Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950

Modernity, Violence and (Be) Longing in Upper Silesia

Tomasz Kamusella, James Bjork, Timothy Wilson, Anna Novikov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317279662
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Upper Silesia was the site of the largest formal exercise in self-determination in European history, the 1921 Plebiscite. This asked the inhabitants of Europe's second largest industrial region the deceptively straightforward question of whether they preferred to be Germans or Poles, but spectacularly failed to clarify their national identity, demonstrating instead the strength of transnational, regionalist and sub-national allegiances, and of allegiances other than nationality, such as religion. As such Upper Silesia, which was partitioned and re-partitioned between 1922 and 1945, and subjected to Czechization, Germanization, Polonization, forced emigration, expulsion and extermination, illustrates the limits of nation-building projects and nation-building narratives imposed from outside. This book explores a range of topics related to nationality issues in Upper Silesia, putting forward the results of extensive new research. It highlights the flaws at the heart of attempts to shape Europe as homogenously national polities and compares the fate of Upper Silesia with the many other European regions where similar problems occurred.

1 Upper Silesia in modern Central Europe

On the significance of the non-national/a-national in the age of nations¹

Tomasz Kamusella

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the historic region of Upper Silesia (a century earlier split between Prussia and the Habsburg lands) was gradually infiltrated by conflicting nationalisms. Afterwards, following the founding of the nation-state of Germany in 1871 and those of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918, Upper Silesia was divided and re-divided between these three polities. In turn, by official fiat, the region’s population was first allocated to this nation, and next to another. Contrary to what the relevant national master narratives maintain, the population concerned did have their own identity(ies) of an a-national or non-national kind. Thus, instead of passively awaiting ennationalization from above, they deployed their identity as a national one or negotiated its (more or less accepted) position. It was done in the context of the currently obtaining national identity connected to the state that was at any particular time in possession of Upper Silesia or of a fragment thereof. Without bearing in mind the importance and the persistence of the non-national identity(ies) among the region’s inhabitants, and without taking into consideration its salient points of reference (administrative, ecclesiastical and political borders; confession; memories of the past; or language), it is difficult or even impossible to account for the intermittent rise of the idea of the Silesian and Morawec nations or ethnic groups, and of the languages of Silesian, Morawec and Lachian from the nineteenth century to this day.

National teleology

The nineteenth century heralded the Age of Nationalism in Europe. In the scheme of things, the ‘nation’ became the highest rank of recognition and ‘civilizational achievement’, that a human group could ever achieve. After the splitting of Central Europe among newly founded nation-states in the wake of the Great War, no other groups but nations alone were seen as having a legitimate right to statehood. On the one hand, it meant the destruction of the thus delegitimated non-national polities (for instance, empires) and of their bodies politic (for example, empire-wide elites), while on the other, it also meant the subsuming of all other surviving human groups that were non-national in character under the mantle of this or that nation. During the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of decolonization and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the only large avowedly non-national polity, nationalism became the first-ever worldwide – universal, that is – ideology of statehood and peoplehood legitimation.² Significantly, whatever ideological, political, economic, religious and other differences may exist among the extant polities, they all now define and legitimate their existence through nationalism only. No other ideology is seen as legitimate in the role of statehood and peoplehood legitimation. This normative political monopoly makes of nationalism the unique, first-ever, ‘infrastructural ideology’ of the modern world, equally subscribed to by Iran and the United States, by China and Fiji.

In line with this ideology’s view of the social world, the ‘nation’ is the ‘natural unit’ of human ‘groupness’. In its stronger, essentializing, version it assumes that humanity consists of identifiable discrete nations that are very durable if not eternal, their histories extending back for a millennium or longer.³ In the scheme of things, scholars and politicians ‘simply’ need to identify the extant nations and grant them their own states, thus heralding the long-awaited age of peace and prosperity. It was the nationalist ‘end of history’, as proposed in the wake of the Great War by the United States president Woodrow Wilson and leaders of various stateless national movements, mainly in Central Europe.⁴ (But Wilson’s vision did not extend outside Europe, to ‘non-white’ populations – typically not considered to be nations by Western observers – which were to remain subjected to ‘civilized white nations’ with their own empires.⁵) The weaker version of the national theory of humanity agrees that nations are created by humans themselves, but with the deterministic caveat that it is the ‘unchangeable laws of history’⁶ that require such a development. Thus the rise of nations is equated with the Western (Judeo-Christian) concept of ‘progress’,⁷ or a predestined linear unfolding of humanity ‘from primitivism to civilization’.⁸

The Western intellectual milieu that spawned the social sciences in the mid-nineteenth century equated the concept of ‘society’ with that of ‘nation’. In addition, it was emphasized that ‘advancement and modernity’ are inextricably connected to the nation (society), and can be attained only in national states, not shared with any other nations. Furthermore, only such polities were thought to be capable of controlling their respective ‘national economies’, as the very basis of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’.⁹ No ‘progress’ was thought possible outside the confines of the nation.

Initially, marxists (social democrats) failed to develop a theory that would account for the observed political and social force of nationalism. They came to grapple with this issue only at the turn of the twentieth century in Austria-Hungary, hoping to work out a compromise that would satisfy the demands of national movements without destroying the non-national Dual Monarchy.¹⁰ The official marxism-leninism of the Soviet Union drew on this insight by connecting the nation, as a specific type of social organization, to the ‘capitalist stage of economic development’.¹¹ The subsequent organization of the administrative division of the Soviet Union was carried out on the national basis, as a necessary – in light of marxism-leninism – but, nevertheless, temporary step to postnational classless communism.¹² With the privilege of hindsight, it is possible now to say that the communist polity of universal, global-wide aspirations, rather than quickly scaling the ‘national stage in social development’ and progressing toward communism, functioned as the conveyor belt for the spread of nationalism across Eastern Europe and Asia.¹³

As sketched above, in the nineteenth century thinkers and politicians (mostly Western) of various ideological hues and convictions worked out an increasingly accepted theory that humanity consists or should consist exclusively of nations. This was seen as the prerequisite of ‘progress and development’, and the cornerstone of ‘modernity’ epitomized by the nation-state. This normative belief spread all over the world during the first half of the twentieth century, and the entire habitable surface of the globe was divided among such national polities in the other half of that century.

In this scheme of things there was no place left for human groups construed or identifying themselves on the basis of principles other than the national one, especially if on this basis they aspired to their own statehood. In the strong version of nationalism, the existence of such groups was denied, and they were seen as merely different layers or subgroups of long-lasting (or already existing) nations. On the other hand, the weaker version of this ideology was typically adopted by national activists faced with the problem of the stunning lack of interest in the national message and project on the part of some groups that ‘patently belonged’ or ‘should belong’ to this or that nation. The activists denied such groups any agency and saw them as a ‘mass without qualities’, patiently awaiting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Upper Silesia in modern Central Europe: on the significance of the non-national/a-national in the age of nations
• 2. Fatal violence in Upper Silesia, 1918–1922
• 3. ‘Scoundrels’ and desperate mothers: gendering German and Polish propaganda in the Upper Silesian plebiscite, 1919–1921
• 4. Monoglot norms, bilingual lives: readership and linguistic loyalty in Upper Silesia
• 5. Creating a citizen: politics and the education system in the post-plebiscite Silesian Voivodeship
• 6. Polish nationalism and national ambiguity in Weimar Upper Silesia
• 7. The Nazi ‘recovered territories’ myth in the eastern Upper Silesian borderland, 1939–1945
• 8. Upper Silesia in the age of the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, 1939–49
• 9. Ascribing identity: public memory of the plebiscite and uprisings
• Index