Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

A person’s identification with a given social organism, with a given
nation, is conditioned by many societal, socio-psychological and
economic factors. Here I am thinking of the national make-up of
one’s family, the social structure of one’s ethnic group, the spatial
distribution, age and education of individuals, as well as the effects
of institutions and organisations that aim to cultivate national identity.
Sociological researchers have confirmed that people who originate
from nationally homogeneous families, those who live close
together in a given ethnic territory, those in the older age groups
and those with higher education play a decisive role in the formation
and development of national identity. Members of the intelligentsia
are the most involved in issues relating to nation or to
nationality. And members of the intelligentsia who are primarily oriented
towards the humanities (not just professional historians or
history teachers), in the course of their own engagement with nation
and in the impact this has on the broader strata of their national
community, have relied and still rely on their nation’s past,
re-cast as history, from which they draw arguments for the formation
and strengthening of their community’s national identity.
In our East-Central part of Europe, the fall of privileged, Estatesbased
aristocratic society and the birth of civil society raised the
question of nationality and national identity as an ethnic and linguistic
entity, and did so very sharply; this, alongside cultural, linguistic
or denominational markers, was also decisive in
characterising or forming a state‘s political point of view, substantially
supported by historical argumentation.
Coupling the civic principle with the principle of a nation was not a
‘misunderstanding’, as is nowadays asserted by some ardent defenders
of the ‘a-national’ civic principle, who take the view that
everything national – in the sense of ethno-linguistic or ethno-cultural
– is purely anachronistic. After the ending of the old feudal
regimes, which were based on Estates and on the dynastic principle
expressed symbolically through the ‘holy crown’, in favour of
formal freedom and equality of individuals, national consciousness
– modern nationalism – was increasingly and insistently brought to
bear as the integrating principle for the whole of society, more or
less successfully merging the tradition of the ‘glorious historic past’
and the historical constitutional law rooted in it with the current and
increasingly strong factor of ethnic or cultural unity based on lan-
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