Poor humanity, how you have suffered! No, it is no more soil than it is race which makes a nation.First of all, is it the mountains or the rivers that we should regard as fanning these so-called natural frontiers? 186-205. There never were any Assyrian patriots, and the Persian Empire was nothing but a vast feudal structure. If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. In what ways does the principle of nationality differ from that of races? ?P��(�s��5y���@F�� 0�D� I am a working professional with a deep passion for writing who likes to share his thoughts using credible sources and facts. But an empire twelve times larger than present-day France cannot be said to be a state in the modern sense of the term. Even if you go back to origins, similarity of language did not presuppose similarity of race. Let us not abandon the fundamental principle that man is a reasonable and moral being, before he is cooped up in such and such a language, before he is a member of such and such a race, before he belongs to such and such a culture. For an observer like Marx, these values were destroyed forever in the black farce of 1848. trailer If the policies pursued by the House of Caper by and large resulted in the grouping together, under the name of France, of the territories of ancient Gaul, this was only because these lands had a natural tendency to be joined together with their fellows. Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was a French expert of Semitic languages and civilizations, a philosopher, historian, and writer. However, I do not know to what degree E. Renan took into consideration the basic factors of human uniqueness and variations in our experiences. One was not an Athenian if one refused to practise it. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation.Through their various and often opposed powers, nations participate in the common work of civilization; each sounds a note in the great concert of humanity, which, after all, is the highest ideal reality that we are capable of attaining. Words such as brachycephalic or dolichocephalic have no place in either history or philology. As a consequence of what was said previously, I will not have to detain you very much longer. 32 16 A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. If the rivaling Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish factions would only agree to live together and be governed with their mutual consent, then peace would prevail in Iraq instead of political instability. Each person believes and practises in his own fashion what he is able to and as he wishes. This is a complete illusion. This is what constitutes a right, a legitimacy. The old principle, which only takes account of the right of princes, could no longer be maintained; apart from dynastic right, there is also national right. At the time of the French Revolution, it was commonly believed that the institutions proper to small, independent cities, such as Sparta and Rome, might be applied to our large nations, which number some thirty or forty million souls. 0000000918 00000 n Gaul, Spain and Italy, prior to their absorption by the Roman Empire, were collections of clans, which were often allied among themselves but had no central institutions and no dynasties. 47 0 obj <>stream First, the fact that the Germanic peoples adopted Christianity as soon as they underwent any prolonged contact with the Greek or Latin peoples. 0000002531 00000 n 0000006642 00000 n is an 1882 lecture by French historian Ernest Renan (1823–1892), known for the statement that a nation is "a daily referendum," and that nations are based as much on what the people jointly forget, as what they remember. In other words, the zoological origins of humanity are massively prior to the origins of culture, civilization, and language. This is a very great error, which, if it were to become dominant, would destroy European civilization. ), Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939), pp. 0000000981 00000 n After one or two generations, the Norman invaders no longer distinguished themselves from the rest of the population, although their influence was not any less profound because of this fact; they had given the conquered country a nobility, military habits, and a patriotism that they had not known before. It may be that, after many fruitless gropings, people will revert to our more modest empirical solutions. (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?) Languages are historical formations, which tell us very little about the blood of those who speak them and which, in any case, could not shackle human liberty when it is a matter of deciding the family with which one unites oneself for life or for death. The grandsons of Clovis, Alaric, Gundebald, Alboin, and Roland were already speaking the Roman tongue. The former have favored movement in history, whereas the latter have restricted it. The Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire and the empire of Alexander the Great were not countries either. At the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even. Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. Antiquity was unfamiliar with them; Egypt, China and ancient Chaldea were in no way nations. In its closing stages, lofty souls, enlightened bishops, and the educated classes had a real sense of the Pax Romana, which withstood the threatening chaos of barbarism. France is [at once] Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic. It is indisputable that the mountains separate, but the rivers tend rather to unify. We touch here on one of those problems in regard to which it is of the utmost importance that we equip ourselves with clear ideas and ward of misconceptions. This fact was itself the consequence of another important feature, namely, the fact that the Franks, Burgundians, Goths, Lombards, and Normans had very few women of their own race with them. Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a stable thing and, if today you use it against others, tomorrow you may see it turned against yourselves. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. 4* The partition of Verdun (AD 843) ended a period of civil war within the Frankish -Empire, during which the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought each other. If the Germanic language has dominated in the British isles, it was simply because Latin had not wholly replaced the Celtic languages, as it had done in Gaul. How to use nation in a sentence. `France' became quite legitimately the name of a country to which only a virtually imperceptible minority of Franks had come. The nations are not something eternal. Furthermore, much has been made of the linguistic qualities of the Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn by Louis and Charles to each ocher's armies, in Old French and Old High German respectively. Editor: What is a Nation? He believes a nation is defined as the “culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion” and “a large scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past” (Internet Modern History Sourcebook 1). You can be sure that, if one obliges science to furnish diplomacy with its first principles, one will surprise her many times in flagrant delit. Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens as such. The spurious system according to which nobility owed its origin to a privilege conferred by the king for services rendered to the nation, so that every noble was an ennobled person, was established as a dogma as early as the thirteenth century. Otherwise, everybody would lay claim to their military conveniences, and one would have unceasing war. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. They had rediscovered, through their dealings with antiquity, the secret of the genuine education of the human spirit, and they devoted themselves to it body and soul. This religion was, fundamentally, the cult of the Acropolis personified. 166-8 of The Age of Revolution (London, 1962), shed some light upon Renan's aphorism, in that the vanguard of European nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s was not so much the business class as 'the lower and middle professional, administrative and intellectual strata, in ocher words, the educated classes'. They were utterly indifferent to the race of the populations which they had subdued. Renan’s third argument states people who show a willingness to live together in the present in harmony are a nation. If Old French had been generally spoken in Gaul in the fifth century Clovis and his people would not have abandoned German for Old French. A Frenchman is neither a Gaul, nor a Frank, nor a Burgundian. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. 10Recently, state-building and nation-building have sometimes been used interchangeably. This was the origin of France, Burgundy, and Lombardy, and, subsequently, Normandy. Let me simply say that so loftily national had this great French royal principle been that, on the morrow of its fall, the nation was able to stand without her. Isolated, each has its weak point.

There is no longer a state religion; one can be French, English, or German, and be either Catholic, Protestant, or orthodox Jewish, or else practise no cult at all. If we are not to distort science, we should exempt it from the need to give an opinion on these problems, in which so many interests are involved.

6* Upon the occasion of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, in 1572, many thousands of Huguenots were killed.
In the tenth century, in the first chansons de geste, which are such a perfect mirror of the spirit of the times, all the inhabitants of France are French. It is the physical element of the State. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and only one master. The Germanic family, according to the theory I am expounding here, has the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again. 0000006117 00000 n

However, state-building generally refers to the construction of state institutions for a functioning state, while nation-building the construction of a national identity, also for a functioning state. One was not considered a good Venetian if one did not swear by Saint Mark; nor a good Amalfitan if one did not set Saint Andrew higher than all the other saints in paradise. Ethnographic considerations have therefore played no part in the constitution of modern nations. c: a territorial division containing a body of people of one or more nationalities and usually characterized by relatively large size and independent status a nation of vast size with a small population — Mary K. Hammond A nation has little to do with the physical needs of the people. His arguments are legitimate because they rest on the people’s volition. The primitive Aryan, primitive Semitic, and primitive Touranian groups had no physiological unity.

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