The Hungarian historian, Gyula Szekfű was famously accused of “treason against the nation” after the publication of his first book in 1916, after which he stated in bitterness that the title “traitor of the nation” is usually reserved for worthier ones who could carry the weight of such charges like a “holy cross” on their “noble shoulders.” Although he made this remark in 1916, it is still relevant today, and reflects the difficult position of a historian willing to analyze a sensitive topic – a key component of national mythology – from a critical angle. Tomasz Kamusella’s book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe does exactly that. It focuses on the most important element of contemporary national identity in Central and Eastern Europe: language. Thus, his book will most likely spark intense academic and public debates in the countries in question, and will certainly trigger a wide range of political and emotional responses.
Kamusella is a specialist in nationalism studies, and he is the author of several monographs and dozens of articles on the subject. The book discussed here could best be described as a monumental interdisciplinary endeavor. The term “interdisciplinary” is most often used as a buzzword these days, one that is overused in publicity blurbs or project proposals. In the case of Kamusella’s book, however, it is a well-justified category. The volume is a monumental endeavor not only because of the sheer length of the book (more than 1,000 pages) but also because of the various disciplines, theoretical and methodological approaches that the author relies on in a single volume. Although Kamusella’s original intention was to combine history with linguistics, the book achieves much more than that. Apart from history and linguistics, the volume draws upon the theoretical and methodological tools of the social and political sciences, cultural anthropology, and linguistics (sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, in particular), and it refers to cultural theory, theories of language, theories of nationalism, as well as theories of modernity.
The book in essence is an argument for studying the importance of languages in politics and identity formation – and not just in Central Europe. It shows how deeply languages are interconnected with politics, how they influence our perception of the world, and how they were (and still are) utilized to create new identities. At the same time, the book also provides a thorough, systematic assessment of the cultural, social, and political background of linguistic nationalism, on an immensely broad timescale. Therefore, besides simply being a study of language politics in Central (and Eastern) Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book is a (quasi-comprehensive) history of Central and East European languages, and a cultural history of Central Europe. The monograph could thus be regarded as an encyclopedic attempt by a single author to portray the cultural-linguistic landscape of the region in modern times.
The reason Kamusella has analyzed his subject from such a wide perspective was to underline his provocative claim that the politics of language was identical with the political and social history of the region. The association of a standardized version of language with the nation and the state – what Kamusella calls “normative isomorphism” – led to immensely violent attempts to equate the political frontiers of the state with ethnic and linguistic boundaries. Such attempts at ethnolinguistic homogenization led to mass expulsions, the deportation of minority populations, and violent assimilation projects in Central Europe in the twentieth century.
The book analyzes the process of the liquidation of languages and dialects other than the standard languages in a Central European context. This process was typical of modern Western historical development, the result of which was the creation of ethnolinguistic nation-states in the West. In Central and Eastern Europe a similar process started after World War I, when the newly established multiethnic nation-states (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Yugoslavia, etc.) started pursuing vehement policies of ethnolinguistic homogenization. This was a process more intense and dramatic than in the West centuries before, and its human costs were much higher. During the lifetime of a generation the peoples inhabiting the region experienced compulsory education in the titular “national language,” right-wing and left-wing dictatorships, radical border changes, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, the deportation and expulsion of minority populations, and so on, all of which contributed to the withering away of multilingualism and multiethnicity (i.e., multiculturalism).
The book analyzes this particularly intensive and traumatic process of ethnolinguistic homogenization in nineteenth- to twentieth-century Central Europe, on the basis of four case studies: the Polish, the Czech, the Slovak, and the Hungarian cases, although it actually compares a vast number of languages including languages in the Balkans, in the entire East European region, and also in Israel, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
Apart from being an exceptional academic achievement, the monograph is also a very powerful political statement. It is one of the most impressive, in-depth arguments for the relevance of the study of Central Europe as a historical region. While the author acknowledges the arbitrariness of the term “Central Europe” by referring to the tendency to use it as a cover term, and defines it as a concept capable of incorporating cultural-political agendas, he also convincingly argues for the continued analytical use of the term in an academic context. Kamusella understands “Central Europe” as a complex notion: it is defined not just as a geographical region, but also as a form of identity that links several regions together. The somewhat casual treatment of the concept “Central Europe” in what could (equally) superficially be referred to as “Western scholarship” has resulted in “academic othering” and the proliferation of negative stereotypes about the region in the West. Although the notion of Central Europe retains idealistic overtones in Kamusella’s book, the volume nevertheless has the potential of balancing out knowledge-gaps between scholars from the Anglophone world and from the region. The book also criticizes and deconstructs “myths of otherness” (such as “Balkanization,” “Kleinstaaterei,” etc.) that are so strongly associated with the countries in question.
Being a Central Europeanist, however, is not easy, and apart from completing the heroic task of compiling an encyclopedia of the cultural landscape of the region, the book will most likely not contribute to the revival of the Central Europe debate, which looks quite dead these days. Although the book is clearly sympathetic to the idea of Central Europe, it fails to make the somewhat blurry notion of Central Europe more tangible and concrete. It is not fully clear what the defining characteristics of Central Europe (apart from language politics) are, according to the author, and which countries and nations are included in his definition and why. This is also the reason why the book is likely to trigger traditional criticisms of Central Europeanism, namely, the tendency to nurture nostalgic representations of the Habsburg imperial past.
The novel approach to the historical region that the book actually advances is the adoption of the dialect-continuum idea to the cultural-historical landscape of Central Europe. The notion borrowed from sociolinguistics refers to the idea that dialects emerged to form a continuum without clear-cut boundaries separating them. Kamusella convincingly argues that the languages of Central and Eastern Europe had constituted such a continuum, and this was gradually destroyed by the process of ethnolinguistic homogenization. At this stage, one might suggest, that the argument could have been taken one step further. It is not just languages that form a continuum of mutual understandability – other cultural processes are also based on the same principle. Moreover, culture could also be understood as a continuum of cultural markers, cultural codes, and communicational practices that are recognized by a multiplicity of communities with different ethnic backgrounds living in relatively close proximity to each other. The cultural continuum naturally has a spatial dimension: similarly to dialects, cultural codes that are shared by communities living near each other might not be understood by societies at the peripheries of such a continuum.
Despite the allure of the continuum paradigm, the question of how smooth and efficient the communication process was in the Central European multilingual environment is still a pivotal one. Although the example of children exchanges between families of different linguistic backgrounds in the area of Pozsony-Bratislava-Pressburg seems to justify the author’s theoretical framework, one could still wonder about the number of multilingual communities in which different ethnic groups simply refused to communicate with each other. The answer to this, however, would necessitate extensive microlevel research and a dive into the theoretical-methodological pool of historical anthropology. Such a bottom-up approach would certainly give the author’s arguments a more thorough grounding. However, this is more a call for further research rather than an actual criticism of the volume; it would have been simply impossible to carry out such wide-ranging research in local archives within the framework of a book of such an interdisciplinary and comparative nature.
The book should certainly be received favorably by Anglophone students of Central and Eastern Europe, who would find this text a must-read in decades to come. In the English-speaking academic world, it is most likely to be used as an essential reference work that provides a broad – and yet in-depth – overview of the region’s cultural, linguistic, and historical landscape.
As for reception of the book in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, one should not be overly optimistic. It is quite likely that the book will be less positively received (to say the least) than in the West. In fact, it is quite possible that it will be – at best – totally ignored by politicians and the academic community alike because of the political and symbolic relevance of the issue analyzed in the book. The project of linguistic homogenization is still an ongoing process (note the new language law in Slovakia) in Central and Eastern Europe despite the alleged triumph of “Europeanization,” and “multiculturalism” in the region. It is also likely that the monograph may be criticized by semi-established academics in local academic journals, and the author accused of being “unpatriotic” or even a “traitor of the nation” (or nations) in the countries in question. One can only hope that Kamusella will not have to carry the burden of such accusations, and academics and politicians in important decision-making positions will actually read the book to learn about the potentially destructive consequences of their thoughts and actions.