bropasaran
4th March 2014, 22:59
What are some (truly) leftist opinions about coming into and continuing of existence of nations?
E.g. Bakunin says: "differences between races, nations, sexes, ages, and persons – far from being a social evil, constitutes, on the contrary, the abundance of humanity. "
And Bookchin's statement that "specific peoples should be free to fully develop their own cultural capacities is not merely a right but a desideratum".
I've been an extreme nationalist in my younger days, but have later realized that the question of the nation itself is pretty messed up once you start reading about history without a bias, and see various facts and opinions.
For example, the place where I'm from and my nation - "Croat" in the middle ages seems to have been used only for South Slavs of Kajkavian and Chakavian dialects, and Shtokavian dialect users being called Serbs, and only when coming in the modern times (like two centuries to a century ago) a big number of shtokavians started to identify as Croats- because of religion. Actually that number was so big that in Kingdom of Yugoslavia the Shtokavian dialect was (and with superficial nationalistic modification still is) used as the 'official'/ 'literary' Croat language, and a majority of people using the terms "Serbo-Croatian" and "Croato-Serbian" for the language that we speak, because in that time, and up until today, as a rule Serbs and Croats have virtually total mutual intelligibility. In the last hundred years a new nation formed, based on their belonging to Islam- the Bosniaks, which were before that just Serbs or Croats who were muslim; and in the last 50 years there formed the Montenegrin nation, basically just based on localism.
I've been reading about the French nation, the most interesting detail being that in it's modern begining, during the Revolution and Napoleon, only about a half of the population actually spoke French as their first language. The centralisation of culture, education and language in the French nation-state during it's two centuries of existence basically eradicated a bunch of smaller Gallo-Romance languages that were used on that territory. When you think about it, those people who used such languages as their mother tongue were in a much truer sense nations then we here in the Balkans are, we have four nations whose people live in the same region and basically speak the same language, yet we had national wars, and there's still a lot of tension.
This question has implications on the scale of the current strugle, also on the the question of scale and coordination during the transition to a new society (having in mind that revolution isn't going to happen in one day, and on the same day in the entire globe) and the scale and form of political organization in the post-(nation-)state and post-capitalist society.
E.g. Bakunin says: "differences between races, nations, sexes, ages, and persons – far from being a social evil, constitutes, on the contrary, the abundance of humanity. "
And Bookchin's statement that "specific peoples should be free to fully develop their own cultural capacities is not merely a right but a desideratum".
I've been an extreme nationalist in my younger days, but have later realized that the question of the nation itself is pretty messed up once you start reading about history without a bias, and see various facts and opinions.
For example, the place where I'm from and my nation - "Croat" in the middle ages seems to have been used only for South Slavs of Kajkavian and Chakavian dialects, and Shtokavian dialect users being called Serbs, and only when coming in the modern times (like two centuries to a century ago) a big number of shtokavians started to identify as Croats- because of religion. Actually that number was so big that in Kingdom of Yugoslavia the Shtokavian dialect was (and with superficial nationalistic modification still is) used as the 'official'/ 'literary' Croat language, and a majority of people using the terms "Serbo-Croatian" and "Croato-Serbian" for the language that we speak, because in that time, and up until today, as a rule Serbs and Croats have virtually total mutual intelligibility. In the last hundred years a new nation formed, based on their belonging to Islam- the Bosniaks, which were before that just Serbs or Croats who were muslim; and in the last 50 years there formed the Montenegrin nation, basically just based on localism.
I've been reading about the French nation, the most interesting detail being that in it's modern begining, during the Revolution and Napoleon, only about a half of the population actually spoke French as their first language. The centralisation of culture, education and language in the French nation-state during it's two centuries of existence basically eradicated a bunch of smaller Gallo-Romance languages that were used on that territory. When you think about it, those people who used such languages as their mother tongue were in a much truer sense nations then we here in the Balkans are, we have four nations whose people live in the same region and basically speak the same language, yet we had national wars, and there's still a lot of tension.
This question has implications on the scale of the current strugle, also on the the question of scale and coordination during the transition to a new society (having in mind that revolution isn't going to happen in one day, and on the same day in the entire globe) and the scale and form of political organization in the post-(nation-)state and post-capitalist society.