the trap of backwardness: modernity, temporality, and the study of eastern european nationalism

The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern EuropeanNationalismAuthor(s): Maria TodorovaSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 140-164Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650070 .

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The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism

Maria Todorova

With very few exceptions, the most notable being Fernand Braudel's

tripartite treatment of histoire evenementielle, conjoncture, and longue duree- that is events, conjunctures of medium duration, and long cycles-as well as Reinhart Koselleck's studies of temporality, especially his notion of tem-

poral layers or strata (Zeitschichten), time has rarely been a specific object of research interest for historians.l This is maybe because time is such a basic notion of historical thinking; it is so much assumed as to be com-

pletely naturalized. Until recently historians dealt with time solely by fol-

lowing their centuries old vocation of "recording chronological change, of measuring, registering the rhythms, the metamorphoses, the cycles, the

synchronies, etc., in a word, of utilizing the traces of time in order to paint the always renewable picture of the historical narrative."2 In contrast, philosophers have long been concerned with time, but in a manner too fundamental and rarified for the concrete purposes of the historian.3 The closest they have come to historical specificity is Zygmunt Bauman's pos- tulate that "the history of time began with modernity," modernity being "more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history." For Bauman, modernity emancipated time from space

A preliminary version of this text was given in December 2003 as the Oskar Halecki lec- ture at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas at the University of Leipzig. My gratitude to Stefan Troebst for his rigorous and insightful reading. I also wish to thank the participants in the modernities reading group at the Uni- versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where a broad and passionate exchange of ideas over the academic year 2003-2004 much improved my overall understanding of the category and phenomenon in all of its multifarious aspects, disciplinary interpretations, and regional variations.

1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York, 1975); Braudel, On History, (Chicago, 1980). Paul Ricoeur maintains that in order to escape the clutch of events, French history of the Annales tradition had to ally itself with disciplines that are not preoccupied by time, like geography, economy, and anthropology. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pel- lauer, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1984-1988), 1:95-111. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Se- mantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), originally published as Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979); Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt, 2000); and Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing His- tory, Spacing Concept (Stanford, 2002).

2. Alexandru Zub, ed., Temps et changement dans l'espace roumain: fragments d'une histoire des conduits temporelles (Iasi, 1991), v.

3. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative; also his essays "The Human Experience of Time and Narrative," "Narrated Time," "Time Traversed: Remembrance of Things Past," and "Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator," in Mario J. Vald6s, ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto, 1991). On Edmund Husserl's treatment of time, see Krzysztof Michalski, Logic and Time: An Essay on Husserl's Theory of Meaning (Dordrecht, 1997); George Nadel, ed., History and the Concept of Time, vol. 6 of History and Theory (Middletown, Conn., 1966). See also Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, 2001).

Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005)



The Trap of Backwardness

because, unlike space, time could be changed and manipulated through technical innovation. "Whoever traveled faster, could claim more terri-

tory-and, having done that, could control it, map it and supervise it...

Modernity was born under the stars of acceleration and land conquest."4 Important as they are, Bauman's insights are more valuable for the un-

derstanding of imperialism than of nationalism. Anthropologists, too, have lately reflected on time in several groundbreaking works, both im-

plicitly (Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities) and explicitly (Jo- hannes Fabian's Time and the Other), and their contributions speak perhaps more directly to the historical imagination.5

Benedict Anderson, in linking nationalism to modernity, explains that a new secular and historical understanding of time was central to the formation of national consciousness. This came about through the repre- sentation of simultaneity in novels and through the ceremonial experience of simultaneity with newspapers, both a result of what he aptly called

print capitalism. Borrowing Walter Benjamin's notion of "homogeneous and empty time," Anderson maintained that the historical consciousness of time viewed humankind as moving through a homogeneous time of clocks, calendars, and temporal coincidence. For Anderson the nation-this imagined community forged through specific technologies of communication and transportation-is premised on new republican modalities that establish horizontal relations among people inhabiting demarcated territories, but also on a new consciousness of time. Creating what is in effect a theory of the nation as a traveling modular form, An- derson proposed Creole nationalism in the Americas as the primary form that was then copied and pirated, since, according to him, "the 'nation'

proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent."6 He thus sees a series of successive waves of nationalism starting with the terri- torial nationalisms of the Creoles in the Americas, then moving to Europe where it assumes a vernacular form, followed by the official nationalisms of imperial powers, and then finally the last emancipatory wave in the so- called Third World. In this process of diffusion and transmission, different geographical and historical contexts produced different emplotments of national consciousness, resulting in different modalities. Thus when nationalism spread to Europe in the nineteenth century, history as a dis-

cipline had been formally constituted, and the secular and sequential notion of time it produced and employed made it impossible to experience the nation as new. Instead, it was reinterpreted or rather reinscribed as ancient or as eternal. Hence the anthropomorphic metaphor of the nation

being awakened from a slumber, revived, reborn.

4. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 110, 112. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-

tionalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983). See also Henry Rutz, ed., The Politics of Time, American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, no. 4 (Washington, D.C., 1992). The only article in the latter volume dealing with eastern Europe is Katherine Verdery's "The 'Etatization' of Time in Ceau?escu's Romania," 37-61.

6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67.

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This characteristic of nationalism-its tendency to narrate and legit- imize itself through history-can explain, on the one hand, the persis- tence of a discourse that essentializes the nation as a perennial biological entity and, on the other hand, the resistance to seeing the nation as a part of and product of modernity. In this respect, Peter Osborne's analysis of the hierarchical relationship between modernity and nationalism as

categories of analysis is helpful in that it offers a possible way to inscribe nationalism in its numerous concrete historical hypostases within a single explanatory framework, that of modernity. According to Osborne, the

problem is "not how to rethink the notion of modernism from the stand-

point of national cultures (modernism as national allegory, for example). It is, rather, how the problematic of the modern, concretely applied, can

help replace the problematic of 'national cultures,' with a broader con-

ception of the temporal-cultural dimensions of social relations-social relations through which 'the nation' is itself produced as a cultural-

ideological effect of various forms of state power."7 Applying his very broad understanding of modernism as "a particular temporal logic of

negation (the new)" together with the metaphor and theory of translation, Osborne succeeds in dissolving the discreteness of separate nationalisms and their cultures.8 We see them floating, with their ships of different size and shape and colorful crews, which are often in conflict or

fleeting alliances, in the common sea of modernity. Yet Osborne himself, like Anderson and a multitude of other scholars, for all his universal mod-

eling, sees the need to point to origins, where the concept of modernism, as an initially "Western cultural form subsequently generalized" to and transformed in non-western contexts, "nonetheless retains a certain

highly abstract but still recognizable shape."9 The link between modernity and nationalism seems to be a consen-

sual point among most scholars of nationalism today.10 Even those who in-

7. Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London, 2000), 61. 8. Ibid., 59. 9. Ibid., 54. This is not the place to dispose lightly of a fruitful and passionate debate,

yet I would like to emphasize that my phrase "universal modeling" is not used here in any derogatory or ironic sense. Quite to the contrary: I believe that the concept of the modern as a universal category is powerful precisely because of its global extent. I do not think that it intrinsically implies a normative European model and a rigid sameness in its concrete regional and historical variations, despite the fact that many studies have erred in this respect and despite justified critique that has been heaped on them (and by exten- sion, on the concept). While rightly arguing against the dangers of a Eurocentric paradigm, in which European history is sold as universal history, the now fashionable notions of alternative or multiple modernities come with their own liabilities, chief among them a slip into easy pluralism and cultural relativism. Stacy Pigg, in particular, has argued against the concept of the modern as universal, proposing instead to attribute its influence to its cosmopolitan nature, as if modifying an adjective from the Latin to the Greek would sud- denly purify its subject. Stacy Pigg, "The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of 'Vil- lagers' Beliefs' in Nepal," Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 160-201. Cited in Chris- tineJ. Walley, "Our Ancestors Used to Bury their 'Development' in the Ground: Modernity and the Meanings of Development within a Tanzanian Marine Park," Anthropological Quar- terly 76, no. 1 (2003): 33-54.

10. The literature on the question is enormous. See Charles Taylor, "Nationalism and Modernity," in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, 1999). For a general overview, see Umut Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (New York,

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sist on the medieval and sometimes ancient roots of nationalism-like John Armstrong, Anthony Smith, andJosep Llobera-agree that modern nationalism is a sui generis phenomenon." As Llobera, a sociologist, puts it, "the nation, as a culturally defined community, is the highest symbolic value of modernity; it has been endowed with a quasi-sacred character equaled only by religion." 2 Nationalism as we know it is, in this view, a product of modernity, both in its sociological make-up (it is, from the point of view of size, an unprecedented form of group identity made possible only within a modern regime with all its paraphernalia-the spread of printing, the growth of literacy, the rise of mass politics) and in its critical response to the futuristic tunnel vision of modernity. Nationalism, contrary to modernity with its obsession with change and newness, insists on the need for roots and tradition, hence the obsession with genealogy and continuity. On the other hand, I would define this response as quasi- critical, because effectively, despite its past-oriented rhetoric, nationalism in its practice was an equally radical futuristic project. This was, of course, well understood by the conservative establishments of the day, and in the nineteenth-century Europe of the Holy Alliance, nationalism was con- demned as a revolutionary virus alongside liberalism, republicanism, and, later, socialism. Its slow domestication and eventual transformation into the most powerful establishment tool came only in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and as a legitimizing state principle-national self-determination-it was adopted only at Versailles in the wake of World War I.

Practically without exception, all treatments of nationalism assume the pioneering character of west European nationalism. They may differ in their assessment of causal relations between industrialization and nationalism, modernity and nationalism, capitalism and nationalism, state and religion and nationalism, and the like, but they are quite unanimous about the space of origins. For Llobera this is "the birthplace and lieu clas- sique of nationalism" with "no equivalents in other parts of the world in spite of superficial similarities to the contrary."13 Llobera's analysis of western European nationalism is based on five cases, which, even in his choice of names, are supposed to point at deeper roots: Britannia, Gallia, Germania, Italia, and Hispania. Were one to assault the consistency of the base (i.e. western Europe as an entity and a separate unit of analysis), the

2000). For a specifically east European take, see Maria Todorova, "Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe," East European Politics and Societies 7, no. 1 (1993): 135-54.

11. John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, Eng., 1981); Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994). Curiously, while in the past it was historians who mostly kept the flame of the "deep roots" of the nation alive, it is now sociologists who are arguing the thesis. Medieval historians, conversely, have been increasingly skeptical about this. See, for example, Otto Dann, ed., Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit (Munich, 1986); and most recently, PatrickJ. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Prince- ton, 2002).

12. Llobera, The God of Modernity, ix. 13. Ibid., ix, xiii.

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whole structure would collapse. Indeed, where Britain and Gallia show some structural similarities, most notably long-existing statehood, Italy and

Germany are in many ways more "east European" than some authentically east European examples. Balkan nationalism, in particular, in many ways preceded or was contemporaneous with Italy and Germany. In at least two cases- Greece and Serbia-Balkan nations achieved statehood roughly a

generation or two before Italy and Germany, and Romania's unification and Bulgaria's sovereignty were achieved at practically the same time.

Ernest Gellner, in a response to objections about his theory of nationalism, particularly his trouble explaining the rise of nationalism in pre- industrial contexts, notably eastern Europe or, later, Africa, acknowl-

edged that Balkan nationalism actually did present difficulties to his

theory.14 He had in mind his insistence that it is modernity that creates nationalism and not the reverse. What is baffling about Gellner's bafflement is not that he singled out Balkan nationalism, but that he did not see the exact same paradox for western Europe: Italy's mid-nineteenth-century or Spain's early nineteenth-century national outbursts in traditionally very "backward" areas. Had he not constructed eastern Europe and the Bal- kans in particular (and by the same token western Europe) as discrete

spaces with their own, separate flow of time, his puzzlement would have been conveniently resolved.'5

Anderson's claim for the primacy of the Americas, especially of South America, can be and has been contested, but it was a refreshing breach in the orthodoxy of exclusive (west) European inventions. Yet, his preoccu- pation with the origins and transmission of nationalism cannot forgo an inbuilt flaw, namely the notion of a temporal lag, though he tried to reverse the sequence of originators and recipients (copyists and pirates). I

14. The most complete exposition of his understanding of nationalism is in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983). Several authors, among them Kenneth Minogue and Elie Kedourie, accost Gellner's posited correlation between industrialization and nationalism. Minogue asserts that Britain industrialized without any nationalism at all, while Kedourie emphasized the spread of nationalism in the Balkans, particularly Greece, long before the advent of industrialization. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1993); Kenneth Minogue, "Ernest Gellner and the Dangers of Theorising Nationalism," in John A. Hall and IanJarvie, eds., The Social Philosophy ofErnest Gellner (Amsterdam, 1996), 113-28. It is in his specific response to Kedourie in that volume that Gellner registers the point that the Balkans obstruct the smooth logic of his theory. Gellner, "Reply to Crit- ics," 630.

15. On other similar counts, Gellner responds by pointing out that "industrialism cast a long shadow" before its actual reality and that it was only intellectuals who were nationalists (BBC radio discussion with Kedourie, cited in Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, 140). But in the end, at least Gellner was puzzled. Hagen Schulze, on the other hand, brushes aside any potential criticism that he is not even dealing with eastern Europe, or only dealing with it in a subordinated (stiefmiitterlich) way, by reproducing the cliches about two millennia of totally separate civilizational development after the division of the Roman Empire, in which the eastern part of the continent bypassed important phases like the Re- naissance and Enlightenment, in whose wake national sovereignty and democracy followed. While he points to three distinct European regions for the rise of nations-the West, the East, and a central area, i.e. Germany and Italy-the latter is actually subsumed in the western model. Hagen Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europdischen Geschichte (Mu- nich, 1994), 16-17, 148-50.

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will come back to this simile. The notion of a temporal lag is ubiquitous both in western representations of nationalism outside the west Euro-

pean space and in the self-representations of the non-western world. The latter's nationalisms are "later" and therefore less mature, young, uncon- trollable, or else they emulate forms that are not organically appropriate for the context to which they are transplanted, and as a result they most often degenerate. In a word, this discourse postulates a chronic allochronism in which the non-western world lives in another time, always "behind" the west. As the anthropologist Akhil Gupta puts it: "In the Third World, the utopian time of the nation is profoundly shaped by a sense of

lag and a historical consciousness of lack. Visions of the future are predi- cated on this sense of belated arrival, of being born into a world of nations

competing against each other, but in which the new arrivals are posi- tioned in the starting block of a race already underway."16

This sense of lag and lack, analytically subsumed in the notion of backwardness, has been a dominant trope not only in non-European histo-

riographies. For long decades it had been painfully present in German

self-perceptions.17 It continues to be present in Spanish and Italian dis- courses, although no longer with the painful overtones. It is still ubiquitous in eastern Europe.18 In the east European context, more so than in other non-western contexts, the literature on backwardness is dominated

by economic historians and political scientists. In fact, some authors have

argued that the subdiscipline of economic development was created in the 1940s mostly by east Europeans who employed the cases of eastern Eu-

rope as their original empirical base.19 If cultural aspects are discussed, it

16. Akhil Gupta, "Rethinking the Temporalities of Nationalism in the Era of Liberal- ization" (paper, the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, April 2001), 11 (cited with the permission of the author). He quotes Jawaharlal Nehru, who in the 1950s spoke of the catching-up imperative for India, according to which it had to achieve in two or three decades what "the advanced nations of the West" had accom- plished in a century or two. The same was, of course, one of the most obstinately persist- ing refrains in the ideology of state socialism, which boasted the achievements of an accelerated and overtaking development.

17. See Reinhart Koselleck, "Deutschland-eine verspatete Nation," in Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 359-380.

18. For the purposes of this text, eastern Europe will be treated as a loose and conventional historic-geographic space, encompassing both southeastern Europe (the Bal- kans) and east central Europe. While Russia definitely is part of eastern Europe, its exclusion from this coverage is merely a matter of convenience: its sheer size presupposes the mastery of a huge historiography with somewhat different emphases and nuances. At the same time, I believe that the general parameters of the argument can be easily and suc- cessfully applied also to the broad Russian context. Yet, I would like to shy away from easy generalizations about Russia in a systemic way; in a word, I do not want to commit vindic- tively upon Russia the reverse of the Cold War academic practice of subsuming eastern Eu- rope (itself a very diverse entity) into the Russian model.

19. Joseph L. Love evokes the names of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurske, Kurt Martin, Hans Singer, Alexander Gerschenkron, Peter Bauer, Paul Baran, Michal Kalecki, and others. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, 1996), 6. Love argues that "in the interwar period ... the newly independent and newly configured nations of East Central Europe constituted a 'proto'-Third World in which the problems of economic and social backwardness were first confronted and for-

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is only by way of weighing cultural traditions as impediments or promot- ers of development. Questions like "Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in the West?" and "What causes economic growth?" are the ones that frame the discussion, and while there are different explanatory systems-the dominant among them Marxism, even when unacknowledged; world systems theory, especially center-periphery relations; modernization theory; geographic determinism; and cultural determinism (in this order) -there is an overall consensus that eastern Europe has been lag- ging economically at least since the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries and maybe as far back as the eleventh to twelfth centuries, but in any case long before it was absorbed into the wider western world market.20 As far as the explanations for this economic backwardness go, the consensus, if any, is far more brittle. These explanations range from social-structural ones of a historical longue duree (Jeno Sziics) to reversing the premises of the debate: it is rapid growth rather than a tendency to stagnation that is exceptional and eastern Europe, from this point of view, is normalized with the rest of the world where western Europe is seen as the exception that ought to be explained.21

This article focuses on the discourse of backwardness in this cultural milieu, an aspect of what has been recognized as without doubt the dom-

mally theorized, against a range of development options, which included Soviet socialism" (214).

20. See the important collective volume of Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Back- wardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1989), which was the result of a conference at Bellagio in 1985 and in- cludes the first-class articles of Chirot, Robert Brenner, Peter Gunst, Jacek Kochanowicz, Fikret Adanir, John Lampe, and Gale Stokes. This approach has produced important research, and at least a few other works are worth mentioning, even if they do not necessarily reach identical conclusions: John Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington, 1982); John Lampe, "Moderization and Social Structure," Southeastern Europe 5, pt. 2 (1979): 11- 32; T. Ivan Berend and Gy6rgy Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780- 1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Berend and Ranki, "Underdevelopment in Europe in the Context of East-West Relations in the Nineteenth Century," Etudes Historiques Hongroises 1 (1980): 687-710.; Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies, 1800-1914: Evolution WithoutDe- velopment (Cambridge, Eng., 1997); Holm Sundhausen, "Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen fruhneuzeitlichem AuBenhandel und 6konomischer Rickstandigkeit in Osteuropa: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der 'Kolonialthese,'" Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 544-63; Sundhausen, "Der Wandel der osteuropaischen Agrarverfassung wahrend der fruhen Neuzeit: Ein Beitrag zur Divergenz der Entwicklungswege von Ost- und Westeuropa," Siidost Forschungen 42 (1983): 169-81; Sundhausen, "Die 'Peripherisierungstheorie' zur Erklarung Sudosteuropaischer Geschichte," in Uwe Hinrichs, HelmutJachnow, Reinhard Lauer, and Gabriella Schubert, eds., Sprache in der Slavia und aufdem Balkan: Slavistische und balkanologische Aufsdtze; Norbert Reiter zum 65. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1993), 277-88; Roland Sch6nfeld, ed., Industrialisierung und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Siidosteuropa (Mu- nich, 1989); and Zwetana Todorova, ed., Probleme der Modernisierung Bulgariens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Sofia, 1994).

21. Jeno Szics, "Three Historical Regions of Europe," in John Keane, ed., Civil Soci- ety and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988), 291-331; Daniel Chirot, "Causes and Consequences of Backwardness," in Chirot, Origins of Backwardness, 1-14. The latter way of thinking was inspired by the significant impact of the work of Eric L. Jones, The Eu- ropean Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History ofEurope and Asia (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1981).

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inant trope in east European historiography until the end of the twentieth century (and in Europe in general at least until the middle of the twentieth century), namely nationalism, the "god of modernity" as aptly named by Llobera. It argues for the relative synchronicity of eastern and western Europe within a longue duree framework, a perspective that cir- cumvents the trap of origins, which carries backwardness as its corollary.

Let us begin with the example of the historiography of east European nationalism written by outsiders. Although this is articulated at different levels of sophistication, among its practitioners the national movements are taken at best to be exports of a western ideology and at worst products of great power manipulation and incitement.22 Interestingly, a great num- ber of works whose main objects of study are the east European societies themselves and not simply their contextualization in a pan-European or global comparative context tend to err in the same direction, although for a completely different reason, rooted in the general understanding of nationalism as an "organic" western phenomenon that was exported, transplanted, and modified in an ostensibly "alien" soil. In historiography, this process is traditionally treated as the influence of ideas conceived in and for the west, and then adopted, adapted, and accordingly metamor- phosed in the new environment.23 Thus, the study of east European nationalism is subjected to the same evolutionary paradigm as industrialization, modernization, and so on. The latecomers are laggards resorting to

22. This latter has been the dominant assessment in a majority of general accounts of the Ottoman Empire whose primary attention is focused on the workings of the empire from the center. They usually give Balkan nationalisms short shrift, explaining them away as primarily generated by the manipulations of Russia and, to a lesser extent, of the Habs- burgs and of France.

23. For general accounts of east European nationalism, see Peter F. Sugar and Ivo John Lederer, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1994); Sugar, ed., Eastern Euro- pean Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1995); Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest, 1981); Andrew Gy6rgy, Nationalism in Eastern Eu- rope (McLean, Va., 1970); Ronald Sussex and J. C. Eade, eds., Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Columbus, 1985); Richard Plaschka, Nationalismus, Staatsgewalt, Widerstand: Aspekte nationaler und sozialerEntwicklung in Ostmittel- und Siidosteu- ropa (Munich, 1985); Gerasimos Augustinos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, 1996). See also the specific coverage of southeastern Europe in Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan Na- tional States, 1804-1920 (Seattle, 1977); Edgar H6sch, "Die Entstehung des Nationalismus in Sudosteuropa," Siidosteuropa: Zeitschriftfiir Gegenwartsforschung 42, no. 10 (1993): 551- 63; Norbert Reiter, ed., Nationalbewegungen auf dem Balkan (Wiesbaden, 1983); Dimitrije Djordjevic and Stephen Fischer-Galati, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New York, 1981); Veselin Traikov, Ideologicheski techeniia i programi v natsionalno-osvoboditelnite dvizhe- niia na Balkanite do 1878 godina (Sofia, 1978); Dimitrije Djordjevic, Revolutions nationales des peuples balkaniques, 1804-1914 (Belgrade, 1965); Gale Stokes, Nationalism in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1984). Worth mentioning are also some major collective works on European nationalism in general, in which eastern Europe again assumes the role of recipient of ideas: Mikulda Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Eu- rope in Historical Context (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); Louk Hagendoorn et al., eds., European Nations and Nationalism: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, Eng., 2000). For a first-class, recent comparative attempt in a general European framework that can serve as the rare example of a balanced rendition, see Ulrike von Hirschhausen and J6rn Leon- hard, Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (G6ttingen, 2001).

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mimicry without "organic" roots. An additional characteristic of western

historiographical studies of nationalism in eastern Europe is the continu-

ing dominance of a paradigm that otherwise has been heftily criticized and is being gradually overcome in the general literature on nationalism: the post-World War II paradigm of west European liberals (stemming from Hans Kohn and others, and to whom the late Peter Sugar also be-

longed) who were struggling to come to terms with the German aberra- tion of the interwar period and postulated a binary model of western (civic) versus eastern (organic) nationalism.24

East European historiographies by indigenous scholars, on the other hand, consider nationalism as the central trope of the modern period and focus almost exclusively on the emergence, maturation, and victory of national-liberation struggles, a grand narrative in which other processes and events figure only as background, side-effects, or conditions that favored or hampered the ongoing progression of the national movements. While

they reject the treatment of east European nationalism as the export of a

contagious disease by the great powers, they practically all share (explicitly or implicitly) in the premise that the major ideological currents of the

eighteenth and nineteenth century-the Enlightenment, romanticism, nationalism, republicanism, socialism, and so forth-are "western" ideas

transplanted (although not necessarily deformed) on east European soil. This, of course, goes hand in hand with unreconstructed treatments of

24. For a recent critique of the Kohn model, see Miroslav Hroch, "Ethnonationalis- mus-eine ostmitteleuropasiche Erfindung," Oskar-Halecki Vorlesung 2002 (Leipzig, forth- coming). For a particularly poignant example of how hardwired these ideas are, see the otherwise excellent recent study of Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, 2004). The author first pro- nounces the cabbalistic formulae of modern political correctness, which are supposed to somehow exempt the ensuing narrative: "[In] emphasizing the similarities and appropri- ations between European and Bulgarian nationalist ideas, I do not want to imply that Bul- garian nationalism was a mere facsimile or distortion (as many scholars argue) of West Eu- ropean nationalisms. Instead, I agree with Partha Chatterjee's assertion that 'latecomer nationalisms' are not just following a 'script already written' but are inherently creative projects of individual national imaginations" (7). Yet, this proleptic entry does not deter the author from asserting that it was "the politically charged observations and ethno- graphic 'discoveries' of European scholars and travelers in the region [that] ignited Bal- kan national visions and ambitions" (18), completely neglecting volumes of empirical work on the genesis of Balkan nationalism. She further maintains that "Bulgarian thinkers pulled devices for understanding their past from the European conceptual toolbox" (24- a rather crude literal instrumentalism), or even that their visions of their plight within the Ottoman Empire were "supplemented, if not invented by European notions of Ottoman, and more generally, 'Asiatic' depravity and barbarism" (24), all the while positing a hypo- thetical dichotomy between "European" and "Bulgarian" and thoroughly dismissing native Orthodox traditions of stereotyping the Ottoman. Having started out by magnanimously conceding that "as with any child, Bulgarian nationalism also had its own genetic code" (7), she ends by enforcing this puerile metaphor in the concluding chapter of the book, where the two infants-Bulgarian and Muslim-are, in the end, helpless objects of adult ideas, like European nationalism: "Throughout its modern history, the Bulgarian-Muslim encounter has unfolded in the shadow of European influence. Bulgarians were caught up in the irrepressible current of European ideas, such as nationalism, which ultimately drove a wedge between Bulgarian and Muslim" (201).

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the organic nation from times immemorial, in which west European nationalism serves as the wake-up call.25

There are two levels at which the problem of temporality can be introduced here. One is at the level of the discourse of nationalism itself, which is characterized by a certain atemporality, treating the nation as ever present, as eternal. This has been true of practically all nationalisms and national historiographies; it is not a particularity of east European nationalism. That it is still more present in treatments by east European historians than in similar analyses of west European and other nationalisms is more an illustration of the sociology of scholarship than of the character of east European nationalism itself. There is a delay of probably no more than a generation between west and east European scholarship after World War II before the modernist analysis of the nation, as opposed to the organic, became the dominant interpretation.

The other and more important level, already evoked here as the sense of lag and the consciousness of lack, is the historiographical explication of uneven development as well as the interpretation of precedence, de- rivativeness, and generally the traveling of ideas. What does it mean to be first in calendar time? How are diffusion and transmission rendered, and more significantly how are they evaluated? In assessing the nationalist phenomenon in a global framework, the great puzzle is, of course, the remarkable similarity of both the institutional forms of nationalism and of the national imaginary. Anderson's response to this puzzle is that models of nationalism are easy to copy, since it is impossible to secure a patent on them, and in his account the Americas provided the "'concepts,' 'models,' and indeed 'blueprints.'" Thus European nationalisms borrowed "out of the American welter ... these imagined realities: nation-states, republican institutions, common citizenship, popular sovereignty, national flags and anthems, etc." By the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, according to Anderson, a "'model' of 'the' independent national state was available for pirating" and although he makes allowances that this model may be seen as a complex composite of both French and Amer- ican elements, he clearly privileges the American "blueprint."26

Quite apart from whether one accepts the copying sequence proposed by Anderson, the more important question that should be posed is, why necessarily construct a model looking for a basic genealogy and patterns of transmission based on the copying metaphor? An alternative way to understand the basic similarity of nationalisms is to start from the idea of the basic similarity of human societies, even when they are not in immediate contact, which was more often than not the rule for the premod- ern period. Then nationalism could be approached as an almost synchro-

25. It is impossible to even begin to cite the enormous historiography produced both in and about eastern Europe. Even mentioning a few important works would be a disser- vice to the many other unmentioned, but still important ones. A good way to start is to look up the literature cited in the country-by-country treatments in the two aforementioned collections: Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, and Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century.

26. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 81.

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nous rearrangement of group solidarities in human society, as a global social process that is itself a by-product of urbanization, bureaucratization, the revolution in communications, and so on; in a word, it is intimately linked to modernity. I am not using synchronous in a rigorous sense as concurrent, pertaining to strict calendar or clock time, but in terms of a

general longue duree framework (in the Braudelian understanding) of a historical period in which separate developments can be treated as rela-

tively synchronous. I use it, thus, more in the sense of the geological term coetaneous, belonging to the same period. This does not contradict the

theory of the modularity of the national form, nor does it deny the se-

quential transmission of ideas, but it dispenses with notions like "pirating" and "copying," which, strangely enough, Anderson deploys in his very commercial allegory of the "invention" of the nation and the impossibil- ity to put a "patent" on it and thus obtain copyrights.

Take Peter Sugar's influential model of the "arrival of nationalism" in eastern Europe (he does not even use the word "birth" but insists on "arrival"): even though it is articulated in prose much less sophisticated than Anderson's or Osborne's, structurally it makes essentially the identical ar-

gument. Nationalism was a "Western concept" which "penetrated into East- ern Europe" or "was imported into Eastern Europe" where it emerged in

many variations, "as it was adapted by the people living in Eastern Europe." With time, these variations disappeared and east European nationalism

"began to take on the features of the most aggressive and chauvinistic vari- ants evident in Western Europe," to turn into a homogeneous "integral nationalism."27 Since this view is reproduced in most any treatment of nationalism, it deserves a full quote:

In Central and Eastern Europe the character of nationalism changed according to local conditions: the farther an area was from the lands in which nationalism developed, the less its nationalism resembled the original model. Even such basic expressions of nationalism such as con- stitution, freedom, or republic acquired different meanings in more eastern areas of Europe. This is anything but surprising. People who grew up in the Orthodox world and were not affected by the major cultural, religious, and political movements that transformed the Western Chris- tian world-such as the scientific revolution, Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment- or by the drastic economic and societal changes that accompanied them, were bound to attach different meanings to the concepts of nationalism. This was particularly the case for people in the Bal- kans who had lived under Muslim rule for centuries.28

27. Emphasis mine. See Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 20, and Sugar and Led- erer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 8-9. The notion of integral nationalism is adopted from Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York, 1990) and ultimately derived from CarltonJ. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931).

28. Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 8. Such thinking inevitably leads him to facile conclusions of this kind: "The roots of today's problems-the inability of the various nations living in the Balkans to cooperate and the so-called historical hatred that separates them-can be found in the arrival of nationalism and in modern interpretations of historical events." For a replication of this line of thought see, among numerous others, the aforementioned works of Hagen Schulze, Jeno Sziics, as well as Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe (New York, 1997).




Sugar goes on to express his surprise at the remarkable accomplishment of Father Paisii, an eighteenth-century Bulgarian monk who, in 1762, wrote his subsequently hugely influential Slavo-Bulgarian History. Given that new concepts and ideas can be discovered and transmitted only by literate people, and that most people in the Balkans at that time read neither French nor English, Sugar writes that they "got their knowledge secondhand through German or Russian." In the case of Father Paisii, cir- cumstances were even more unfavorable. He worked in a monastery on Mount Athos and had no access to any of the major western authors, either in the original or in translation. Besides, he did not really know the

languages. So the fact that he wrote a work that "shows him to be a nationalist in the modern sense" leaves Sugar astonished, yet he never at-

tempts to explain either his puzzlement or the phenomenon itself.29 Had he seen the eighteenth and nineteenth century world in terms of the uni-

fying structure of modernity and had he measured it with a clock attuned to relative synchronicity, he would have surely been less surprised.

Neither is the non-Orthodox east European world exempt in this account. True, it is admitted that the Poles developed a modern nationalism

by stressing ethnic identity fairly early, primarily as a response to outside attack and the partitions; however, their non-westernness is introduced by classifying them, alongside the Hungarians, as bearers of an aristocratic nationalism, which, "being basically a contradiction in terms, produced the least constructive results."30 To complete Sugar's classification, he or- dered the rest of eastern European nationalisms under the rubrics of popular nationalism, which reminded him ofJacksonian democracy (the Serb and Bulgarian cases), bureaucratic nationalism reminiscent of the nationalism of the newly emerging countries of Africa and Asia of the twentieth century (Romania, Greece, and Turkey), and bourgeois, which most resembled but was not identical to its western model (the Czech case). What is amazing is that Sugar, in order to make the point of a complete cleavage between east and west, effectively introduces the class principle, and the fact of the "missing bourgeoisie" becomes the litmus test in his classification. For all his professed non- and even anti-Marxist approach, this is essentially a replication of the most vulgar economism. Conversely, although both his volumes were written or reprinted nearly a decade after the publication of Miroslav Hroch's Marxist analysis, Sugar never

adopted Hroch's sophisticated shift of attention to the role of the intelli-

gentsia rather than the bourgeoisie as the original motor of nationalism.31

29. Ibid. The German intermediacy is seen as a facilitating agent for the adoption of western ideas: "By the time they became operating forces east of Germany they were at least twice removed from their western models." Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 13.

30. Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 46. 31. Miroslav Hroch, The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative

Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the SmallerEuropean Nations (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1985). For a critique of the essentializing link between the bourgeoisie and nationalism, see Llobera, The God of Modernity, 123-33, 220. Sugar's facile theory is all the more astounding as the majority of the individual contributions to Sugar's collection actually demonstrate (sometimes explicitly insisting on) the indigenous roots of nationalism and refuse to employ the importing metaphor.

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The Czechs, too, were not exempt from their non-westernness. Their lack of a state "made it imperative for Czechs to champion outdated rights and institutions (Staatsrecht, and so on) to justify their other demands.

Consequently, their outlook became less realistic and more historical-tra- ditional than the bourgeois nationalism of western Europe. They looked to the West, sharing its traditions and development, but geography and

political realities forced their nationalism into an eastern world."32 This time, the mental map on which this conclusion is based comes directly from Hans Kohn. Kohn had posited a fundamental difference between western and eastern nationalism:

Nationalism in the West arose in an effort to build a nation in the political reality and struggle of the present without too much sentimental regard for the past; nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe created, often out of myths of the past and the dreams of the future, an ideal fatherland, closely linked with the past, devoid of any immediate connection with the present, and expected to become sometime a political reality. Thus they were at liberty to adorn it with traits for the realization of which they had no immediate responsibility, but which influenced the nascent nation's wishful image of itself and its mission .. .33

This neat mechanical bifurcation of the European space into special- ized production areas-a west European one, ostensibly based on reality and characterized in terms of producing modern principles (like self- determination) and the east European one, which, in contrast, is characterized by its obsession in producing historical myths-was taken up by Kohn's followers and continues to be reproduced, having become one of the most persistent tropes in east European studies. Here is Sugar again, for whom east European nationalism's defensive character and its pop- ulist myths have no parallel in the west European space: "This rather pes- simistic nationalism produced national holidays or historical benchmarks tied to military or political defeats: the Battle of Kosovo (1389) for the Serbs, the battle of Mohacs (1526) for the Hungarians, the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) for the Czechs, the three partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) for the Poles, and the Treaty of Berlin (1878) for the Bulgarians."34 Apart from the fact that, with the exception of Serbia, none of the defeats are part of the national celebratory ritual, in the Bulgarian case the error seems to be deliberately flagrant: after all, any good historian is well aware that Bulgarians celebrate as their national day the Treaty of San Stefano and not Berlin, a chimera, to be sure, but one of achievement, not defeat.

Needless to say, not only is this a reductionist dichotomy that fails to account for the incredible west European investment in and production of foundation myths, studies of ethnogenesis, historical literary fakes, and so on, but it also forgets that the compulsive attempts at historical legiti- mation by the new east European states were a response precisely to west

32. Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 47- 48. 33. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New

York, 1948), 330; cited in Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 9-10. 34. Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 417.

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European obsessions with the rights (or lack thereof) of "historic" and "non-historic" peoples.

The Balkans in particular have been singled out as having a special propensity for myths. These myths, according to another model by the German historian Holm Sundhaussen, include the "golden" pre-Ottoman period, the myth of the "Turkish yoke," the myth of the pure and organic nation, the myth of national rebirth, the Kosovo-myth, the haiduk-myth, and the victimization myths.35 I would submit, however, that it is very difficult to distinguish these myths structurally from the "golden" myth of antiquity, the myth of the Dark Ages, the myth (and practice) of the Nu- remberg laws of the 1930s and ius sanguinis, the myth of Rome (as in Ital- ian national ideology, with the myth of the Roman Republic, the Roman empire, and the Papacy), the myth of the battle of Poitiers (both the one in the eighth, and the one in the fourteenth century), the myth of the Walkiiren, and the myth of a fortress besieged by enemies (as in both the Masada as well as German military doctrine in World War I). While the model acknowledges that many of these characteristics are not specific only to the Balkans, it posits that what constitutes the Balkan specificity is this cluster of characteristics that unmistakably defines it. But positing a diachronically stable evolution that produces a cluster of characteristics leads to a static analysis that pays no attention to the fact that these myths, while existing and undergoing a continuous transmission through education or other cultural and political channels, are inflamed and become operative only at certain periods. In recent years, this was the case in Yu- goslavia, a country disintegrating and caught up in a civil war. Character- istics of the extraordinary Yugoslav situation were externalized and, in a totally unwarranted fashion, were rhetorically sold to the political class and to the broad public as Balkan.

Let me give another example, again involving the Balkans. It juxta- poses the two different approaches to the same historical phenomenon: one utilizing the longue duree framework and the notion of historical legacies, the other an essentially structuralist approach to the Balkans as a discrete space with its own characteristics (albeit the result of historical evolution). One of the longest standing legacies of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans has been the demographic one. The interpenetration of different ethnic groups over the course of several centuries made their dis- entanglement under the regimes of the newly created nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exceedingly difficult. As a result, mi- nority problems have plagued practically all Balkan nation-states, and they have resorted to similar solutions: emigration and assimilation. Alto- gether, several major "cleansing waves" have occurred in the Balkans, from the consecutive secessions from the Ottoman empire until today. This would be a consensual point among historians from which dissent can hardly be expected.

Yet there are different ways of articulating this consensus and different interpretational frameworks in which it is inscribed. The interpreta-

35. Holm Sundhaussen, "Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Eu- ropas," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25, (1999): 626-53.

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tion that approaches the Balkans as a historical space, seeking to establish its defining characteristics, expresses the demographic legacy as "the instability of population relations and ethnic mixture in a very small space," and posits that, in contrast to western Europe, population relations in the Balkan peninsula were never consolidated.36 This is certainly not an unacceptable way to phrase it, but the same point could have been made dif- ferently. Instead of speaking of the contrasting features of population characteristics of two discrete spaces-stability for the western space and instability for the Balkan space-the same fact can have the following ar- ticulation: a process of consolidation of homogeneous dynastic, religious, and ethnic states has been taking place in Europe at least since the fifteenth century. The same process may be described less euphemistically as ethnic and religious cleansing. Nation building and consolidation is a dynamic process that in Europe has taken several centuries and is not yet completed. If we have to map it geographically and chronologically, it begins in the European west and moves gradually to the north, the center, the south, and the east, the southeast (or the Balkans) presenting its youngest version. So, what we call stability in the west may be reconceived as the somewhat earlier (although also ambivalent) completion of this process.

Practically all of the authors considered in this article share in the widely spread conventional assumption that ideas like the Enlightenment, national self-determination, individual liberties, and so on were and are organic to the west, whereas in the east they are transplanted on alien soil. These botanical metaphors tend to overlook the gradual and uneven process by which these ideas took hold also in the west. After all, as Eugen Weber has shown brilliantly, peasants were turned not only into Greeks, Serbs, or Bulgarians but also into Frenchmen.37 Even today, when a Frenchman is socialized to Voltaire, he has to learn him anew; Voltaire is not in his blood. What makes this socialization process different for a Pole or a Hungarian today? Some time ago, at a concert at which a black con- ductor was conducting a Gustav Mahler symphony, I heard the comment of one of my Balkan escorts who found it somehow abnormal for a black man to interpret what he thought of as essentially European music. He was indulgent enough and had no objection to the qualifications of the musician (after all, this particular individual had been "westernized") but the scene seemed too eclectic to him; it somehow offended his sense of aesthetic purity. This is a form of racism. It never occurred to him that to most west Europeans or North Americans, Balkan or other east European individuals (with the possible exceptions of the ones anointed by Habs- burg rule) listening to the music of Mahler or espousing "western ideas" like liberalism, individualism, democracy, and so forth probably present a

36. Sundhaussen, "Europa balcanica," 639. The following polemical argumentation was formulated first and published in Maria Todorova, "Der Balkan als Analysekategorie: Grenzen, Raum, Zeit," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 470-92. See the latest response of Sundhaussen: "Der Balkan: Ein Pladoyer fur Differenz," Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003): 608-24.

37. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870- 1914 (Stanford, 1976).

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similar paradox (with the additional indulgent exception, of course, of

particular individuals who have been "westernized"). It would be indeed

surprising to see a peasant with a kalpak at a Mahler concert. But I per- sonally would be as surprised to see the organic attire of Lederhosen and Dirndl amidst a Mahler audience. In any case, I am offering this example because it neatly illustrates, among other things, the notion of chronic allochronism: the non-westerner is always living in another time, even when he is our contemporary; on the other hand, Mahler or whomever we like from another time is appropriated, brought into our own time period in a manner which we can call isochronism.

The reformulation that I have suggested of nationalism as a long-term process is not undertaken for the sake of political correctness or diplo- macy, but in order to make a methodological point. While the first de-

scription presupposes two distinct geographic and historical spaces, the second involves the Balkans in a common long-term process. It thus redefines the Balkans as part of a common space (European or global) which evolves, and one of whose characteristics is the homogenization (or, rather, imagined homogenization) of polities. It also allows us to de- construct the category "west" and transform it from a model-like entity into a dynamic one which itself underwent the process unevenly and over a long period of time.

Two serious methodological caveats need to be given here. One con- cerns the treatment of long-term processes, the other the problem of

agency. In describing a longue-duree process from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, one can be accused of postulating a deterministic, teleolog- ical evolutionary development culminating with "cleansed" nation-states. Of course, the "latecomers" are not simply latecomers, replicating the ex-

perience of the "pioneers" in an ideal laboratory setting. The end of the twentieth century is different from the end of the fifteenth century, not least because the "pioneers" (who represent today's most economically and politically influential part of humanity) deem as unacceptable the

types of behavior that had been accepted or imposed as normal several centuries ago. There are, I think, two ways to respond to this challenge.

The first addresses the question of longue-duree processes and the ad-

equacy of subsuming various distinct forms within the same category. Another concept-industrialization-faces a similar challenge. Not only did it take place over the course of several centuries over Europe, even in its core space, England, it took several centuries for its accomplishment and penetration into different areas of the country and into different branches of industry (the eighteenth and nineteenth, or, according to a different interpretation, the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries). Surely, the mechanisms of the process and the social price at different

junctures of this development were different (with pioneers and laggards in each case), but still nobody questions the epistemological adequacy of describing them within the same overall process (and the respective category).

One could play with a more grandiose example: the spread of farm-

ing from the Fertile Crescent throughout Europe over many thousands of

years. That farming arose in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago

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is well known. As Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has shown in his Genes, Peoples, and Languages, farming spread from Southwest Asia across the Balkans and from there toward the European northwest at a speed of one kilometer per year; that is, it took 4,000 years for farming to reach the British isles.38 Should we abstain from describing this as a long-term process lest it dis- play the dangers of a telos-driven activity? And, on the other hand, once the process is completed, does it matter where it originated and by whom? Just imagine Saddam Hussein commenting on the derivative character of agriculture on the British isles....

In a word, overarching and long-term categories implicitly carry in themselves the danger of essentialism, or teleology, or determinism. We can get around this by providing detailed and sensitive area- and time- specific studies. But as scholars we owe our readers at least consistency. We either apply these categories (with all due qualifications and consciously taking all the risks) to everyone (to the Balkans, or any other region which seems to be undergoing similar processes that are spatially and temporally linked), or else purge these categories altogether, proclaim the inevitable solipsism, and lapse into an epistemological nirvana.

The other response addresses the charge of determinism and the problem of agency. Does my argument implicitly assert that eastern Eu- rope was swept by a preordained process of nation formation and ethnic homogenization to which there was no alternative? In theory, I do not subscribe to reductive determinism and welcome the exploration of alternative developments at each historical juncture. In practice, I would maintain that the maneuverability of small nations and states in a hierarchical configuration is very limited, and that they are constrained in their choices down to the finest details. It suffices to recall the hegemonic dis- courses (and accordingly practical imposition) of legitimate monarchies during the era of the Congress of Vienna; the later consideration of empires as anomalies, and the subsequent imposition of nation-states as the normative template; and the present straightjacket free-market democra- cies advocated (without alternative room for choice) by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the leading economic powers.

The more difficult and serious problem to address is whether by emphasizing the constraints on the agency of local players one does not alle- viate their responsibility for their actions. Let me, in this connection, in- troduce another example. In 1913, the Serbian prime minister, writer, and scholar Vladan Djordjevic wrote the most explicit racist abuse against the Albanians. The obvious link has been made with the racist anti- Albanian insults in the 1980s and 1990s Serbia under president Slobodan Milosevic.39 This reflects a diachronic approach illustrating the continuity of Serbia's discourse, a distinct choice of a mental map. It is a legitimate choice, but it is not the only option. For myself, I prefer to extend the space of the analysis over the intellectual map of Europe at the time. In the discrete chronological period of the latter half of the nineteenth

38. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, trans. Mark Seielstad (New York, 2000).

39. Sundhaussen, "Europa balcanica," 552-653.

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and the beginning of the twentieth century, Vladan Djordjevic can be seen in the company of Joseph de Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler, and the like, that is, in the common space of European racism.40 This does not make Djordjevic less disgusting for his views. What it does, however, is include eastern Europe (in this particular instance southeastern Europe) in a common European or global space and in the proper comparative perspective, rather than ghettoizing it in a diachronic and spatial Balkans continuity. It ought to be stressed

again that when I employ the notion of a "common European space," this is not the result of some kind of ontological angst to "decenter" Europe. I am in no way essentializing Europe, nor is this methodological assertion to be politically translated into the aspiration to be included in the "common European house" of Gorbachev. It simply reflects the concrete fact that Europe (in a very elastic understanding) is the natural geographic and historical background against which developments in one of its sub-

regions in the particular time period under discussion can be most ade-

quately projected. Let me reintroduce the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue

duree framework. What it allows us to do is to describe a period not simply in terms of linear consecutive developments but as a process that empha- sizes its dialogical nature. This is how Gupta sees it for the Third World:

As far as the Third World is concerned, the story of the nation as a traveling, modular form is one that reinstates the temporal lag of the great Euro-American-centric narratives of modernity. Understanding nationalism as a process, however, allows us to turn this story around: thus, we could narrate the tale of American nationalism by demonstrating how the rise of historical consciousness in Europe altered nationalist ideolo- gies and practices in the Americas; how the official nationalism of imperial powers fundamentally reshaped nationalism in Europe and the Americas; how Third World nationalisms that constituted the last wave infused democratic and dissident currents in the nationalisms hegemonic in the First World. The crisis in U.S. nationalism created by movements against imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia that are now indexed by the term 'The Sixties' would be unthinkable without Third World national liberation struggles: how could one write the story of the movement led by Martin Luther King without Gandhi or the independence of new nation-states in Africa, or of the anti-war movement without Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh? 41

In a similar intra-European dialogue, much of the romantic passion of George Byron and Aleksandr Pushkin cannot be understood outside of the influence of Greek nationalism; the Polish partitions and the sub-

sequent mobilization of Polish nationalism created waves that inspired a variety of responses, from philosophers and writers beginning with

Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the crystallization of a specific Russophobia in nineteenth-century Europe that goes a long way in explaining the

40. Of the plentiful literature on this problem, see the recent work of Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia 1999).

41. Gupta, "Rethinking the Temporalities," 15-16.

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specificity of European international relations; the German preoccupa- tions with folklore cannot be understood without the Serb connection, nor the introduction of the moral principle (although not necessarily morality) in British Gladstonian politics without the impetus of Bulgarian nationalism and the retaliation it invoked; and I don't even want to touch upon the connections between the Balkans and the new world order with its warrior-pacifying conduct. Thus, "a Gramscian perspective that treated nationalism not as an achievement but a fragile, always-contested, hege- mony that was formed within a larger context of global geopolitical, capitalist, and ideological changes would give us a very different picture of the time of the nation than that of homogeneous, empty time."42

The idea of relative synchronicity within the same time period (i.e. of coetaneous phenomena) does not exclude the existence of asynchronic developments in the strict sense of the word. This can be aptly illustrated by a general survey of the rise and evolution of Balkan nationalisms until the advent of their nation-states. I am narrowing it down to Balkan nationalism not only because of considerations of expertise but also because of the relatively earlier emergence of the Balkan nation-states from the pre- vious imperial formation (the Ottoman Empire), as compared to their east European counterparts under Habsburg or Russian rule, as well as their posited relative backwardness even vis-a-vis east central Europe. The Bal- kan case thus illustrates most poignantly the argument I want to advance.43

Miroslav Hroch's influential model of nation formation, developed for the smaller nations of central and eastern Europe, provides a very use-

42. Ibid., 16. 43. There are very few, if any, genuine comparative studies of the rise and develop-

ment of nationalism in the two imperial regions of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Most general historical accounts of eastern Europe simply enumerate the separate cases without analyzing the existence or lack of regional characteristics. On the other hand, the studies that posit fundamental differences between east central and southeastern Europe (the majority of them belonging to political scientists) do so without any empirical analysis, instead imposing models. The famous essay byJeno Szics, "Three Historical Regions of Eu- rope," does not even deal with southeastern Europe, as it presumes its absolute difference as conventional knowledge, without proving it. A recent rare attempt at comparison is Miroslav Hroch, "Die nationalen Formierungsprozesse in Mittel- und Sudosteuropa: Ein Vergleich," in Elitenwandel und Modernisierung in Osteuropa, Berliner Jahrbuch fuir osteu- ropiische Geschichte 2 (Berlin, 1995), 7-16. It makes for embarrassing reading from an otherwise great historian who attempts to impose a comparative analysis based on rather scanty knowledge of southeast European developments. It probably would not be worth mentioning were it not for its rarity, and for the fact that it illustrates the profound difficulties of genuine comparisons when undertaken without the appropriate expertise. On the other hand, some valuable intra-regional comparisons are beginning to appear. See, for example, Diana Mishkova, Prisposobiavane na svobodata: Modernost-legitimnost v Surbiia i Ru- muniia prez XIX v. (Sofia, 2001), or Ivo Bock, Kollektive Identitdten in Ostmitteleuropa: Polen und die Tschechoslovakei (Bremen, 1994). Although uneven in terms of quality, the collective volume ofJolanta Sujecka, ed., The National Idea as a Research Problem (Warsaw, 2002), which was the outcome of an international conference at the Polish Academy of Sciences, is also worth mentioning. While the introduction misses the opportunity to address the comparative potential of the separate studies, the very fact that they range naturally across the posited divide, including Poles, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechs, Kashubians, and Buriats, is already quite a positive development.

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ful template for comparative analysis.44 Hroch outlined three phases of

development: phase A, termed the scholarly phase, when a small elite of activists begins the study of language, culture, and history; phase B, when

patriots beyond the scholarly elites are mobilized and seek to "awaken" national consciousness among the ethnic group-the national agitation phase; and phase C, the era of mass national movements, when a full social structure came into being, and the movements differentiated into rival wings with their own national programs.45

All Balkan national movements went through the consecutive phases of the development of their national idea as outlined by Hroch throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this development had an asynchronic character, and the different phases had a longer or shorter

time-span in the particular cases. If Greek nationalism, being the earliest, is accorded the status of a standard against which the other nationalisms can be compared, one could observe a contraction of phases B and C for the Serbian case before autonomy and independence, a protracted phase B for the Bulgarians, and almost coincidental phases A and B for the Al- banians before they were propelled into independence even before the onset of phase C.

This asynchronic character of the separate national movements also

explains the idiosyncrasy of their mutual relations. Greek nationalism, presiding over the first, however weak, Balkan nation-state and with a

strongly articulated and ambitious national irredenta, became the hegemonic nationalism in the peninsula throughout the nineteenth century until the demise of its program in the aftermath of World War I, and es-

pecially the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922. Likewise, although on a more modest scale, Serbian nationalism developed messianic features as the

44. Hroch distinguishes between two distinct stages in the process of nation building: one beginning in the Middle Ages, the other accompanying the transition to a capitalist economy, i.e. the formation of the imodern nation per se. The first stage produced two different outcomes. One was the development of the early modern state, absolutist or with a representative estates system, under the domination of one ethnic culture. In this case, the old regime was transformed, by reform or revolution, "into a modern civil society in parallel with the construction of a nation-state as a community of equal citizens." The second outcome occurred in cases when "an 'exogenous' ruling class dominated ethnic groups which occupied a compact territory but lacked 'their own' nobility, political unit or continuous literary tradition." While Hroch is cautious enough to show transitional cases and exceptions, as a whole the first outcome prevailed in western Europe, whereas the second was typical for eastern Europe. Miroslav Hroch, "From National Movement to the Fully- Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe," in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation (London, 1996), 79- 80.

45. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival, 22-24 and passim. In his 1996 article, "From National Movement," Hroch characterized Phase C as the period when "the major part of the population came to set special store by their national identity" (81). This can be disputed in light of the significant literature on the protracted process of nation formation, most radical and successful after the triumph of nationalism and the erection of a nation-state even in the west European zone (the classical work being that of Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen). Apart from the quibble over "the major part of the population," one can still accept the mass phase by reducing the support to a substantial part of the population or to a part forming a critical mass, without in any way constituting a majority.

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unifier and leader of the South Slavs. In contrast, Bulgarian nationalism displayed a singularly defensive quality. Defensiveness vis-a-vis Europe is a common trait of all east European nationalisms (although not from the outset), but in the Bulgarian case it was particularly aggravated because it had to operate against the earlier-formed nationalisms and earlier-articulated irredentist programs of its neighbors. In the Albanian case, a similar defensiveness and apprehension actually transformed what was essentially and simply a bid for cultural autonomy into one for independence.

If we were to compare the particularities of the sense of lag and the consciousness of lack between the so-called Third World nations of the twentieth century, such as India, Pakistan, or the African ones-in a word, the postcolonial nations that emerged after World War II-and the ones in eastern Europe, a curious, although not necessarily fundamental, trait will stand out. Granted, all the discursive characteristics of the relationship of the new nation-states to the west are shared, and they are all based on the premise that Europe or the west is the model of imitation, and that modernizing is articulated in terms of a catching up, in which time will be accelerated, so that one would accomplish in a decade or two what others have achieved in a century or two. Accordingly, the main categories of analysis of the past are ones that pertain to emptiness: lack, absences, what one is not, incompleteness, backwardness, catching up, failure, self- exclusion, negative consciousness, and so on. And in both cases the rea- sons for the backwardness are external.

Yet, while in the Third World the agent of backwardness is the west itself, this is not so for eastern Europe where the culprits are, alternatively, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian cum Soviet empires (and for the latter the Turko-Mongol yoke). The one exception is Turkey, where a whole interpretive trend exists that treats the Ottoman Empire in the last century of its existence as a quasi colony of the west, describing the relations as semi-colonial, and where, accordingly, dependency theory, world systems theory, and postcolonial studies have found fertile ground. For the rest of eastern Europe, it is Ottoman or Russian rule or communism, as imposed by the Soviet Union, that has severed eastern Europe from what is often described as its own evolution within its own larger organic space: Europe. Thus the lag is depicted as an artificial one, having delayed one's own evolution. In a word, the acceleration of time in the future, the catching up, is with one's own "what might have been." Europe's past is eastern Europe's organic, not emulative, future. To be sure, this is only one of many different historiographic assessments, but I would maintain that it is the dominant one for most east European nationalisms. There are certainly also analyses that strive to outline central Europe's or the Bal- kans' uniqueness, their "otherness" from both west and east, but they have never reached the level of significance or influence that the Slavophile ideology or the Eurasian idea, for example, have had in Russia. The central European idea, which was quite powerful as an emancipatory and legitimizing device in the 1980s and 1990s, has for all practical purposes disappeared.




In addition, because the Balkan national idea began developing relatively early among the majority of the ethnic groups of the region-from the second half of the eighteenth century on-defensiveness vis-a-vis Eu- rope is not encountered during the constitutive stages of the Balkan nationalisms. After all, some of the Balkan national movements developed earlier by at least a generation compared to many other east European nationalisms under the Habsburg or the Romanov empires: Finnish and the other Baltic nationalisms, Slovak, Ruthenian, and so forth. As a whole, they were coeval to the German and Italian movements, and in the Greek and Serbian case achieved earlier, though truncated, statehood. One can see defensiveness full-blown only after the establishment of the independent Balkan nation-states and continuing until the present, when the lack of wealth, institutional expertise, and human capital of these societies has been felt as a painful deficiency. But this was not the case in the formative stages of Balkan nationalism. When the first ethnic group in the Balkans to develop an enlightened network of educational establishments-the Greeks-began to advocate the national idea, it was looking for an inspirational model not so much to western Europe but to its own glorious past, which was serving at the same time as the inspirational model for enlightened western Europeans.46 In the peculiar nationalist rhetoric, it was not a matter of borrowing ideas from an alien neighbor (the west) but over- coming the degenerative and retarding effects of the alien oppression of another neighbor (the Ottomans), and joining one's natural family (Christian Europe). Likewise, the Bulgarians in the mid-nineteenth century struggled against what was perceived as a double alien oppression (the political one of the Ottomans and the religious one of the Greeks), but their national ideology was seen as on par with and not emulative of the most advanced ideas in Europe at the time: Mazzinian nationalism, republican ideas, and even early socialist stirrings.

As for the temporal aspect that is expressed in the notion of precedence, epistemologically it makes sense only insofar as direct influence can be established and patterns of transmission demonstrated, like in the undoubted influence of Czech education and culture in general upon

46. Sensitized both to the classicizing spirit predominant in the west and to the ideas of liberal nationalism prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Adamantios Korais worked tirelessly to imbue his fellow Greeks with pride in their glorious past. Prais- ing "the illustrious city of Paris, the home of all arts and sciences, the new Athens," he con- cluded that while it "would amaze anyone, but for a Greek, who knows that two thousand years ago in Athens his ancestors achieved a similar (perhaps higher) level of wisdom, this amazement must be mingled with melancholy, when he reflects that such virtues are not only absent from the Greece of today, but they have been replaced by a thousand evils." Richard Clogg, ed., The Movementfor Greek Independence, 1770-1821: A Collection of Docu- ments (New York, 1976), 45. This is thus an apt example of the dialogical principle evoked above, where a mutually enriching dialogue is going on between the west European En- lightenment inspired by Greek classical thought and the Greek Enlightenment in the per- son of one of its main exponents, Korais, who himself was one of the principal and pioneering channels for the transmission of Greek authors to the intellectual audience in Paris and was, at the same time, inspired by the spirit reigning there.

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Slovak society, or that of Greek upon Bulgarian society. Otherwise, tem-

poral primacy is quite immaterial. Rather different is the question of how

precedence is evaluated, especially by the ones who boast to be the first and insist on a copyright. It is meaningless once a longue duree process is

completed, as I have tried to suggest with the example of farming, or even when it is globally still incomplete, as in the example of industrialization. The otherwise powerful historiography on the English industrial revolution looks pathetic whenever it deserts analytical discourse and ventures

psychological and moral explanations for English priority and uniqueness, especially now that Britain has dropped severely down the ranks of industrial and financial powers. While the process is ongoing, however, precedence is a very strong and effective ideological argument, deftly ex-

ploited and manipulated by the powerful. So far we have addressed the problem of differences in time between

separate east European nationalisms or between east European nationalism as a whole and the west. But the problem can be also posed, although it has not been treated explicitly, of different temporal modes within the individual nationalisms. To my knowledge, no east European society has been studied from such an angle, namely how different social groups (classes, professional groups, religious denominations, age strata, gen- ders) with their own time rhythms and understandings of change, and some even with temporal philosophies, react to and prove more or less re-

ceptive to the new time (or rather times) of the nation.47 I am also not aware of similar studies for the areas outside of eastern Europe as far as nationalism is concerned, although it has been touched upon implicitly in other contexts. Such, for example, was the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which produced an important historiography, es-

pecially in Germany, from the 1960s to the 1980s. In it, although not al-

ways explicitly touching on the category of time, questions about unequal economic development were raised alongside specific cultural and be- havioral modes.48 These were later subsumed under the evocative notion

47. I have since come across a happy exception, although it is an exception: the excellent article by Kristina Popova, "Khramut 'Sv. Dimitur' i boiat pri Port Artur: Subitiia i vreme v pripiskite vurkhu tsurkovnite knigi v selo Teshovo 1849-1927 g." (The 'Sv. Dimi- tur'church and the battle at Port Arthur: events and time in the marginalia of sacred books in the village of Teshovo 1849-1927), BalkanisticForum 3, no. 2 (1994): 76-106. It dem- onstrates the gradual change of mentality and perception of time among the clergy, and the substitution of cyclical with linear time in the course of half a century. See also Tsve- tana Georgieva, "Istoricheskoto suznanie i otchitaneto na vremeto," Istoriia 1 (1992): 12- 16. A couple of articles in the aforementioned edited volume by Alexandru Zub also touch on similar problems for Romania: Mihai Dorin, "Interffrence temporelles dans la r6volte de Horea (1784)" and Liviu Antonesei, "Interpretations du temps populaire dans la culture roumaine de l'entre-deux-guerres," in Zub, Temps et changement, 85-97, 167-86.

48. For example, Hans Medick's work on plebeian culture and economy, in particular the experience and behavior of the poor and the propertyless in the transition to capitalism. "Plebejische Kultur, plebejische Offentlichkeit, plebejische Okonomie: Uber Er- fahrungen und Verhaltensweisen Besitzarmer und Besitzloser in der Ubergangsphase zum Kapitalismus," in Robert Berdahl, Alf Liidtke, and Hans Medick, eds., Klassen und Kultur: Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt, 1982).

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of the "simultaneity of the non-contemporaneous."49 Yet, as Alf Ludtke shows in his survey of Marxist perspectives in historiography, most of these works were inspired by a general belief that, in the end, society will be subsumed in a singular and common history. The groundbreaking work in this respect belongs to Ernst Bloch, who developed the idea of a "multi-

temporal and multi-spatial dialectics," yet posited that this was only a

temporary phenomenon. His perspective was progress as the great ho-

mogenizer.50 It seems that, as Ludtke has suggested, this belief in the har-

mony of temporal perspectives is a result of the fact that historians have

only relatively recently begun to pay the proper attention to the significance of everyday activities for understanding the specific response to

processes that are both global and local. He accordingly calls for analyses that would pluralize historical time, mostly for the sake of approaching "the other" as constitutive of the historical process and not simply as a pas- sive bystander.51

To reiterate, I have been trying to show that eastern Europe as a whole and the particular problem of east European nationalism in historiography have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the

pattern of anthropological objects. Johannes Fabian has provided us with a splendid critique of the "original sin," as it were, of his own discipline: "Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose refer- ent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing object. This 'petrified relation' is a scandal. Anthropology's Other is ultimately, other people who are our contemporaries."52

An optimistic and superficial impulse might tell us that historiography is exempt from this sin: after all, it is by definition an allochronic discourse, truly about other people in another time. A closer look, however, will disabuse us of any optimism: it only makes the problem more difficult to expose. Western historical writing (of which east European historiography is a local branch) has been characterized from its beginnings by presentism. This tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms took, according to Lynn Hunt, "a more problematic turn when the notion of 'the modern' began to take root in the seventeenth century. Over time, modernity became the standard of judgment against which most of the

past, even the Western past, could be found wanting."53 It produced a

49. See in particular Koselleck's treatment of historical acceleration: "Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?" and "Zeitverkiirzung und Beschleunigung: Eine Studie zur Sekularisation," in Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 150-76, 177-202, esp. 165, 175, as well as, in general methodological essays, 9, 101, 307.

50. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt, 1962), cited in Alf Lidtke, ed., Was bleibt von marxistischen Perspektiven in der Geschichtsforschung? (G6ttingen, 1997), 15-16.

51. Ibid., 18-19. 52. Fabian, Time and the Other, 143. 53. Lynn Hunt, "Against Presentism," Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical

Association 40, no. 5 (May 2002): 7ff. She observes that, ironically, intolerance toward fore- bears who fail to live up to present standards appears more readily in Western interpretations of its own, rather than of the non-Western, past. With the advent of cultural rela-

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kind of moral complacency, a temporal feeling of superiority. This kind of

writing, based on evolutionism and the belief in progress, unites the great explanatory telos-driven accounts, whether inspired by G. W. F. Hegel's supreme achievement of the state, or the striving toward the Volksgeist, or of revolution and social equality, or whatever. In it, the genuine and prin- cipally correct allochronism vis-a-vis the writer's own (western) predecessors may have been imbued with ajudgmental superiority, but the attitude toward their non-western contemporaries displayed all the underpin- nings of anthropological allochronism: these people were desperately behind in time even in relation to the writer's less-than-perfect western

predecessors. Fabian laments that even as evolutionism was "all but discarded as the

reigning paradigm in anthropology, the temporal conceptions it had

helped to establish remained unchanged."54 I have tried to demonstrate how this operates in historical analysis that employs structural models of "'timeless' theory and method" and brackets out Time as a dimension of intercultural study.55 I have also tried to argue that there are ways to cir- cumvent this fallacy, in which regard the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue duree development seems to be particularly fruitful without

overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, diffusion, and so on. To conclude with Fabian's own effective ending, there "are ways to meet the Other on the same ground, in the same Time."56

tivism and political correctness, "we more easily accept the existence and tolerate the moral ambiguities of eunuchs and harems, for example, than of witches."

54. Fabian, Time and the Other, 147. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. Ibid., 165.

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the trap of backwardness: modernity, temporality, and the study of eastern european nationalism

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