Comparative Studies in Modern European History by Miroslav Hroch;

Author:Miroslav Hroch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

If we project these six points into concrete historical developments, we find without a doubt a striking and convincing coincidence of these factors only in one European country: in Bosnia. In other regions, we find only some of these factors, and on the other hand, these six destabilising factors are almost absent in countries with lower levels of the nationalist attitudes mentioned above.

To summarise, the first point of my conclusion is: the ‘new nationalism’ operates in different countries with rather different emphases. The explosion of aggressive nationalism that we are observing in former Yugoslavia is a rather unique case and cannot be generalised as the main trend in all former communist countries.

On the contrary, we are observing a retreat of nationalism in some of them, as a result of changing social and political realities. Even though this retreat cannot be generalised, it is an important sign for two reasons. Above all, it demonstrates the importance of the nationally relevant conflict of interests as a stimulating force of nationalism. Secondly, it allows us to put the phenomenon ‘nationalism’ into an appropriate framework.

Nationalism – this has to be stressed once more – is not a malady, not a virus which could be exterminated forever by an appropriate treatment. Nationalism is a potential function and product of actually existing national identities. As long as nations exist, nationalism will remain as a latent answer to problems and challenges. In this sense, it can be regarded as a latent danger – not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe.

Sometimes, the difference between the ‘nationalist East’ and the ‘democratic West’ is based to the concept of democracy as the best treatment which can be used to prevent or exterminate nationalism. The relation between democracy and the nation-forming process is, nevertheless, more complicated. Naturally, constitutionalism and democracy are an inevitable condition of civil society, but it would be a wrong deduction to say that national movements and democracy exclude each other. On the contrary, in many cases, the oppressed nations perceived democracy as a suitable instrument to be used by their national movement.

For this reason, democracy cannot be regarded as a universal treatment for nationalism. The decisive role that emerging or weakening nationalism plays, as in the past, is in response to nationally relevant conflicts of interests, conditioned by a high intensity of social communication and mobility. These conflicts of interests can under given conditions be either real or constructed. The emergence of nationally relevant conflicts of interests in reality is usually an answer to some social, economical or political crisis and, for this reason, cannot be prevented by learned arguments or humanist speeches. Nevertheless, its constructed form could be avoided by responsible mass media. Even though this sounds utopian, it is proven by experience that emergent nationalism will find it difficult to persuade a majority, if it happens under conditions of constitutionalism and high political culture.

The usual concluding question, addressed to ‘experts’, is: what must be done? I cannot escape this question, but I

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