Nietzsche,Historiography and Yugoslav Nationalism

Nationalism and historiography

The continuing conflict in the former Yugoslavia has been regarded as further evidence of the degeneration of Western models of nationalism from what Anthony Smith describes as ‘a pristine reasonableness into an inflammation and thence into a madness’ (Smith, 1971, p. 194). This form of extreme right-wing nationalism ‘characterised by an ideological and programmatic emphasis on “restoring” supposedly traditional values of the nation or community and imposing them upon a nation or community’ can, for some scholars, be distinguished from the nation-building, constructive forces of citizenship and sovereignty attributed to the French Revolution. It is argued that nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe appeared at a time when, unlike the more homogeneous and less mobile communities of the West, borders were still fluid and large-scale migration still apparent (Griffiths, 1993; Ramet, 1999, p. 4). Consequently, this ‘Eastern’ nationalism tends to deny the social contract inherent in the ‘West's version and ‘insists instead on the inherited, historicist character of national identity’ (Eley, 1981, p. 85; Kohn, 1967). In other words, the legal and political basis that underpins the ‘Western’ concept is, for commentators such as Smith, supplanted ‘by creating a widespread awareness of the myths, history and linguistic traditions of the community [and thus] … substantiating and crystallising the idea of an ethnic nation in the minds of most members’ (Smith, 1991, pp. 10–12).

The rise in value of these myths and national fables coincided with a significant decline in the political efficacy of organised religion as nationalism offered an empirically justified alternative reading to an exegetic understanding of human origins and societal relations. Myth, like theological historiography, ‘expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man’ (Malinowski, 1954, p. 101). The rational revolution of the Enlightenment thus drove a wedge between religion and myth with an historiographic ‘objectivity’ which left ‘no hiding place for the gods from the searching of the telescope and the microscope’ (Campbell, 1968, p. 387). Historical myth, rendered convincing by the alchemist-turned-historian, became superimposed upon the theologian as a means of ensuring that ‘the future will remain faithful to the present and the past’ (Levi-Strauss, 1979, p. 43).

An Hegelian model of progress came to replace the ever-diminishing returns of a journey away from the era of the prophets. Historiography, as the ‘science of man’, became a means of reassuring us, through positivist endeavour, that morality is not relative and we will one day arrive at a future ‘glorious and paradisiacal’ (Henri de Saint-Simon and Joseph Priestley, cited in Bebbington, 1979, pp. 79–81). Nietzsche, by contrast, warns against concluding that humanity is involved in any kind of lineal progression (1957, p. 21). It is dangerous, he argues, to believe that we are not subject to, and condemned to repeat, the errors of our ancestors. For him historical objectivity is merely ‘the measurement of the opinion and the deeds of the past by the universal opinions of the present’ (ibid., p. 37). Moreover, as historical information becomes important simply for its own sake and method takes on a new rigour, humanity is bombarded with ‘facts’ ‘and modern man carries inside him an enormous heap of indigestible knowledge-stones’ (ibid., p. 23). Not only more plentiful, the logic of progress means that these stones are also intrinsically more commodious than those carried by previous generations. The burden of how to digest and usefully apply this excess of empirically-arrived-at data is, in Nietzsche's mind, too great for modern society to bear. Able neither to exclude this imperative from his consciousness nor to suppress continual additions to his memory, Man is paralysed and left to wonder in envy at the happiness of the unhistorical beast, too forgetful even to remember its reply.

Instead an awareness of what Nietzsche calls wirkliche Geschichte (or effective history) can allow the thinker to digest some of his knowledge stones and to escape the myth that history is determined by constants and absolutes. It is grounded on the realisation that nothing can be sufficiently stable to serve as a foundation for self-recognition or the understanding of the past. Applied by the forgetful and therefore unburdened thinker, it prevents the single event being subsumed into a teleological continuum, thereby providing a ‘higher’ understanding of human development and a basis from which to act. Historiography is therefore only effective if it is founded on the recognition that the course of time is entirely governed by haphazard, random conflicts and chance occurrences (Nietzsche, 1994, pp. 54–55). Consequently, historians, Nietzsche writes, ‘cease to be instructive as soon as they begin to generalise’, mistakenly assuming that history is determined by immutable intentions rather than a ‘host of errors and phantasms’ (Nietzsche, 1994, pp. 54–55 and 1974a, n. 16). In contrast, the effective method allows the researcher into the past to concentrate on the particular and on the discipline's ‘real value [which] lies in inventing ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme’ (Nietzsche, 1957, p. 39).

For Nietzsche, this theme is the analytical unit of the nation state. Defined by the economic utility of the national interest and fuelled by middle-class patronage of a ‘modern’ education, an alliance between historiography and European militarism grew up in the late nineteenth century. As practitioners of the new empiricism, scholars searched for distinctions based on kind, level and function and found nationality to be the most significant group difference (Shafer, 1955, pp. 215–216). This was famously highlighted by Ernest Renan, speaking at the Sorbonne in 1882, when he stated: ‘to have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again – these are the essential conditions for being a nation’ (cited in McCrone, 1998, p. 44). Beyond race, religion, shared interest, language and territoriality, nationhood, he continues, is ‘constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future’ (Renan, 1990, p. 19).

This is what Nietzsche calls ‘monumental’ history or ‘the knowledge that the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again’ (1957, p. 14). In contrast to the effective historian, adherents to this theory believe, according to Nietzsche, that the high points of historical development can be restored and perpetually maintained through their own, or others', volition. By presenting this discourse as a scientifically-ordered analysis of history, its actual value-driven and selective nature is, for Nietzsche, obscured. Enveloped in objectivity, it tends to ‘entice the brave to rashness and the enthusiastic to fanaticism with its tempting comparisons’ (Nietzsche, 1957, p. 16). Whereas effective historiography acknowledges its injustice and bias with deliberate affirmation or negation and undisguised demagoguery, this excessive historiography denies that its structure and results are, in Nietzschean terms, determined by the ‘will to knowledge’. Presented as neutral and singularly aimed at truth the excessive method fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of the inquisitor and therefore can be used to foment moral indignation and ultimately promulgate an illusion of a shared tradition. In this way a unitary vision of nationhood can develop and be generally accepted, leading Europeans ‘to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine’ and making excessive history the basis of political legitimacy (Nietzsche, 1974b, p. 339).

So, for the history-wielding nationalist, or indeed the nationalist historian, a glorious past is crucial to the notion of an unworthy present from which only they, or their ideology, can lead the people. To deter further, and perhaps contradictory, versions of past events, nationalist myth-makers maintain an anti-intellectualism often centred around the education system. ² What Nietzsche calls a ‘herd morality’ predominates as an ideological and programmatic emphasis on ‘restoring’ the supposedly traditional values of the nation is imposed by the ‘pretentious jobbers’ who staff ‘modern’ universities (cited in Kaufman, 1982, p. 508; Roberts, 2000, p. 6). Having forsaken their critical independence, they become a mirror of the resentful ideology of the masses and, unable to negate or affirm, an instrument of chauvinist nation-building, thereby facilitating the dominance of political over philosophical historiography. ‘For’, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, ‘history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies … The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies’ (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 6). In this way, a deterioration in national fortune, often attributed to an historical conspiracy of social groups outside the in-group belief structure, is presented as tractable only through the new historical awareness of the ‘scientific man’.

Modernity's denial that we are ‘men-of-mixture’ has, in Nietzsche's view, had a disastrous effect on European culture and society. In an ‘attempt to gain a past a posteriori from which we might spring’, individuality has been crushed by the weight of historical excess and progress's insistence that knowledge is employed in a continually and quantifiably ‘better’ way (Nietzsche, 1957, p. 21). The Europeans are thereby made oblivious of their origins. Ignorant of their mixed ancestry, or true homelessness, they seek national reaffirmation based upon past events misrepresented by the expedients of political contest (Nietzsche, 1974a, p. 338). Thus, in the pursuit of what Nietzsche calls ‘antiquarian history’, a spiritual homeland is created as an attempt ‘to conserve for posterity the conditions under which we were born’ (Nietzsche, 1957, p. 18). By giving the Scotsman a tartan or the knight a romantic verse, the modern commentator can instil the belief that the culture and language of the present have a continuity with the past. For Nietzsche, however, ‘spiritual dependence and de-nationalisation are obvious, and the real value and meaning of present culture lie in a mutual blending and fertilisation’ (cited in Morgan, 1965, p. 358, Nietzsche's italics).

Yugoslavia

Hobsbawm argues that such an invention of tradition is more likely to occur ‘when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable’ (1988, p. 4). In Eastern Europe, as Communist governments began to collapse in 1989 the process of historiographic re-invention took on a great urgency and, as Craig Calhoun remarks, it became ‘common to appeal to the pre-Communist era as a time of imagined unity and normality’ (1997, p. 52). The strong state, exemplified by Tito's administration in Yugoslavia, had been able to keep the twin genies of excessive history and nationalism corked in separate bottles, but had failed to institutionalise any mechanisms for their expression. With the demise of federalism the corks came out and every Yugoslav citizen's identity was re-defined. ³ In his study of Slovenian politics, for instance, Rudolf Rizman argues that this search for moral safety became particularly apparent as communism's ideologically-constructed and repressively-maintained internal class enemy gave way to a political vacuum. ‘The radical right’, he contends, ‘filled this psychological gap by introducing new lists of enemies toward whom the people should address their hatred’ (Rizman, 1999, p. 149). Similar patterns emerged in other republics throughout the 1980s as Yugoslavia was ‘deliberately and systemically killed off by men who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from a peaceful transition’ (Silber and Little, 1995, p. xxiii).

Those leaders who were best able to unite nationalist sentiment with historical legitimacy emerged triumphant from the disintegrating federation. Serbs, previously subsumed as Yugoslavs, found a new national identity in a return to the messianic significance of Prince Lazar who chose to die in the Battle of Kosova in 1389 rather than to submit to the Turks. Having opted for martyrdom, the mythical Lazar is merged with Orthodox iconography reinforcing the Serbian belief in a millennial re-invocation of the nation state. According to Professor Korac of Belgrade University, ‘what it tells the Serbs is “we are going to make a state again”. Just as Jesus is “coming back”, so is Lazar’ (quoted in Silber and Little, 1995, p. 27). Thus, a theological construction of a procedurally degenerative historical course is accepted only as far as the moment of awakening. Presented as an objective account as part of a nationalist discourse, the return of the spirit of Lazar is able ‘to restore a measure of certainty in a world of ambiguous, fluid and multiple identities, and to conceal the precarious character of the cultural and political identities they support’ (Sofos, 1996, p. 251).

Calls for a ‘Greater Serbia’ centred initially around concerns for Serbian minorities living in the increasingly unstable republics. ⁴ This was particularly true of Kosova where Serbs were outnumbered by ethnic Albanians nine to one. In bringing the Serb minorities living in Croatia and Bosnia closer to the influence of Belgrade and encouraging separatist irredentism, Milosevic was, through his coterie of intellectuals and clerics, able to promote himself as ‘the one figure who had revived the age-old dream of uniting all Serbs in a common Serbian national state’ (Pribicevic, 1999, p. 196). By obscuring the mixed roots of Serbian ethnicity and concentrating on ‘monumental’ and ‘antiquarian’ history, Milosevic and his supporters created a collective identity founded on an alliance between militarism and excessive historiography. The Serbian ‘national community’ was encouraged ‘to imagine itself as an “endangered species” that urgently needed its own state in order to protect itself from other “species”’ (Pesic, 1996, p. 11). As Dobrica Cosic puts it, ‘the enemies of the Serbs made Serbs Serbs’ (Politika, 27 July 1991). In this way, ‘the use and abuse of historical memory was what prepared the Serbs for war in 1991’ (Judah, 1997, p. 43).

A similar preoccupation with historicism was evident in the iconography of the new regime in Croatia, ‘notably in the ubiquitous display of the red and white chequered armorial shield that had been an emblem of the medieval Croatian state’ (Brubaker, 1996, p. 71). Here, the alliance between excessive historiography and the politics of identity provided emotional nourishment for nascent nationalist sentiment and supported it wherever it faltered. The search for an acceptable antecedence from which the nation might spring has been framed by a ‘choice of tradition’ intended to deny the unintelligibility of the past (Grdesic, 1999, p. 188). The Croatian Constitution of December 1990 reflected this interest in history as a source of legitimacy citing 12 instances of state development beginning in the seventh century (cited in Vukovic, 1997, pp. 136–137). Indeed, the institutionalised position of this state-determined historiography was emphasised by Grdesic, in his study of Croatian society in 1995, leading him to conclude that ‘cleavage lines along political and ideological values [were] very often rooted in historical collective memories’ (1999, p. 188).

So in former Yugoslavia history is construed as no longer providential, but rather a continuum ordained by man, knowable, extra-societal and objective. While in fact based on an inherent selectivity, history is presented by those who find it expedient as immutable and progressive. This, as Nietzsche forewarned, has separated history's modern inheritors from the unchanging character of the universe and burdened them with an excess of knowledge worsened by the imperative of progress. Thus society is unable to respond to change, its effective historical sense gone and the allegiance of its people easily manipulated by the state. Historiography has thus become a means of perpetuating or increasing group unity and maintaining social hierarchies. In this way, the Yugoslav political elite was able to emphasise the regenerative sanctimony of the moment by historicising social diversity. This excess of history-as-science located salvation as dwelling only within the evolution of past to future and produced a present increasingly absorbed with grave-digging (Nietzsche, 1957, pp. 7–10). So maybe it is, as Hobsbawm grimly predicts, that, ‘on the whole, the people of central and eastern Europe will go on living in countries … inspired by xenophobic nationalism and intolerance’ (1997, p. 6).