Museums and Nationalism in Croatia, Hungary, and Turkey

Lorenzo Posocco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000520965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Museums and Nationalism in Croatia, Hungary, and Turkey draws attention to museums as political productions of the nation-state and shows how they can be shaped by the political forces that rule a country.

Drawing on case studies and interviews from Croatia, Hungary, and Turkey, the book investigates how the past has been exploited to serve the interests of nationalism in the twenty-first century, and how museums themselves are exploited to serve nationalist ideologies.Posocco argues that, in a world of nation-states where nationalism is the dominant ideology, all museums are national museums, even when they aren't. In this perspective, they can (and do, in the case studies under analysis in this book) become the cultural offshoots of political wars, places where the national past is contested, rewritten, and sometimes even created from scratch, and finally exhibited. Paying particular attention to the decision-making and economic aspects of the museum, the book also examines the micro-sociological and political aspects, which will be the foundation for further reflections on the macro dynamics of museum-making in other countries and contexts

Museums and Nationalism in Croatia, Hungary, and Turkey provides rare and interesting insights into how museums materialise culture in the service of nationalism. The book will be of interest to those engaged in the study of museums, heritage, nationalism, memory and politics, as a result.

1

Nationalism and the museum

DOI: 10.4324/9781003053033-2

Chapter 1 outlines the body of theories that guides this research on the relationships between nationalism and the museum in Turkey, Croatia, and Hungary. Its goal is to critically review scholarly studies that deal with this subject. The discussion starts with questioning the definition of museum given by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and stresses the difference between the ideal museum of ICOM, a non-profit institution at the service of society, and the real one, an institution subject to heteronomous forces that influence it. The chapter continues with the identification of nationalism as ideology and one of the major forces impacting the museum. After providing the definitions of nationalism and nation-state, the chapter will look at the available literature on nationalism, museum, and nationalism in museum to acknowledge that nationalism is ubiquitous, present at all levels of society, structural and subjective, also in the museum, regardless of its typology, and the museum personnel.

What is a museum and what are the relationships between museums and nationalism? Being that the museum institution is more than 200 years old, one may think that there is a fairly clear idea of how to answer these questions. However, both the literature and the available definitions of museum show no consensus (Mason et al., 2018). A recent definition by the International Council of Museums (ICOM, 2019) highlights the purest purposes of the museum:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.

(ICOM, International Council of Museums, 2019)

A second definition instead, officially acknowledges the political role of the museum, which is described as a dynamic institution—one that changes—according to the changing needs of society.

Museums are dynamic and accountable public institutions which both shape and manifest the consciousness, identities and understandings of communities and individuals in relation to their natural, historical and cultural environments, through collection, documentation, conservation, research and communication programmes that are responsive to the needs of society.

(SAMA, South African Museums Association, 1999)

It is revealing and worth highlighting that SAMA’s definition was written in 1999, when the country was passing from a past of segregationist policies against non-white citizens to the end of the Apartheid. SAMA felt the need to address the problems created by white nationalism—which espouses the belief that white people should develop and maintain a white racial and nationalist South Africa—in South African museums. These involved, among others, under-representing, misrepresenting or not representing at all the native population in South African museums.

Investigating the relationships between museum and nationalism involves questioning, as SAMA did, the role of nationalism. The first important distinction is between far-right nationalism and nationalism. Although the vast literature on far-right nationalism shows no consensus on how to define it or even exactly what to call it, I call here far-right nationalism the ideology commonly associated with racial supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic or transphobic organisations that share certain traits such as the tendency to authoritarianism and recurrence to violence also in extreme forms such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Instead, nationalism can be defined as an ideology entailing the belief that the world is naturally divided into nations that have distinctive cultural and physical characteristics inscribing them on the human landscape over time. It doesn’t necessarily involve violence, xenophobia, homophobia, and so on. As Malešević put it, ‘notwithstanding the centuries of coercive bureaucratic pressure and mass ideologisation, individual human beings remain largely unenthusiastic about killing or dying for abstract nationalist principles’ (Malešević, 2013b: 33).

For Althuser, all ideologies, therefore also nationalism, have no relation to what he defines as “real world” but provide a set of imaginary relationships of individuals to the real world that are necessary to interact with it (Althusser, 2001). We are always within ideology, and different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary reality, ‘not a representation of the Real itself’ (Althusser, 2001: 109). Nationalism as the ‘dominant mode of political legitimacy and collective subjectivity in the modern era’ (Malešević, 2019: 17) creates an imaginary representation of the self as a national self immersed in a world appearing, naturally, as a world of nations. For the sake of clarity, the fact that nationalism does not represent the Althuserrian real itself doesn’t mean that its consequences are not real. The consequences of Nazism as an aberration of nationalism were (and are) real to millions of victims of WW2, Holocaust, and genocides. Without resorting to examples of violence, one could say, as Calhoun did, that nationalism is real in its modelling of our everyday life, our habits, and with them the way we interact with the world (Calhoun, 1997).

The view that nationalism is dominant is in line with Žižek’s idea that ideology runs ubiquitously through society and everybody is influenced even when they think they aren’t (Žižek, 1989). Malešević (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2013a, 2017, 2019) went further with a theoretical model that sheds light on the development of nationalism as an ideology grounded at all levels of society. Through an approach based on the Braudelian longue durée, Malešević details the way nationalism worms its way through the intellectuals and the economic and cultural elites, and it gradually incorporates other social groups, the middle classes, the bureaucratic organs of the state, army, police, workers, and so on. Nationalism becomes structure institutionalised in the state and develops an extensive organisational capacity. It offers a perspective of liberation and collective emancipation that not many ideologies have, and this is an element that increases its ideological penetration. Finally, it gives birth to a national imaginary and rhetoric ‘of micro-level solidarity to continuously legitimise and mobil-ise social action of individuals under their control’ (Malešević, 2019: 38). These three points: 1) organisational capacity, 2) ideological penetration, and 3) envelopment of micro-solidarity are the basis of nationalism as a grounded ideology.

On logical grounds museums, as any other public or private institution, do not escape nationalism. Museum personnel, curators, historians, architects, art historians, archaeologists, and all those figures that revolve around the museum world are affected by it. For the sake of clarity, there is a solid body of literature that inspired this study and brings further evidence about nationalism as ubiquitous and nationalism as influencing museum display, architecture, and symbolism. These studies are the grounds to go one step further and advance the hypothesis at the basis of this book, that all museums are national museums, even when they aren’t.

The first body of studies includes Anderson (1991), who saw nationalism in ‘language and discursive practices of print technology and print capitalism, allied to changes in our conceptions of time’ (Smith, 2009: 14); Gellner (1983) saw it in the modern political and economic structures that have given birth to nations; Hall and Malešević (2013) have focused on the connections between war and nationalism; Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) saw nationalism in invented traditions, museums, monuments, and nationalist intellectuals; Breuilly (1982), Mann (1995), Brubaker (1992), and Tilly (1996) saw it in modernity, in particular in its technological, bureaucratic, political, and economic changes. Michael Billig (1995) saw it in the daily—almost unnoticed—reproduction of identity discourses. Evolutionary psychologists saw it in the DNA, thus in genes that incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves (Rushton, 2005). Craig Calhoun identified nationalism in discursive formation, ergo in language that shapes consciousness (Calhoun, 1997). Media scholars have seen it in the internet, shaping communities in cyberspace (Eriksen, 2007). Ethnomethodologists have seen modern nations and nationalism as inextricably linked to cultural resources rooted in ancient ethnies. They challenged modernists, emphasising the fact that modern nations are the result of nationalists who select a past of popular resonance and patterning of pre-existing ethnohistories (Smith, 2009; Von Scheve and Salmela, 2014). Finally, Michael Billig and his wide legacy (Billig, 1995; Skey, 2009; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008) identified popular aspects of nationalism such as the use of flags in everyday life, national expressions at national football games, anthems, and so on.

The second body of studies includes those works on identity negotiation and construction in heritage and museums as institutions created to celebrate the nation (Watson et al., 2019; Macdonald, 2011; McLean, 2005, 2006; Newmann and McLean, 2006; Macdonald, 2003; Fyfe, 2011; Boswell and Evans, 1999). Although, to my knowledge, there isn’t a study that provides a comprehensive theoretical framework that could successfully explain the multifaceted influence of nationalism over museums. Many fail to acknowledge that the ubiquity of nationalism is such that its influence on museums goes well beyond the political elites, forgetting that not always do those who materially make museum exhibits belong to the latter. Moreover, ubiquity and ideological penetration of nationalism are also at the center of a process that is far from being understood, that is the ease with which visitors accept national discourses. Failing to recognise that museums are not only a matter of elites pushed Gordon Fyfe (2011) to call “dominant ideology approach” the one that sees museums as the product of and performing a top-down imposition. The advocates of the dominant ideology approach take museums as rituals of state power aimed to reinforce and reproduce the state structure, including class inequalities, individual and collective identities, and so on (Duncan and Wallach, 1980; Meltzer, 1981; Bourdieu, 1984). This notwithstanding, the current literature on museums and nation-making abounds with many studies on museums as rituals to celebrate the nation.

Scorrano (2011) studied national representation at the museum of Sydney, Australia, Żychlińska and Fontana (2016) focused on the celebration of the Polish national identity at the Warsaw Rising Museum, Crow (2009) studied the way the Chilean Museo Histórico Nacional celebrated Chilean identity by narrating Chilean national history, and Sang-hoon (2020) investigated nationhood in the National Museum of Korea. Similar case studies have been carried out almost everywhere by scholars of the museum. Finally, it was Crooke who, in Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges, identified the importance of using the study of nationalism as a means to understanding museums. She wrote:

Using the study of nationalism as a means to understanding museums reveals important aspects of their significance. The values that made museums useful for nationalism are the same characteristics that give them relevance today. Although the collections that we form today may be very different from those created by our predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reasons why we collect are much the same. Today, as in the past, collections are an expression of our identity. As we build collections they become an extension of ourselves; they reflect what we are interested in, our values, and our judgements.

(Crooke, 2007: 14)

Similarly, for Elgenius, ‘as part of the nexus of symbolism, used by elites as political tools, national museums raise awareness of, claim and contribute to the construction of national identities’ (Elgenius, 2015: 145). Elgenius emphasises the role of the elites while Crooke uses the word “we” to include all those who contribute to the making of museums. It’s an important distinction in the conceptualisation of the museum, but the basic point stands. Both definitions highlight the fact that museums reflect the society around them. Crooke states that museums reflect what we are interested in, our values, and our judgements. It appears that beliefs, values, and judgements are the building blocks of ideology. It follows that nationalism as the dominant ideology of our time is reflected in the museums we build.

Another study that proves useful when looking at the connections between nation and museums is Laurajane Smith’s Use of Heritage (Smith, 2006). Building on other seminal works—among which are Bennett’s Birth of the Museum (1995), Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992), and Duncan’s Civilizing Rituals (1995)—Smith states:

There is a hegemonic ‘authorized heritage discourse’, which is reliant on the power/knowledge claims of technical and aesthetic experts, and institutionalised in state cultural agencies and amenity societies. This discourse takes its cue from the grand narratives of nation and class on the one hand, and technical expertise and aesthetic judgement on the other. The ‘authorized heritage discourse’ privileges monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time depth, scientific/aesthetic expert judgement, social consensus, and nation-building.

(Smith, 2006: 11)

The concept of “heritage” represents here all that’s good and important about the past of the nation. It is what Smith defines as “authorized heritage”, which is a discourse reliant on the kind of power/knowledge that museums claim to possess. Heritage is authorised when its subject and content are decided by “experts”—in Smith’s words they are historians, archaeologists, architects, and museum curators—in the field of heritage. The concept of expert is defined here through the work of Michel Foucault (1966, 1975, 1991), whose studies have tackled problems arising from the relationship between knowledge, authority, and power. In Smith (and Foucault), power matches with elite and comes into play when, since the 19th century, states meteorically increased the use of disciplinary institutions such as the prison and psychiatric institutions, but also schools and museums. Smith, but also Macdonald (2003), Bennett (1995), and others show their awareness of museums as disciplinary institutions of the nation, where people learn about themselves as communities: nations in a world of nations. What they don’t underline is that at the center of this discourse is always nationalism and that experts graduated from national schools and universities are the vehicles through which nationalism reproduces itself in museums and other public and private institutions. Charles Tilly made clear that in the world of nation-states education and nationalism are inextricable. National schools and academies impose standard national languages and produce national experts ‘to organize expositions, museums, artistic subventions, and other means of displaying cultural production or heritage, to construct communication networks, to invent national flags, symbols, anthems, holidays, rituals, and traditions’ (Tilly, 1994: 140). Similarly, Ulrich Beck and Andreas Wimmer wrote about methodological nationalism, which is the ‘naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences. Scholars who share this intellectual orientation assume that countries are the natural units for comparative studies, equate societies with the nation-state, and conflate national interests with the purposes of social sciences’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003: 576). Museums hire experts born into nations, educated in national schools and academies through national lenses, and subject to methodological nationalism. At this point, we must ask the following question: Is it surprising if the work of these experts reflects the national environment in which they were raised?

This brings us to the influence of nationalism over museums, which can be evident or subtle. In some typologies of museum, specifically in national museums, the mission is evident and public: to exhibit the national heritage. This typology of museum can be found in almost any state in the world. The Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, investigated in this book, is an example of a national museum. It will suffice to say that this typology of museum is inextricably linked to the birth of the modern nation-state; therefore, to states that endeavour to unite the people subjected to their rule ‘by means of homogenisation, creating a common culture, symbols, values, reviving traditions and myths of origin, and sometimes inventing them’ (Guibernau, 2003: 4). Here it is worth opening a brief parenthesis on the nation-state. It is a concept that will recur often in this book, and it is worth defining it to avoid misunderstanding. Nation-state is understood as the materialisation of the Gellnerian principle ‘that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner, 1983: 1), thus ideally it is a territorial space occupied by one nation. For Brubaker, this territorial space is ‘the dominant political reality of our time’ (Brubaker, 2015: 115). It involves governments (democratic or not) that rule claiming to represent the nation, and nations believing to find expression in their states.¹ As a means of example, I report three extracts of this rhetoric from the constituti...