[lbo-talk] Anthro/ethnography query

Jacob Conrad jakub at att.net
Thu Oct 2 07:48:19 PDT 2003


JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:


>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.



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