A. Beginning of Nation-States
a.
The earliest
ancestors of nation-states are the city-states of ancient
The rising power
of
Ancient Rome, which evolved from a city-republic to a world empire, also deeply influenced the progress of nations. This influence was derived in part from the enormous Roman achievement in formulating the principle that constitutional law, establishing the sovereignty of the state, is superior to ordinary law, such as that created by legislative enactments.[2]
b. The Coronation of
Charlemagne
Charlemagne built a kingdom that contained almost all of western and central Europe, and he presided over a cultural and legal revival that came to be known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Two main territories of his empire, East and West Francia, later became the major parts of two important European entities: West Francia became (roughly) modern-day France, and East Francia became first the Holy Roman Empire and then the modern state of Germany. Charlemagne’s close alliance with the popes established a precedent for subsequent ties between medieval popes and kings.
Charlemagne’s first move came against Sachsen, a region of northwestern Germany. The Saxons, the last non-Christian and independent tribe of central Germany, had long harassed the Franks with incursions across their borders. Charlemagne regarded the Saxons as a serious threat to his empire, and he wanted to convert them to Christians.
Similarly, Charlemagne annexed Bavaria and some of the border territories between Germany and the Slavic and Avar countries to the east. Between 791 and 795, he forced the Slavs and Avars to pay him tribute. The lands— which included parts of modern Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia— became the buffer territories on the eastern frontier of his empire.
Pope Adrian I Asks Charlemagne for Help at the Meeting Near Rome When He Was Threatened by Invaders in 772.[3]
In 800, Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans. This action revived the imperial tradition of the Western Roman Empire and set a precedent that the emperors’ authority rested on the approval of the pope. Although the imperial title did not confer any new powers on Charlemagne, it legitimated his rule over central Italy, a fact that the Byzantine emperor acknowledged in 812.[4]
c. Creation of Commercial
City-States
On the other hand, the struggle of the feudal barons to limit the absolute power of their monarchs eventually produced many contributions to the theory and institutions of representative government. During the Middle Ages, commercial city-states arose in Europe. These city-states eventually formed the Hanseatic League and the powerful Italian city-republics, or communes.[5]
The final emergence of national governments is attributed to two primary causes. The first is economic and consists of several emerging phenomena, including a great expansion in trade and the development of manufacturing. These conditions began to undermine the feudal system, which was based on isolated and self-sufficient economic units, necessitating the creation of large political units. The other cause was the Reformation, which succeeded in eliminating the restraining influence of the Catholic Church on political development in a number of European countries.
d. Creation of Modern
Nation-State
The modern nation-state became a definite form of government in the sixteenth century. It was almost entirely dynastic and autocratic. The determination of the reigning monarch was absolute, as the famous aphorism of King Louis XIV of France, “L'état, c'est moi” (“I am the state”) suggests. However, the unlimited powers of monarchs began to be objected to. In England, the Glorious Revolution in 1688 restricted such powers and established the preeminence of Parliament. This tendency culminated in two events of historic importance, the American Revolution, beginning in 1775, and the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. Historians generally date the rise of modern democratic government from these events.
e. French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the
Partisans in
The Napoleonic Wars were a continuation of the wars of the French Revolution, in which the Habsburgs and other dynastic rulers of Europe combined to overthrow the French revolutionary government in an attempt to restore the rule of the French monarchy. However, for a while, Napoleon made substantial advances in the war, and ruled an enormous portion of Europe.
Gradually, the significance of the Napoleonic conquest for the local citizen in Europe shifted from a liberation army to a force of oppression. The first resistance against Napoleon happened in Spain. The beginning of the Spanish citizens’ struggle was an attempt by the French to remove members of the Spanish royal family. The anger of the people boiled over. On the May 2, 1808, the people of Madrid rose up against their tormentors. As the workers of Barcelona would do in 1936, they fought with kitchen knives, clubs, old hunting rifles, and their bare hands against professional soldiers. They attacked the French with extraordinary courage.[6]
Francisco de Goya Second of May, 1808 Third of May, 1808 1814
The painting Second of May, 1808 and Third of May, 1808, was completed by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya in 1814. Goya’s purpose was to memorialize the Spanish war of liberation, during which numbers of innocent civilians were shot by soldiers from Napoleon’s army. At this late stage in Goya’s career, he had become embittered about the fate of the human race, and this attitude is reflected in the raw, expressive quality of the painting style in this piece.
Young Victor Hugo was an eyewitness. He had come to Spain to visit his father, one of Napoleon's generals, traveling by convoy, stopping for the night in Spanish houses. He later recalled: "Even the furniture was hostile; the chairs received you badly and the walls told you: go away!"[7]
Professor Miguel Artola, an authority on that war, says
"We had in our minds a memory of the Arab invasion, and how we had refused it and driven them out. And our priests and monks waged a psychological war. They knew Napoleon had imprisoned the pope and taken other measures against the church. They published small religious books and made many sermons explaining that to kill the French was not a sin. And there was a nationalism, a Spanish pride: Napoleon had kicked out our kings and imposed his own kin.[8]
Napoleon had believed 80,000 troops would hold Spain; however, the number reached 320,000. And every day some died. Napoleon had misjudged the Spanish character. "It was that miserable Spanish affair that killed me," Napoleon muttered years later on St. Helena.[9] This episode of partisan resistance is historically important as the first emergence of partisan warfare, shifting the definition of war from the fight between nations to the one with asymmetric combatants. However, the Congress of Vienna in 1814 restored the old rule of war “jus publicum europaeum.” Henceforward, until World War I, partisans were regarded as fighters outside the domain of “jus publicum europaeum.” They were judged as criminals, not as soldiers.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, known as a German idealist philosopher and the first rector of the University of Berlin, wrote about the moral order of the universe and the moral nature of societies in such works as The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge, which was published in 1798. Written during a period in which the independence of German states was imperiled by the ambitions of Napoleon, Fichte fervently advocated the development of a German national consciousness in Addresses to the German Nation in 1808. Almost all parts of Europe were influence by the Napoleonic Wars, not only Spain and Germany, and out of this tumult modern-day nationalism emerged.
f. Effect of the
Napoleonic Wars in Croatia and
The Napoleonic Wars were a continuation of the wars of the French Revolution. They set the stage for the rise of nationalism and the Revolutions of 1848. Croatia and Slovenia were also part of this sweeping historical phenomenon.
The earliest inhabitants of what is now Croatia were Illyrians, who were conquered by the Romans by 10 CE. Their land, Illyricum, became the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia. As Roman power declined, frequent attacks and widespread destruction by mostly Germanic tribes culminated in the sixth century by the conquest of nomadic people called Avars who were of Mongolian and Turkic origin. Slavic tribes, who probably came with the Avars or were simply swept along from their homeland (almost certainly from the area of present-day Ukraine, Poland and Belarus), settled over most of central and southeastern Europe.[10] In Pannonia and Dalmatia, they started to be called Croats (Hrvati). Of the name “Hrvati,” it is speculated that the Persians who dominated Slavic tribes named them.[11]
In 623 CE, a chieftain named Franko Samo created the first independent Slovene state, which stretched from present-day Hungary to the Mediterranean. This state lasted until the eighth century.
At the end of the eighth century, Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s army destroyed the Avars. Croat and other Slavic tribal federations then established a number of small states between the Roman Catholic Frankish Empire on the west, and the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire on the east. Historically, most of the Slavic states were dominated by one or more empires. Those that were closer to the Frankish Empire, such as the Croats, became Roman Catholics; those closer to the Byzantine Empire, such as the Serbs, became Eastern Orthodox Christians. Since then, the religious difference has been a major part of confrontations between Croats and Serbs. Under the reign of King Tomislav (910-929), Croatia had become an independent kingdom, and had expanded in area to include both Pannonia and Dalmatia, and sometimes Bosnia.[12] In the tenth century, Slovene state was reorganized as the duchy of Carantania by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I.
An unstable succession to the throne after the reigns of Kresimir IV and Zvonimir in the eleventh century led to a Hungarian invasion. In 1102, the two kingdoms united under the Hungarian king, either by the choice of the Croat aristocrats or by Hungarian force. From then until 1918, kings of Hungary were also kings of Croatia, but Croatia kept its own parliament and maintained a certain degree of autonomy. Since 1420, the city-state of Venice had controlled the entire Dalmatian region. In 1526, King Louis II of Hungary was killed and his army destroyed by Ottoman forces in the Battle of Mohacs, establishing Ottoman rule in most of Hungary and Croatia for more than 150 years. By 1699, the Austrian Habsburgs, who had succeeded King Louis’s reigns in 1526, had excluded the Ottomans from Hungary and Croatia.
Map of the Present Croatia[13]
Croatia remained divided. Dalmatia and Istria were ruled by Venice until Napoleon abolished the Venetian Republic in 1797. When Dalmatia and Istria were joined to the Habsburg Empire in 1815, they became Austrian rather than Hungarian provinces and remained separated from the rest of the Croatian lands. Although a large portion of their territory remained under direct Austrian rule until the late nineteenth century as part of the Habsburg Military Frontier, Croatia and Slavonia were formally part of Hungary. Responding to a Habsburg invitation, many Orthodox Serbs settled there as privileged soldier-farmers. Because of this, Serbs became the majority population in much of the Krajina area.[14]
In 1848, Ban Josip Jelacic and his Croatian army helped the Austrians put down the Hungarian revolution. Croat leaders hoped that the Habsburgs would reward their help by establishing a unified Croatia separate from Hungary. However, the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, which created the nation of Austria-Hungary (also called the dual monarchy), again assigned Croatia and Slavonia to Hungary, and Dalmatia to Austria. Unification and greater autonomy became the primary demands of most Croatian political parties in the years leading up to World War I.
Slovene and South Slav nationalism triumphed at the close of World War I in 1918, with the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929.
B. The
Twentieth Century in
a. Carl Schmitt and Theory
of Partizan –Emergence of Nazism
In the beginning of his book Theorie des Partisanen (Theory of Partisans), Carl Schmitt argues about the importance of the partisan in Spain. The Spanish guerillas in 1808 emerged as the first partisans which dared undertake an “informal” struggle against a modern military force.
According to Schmitt, the partisan appears when the military becomes a formal institution. In the case of the Napoleonic Wars, the formality of the nation and the military were defined by the French government and the French military, both of which were created by Napoleon. Because of the emergence of the formal military led by Napoleon, Spanish citizens became partisans and fought against the French military, an official army.
b. Mixture of Marxism-Leninism - The Creation of
Yugoslavia as a Product of Partisan Activity
Schmitt also argues that the theory of partisan struggle, which originally appeared as a method of indigenous resistance, was revived by communism’s world-revolution strategy, which created an absolute definition of enemy. This definition of enemy itself deconstructs an earlier concept of war that existed before the French Revolution, in which war was defined as a conflict between nation-states In the case of Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans attracted all of the Slavic people in the name of communism; Nazi Germany, the invader of Slavic nations, became the perfect enemy.
On the other hand, this partisan ideology risks causing class struggle within the nation. The partisan authority not only tries to expel different classes as enemies of the nation, but also tries to extinguish them. This can cause civil war.
In the case of war between sovereign nations, “correct enemies” are clearly defined. As a result, this framework limited the field of war, and because of it, Europe could largely get rid of the brutal religious wars and the civil wars of its past.
As mentioned above, the Congress of Vienna in 1814 restored the old rule of war “jus publicum europaeum.” Since then, partisans had formed “unofficial” armies outside of “jus publicum europaeum” until World War I. They were judged as criminals when they were captured and tried, not as prisoners of war or war criminals. In the book Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff (The Shift to the Discrimination of the Concept of War,) Schmitt, a member of the Nazi party, justified the abolition of this distinction between combatant and non-combatant that accompanies total war as “dialectic aufheben,” and positively evaluated this as “not a mitigation of antagonism, but reinforcement.”[15]
c. New Definition of
Inside and Outside
In twentieth century, the opposition of East and West because of the Cold War became the new raumordnung (ordering of space.) During the Cold War, both eastern and western sides tried to distinguish their enemies, and this process shifted the partisan’s realistic or pragmatic antagonism to an absolute antagonism. However, this raumordnung was active in European region, but not in other areas. Outside of Europe, such as the case of Vietnam, atrocious weapons which were never used in Europe were employed.
To divide the space by terms separating outside and inside— such as “here” and “there,” “civilization” and “terrorism,” or “safe area” and “dangerous area”— is illusory. The remarkable book Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson explores this subject. However, as long as the structure of such a distinction of space continues to exist, the world cannot get rid of the fear of terrorism and reverse terrorism, and the justification of sacred war and imperialism, since people fight against partisans as partisans.[16]
d. Different Definition of Nationalism – Edward Carr,
Hannah Arendt and Benedict Anderson
Nationalism: A report by a Study Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published by Edward H. Carr in London in 1939, points out that nationalism has different characteristics. Nineteenth-century nationalism, for example, tries to create a political organization dominated by one ethnic group. This idea of nationalism can fit with internationalism, so nationalism was not regarded as immoral in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, nationalism is more aggressive. Nationalist movements sought to expand the border of the nation and to define the morality of nation.[17] Nationalist movements in Croatia and Slovenia during the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolution of 1848 were typical of nineteenth-century nationalism. However, the nationalism that characterized Nazi Germany was a different phenomenon. Because of what happened in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, the image of nationalism became negative in the second half of the twentieth century.
However, the definition of nationalism by Hannah Arendt is different. In the book Elemente und Ursprünge Totaler Herrschaft (The Origin of Totalitarianism,) she discusses the difference between western European (Westeuropäischer Prägung) nationalism and racial Nationalism (der völkische Nationalismus). Western European nationalism created nation-states after the French Revolution. In this form of nationalism, ethnic identity was formed in a long historical process and succeeded by uniting the sense of belonging and the national organization.
Racial nationalism applies to Central and Eastern Europe. Ethnic groups in these countries were inspired by the movements of Western Europe, but there is no clear national identification. Rather there is obscure sense of communal belonging based on race. These ethnic groups were different from those of Western Europe, and did not have clear similarities such as history, language, and habitation. Because of this, their nationalism tried to rely on blood, which caused the pan-ethnic movement to create a completely new form of organization.
Also, these two nationalisms have different relationships with nations. Originally, the establishment of nations has a longer history than ethnic consciousness. The function of the nation was to protect citizens in its own territory without regard to ethnic backgrounds. However, the consciousness of the ethnic groups propels the particularity of the ethnicity. This definition of ethnic particularity conflicts with the essential supreme function of the nation. This will cause the tragedy of a nation-state. However, the danger of the conquest of the nation-state by the nation (die Eroberung des Staates durch die Nation) was not realized in Western Europe, since this type of nationalism was originally connected with the state, and had not abandoned the allegiance to the state and to the nature of states in general. On the other hand, the racial nationalism that was created by an expanded sense of ethnic identity tried to set itself in conflict with the nation. This conflict generated movements that tried to destroy existent multiethnic nations, which became the forerunner of totalitarianism.[18]
According to Benedict Anderson, there are three waves of nationalism. These are the Creole nationalism in North and South America, Language Nationalism in Europe, and Colonial nationalism.
e. Language
Nationalism and the Creation of Serbo-Croatian
From 1800 to 1850, North Balkan local scholars created three different literary languages; these are Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the 1830s Bulgarians people were often considered the same as Serbs and Croats, and Bulgarians joined the Illyrian Movement from 1835 to 1848. However, Bulgaria was established as an autonomous principality in 1878.
The Polish consultant to the Serbian government proposed the idea of creating an Illyrian state using the ancient name of Illyrians, as used earlier by the Emperor Joseph II and Napoleon for the Balkan peoples. This same name was proposed by Croat revivalists for all South Slavs as a common name. Under the guidance of Serbia, this notion of an Illyrian state caused the blending into a single nation of all the South Slav nations, which as well as the Serbs and the Croats was to include Slovenes and Bulgarians.[19]
In 1850, to compete against the cultural threat of Germany and Hungary, some Croats intellectuals met Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic in Vienna and made an agreement to promote a linguistic policy that would unite Croats and Serbs. As a result, the expression “Serbia-Croatian,” used to describe the imaginary common language, first appeared in 1866.[20]
Croats chose linguistic unity by introducing the stokavian dialect, which they borrowed from the Serbs. The authentic Croatian dialects, kajkavian and cakavian, slowly disappeared from public use. A stokavian mode of expression, transliterated from the Serbian Cyrillic to the Latin script, became the Croat literary standard. Because of this introduction of the stokavian dialect, the Croats acquired their first important goal, which was the linguistic and cultural unity of their nation.[21]
Giorgio Castellan points out that the Croats’ need for Serbs as allies was important to their struggles against Hungarian oppression, and this need initiated brief periods of Serbo-Croat co-operation (1848,1867-1868). About this co-operation, Dusan Batakovic writes:
They were characterized by the close relations of Serb leaders with the circle of liberal Catholics gathered around the neo-Illyrian People's party of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer. His clerical option for the Croatian national question was compatible with the supra-national, linguistic model. A Catholic first of all and a Croat second, Strossmayer tried to adapt the Yugoslav idea and the linguistic unity proposed by the Illyrians to the principles of Catholic liberalism. In the cultural and political unity of South Slav nations he saw only one of the means to reconcile and unite the two disputing Christian Churches, the Roman-Catholic and the Serbian-Orthodox, but in a such a way that both in Krajina, Bosnia and Serbia, a Roman Catholic union would be imposed upon the Serbs, as a transitory measure on the road to the final acceptance of Catholicism.[22]
This historical background is extremely important when considering the emergence of nationalism, especially after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Go Next: Ⅱ Overture of Chaos in Yugoslavia