>Chris Doss wrote:
>
>
>>I was babbling on here about the Cossacks a while ago, and the thought
>>occurs to me: Does anyone know of any other instances in history in which
>>a group that was artifically created by a state (in this case, for military
>>purposes) over time developed into a group that considers itself to be
>>an separate ethnicity? <snip>
>>
>Well, they managed to get a lot of ethnic groups in the U.S. thinking of
>themselves as white by welding them into one reactionary identity, not-Black. It
>only took a few decades. Was that identity created artificially by the state?
><snip>
>
>Jenny Brown
>
>
We are quite a long way from Cossacks here, a kind of Janissary caste
recruited into service as border marchers, who in time constituted
themselves as a self-described "ethnic" group. I think that what we saw
in the US, with the assimilation of the European immigrant groups to a
more generic "American" (and "white") identity, was the American version
of "nation-building," to coin a phrase. It was a process that went on
in tandem in the more "advanced" countries. Following Italian
unification, Cavour is supposed to have said, "Having made Italy, we
must now make Italians," and it is a remark that could well have been
echoed, mutatis mutandis, in many other places. Eugen Weber's classic
study _Peasants Into Frenchmen_ describes the process as it occurred in
France. France is a famously centralized polity, where schoolchildren
from Picardy to Languedoc proverbially recited the same lesson beginning
"Nos ancetres les Gallois" at the same hour on the same day. Yet in
1870 France was still in many ways a congeries of local peasant
cultures, many of them speaking mutually unintelligible dialects. Weber
tells the story of how this collection of localized cultures was
transformed in the years after the Franco-Prussian War into the modern,
unified French nation. Part of it was universal schooling, part of it
was military service, and part of it was the whole panoply of flags and
anthems and parades and mass rallies--in a word, "patriotism." The same
process occurred, with local variations, in Germany and Italy and
Britain, which has few rivals in the invention of national tradition.
I know little of Japan, but the young oligarchs who confected the "Meiji
Restoration" seem to have been embarked on a similar project. And the
principal motives for these nation-building projects were emulation--the
wish of local elites to make their nation-states "modern"--and
competition--the desire of those same elites to fit their states for the
imperial sweepstakes.
In the US, elites were faced with the task of assimilating enormous masses of immigrants, a necessary endeavor since their labor power was required to build American capitalism. The American nation-building process, like others of its kind, took on distinctive local characteristics, owing to pre-existing cultural assumptions and traditions. It was, for example, less military than the European version; US society did not become heavily militarized until WWII and its Cold War aftermath. "Race," in the modern black/white sense of the word, permeates the nation-building process in the US, as it does everything else in American life. In the 19th century, the word "race" was used rather freely. People spoke of the "Irish race," the "Italian race," and so on. During the period in question, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the cut-off of immigration after WWI, the word assumes its modern American usage. Part of the reason was the simultaneous project of reconciling the sections after the Civil War. The political deal was explicitly struck in 1876/77--Republican control of the White House in exchange for the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of apartheid in the south, slavery in all but name. In a cultural/political sense, sectional reconciliation demanded the acceptance throughout the US of the justification for the southern social system, which got folded into the general belief system. "Politics" became "ideology," you might say. Nor in speaking of American idiosyncracy should we leave out of account the general oddness of American politics, which goes all the way back to the Hamiltonian Federalists opposing the French Revolution and all its works, while Jeffersonian agrarians (many of the slave-holders) and semi-literate back-country grandees donned the liberty cap--the exact reversal of the constellation of social forces everywhere else. In the nation-building era, progressivism, a movement aimed at coping with large-scale monopoly capitalism and led by middle-class professionals and intellectuals, provided much of the ideology.
So do states always build nations? That may be putting it a bit strongly, but that statement seems much nearer the truth than its reverse.
Jacob Conrad
P.S. By way of digression, I might add that Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the exemplar of the contradictions and ironies of American progressivism: a moderate trust-buster and reformer at home, the father of federal environmental protection, a peace-maker who won the Nobel peace prize, who bawled for Gatling guns and dreadnaughts so that the US could join the leading European states in the pursuit of empire--all, of course, in the service of "democracy." Woodrow Wilson exemplifies the same contradictions and ironies of progressivism, but also its agony.