Linguistic nationalism essentially requires control of a state or at least winning of official recognition for the language…At all events, problems of power, status, politics and ideology, and not of communication or even culture, lie at the heart of the nationalism of languages. If communication and culture had been the crucial issues, the Jewish nationalist (Zionist) movements would not have opted for modern Hebrew, which nobody (as yet) spoke, and in a pronunciation unlike that used in European synagogues. It rejected Yiddish spoken by 95 percent of the Ashkenazi Jews from the European east and their emigrants from the west, by a substantial majority of the entire world Jews. By 1935, it has been said, given the large varied and distinguished literature developed for its 10 million speakers, Yiddish was one of the leading ‘literate’ languages of the time.” The Ashkenazi Jews were so assimilated in Europe that instead of Yiddish they took pride in speaking the native languages.

Joshua Aaron Fisherman in his The Sociology of Language lays emphasis on the same point. He writes, “How except through support by public authorities and recognition in education and administration were domestic or rural idioms to be translated into languages capable of competing with prevailing languages of national and world culture let alone virtually non-existent languages to be given reality? What would the future of Hebrew have been had not the British in 1919 accepted it as one of the three national official languages of Palestine, at a time when the number of people speaking Hebrew as an everyday language was less than 20,000? The same happened with Finnish while the majority of the educated Finns find Swedish more useful than their mother tongue.”

In the case of Quebec and Flemish, the national problem was never linked to the safety of the national languages but was related to the social position of the minority, which wanted to gain more privileges. It could only be solved through a political movement. The dilemma of Indian Muslims was exactly the same. Their struggle for a separate homeland in the name of religion was in fact a contest for higher social positions. A new country — with the Hindu majority excluded — could have provided them better opportunities with minimal competition. And that is what ultimately happened.

According to Declan Kiberd, an Irish writer and scholar, “The Irish national movement launched its doomed campaign in 1900 to reconvert the Irish to a language most of them no longer understood, and which those who set about teaching it to their countrymen had only themselves begun to learn very incompletely.”

(To be continued)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com