Chapter I – JULES MICHELET’S CONCEPT OF PEUPLE 1. Commentary on its origins and meanings

ficities to enrich their cultural heritage or evaluate their histories objectively, but instead used them to construct the archetype of ‘the ethnic being’. These collective identities sprang from their imagination. Essentially, such definitions of identity were based on spiritual and cultural speculations. For these reasons, the genesis of the modern cultural and political identity of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European countries needs to be scrutinised in more detail. The historian Holm Sundhaussen suggests that there are various conflicting elements within it.2 Moreover, such conflicts may be explained through the analysis of the intellectual history of these countries and its impact on their cultures. Sundhaussen, one of the best-known and most influential German scholars of Southeastern European history, argues that ‘The reception of the ideas of Herder and other thinkers by the intelligentsia marks a turn towards a kind of “erudite patriotism” which cannot be put on the same footing as later political nationalism that was fuelled by social and economic factors, although the elements of one were found in the other’.

The realities of many Central and Southeastern European states paint a different picture. For example, in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania it was these same social and cultural discrepancies that had an impact on economic history and political thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as much later. Nationalism has been and remains linked to the way in which the intellectual elite has managed the social, professional, religious and linguistic diversity within the states in question. That is, the nation and nationalism did not appear as an internal necessity, but as a result of the cultivation of differences or the rejection of the ‘other’. In other words, nationalism asserted itself by appealing to the majority and discriminating against the disadvantaged on the basis of education, wealth, political rights, language, religion, origins and number.

Scholars such as Ştefan Stratimirović, Vuk Karadzič, Dositej Obradović, Sándor Farkas Bölönyi, István Széchenyi, Ioan Maiorescu, Simion Bărnuțiu, A. T. Laurian, Alexandru Papiu Ilarian, Vasile Conta, A. C. Popovici and others, not to mention countless other Serbian, Hungarian and Romanian writers, have all been inspired by the Herderian theory of the nation.3 Across the region, a preoccupation with the uniqueness of their own community led to the exaggeration of differences of any kind of minorities and provoked a nationalism

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THE NATION: THE MEANINGS OF A HISTORICAL-POLITICAL CONCEPT

1. WHAT IS A NATION?

In 1882, Ernest Renan delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation? (What is a Nation?), with the intention of exploring the concept from different perspectives. The result was one of the most influential texts about the history of French national identity,1 one that is also a useful reference point for the interpretation of the ideology of the nation across all European culture. Considering it in hindsight after the experience of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation? seems prophetic, illustrating how ‘fatal misunderstandings’ of certain concepts can lead to great tragedies. The text also offers an insight into the political culture of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as it suggests these regions embraced a version of the historical concept of nation quite unlike the meaning it had acquired in France, England and the Netherlands. Renan’s lecture highlights the conflicting doctrines of the past as well as the present, especially regarding cultures that have interpreted nation in a purely ethnographic sense. Written in