BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

participation of the people in state government. 1 The early stages of nationalism were marked by
civil revolutions in two of the most prominent Western European monarchies, England and France.
While the English Civil War of mid-seventeenth century, whereby Parliament challenged and
effectively curtailed the authority of King Charles I, in effect set the wheel of nationalism into motion,
it was the French Revolution of 1789 that made it spin at its fullest capacity. In the sense that popular
revolt in both England and France brought royal tyranny to its knees, Hans Kohn argues that
nationalism was a sort of democratic movement projected at enhancing personal liberties and
limiting the absolute powers of monarchal regimes. 2 At the same time Kohn – as one of the influential
first theoreticians of nationalism – expertly elaborates that this initial meaning of nationalism as an
engine of liberty became distorted as the phenomenon began to move eastward on the European
continent and beyond. The countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (henceforth,
Eastern Europe), where nationalism – more or less – turned into totalitarian exclusionism and
coercion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lacked English and French traditions in
liberal government and statehood.
One vital factor that determined the type of nationalism to develop outside Western Europe,
particularly in the Balkans, was the movement of Romanticism that emerged in Germany during the
late eighteenth century. The nations that embraced Romantic ideology were young for the most part,
lacking in national pride, and in desperate need of dignified (if not glorious) collective identity.
Because of the sort of “inferiority complex” that most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
had as previously subjugated nations, they embraced the Romantic concept of nationalism rather
than its Enlightenment counterpart typical of England and France.
Romanticism called for the celebration of vernacular (domestic) values as an alternative to
the dominant Western ideology of Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment political philosophers
1 For more details on the above definition of nationalism, as well as on its origins and spread from Europe to the
rest of the world, read Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand
Company, Inc., 1955); Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Richard R.
Smith, Inc., 1931); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
2 Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1955), passim.
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