Tweet
HOW AN ASSASSIN IN 1914 SPAWNED TODAY'S ULTRANATIONALISTS
The Globe and Mail, Canada
June 27 2014
Doug Saunders
Earlier this month, a swarm of fighters bearing the black flags of
the jihadi militia known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,
busy invading a large chunk of northern Iraq, decided to pause and
link their cause to the First World War.
On that Tuesday, the Sunni fighters seized a bulldozer and some
military vehicles and plowed a rough roadway through the earthen
berm that divides Syria and Iraq. After dancing on the newly erased
border and firing automatic weapons into the air, the ISIL fighters
took to Twitter and YouTube to make a historic boast: By moving aside
this pile of sand and earth, they said, they "are demolishing the
Sykes-Picot borders. All thanks due to Allah."
Our world, those Sunni insurgents reminded us, is still very much
governed by the ideas that were blasted into global prominence with
Gavrilo Princip's pistol.
They saw themselves reversing a decision made only a few months after
Princip's bullet killed the future leader of Austria-Hungary, one of
the huge empires that controlled much of the developed world in 1914.
Soon after the Great War's battles began in earnest that August,
leaders of the Allied powers realized that those empires -
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian Czarist and German Hohenzollern -
were likely to collapse. They set about inventing something new to
replace them.
Seeing that Constantinople was on the verge of losing hold of the
huge expanse of the Ottoman Empire and worried that this territory
(and the petroleum beneath it) would fall into the wrong hands,
the Allies dispatched two diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain and
Francois Georges-Picot of France, to figure out how to divide the
remains between the future victors. Two years later, their governments
accepted a line those diplomats had drawn across the Middle East. In
the years after the war, that line would define the borders of the
newly created post-Ottoman countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon,
Turkey, Jordan and, later, Israel.
You might think that, by trying to create a Sunni Muslim theocracy
stretching across a wide swath of the Arab world, those ISIL fighters
saw themselves as undoing one of the great consequences of the Great
War: the replacement of empires with scores of newly formed and largely
arbitrary nations; that they were putting an end to the postwar world.
>From another perspective, though, groups such as ISIL are the true
heirs to the ideas of June 28, 1914. Their beliefs, and their way
of organizing those beliefs into terrifying action, are very direct
copies of those that launched the Great War - and which had really
not existed, to any significant extent, before Princip brought them
to life.
Are we living through the long tail of 1914, or experiencing its even
longer antithesis? The difference depends on how you weigh the two
forces unleashed a century ago - one a new form of nation, the other
a new form of nationalism.
The new nations
The modern idea of the nation - that is, a political entity claiming to
represent people united by language or ethnicity - had existed only for
a few decades before 1914, and at the time was regarded as something
of an anomaly. Europe had been nothing more than 200-odd kingdoms and
a handful of empires a century earlier; in June, 1914, it contained
just three republics (Switzerland, France and Portugal). And it had
only recently witnessed the birth of Germany (which is four years
younger than Canada) and Italy (seven years older), both cobbled
together from diverse collections of somewhat-similar kingdoms.
At the same time, 1914 Europe was teeming with nationalist movements,
most of them without nations: Armenian, Georgian, Lithuanian,
Jewish, Macedonian, Albanian, Ruthenian, Croatian, Basque, Catalan,
Flemish, Sardinian and Irish. Few had widespread popular support:
The nationalist idea was an elite one.
It was also almost entirely fictional. European states in 1914 were
far more multicultural and multilingual than they are today; the idea
of finding a common language, culture or ethnicity within any of them
was implausible, and could be accomplished only by using extreme force.
On the eve of the Great War, barely more than half the citizens of
France spoke the French language or considered themselves ethnically
French, as historian Eugen Weber famously illustrated; it was the war
itself that replaced France's regional languages and identities with
a national one.
And France was one of the more unified nations. In 1914, less
than half the population of Romanov Russia was ethnic Russian. In
post-unification Italy, only 2.5 per cent of citizens spoke Italian
on a daily basis.
Multiculturalism was the prewar norm: For every 100 soldiers in the
Hapsburg army in 1914, historian David Reynolds observes, "there were
on average 25 Germans, 18 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 11 Serbs and Croats,
9 Poles, 9 Ruthenes, 6 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes and 2 Italians.
... Many units operated with two languages, some as many as five."
It wasn't the war that changed all that, but the peace. In the postwar
wreckage of Europe's empires and economies, the Treaty of Versailles
attempted to create a new peace by granting independent statehood to
virtually anyone who sought it and asked loudly or forcefully enough.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the man most responsible for shaping the
postwar world, famously declared, in early 1918, that "all well-defined
national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction." He
took the phrase "self-determination" - a Bolshevik idea popular with
Lenin - and gave it a much wider meaning.
This was not at all an inevitable development - in fact, both countries
best poised to determine the peace, the United States and Britain,
were opposed to (and sometimes threatened by) ethnic and linguistic
nationalism. But, as historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed, the
postwar explosion of new countries "was the result of two unintended
developments: the collapse of the great multinational empires of
Europe, and the Russian Revolution - which made it desirable for the
Allies to play the Wilsonian card against the Bolshevik card." Ethnic
nationalism was ugly, but it trumped communist internationalism.
These new postwar nations were of a very different flavour from those
created in the nationalist fervour of the 19th century. "Whereas
Italy and Germany had been created through the unification of various
local polities with similar language and culture," David Reynolds
writes in his superb history, The Long Shadow: The Great War and
the Twentieth Century, these nations were created "through secession
from dynastic empires that had hitherto controlled a volatile mix of
ethnic groups in various stages of national self-consciousness and
political mobilization."
Even before the war was over, more cautious people warned that this
thrust to create ethno-states was a ticking bomb. Wilson's secretary of
state, Robert Lansing, expressed alarm: "When the President talks of
'self-determination,' what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race,
a territorial area, or a community?" The phrase, in Lansing's view, was
"simply loaded with dynamite," and would "raise hopes which can never
be realized" and "cost thousands of lives." He was certainly correct.
These newborn nations were destined for further violence:
None was actually uni-ethnic or uni-linguistic, despite their
claims; most contained competing nationalities and faiths seeking
self-determination. Some, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and
Iraq, were purely artificial hodgepodges of groups that had ancient
rivalries. Arab states such as Jordan and Syria were essentially
gifts to tribal families that had favoured the old empire. The
Israel-Palestine conflict was the most inevitable conflict arising
from the borders of this post-1914 world, but there have been hundreds
of others - including, most recently, ISIL's Sunni-imperial challenge
to the Sykes-Picot line.
"Although nationalist frenzy was more consequence than cause of the
Great War," Mr. Reynolds writes, "the war-makers had let the genie
out of the bottle and the peace-makers could not put it back."
The new nationalism
That nationalist frenzy was not merely the product of top-down peace
treaties and diplomatic deals, though. What Wilson and his allies
unleashed was a new form of thinking, and a new form of politics and
violence, that had filled the air in 1914.
It is important to distinguish these nationalist movements from the
liberal states that were created in their name. They were different
things, with different consequences.
The term "nationalism" was not coined until the final decades of the
19th century; prior to that, the notion that people should form an
independent political entity strictly on the basis of their language
or ethnicity was confined to a few radical philosophers, especially
in Germany. Unleashed, it spread like a disease.
The decade before 1914 was pocked with scores of assassinations,
bombings, kidnappings and violent riots on every continent as the
new nationalism took hold. Princip's bullets were the first acts of
nationalist violence of the war, but the first to succeed in creating
a new country was Ireland's, which erupted in the middle of the war,
overwhelmed Britain with exceedingly bloody conflict, and created
the first of dozens of new nations to be born as a result of the war.
The new nationalism, unlike the new nations, did not pretend to be
orderly or rational. Whether applied by Serbians, Arabs, Basques,
Jews or Sunni Muslims, it was a self-sacrificing, totalizing ideology
that placed the imaginary nation above all else. Today's ISIL fighters
would recognize, in every detail, the beliefs and motives of Princip,
and the nature of the Serbian ultra-nationalist organization to
which he belonged. Historian Christopher Clark, in his new work The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, makes this vividly clear:
"What must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows
the course of the summer crisis of 1914," he writes, "is its raw
modernity. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade
of automobiles.
"Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organization
with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organization
was extraterritorial, without a clear geographical or political
location; it was scattered in cells across political borders, it was
unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique,
hidden and certainly very difficult to discern from outside the
organization."
Princip and his co-collaborators were far from being rogue extremists:
They were selected by organizations that received funding and support
from within the Serbian state. But they were a type of nationalist we
would recognize today: harsh ascetics, they rejected alcohol and sexual
relations with women, "they read nationalist poetry and irredentist
newspapers and pamphlets ... sacrifice was a central preoccupation,
almost an obsession," Mr. Clark writes.
Indeed, their act of June 28, 1914, was meant to be a suicide bombing.
It isn't remembered that way - because the bomb exploded beneath
the wrong car and a handgun was used instead, and because Princip's
suicide capsule failed to kill him - but the language of martyrdom
used by these young men would be entirely recognizable to the foreign
fighters of ISIL and al-Qaeda.
This new ideology had dire consequences. The previously polyglot
countries of Europe discovered the new language of uni-ethnic
nationalism: supremacy, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing. In the years
before 1914, anti-Semitism, previously a Christian hatred of spiritual
rivals that had peaked in the pogroms of the Middle Ages and gradually
faded (though certainly not vanished) after the Enlightenment, burst
back onto the scene in a new form: the Jew as disloyal, unpatriotic
outsider, as civilizational invader.
The war gave new licence to this ideology. In 1915, as the Ottoman
Empire began to collapse, the Turks expelled and slaughtered Armenians
in a mass atrocity widely considered genocidal (they would later also
expel millions of ethnic Greeks). Then, starting in 1916, the Irish
rose en masse against their British occupier. As the decades of war
and extremism unfolded, the ethnic cleansings and expulsions became
more intense: While the Great War and the Versailles Treaty did not
authorize the hateful movements of the 1930s and 40s, they provided a
welcoming climate for their gestation. In the years after the Second
World War, the movements would spread with equal vehemence across
Asia and Africa.
We are left, a century after those bullets in Sarajevo, with two
lasting consequences: a set of lines in the sand, damningly difficult
to erase, and a set of ideas etched into countless minds, even harder
to obliterate. Ours is a much more peaceful, well-ordered world,
but its last remaining threats and menaces are almost all traceable
to the dark origins of 1914.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-an-assassin-in-1914-spawned-todays-ultranationalists/article19379226/?page=all
From: A. Papazian
The Globe and Mail, Canada
June 27 2014
Doug Saunders
Earlier this month, a swarm of fighters bearing the black flags of
the jihadi militia known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,
busy invading a large chunk of northern Iraq, decided to pause and
link their cause to the First World War.
On that Tuesday, the Sunni fighters seized a bulldozer and some
military vehicles and plowed a rough roadway through the earthen
berm that divides Syria and Iraq. After dancing on the newly erased
border and firing automatic weapons into the air, the ISIL fighters
took to Twitter and YouTube to make a historic boast: By moving aside
this pile of sand and earth, they said, they "are demolishing the
Sykes-Picot borders. All thanks due to Allah."
Our world, those Sunni insurgents reminded us, is still very much
governed by the ideas that were blasted into global prominence with
Gavrilo Princip's pistol.
They saw themselves reversing a decision made only a few months after
Princip's bullet killed the future leader of Austria-Hungary, one of
the huge empires that controlled much of the developed world in 1914.
Soon after the Great War's battles began in earnest that August,
leaders of the Allied powers realized that those empires -
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian Czarist and German Hohenzollern -
were likely to collapse. They set about inventing something new to
replace them.
Seeing that Constantinople was on the verge of losing hold of the
huge expanse of the Ottoman Empire and worried that this territory
(and the petroleum beneath it) would fall into the wrong hands,
the Allies dispatched two diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain and
Francois Georges-Picot of France, to figure out how to divide the
remains between the future victors. Two years later, their governments
accepted a line those diplomats had drawn across the Middle East. In
the years after the war, that line would define the borders of the
newly created post-Ottoman countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon,
Turkey, Jordan and, later, Israel.
You might think that, by trying to create a Sunni Muslim theocracy
stretching across a wide swath of the Arab world, those ISIL fighters
saw themselves as undoing one of the great consequences of the Great
War: the replacement of empires with scores of newly formed and largely
arbitrary nations; that they were putting an end to the postwar world.
>From another perspective, though, groups such as ISIL are the true
heirs to the ideas of June 28, 1914. Their beliefs, and their way
of organizing those beliefs into terrifying action, are very direct
copies of those that launched the Great War - and which had really
not existed, to any significant extent, before Princip brought them
to life.
Are we living through the long tail of 1914, or experiencing its even
longer antithesis? The difference depends on how you weigh the two
forces unleashed a century ago - one a new form of nation, the other
a new form of nationalism.
The new nations
The modern idea of the nation - that is, a political entity claiming to
represent people united by language or ethnicity - had existed only for
a few decades before 1914, and at the time was regarded as something
of an anomaly. Europe had been nothing more than 200-odd kingdoms and
a handful of empires a century earlier; in June, 1914, it contained
just three republics (Switzerland, France and Portugal). And it had
only recently witnessed the birth of Germany (which is four years
younger than Canada) and Italy (seven years older), both cobbled
together from diverse collections of somewhat-similar kingdoms.
At the same time, 1914 Europe was teeming with nationalist movements,
most of them without nations: Armenian, Georgian, Lithuanian,
Jewish, Macedonian, Albanian, Ruthenian, Croatian, Basque, Catalan,
Flemish, Sardinian and Irish. Few had widespread popular support:
The nationalist idea was an elite one.
It was also almost entirely fictional. European states in 1914 were
far more multicultural and multilingual than they are today; the idea
of finding a common language, culture or ethnicity within any of them
was implausible, and could be accomplished only by using extreme force.
On the eve of the Great War, barely more than half the citizens of
France spoke the French language or considered themselves ethnically
French, as historian Eugen Weber famously illustrated; it was the war
itself that replaced France's regional languages and identities with
a national one.
And France was one of the more unified nations. In 1914, less
than half the population of Romanov Russia was ethnic Russian. In
post-unification Italy, only 2.5 per cent of citizens spoke Italian
on a daily basis.
Multiculturalism was the prewar norm: For every 100 soldiers in the
Hapsburg army in 1914, historian David Reynolds observes, "there were
on average 25 Germans, 18 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 11 Serbs and Croats,
9 Poles, 9 Ruthenes, 6 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes and 2 Italians.
... Many units operated with two languages, some as many as five."
It wasn't the war that changed all that, but the peace. In the postwar
wreckage of Europe's empires and economies, the Treaty of Versailles
attempted to create a new peace by granting independent statehood to
virtually anyone who sought it and asked loudly or forcefully enough.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the man most responsible for shaping the
postwar world, famously declared, in early 1918, that "all well-defined
national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction." He
took the phrase "self-determination" - a Bolshevik idea popular with
Lenin - and gave it a much wider meaning.
This was not at all an inevitable development - in fact, both countries
best poised to determine the peace, the United States and Britain,
were opposed to (and sometimes threatened by) ethnic and linguistic
nationalism. But, as historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed, the
postwar explosion of new countries "was the result of two unintended
developments: the collapse of the great multinational empires of
Europe, and the Russian Revolution - which made it desirable for the
Allies to play the Wilsonian card against the Bolshevik card." Ethnic
nationalism was ugly, but it trumped communist internationalism.
These new postwar nations were of a very different flavour from those
created in the nationalist fervour of the 19th century. "Whereas
Italy and Germany had been created through the unification of various
local polities with similar language and culture," David Reynolds
writes in his superb history, The Long Shadow: The Great War and
the Twentieth Century, these nations were created "through secession
from dynastic empires that had hitherto controlled a volatile mix of
ethnic groups in various stages of national self-consciousness and
political mobilization."
Even before the war was over, more cautious people warned that this
thrust to create ethno-states was a ticking bomb. Wilson's secretary of
state, Robert Lansing, expressed alarm: "When the President talks of
'self-determination,' what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race,
a territorial area, or a community?" The phrase, in Lansing's view, was
"simply loaded with dynamite," and would "raise hopes which can never
be realized" and "cost thousands of lives." He was certainly correct.
These newborn nations were destined for further violence:
None was actually uni-ethnic or uni-linguistic, despite their
claims; most contained competing nationalities and faiths seeking
self-determination. Some, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and
Iraq, were purely artificial hodgepodges of groups that had ancient
rivalries. Arab states such as Jordan and Syria were essentially
gifts to tribal families that had favoured the old empire. The
Israel-Palestine conflict was the most inevitable conflict arising
from the borders of this post-1914 world, but there have been hundreds
of others - including, most recently, ISIL's Sunni-imperial challenge
to the Sykes-Picot line.
"Although nationalist frenzy was more consequence than cause of the
Great War," Mr. Reynolds writes, "the war-makers had let the genie
out of the bottle and the peace-makers could not put it back."
The new nationalism
That nationalist frenzy was not merely the product of top-down peace
treaties and diplomatic deals, though. What Wilson and his allies
unleashed was a new form of thinking, and a new form of politics and
violence, that had filled the air in 1914.
It is important to distinguish these nationalist movements from the
liberal states that were created in their name. They were different
things, with different consequences.
The term "nationalism" was not coined until the final decades of the
19th century; prior to that, the notion that people should form an
independent political entity strictly on the basis of their language
or ethnicity was confined to a few radical philosophers, especially
in Germany. Unleashed, it spread like a disease.
The decade before 1914 was pocked with scores of assassinations,
bombings, kidnappings and violent riots on every continent as the
new nationalism took hold. Princip's bullets were the first acts of
nationalist violence of the war, but the first to succeed in creating
a new country was Ireland's, which erupted in the middle of the war,
overwhelmed Britain with exceedingly bloody conflict, and created
the first of dozens of new nations to be born as a result of the war.
The new nationalism, unlike the new nations, did not pretend to be
orderly or rational. Whether applied by Serbians, Arabs, Basques,
Jews or Sunni Muslims, it was a self-sacrificing, totalizing ideology
that placed the imaginary nation above all else. Today's ISIL fighters
would recognize, in every detail, the beliefs and motives of Princip,
and the nature of the Serbian ultra-nationalist organization to
which he belonged. Historian Christopher Clark, in his new work The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, makes this vividly clear:
"What must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows
the course of the summer crisis of 1914," he writes, "is its raw
modernity. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade
of automobiles.
"Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organization
with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organization
was extraterritorial, without a clear geographical or political
location; it was scattered in cells across political borders, it was
unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique,
hidden and certainly very difficult to discern from outside the
organization."
Princip and his co-collaborators were far from being rogue extremists:
They were selected by organizations that received funding and support
from within the Serbian state. But they were a type of nationalist we
would recognize today: harsh ascetics, they rejected alcohol and sexual
relations with women, "they read nationalist poetry and irredentist
newspapers and pamphlets ... sacrifice was a central preoccupation,
almost an obsession," Mr. Clark writes.
Indeed, their act of June 28, 1914, was meant to be a suicide bombing.
It isn't remembered that way - because the bomb exploded beneath
the wrong car and a handgun was used instead, and because Princip's
suicide capsule failed to kill him - but the language of martyrdom
used by these young men would be entirely recognizable to the foreign
fighters of ISIL and al-Qaeda.
This new ideology had dire consequences. The previously polyglot
countries of Europe discovered the new language of uni-ethnic
nationalism: supremacy, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing. In the years
before 1914, anti-Semitism, previously a Christian hatred of spiritual
rivals that had peaked in the pogroms of the Middle Ages and gradually
faded (though certainly not vanished) after the Enlightenment, burst
back onto the scene in a new form: the Jew as disloyal, unpatriotic
outsider, as civilizational invader.
The war gave new licence to this ideology. In 1915, as the Ottoman
Empire began to collapse, the Turks expelled and slaughtered Armenians
in a mass atrocity widely considered genocidal (they would later also
expel millions of ethnic Greeks). Then, starting in 1916, the Irish
rose en masse against their British occupier. As the decades of war
and extremism unfolded, the ethnic cleansings and expulsions became
more intense: While the Great War and the Versailles Treaty did not
authorize the hateful movements of the 1930s and 40s, they provided a
welcoming climate for their gestation. In the years after the Second
World War, the movements would spread with equal vehemence across
Asia and Africa.
We are left, a century after those bullets in Sarajevo, with two
lasting consequences: a set of lines in the sand, damningly difficult
to erase, and a set of ideas etched into countless minds, even harder
to obliterate. Ours is a much more peaceful, well-ordered world,
but its last remaining threats and menaces are almost all traceable
to the dark origins of 1914.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-an-assassin-in-1914-spawned-todays-ultranationalists/article19379226/?page=all
From: A. Papazian