Introduction
Research on nationalism has generally accepted the power of mass-nationalism, but after decades of historical debate about how and when nationalism emerged and spread, historians and other scholars have more recently countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. Abundant research on nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as one of the main centers for the emergence of nationalism. Generations of historians and social scientists have examined and debated how this took place, but more recently, multiple historians have questioned and downplayed the role and importance of nationalism, especially as a mass phenomenon in modern European history. Remarkably, against a backdrop of heightened nationalism in the present, an increasingly influential approach consistently downplays the power of nationalism as a mass phenomenon and motive for action.
In one sense, historians and social scientists who question the role of nationalism build on a longstanding approach that argues that nationalism is more recent than nationalists believe. Hugh Seton-Watson, for example, distinguished between old “continuous” nations such as England and France and newer nations (Reference Seton-Watson1977, 7). Some authors have continued to argue for the comparatively old roots of at least some nations (Smith Reference Smith2003; Gat Reference Gat2012; Hastings Reference Hastings1977; Scales Reference Scales2015; Scales Reference Scales2007). However, the overwhelming trend for many authors, including Ernest Gellner (Reference Gellner1983), has been to locate nationalism as a modern ideology and form of identity. Benedict Anderson memorably summed up this point in Imagined Communities, noting the contrast between “the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (Anderson Reference Anderson1991, 5). John Breuilly, who saw nationalism as a means to mobilize against states, described nationalism as a “peculiarly modern form of politics” (Breuilly Reference Breuilly1994, 401). Rogers Brubaker, in a series of essays and books, recast nationalism as a form of practice, but still wrote on modern nationalism (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996, 1).
Multiple historical works stressed the recent roots of mass nationalism for varied European nations, including even the presumably older nations. Thus, Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen argued that only with late 19th century modernization did most peasants truly become French (Weber, Reference Weber1976). Linda Colley in Britons traced the rise of British national identity to the 18th and early 19th century, and Krishan Kumar, in the Making of English National Identity , argued for the emergence of English national identity only in the late 19th century (Colley Reference Colley1992; Kumar Reference Kumar2009). Miroslav Hroch, in a series of case studies that included Central and Eastern Europe, outlined the formation of nationalism in a series of stages, with what he termed a “Phase B,” in which activists adopted and sought to spread nationalism, preceding a “Phase C,” or the emergence of nationalism as a mass movement. He dated Phase B to the early 19th century in cases such as that of the Czechs or Magyars, but “in other cases 50 or even 100 years later,” such as for Belarussians or Ukrainians in Russia, and saw Phase C as starting in most cases by the early 20th century (Hroch Reference Hroch and Fowkes1985; Hroch Reference Hroch1995, 285–86).
These and other key works on nationalist theory and on nationalism in Europe posited a modern origin for European nationalism, but a series of more recent works has countered, arguing that even this starting point was too recent for mass nationalism. As Tara Zahra put it, “Although these scholars posed fatal challenges to primordialist narratives of ‘national awakening,’ they did little to question the resonance of nationalist claims and loyalties in the modern era” (Zahra Reference Zahra2010, 96). The historian Max Bergholz has distinguished between the developmental approaches of Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Hroch and their critics, including Zahra, who find that “ordinary people often remain indifferent when elites attempt to promote a sense of nationhood” (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2013, 680).
This article assesses the new paradigm of national indifference, the emergence of a new non-national narrative, and tests the capacity of this approach to account for cases of extreme discrimination and violence. National indifference, though adding to our understanding of the complexity of nationalism, itself incorporates questionable binary assumptions about motives and identity. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by declaring a victory for one approach, but this contrast between models of nationalism itself shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. This article argues that the debate between the now-classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of two key variables: frames, and sense of time.
This essay draws on and builds on a connection between frames and sense of time suggested by the sociologist Anthony Oberschall who analyzed the manipulation of frames in the case of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. “A cognitive frame,” Oberschall explained, “is a mental structure which situates and connects events, people and groups into a meaningful narrative in which the social world that one inhabits makes sense and can be communicated and shared with others” (Oberschall, 989). Yugoslavs, according to Oberschall, had two frames, a normal frame and a crisis frame: “In peaceful times, the crisis frame was dormant.” The second frame, the crisis frame, in contrast “was grounded in the experiences and memories of the Balkan wars, the first and second world wars – and other wars before that” (Oberschall Reference Oberschall2000, 989). He also employed the phase “normal times” (Oberschall Reference Oberschall2000, 982, 993). To build on Oberschall, the crisis frame was linked with a sense of historical time that connected the subject with historical narratives of victimization, crisis, and violence. The normal frame, on the other hand, linked the subject with peaceful, ordinary events of the everyday or with an everyday sense of time.
Oberschall suggested that a particular frame, the normal frame, may predominate, but that does not mean that people operate with a single frame or linked sense of time. Eric Hobsbawm’s observation about identity provides a useful point of comparison. As Hobsbawm noted, “Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time” (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1996, 1067). Humans can have more than one form of collective identity, and just as they can have multiple identities, they can also perceive the world through more than one frame and with more than one associated sense of time.
Much of the work on nationalism, while attuned to its complexity, paradoxically incorporates the unexamined assumption that the people operate with a single frame and sense of time. For historians who stress the rapid expansion of nationalism, a nationalist frame tied to historical time based on national narratives predominates. In contrast, historians of national indifference contrast these nationalists with masses of ordinary people operating with a normal frame in everyday time. Another possibility exists, however: both nationalists, even activists, as well as those less committed to national identity, operated with more than one frame and perceived reality through more than one sense of time.
Non-Nationalist Narrative
A backlash against influential interpretations of the collapse of Yugoslavia immediately preceded the turn away from nationalism toward the model of national indifference. As Yugoslavia broke apart in a series of wars in the early 1990s, popular explanations, most notably by the journalist and author Robert D. Kaplan, pointed to the power of longstanding hatreds (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1993). Numerous works and pieces since the 1990s have taken issue with the idea that such “ancient hatreds” led to Yugoslavia’s violent breakup. In one of many takedowns, Sabrina Ramet asserted, “Lacking any sturdy foundations, Kaplan’s explanation crumbled at the first touch” (Ramet Reference Ramet2005, 3; Naimark and Case, Reference Naimark and Case2003; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann2001; Gagnon Reference Gagnon2017; Sekulić, Massey, and Hodson Reference Sekulić, Massey and Hodson2006). Kaplan himself actually also observed that “the war in Bosnia was brought about not by ethnic hatreds as much as it was by evil men…,” but authors continued to critique Kaplan as a starting point for their own arguments (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1993, xx; Kushi Reference Kushi2016; Denison and Mujanović Reference Denison and Mujanović2015).
A critique of the role of “ancient hatreds” in promoting nationalism and nationalist violence is still broadly in line with classics of modern nationalist theory, but historians of national indifference extended this critique to question both the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. In sum, multiple works now bolster a counter-nationalist narrative of indifferent nationalism with starting points long before the breakup of Yugoslavia.
The non-national narrative extends back to the turn of the last century. Studies have found, for example, that “national indifference” prevailed in Bessarabia into the early 20th century, in the city of Ghent at the turn of the last century, in the North Caucasus during the First World War, and that identities were ambiguous and blurred in Macedonia throughout the early decades of the twentieth century (Cusco Reference Cusco2019, 14, 18; Van Ginderachter Reference Van Ginderachter2018, 591; Musgrave Reference Musgrave2019; Dragostinova Reference Dragostinova2016).
Recent studies of the Balkan Wars that preceded the First World War and of the conflicts that immediately followed the war during the last years of the Ottoman Empire have downplayed the importance of nationalism. In a study of Muslim-Christian “coexistence and its destruction in late Ottoman Anatolia,” Nicholas Doumanis cited refugees’ memories of prior good relations with their Muslim neighbors and their belief that it was the state that had brought violence and created enmity: “the evidence does not suggest that there was endemic bloodletting” (Doumanis Reference Doumanis2013, 164). Doumanis rejected the role of intercommunal hatred in the demise of the Empire and stressed state responsibility for violence. Ryan Gingeras in Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire charted the complexity of ethnic and religious relations in the Empire’s last decade to cast doubt on the notion of any “monolithic factions” (Gingeras Reference Gingeras2009, 168). He rejected the role of “primordial hatreds” and stressed the importance of local factors in organizing violence and of states in amplifying conflict.
Even after the First World War, nationalism still lacked mass appeal and did not provide a powerful motive for action at the grassroots level. That’s the argument presented by multiple well-received works on interwar Central and Eastern Europe. In a Biography of No Place, a study of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainians borderlands in right-bank Ukraine near Chernobyl, Kate Brown stressed coexistence in a complex multiethnic region and attributed the rise of nations to external states. Thus “Soviet and German officials arranged populations based not on the hybrid qualities of the indigenous inhabitants themselves but on standardized notions of nations and achievement” (Brown Reference Brown2004, 229). Colonizing states forced nationalism onto once “strong” peoples.
Of all the works questioning the appeal and power of nationalism in 20th century Europe, Tara Zahra’s book Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 and her article on “Imagined Noncommunities” stand out for outlining an approach to national apathy in a region often identified as a major center for nationalism. Zahra built on histories of national indifference and apathy carried on through works by historians, including Gary B. Cohen, Pieter Judson, Jeremy King, and James Bjork, among others. Cohen, for example, pointed out that “in nineteenth century Austria, spokesmen for the nationalist causes … frequently complained about … national indifference” (Cohen Reference Cohen2006, 12). Judson (Reference Judson2006) found that “nationalists explained the frustrating national indifference they encountered in rural Austria as misguided resistance to the forces of progress” (68). In Budweiser, King (Reference King2002) observed, “National indifference was an inconvenient fact that nationalist leaders denied and minimized” (3–4). James Bjork (Reference Bjork2008), in a study of Upper Silesia, similarly found considerable national indifference.
In Kidnapped Souls, Zahra provided a rich and nuanced picture of the complexity of nationalism. Zahra documented the often pragmatic, personal, and non-national decisions that parents made in choosing schools for their children. Despite pressures after the First World War, “many Czech-speaking and bilingual parents clearly continued to see themselves as Germans and to send their children to German-language schools” (Zahra Reference Zahra2008, 126). Zahra, critically, made the case that indifference contributed to nationalist radicalization. Indifference, according to Zahra, “propelled nationalists to devise and impose novel and increasingly disciplinary forms of national ascription or classification as well as new ‘progressive’ pedagogies and nationalist welfare institutions in the Bohemian Lands” (Zahra Reference Zahra2008, 5). Responding to ambiguity, nationalists devised plans for classification (Zahra Reference Zahra2008, 138). In this account, nationalist activists sought to impose national categories and practices on others. Before the First World War, the nationalist activists, Czech and German, worked to define national boundaries even as they competed with each other, facing common frustration at the indifference of many in their audiences. Thus, “German nationalists … were no less frustrated than their Czech peers with the national indifference of parents … ” (Zahra Reference Zahra2008, 50). In the interwar era, Czech nationalists gained the upper hand in the new state of Czechoslovakia and replaced German street signs and monuments to Germans or the Habsburg monarchy (Zahra Reference Zahra2008, 114).
The nationalist activists described by Zahra employed a national frame, but it does not follow from that that the subjects of their activity were necessarily clearly either nationalist or indifferent. This was not a binary choice. Parents who chose schools based on other considerations than nationalism expressed indifference or even resistance to nationalism in that sphere of activity, but there is another possibility: that they operated with more than one frame and that a pragmatic normal frame for daily affairs did not negate the existence of a nationalist frame attached to a sense of historical time.
In an article playing on Benedict Anderson’s title Imagined Communities under the title “Imagined Noncommunities,” Zahra broadly argued for the salience of indifference or of “populations and individuals who were not so easily swallowed up by the forces of nationalization” in multiple regions, including populations in Silesia, Carinthia, the Carpathians, Moravian Silesia, Transylvania, Bohemia, Istria, and in Poland and Hungary (Reference Zahra2010, 96, 102–3). She situated national indifference in opposition to nationalist claims or appeals—in this way it is not “premodern.” Rather national indifference “was often a response to modern mass politics” (Zahra Reference Zahra2010, 98). Alexei Miller (Reference Miller2019) has stressed that indifference as deliberate choice or even as resistance is not necessarily passive (64). In contrast, Maria Todorova, who has suggested the term “weak nationalism,” or a limited response to a nationalist mobilizing message, questioned the notion that modern politics actually generated national indifference (Todorova Reference Todorova2015, 684–85, 696).
Zahra’s approach to nationalism ran through her book The Great Departure, a history of mass migration from Eastern Europe. Zahra stressed the key role of states and “one of the most consequential political discoveries of nineteenth-century European states: that emigration could be manipulated like the steam valve on a teapot; that encouraging people to stay or go could be used as an instrument of policy, to serve both domestic and international goals. People could be ‘scientifically’ managed, like any other natural resource” (Reference Zahra2016, 6). With such top-down management, nationalism receded as a motive for migration. Zahra observed that “the memory of these migrations has been distorted by the rise of nationalism and ethnic politics in the twentieth century” (Reference Zahra2016, 16). The book provided striking insights about fears of population loss, discussions during the 1930s about sending Jews outside of Europe, and about the continuity in controlling migration after the Second World War, but it also showed tension between recognizing and minimizing the role of nationalism and of populist ideologies. On the one hand, Zahra acknowledged the presence of nationalism, nationalists (in particular activists), “popular nationalist movements” in late imperial Austria and pogroms, and “populist anti-Semitic movements”—though she presented few details on the level and experience of violence—but instead of integrating a theme of grassroots nationalism, she focused on states, experts, and activists (Zahra Reference Zahra2016, 48). For Zahra, individuals seemed detached from nationalism.
Arriving at the present, the book’s postscript abruptly shifted tone to stress the power of populist nationalism in the refugee crisis of 2015–2016. As Zahra wrote, “Historians of Europe’s twentieth century have found it all distressingly familiar: the rise of right-wing, nationalist populism in Europe and the United States” (293). She suggested that “we need more histories of anti-internationalism, anti-globalization, and anti-migration movements—histories of nationalism, protectionism, and populism in relation to global forces,” and added, “This book did not begin as such a history, but it may end as one” (Zahra Reference Zahra2016, 297). But did such populist nationalism really only become a powerful force in migration politics and policy in the 21st century, or has Zahra overlooked the previous simultaneous existence and popular influence of both a nationalist and normal frame?
The non-nationalist narrative extends past the interwar years and up to and through the Second World War. In a series of books, Tim Snyder charted the proliferation of extreme violence across border zones of eastern Europe while at the same time minimizing the significance of nationalism as a motive for large groups. His work Bloodlands outlined multiple waves of violence, but saw a minimal role for nationalists, nationalism, or indeed for ideology in contributing to participation in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Snyder recognized and even emphasized collaboration during German occupation, but found little if any ideological cause for such action: “The classic example of collaboration is that of the Soviet citizens who served the Germans as policemen or guards … Almost none of these people collaborated for ideological reasons, and only a small minority had political motives of any discernable sort” (Snyder Reference Snyder2010, 397). He acknowledged “an overlap of ideology and interests between Nazis and local nationalists in destroying the Soviet Union and (less often) in killing Jews,” but stressed that “far more collaborators simply said the right things or did what they were told” (Snyder Reference Snyder2010, 397). Possibly addressing potential critics, Snyder has claimed the high ground for this approach, arguing that an emphasis on the role of ideology conveniently distances us from perpetrators: “Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill” (Snyder Reference Snyder2010, 399). Alternately, separating people from ideology could also encourage readers to refrain from considering whether they themselves subscribe to some of the same ideologies that contributed to past discrimination and violence.
In the case of the Holocaust, Snyder in his book Black Earth described widespread participation in destruction while minimizing grassroots initiatives. In the case of Poland, for example, “the Soviet decapitation of society was accompanied by a zombification of the social body” (Snyder Reference Snyder2015, 125). Zombies may be dangerous and sometimes deadly, but they are hardly responsible for their actions—the real driving force then remained the states that made them and set them loose. When local people turned on Jews in regions previously held by the Soviet regime, they did so, according to Snyder, to provide an excuse for their own collaboration (Snyder Reference Snyder2015, 153).
If nationalism remained weak through the interwar years and in many regions into the Second World War, it still, in the non-nationalist narrative, had not developed mass appeal by the end of the Second World War. In a major account of European ethnic cleansing, the historian Phillipe Ther minimized the importance of nationalism during the era of postwar expulsion and population transfer. For Ther, ethnic cleansing was somehow connected to nations: his book was entitled the Dark Side of Nation-States, but actual nationalists were largely absent. The nation-state existed without many committed nationalists, and nationalism had little role in contributing to violence. Ther warned, “it is imperative to maintain a nuanced view of interethnic violence. It has become fashionable in the last decade to focus research on the destructive impact of individuals or groups and their misdeed rather than state institutions. The result is frequently a view of history reminiscent of Hobbes’s Leviathan… . it was largely in the hands of the great powers and the individual states to either contain outbreaks of violence or allow them to escalate into ethnic cleansing” (Ther Reference Ther2014, 19). Ther conceded that the resettlement of Germans at the end of the Second World War was popular in both Czechoslovakia and in Poland, but cautioned that “too much importance should not be attached to the motive of revenge, which is often highlighted by the media and academic literature”(Ther Reference Ther2014, 152).
A recent book by David Gerlach on the economics of ethnic cleansing in the Sudetenland anchored the non-nationalist narrative firmly in the postwar era. Gerlach showed how personal enrichment and social mobility contributed to ethnic cleansing while minimizing or downplaying the role of nationalism at almost every turn (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 105, 127, 277). He suggested “a move away from nationality politics as the frame of reference for postwar Czechoslovak history … ” (17). Following other recent historians, including R.M. Douglas, Gerlach stressed that cases of mob violence were exceptions—“What emerges then, is not a picture of widespread nationally motivated mob violence, but a military campaign to force Germans from the country” (30). Gerlach argued that “Czechs did not rise up as a nation to attack and kill Germans” (53). Noting that Germans differentiated between Czechs, Gerlach underscored the key role of individual actions and views: “Even so, such indicators suggest that starting an analysis of the expulsions from the perspective of national hatreds overlooks such personal interactions, which demonstrate that what often mattered most was how individuals treated one another” (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 59) Czechs themselves were divided, and new settlers included non-Czechs (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 65–66, 94, 98, 101). Ethnic cleansing was not complete or total. Nationalism did not drive out Germans: “Thus while nationalist politics—including symbols, speeches and commentary—were pervasive, they alone could do little to move Germans” (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 275). By the same token, no ideology or form of identity, by itself, can forcibly move people, unless some people act to realize what they see as the principles of that ideology or identity.
If nationalism had not yet arrived as an important motive for mass action by the immediate postwar era, that was still the case, according to some recent works, in war zones of Europe at the end of the twentieth century. A number of researchers have aimed to correct what they see as the popular misconception that nationalism drove violence during the breakup of Yugoslavia. In John Mueller’s analysis of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the kind of forced migration that struck some as ethnic violence was in actuality a series of crimes committed by thugs. Violence in Croatia and Bosnia “principally came from the actions of recently empowered and unpoliced thugs” (Mueller, Reference Mueller2004, 88). To get killers, “politicians found it necessary to recruit fanatics, criminals, and hooligans for the job” (Mueller, Reference Mueller2004, 88). Such factors as “identity, ethnicity, nationalism, civilization, culture, and religion proved more nearly to be an excuse or pretext for the predation than an independent cause of it” (Mueller, Reference Mueller2004, 95; Mueller Reference Mueller2000).
More recently, V.P. Gagnon Jr has disputed the position that leaders even employed ethnicity or nationalism to boost their support. Instead, he argues that they sought “to demobilize those who were pushing for changes… . Violence was imposed on plural communities … ” (Gagnon Reference Gagnon2004, xv, 180). Conservative elites, he argued, in this way sought to stifle calls for change by seeking to demobilize the population.
Together, these approaches to national indifference and related concepts expand our understanding of nationalism in important ways. They point to regional gaps and differences in timing as well as to the difficulty capturing attention let alone belief for any idea, a challenge that is not unique for nationalists. Indifferent audiences may frustrate advocates of any ideology or identity. Recognizing indifference and hybrid or fluid identities also helps case studies to make clear the wide array of actors and interests, some of whom do not fit into clear national or ethnic categories. And studies such as Gerlach’s have demonstrated the importance of material motives. Max Bergholz similarly stressed the opportunity to plunder as a motive for wartime violence in Bosnia (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 91, 117, 119). Finally, scholars of indifference have charted how a lack of response to nationalist appeals can actually alter and radicalize nationalism itself.
At the time, these and related works in sum would either negate a meaningful place for mass nationalism as a motive for political behavior or identify an extremely late and speedy shift in which nationalism suddenly burst into place. If nationalism was not significant for ordinary people in the early 20th century, or in the interwar years, or during the era of the Second World War, or after the war, or even at the end of the Cold War, then perhaps it never gained any traction beyond activists and elites or, alternately, it grew up very late and very fast.
As historians who questioned the power of nationalism have pointed out, individual positions vary, but it is still possible to outline overlapping themes in the historical turn against nationalism. Primordialism or perennialism are no longer even remote possibilities: nationalism as a mass phenomenon did not arrive in much of Europe until far into the 20th century. As Maarten van Ginderachter and Jon Fox have stated, national indifference “survived well into the twentieth century, even into the post-Second World War age of nationalism” (van Ginderachter and Fox Reference Van Ginderachter, Fox, Van Ginderachter and Fox2019, 1). Nations, according to the prevailing models of national indifference, were never unified groups and even when nationalism existed, many remained immune to its charms. It possessed only limited importance as a motive for action on the grassroots level. In short, nationalism may have emerged, but there were seldom if ever many nationalists outside the ranks of committed activists. To take these arguments to their logical extreme, nationalism is something that small elites, national vanguards, or states foisted or forced onto people—one could almost say that nationalism is something that bad states do to good people. Nationalism sank into states, which then imposed categories. We are very far indeed from the realm of ancient hatreds. Mass or popular nationalism has never arrived, except perhaps when it comes to rooting for teams in the World Cup or for Eurovision contestants. This might be alternately irritating or reassuring, depending on one’s view of nationalism, but is it believable?
Thresholds and Motives
The case for minimizing nationalism sets an extremely high threshold for identifying nationalism as a motive for groups beyond elites. Much of the work on German expulsions, for example, rejected the importance of nationalism as a mass motive by discounting the prevalence of spontaneous mob violence without explaining the choice of spontaneous mob violence as the key measure for the influence of nationalism on the grassroots level (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 30, 56; Douglas Reference Douglas2012, 365). Writing about a different case in Macedonia, Theodora Dragostinova made a similar point, “it is difficult if not impossible to document the existence of spontaneous grassroots violence against minority individuals at the local level” (Dragostinova Reference Dragostinova2016, 407). Indeed, the study of most violent acts reveals organization, but it is not clear why spontaneity should serve as the chief criterion or threshold for establishing either significant mass participation or a particular motive for violence.
Works that downgraded the role of nationalism have also adopted questionable assumptions about motives and in particular mixed motives. They have minimized or rejected altogether the possible roles of nationalism or ethnicity as motives for conflict and violence if other motives are apparent. Timothy Snyder, for example, as his title indicates, in no way overlooked the proliferation of violence in the “Bloodlands” that stretched from central Poland to western Russia—“the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people…”—but it is not clear why identifying other possible motives for collaboration disproves the power of ideological motives.
David Gerlach’s model for explaining ethnic cleansing after the Second World War similarly crowded out nationalism as a possible motive. He writes, “Studying property transactions and transgressions in the postwar German-Czech borderlands demonstrates how people’s interests in social mobility and personal gain fueled ethnic cleansing.” While insisting on avoiding economic determinism, he concluded that “hundreds of thousands of Czechs responded enthusiastically when given the opportunity to migrate to the borderlands, but they did not go there for revenge. Instead, Czech speakers participated in ethnic cleansing by moving into Germans’ homes and stripping them of their livelihoods and possessions” (Gerlach Reference Gerlach2017, 105, 277). That very enthusiasm, however, raises the question of whether they also migrated in part for revenge. Why does establishing the significance of one major motive, the real possibility of economic gain, discount another possible motive or motives such as national vengeance? And how is it possible to distinguish between economic gain as an outcome and motive?
Case Studies
Beyond making these questionable assumptions, the case against nationalism also faces difficulty accounting for major themes and episodes in modern European history. The histories of anti-Semitism, violence directed against Jews during the Second World War, and ethnic cleansing and expulsion at the war’s end provide examples of themes and episodes that pose challenges for models of national indifference, even though they might also appear in non-national narratives.
Anti-Semitic violence, though not constant, recurred with waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire and in the aftermath of the First World War, and antagonism to the presence of Jews spiked with widespread adoption of calls during the interwar era to send Jews outside of Europe. All of these topics, none more so than the Holocaust, possess vast historiographies, and it is impossible to reduce the multiple phases of anti-Jewish persecution and violence to a single factor, but the power of anti-Semitism in modern European history poses an extraordinary challenge to any narrative of national indifference. Perhaps some anti-Semites in particular contexts did not always prioritize nationalism, but anti-Semitism was a key feature of nationalism on the European right. Zahra emphasized the connection to populism, noting that “the period from 1880 to 1900 saw the rapid rise of populist anti-Semitic movements across Europe” (Zahra Reference Zahra2016, 48). Populism took multiple forms, but at least some major episodes of anti-Semitism at the turn of the last century, such as the Dreyfus Affair, revealed the emergence of an anti-Semitism with nationalist qualities.
Studies of pogroms in the Russian Empire show the importance both of multiple causes of anti-Jewish violence and of the growing place of nationalism in anti-Semitism. Without fully recreating the historical debate over pogroms, it is possible to identify several interpretations. The role of the Tsarist government has long prompted debate, leading both to the conclusion that the Tsarist government itself did not drive a policy of pogroms and to the counter-argument that pogroms in 1905 suppressed revolution (Lambroza Reference Lambroza1987; Rogger Reference Rogger1986; Khiterer Reference Khiterer2015). Historians have long noted the conjunction between religious tensions and violence, especially around Easter, and many have identified religious animosity as a cause for pogroms. Fictional claims of ritual murder preceded the rioting that started on Easter Sunday at the start of the infamous pogrom at Kishinev (Zipperstein Reference Zipperstein2018, 56, 62–63). Others have emphasized economic competition (Kolstø, Reference Kolstø2014). William Hagen, in a book on pogroms in Poland between 1914 and 1920, combined cultural and economic interpretations to stress both the role of violence in the “moral economy” and the “cultural wellsprings of grassroots aggression” (Hagen Reference Hagen2018, 507, 516).
Pogroms certainly cannot be reduced to a single cause, but historians have also found a nationalist dimension both in Russia and elsewhere. Pogroms in Habsburg Galicia in 1898, for example, included extensive plunder and violence that coincided with the religious calendar, but also charges of national betrayal in a pamphlet entitled “Jewish Secrets” by the priest Mateusz Jez that began with the poem:
A nationalist dimension for pogroms is most striking for pogroms that took place after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and Revolution of 1905 and for pogroms during the First World War. A nationalism on the right that identified Jews with revolution contributed to the pogroms of the era. As the historian Alexie Miller has pointed out, “It was the extreme Right nationalists and conservatives who were the allies of Nicholas II in his resistance to democratization in general and to emancipation of Jews in particular. The former saw the Jews as enemies of the ‘national capital …’” (Miller Reference Miller2008, 124–25). As a multiethnic autocratic state, the example of the Russian Empire seems to diverge from major models of nationalism, but Miller argued that “an effort to consolidate the nation, including a definition of a certain part of the territory of the empire as the ‘national territory,’ does not necessarily signal an intention to ‘disband’ the empire” (Miller Reference Miller, Berger and Miller2015, 311). More specifically, for the Russian case, by 1905, “Russian nationalism became clearly divorced from the agenda of political liberalism, and was rather associated with the revanchist autocratic monarchy and xenophobic quarters of Russian society. Nicholas II developed close ties with the extreme nationalist right, including the Black Hundred” (Miller Reference Miller, Berger and Miller2015, 337).
Pogromists in 1905 identified themselves with nationalism and national or patriotic symbols, including the anthem and flag (Lambroza Reference Lambroza, Klier and Lambroza1992, 225; and Khiterer Reference Khiterer2015, 799). The national anthem, for example, provided encouragement for a pogrom. That was the case at Nikolajew in the Cherson district where a “military music choir” sang the national anthem and church songs (Zionist Organization 1910, 151). The singing of the national anthem provided part of the prelude to a pogrom at Krementschug in the district of Poltava where patriots also displayed the national flag and emperor’s picture before beginning their attack on the city’s Jews (Zionist Organisation 1910, 253). In similar fashion, hooligans in the town of Alexandrovsk in the district of Ekaterinoslav sang the national anthem and yelled “death to the Jews”(Zionist Organisation 1910, 200). A pogrom in Uman, a town in southern Ukraine to the north of the Buh river, began with a patriotic assembly, accompanied by military music, on October 22 that included the cry “Hit the Jews” (Zionist Organisation 1910, 416). The employment of these symbols does not disprove other causes, but to write a history of pogroms without nationalism requires a kind of sealing off of a major potential cause.
Nationalist anti-Semitism proliferated during the interwar years. Here again, the topic is so vast as to defy a simple survey because anti-Semitism blended with different identities and forms of politics, but even though interwar anti-Semitism cannot be reduced to nationalism, anti-Semitism without question gained strong support among varied nationalists. In Weimar Germany, the most extreme antisemitism took form among the Nazis, but as Richard Evans has pointed out, “the language of antisemitism became embedded in mainstream political discourse as never before … . The rhetoric of the Nationalists … was shot through with antisemitic phrases.” (Evans Reference Evans2005, 152; Jones Reference Jones and Jones2014, 9). In Romania, anti-Semitic student activists sang the nationalist anthem “Wake up Romania” when attacking rivals or even throwing Jews off trains; as Roland Clark explained, nationalists “frequently expressed anxieties about their identity…through attacks on Jews and foreigners” (Clark Reference Clark2015, 9, 11). Anti-Semitism and nationalism converged in interwar Poland. Jerzy Holzer outlined how the trends from the late 1920s onward in the “national camp, i.e. political forces with roots in the National Democracy, changed from ideological and tactical antisemitism to supporting the organized use of physical force against the Jews. These groups openly called for exceptional legislation to eliminate almost all Jewish rights” (Holzer Reference Holzer, Polonsky, Mendelsohn and Tomaszewksi2004, 199). Joanna Beata Michlic wrote that “the ethno-nationalism of the National Democracy party, with its elaborated representation of the Jew as the enemy of Poland and its people, was one of the main factors behind various anti-Jewish hostilities that occurred in interwar Poland” (Michlic Reference Michlic2006, 109).
Interwar antisemitism gave rise to violence and calls for exclusion and expulsion of Jews, with widespread calls in countries including Poland and Romania to send Jews out of Europe. Madagascar was often mentioned as a suitable destination. Zahra recognized the anti-Semitism of the era, noting that “The Great Depression intensified xenophobia throughout Europe and America” (Reference Zahra2016, 136). Anti-Semitism took violent form: “Between March 1935 and January 1937, according to the JDC, 118 Polish Jews were killed and 1,350 were wounded in more than three hundred separate incidents of anti-Semitic violence. The violence was typically well organized, and appeared to be tolerated by both local authorities and highly placed members of the Polish government” (Reference Zahra2016, 155). Zahra made a strong case for the importance of government policies of filtering populations, but the populist forms of anti-Semitism also suggest a strong nationalist element. Consider, for example, the chants of National Democrats at Lodz’s city council for “Jews to Madagascar” (Brechtken Reference Brechtken1997). Economic interpretations might add to but do not necessarily contradict nationalist motives.
The problems with nationalist indifference intensify with the history of the Second World War, in particular with reference to extreme violence carried out against Jews. To continue the narrative of national indifference through the war years requires completely detaching widespread complicity or direct participation in violent assaults against Jews from nationalism. Of course, such behavior and actions could stem from multiple causes, but are they really compatible with the notion of pervasive national indifference?
Omer Bartov’s acclaimed study of the Galician town of Buczacz provided an instructive guide to the place of nationalism as a significant factor in the waves of violence that afflicted the town and region. Bartov’s Anatomy of Genocide (Reference Bartov2018) did not seek to establish or demonstrate that all people of the time were highly nationalist. That is not the case even in a highly nationalist society, but Bartov depicts a region and town washed by multiple waves of nationalism. Jews were already targets of animosity by the interwar era. Mendel Reich, president of a Torah school and local activist, wrote in 1936 that Jews were accused of “not going themselves to heaven, to Mars, or at least to Madagascar, so long as one is rid of them” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 100). The appeal of nationalism was uneven before the war, for example, among Ukrainians, but it is still hard to speak overall of indifference: “increasingly militant nationalism… had become the norm among urban Galician Ukrainians in such settings as Buczacz… However indifferent to nationalism many of the peasants may have remained, the efforts to nationalize the rural population were, it appears, bearing fruit, most especially among the young” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 111). Bartov recognized that nationalism did not exist in a vacuum, but that did not make interaction between nationalism and other forms of identity less volatile: “religion and nationalism were being fused together to produce an ideological and psychological climate ripe for widespread violence once the constraints on social order were removed or altered” (120). Bartov found that “talk of violence and removal was everywhere” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 122).
Accounts of occupation during the Second World War reveal killing, not just by forces that imported terror, but also by others much closer to home: “People repeatedly asked, Why did our neighbors, classmates, teachers, colleagues, friends, even family members turn their backs on us, betray us to the perpetrators, or join in the killing?” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 133). Perpetrators of genocide included neighbors as well as newcomers. Describing killing of Jews in Buczacz, Bartov wrote, “Many of these policemen knew their victims personally. This too set a pattern, whereby the Jews of Buczacz were later rounded up and at times killed by men who had known them as neighbors, colleagues, classmates, or parents of their children’s friends” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018 166). Snyder (Reference Snyder2010, Reference Snyder2015) also stressed the level of local involvement in killing, and Bartov recognized the decapitation of local society: “The Germans accomplished the rapid destruction of the Jewish population by creating a local apparatus of Ukrainians and Jews who helped them organize and perpetrate mass murder and by swiftly decapitating the community so as to minimize organized resistance” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 179). That said, killers openly reveled in anti-Semitism even as they gained extraordinary benefits. A witness in hiding saw executions, heard the victims’ cries and the sound of the machine guns. Ukrainian policemen exchanged victims’ belongings for vodka and brandy, celebrating by chanting, “Death for the Jews and Poles. Long live independent Ucraina [Ukraine]” (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 181). Another witness heard Ukrainian police chanting “Death to the Jews” (181). Those who engaged in the genocidal project also gained material benefits, status, and power, or for the Jewish police, at least a temporary reprieve from death (Bartov Reference Bartov2018, 185).
Bartov’s detailed case study showed an array of motives for taking part in violence and murder, but such mixed motives did not amount to national indifference. It would be ahistorical and reductionist to attempt to attribute local participation in genocide solely to nationalism, but adhering to a thesis of national indifference would require a severely blinkered approach as well.
Some of the same episodes featured in recent historical works that downplay or minimize the role of nationalism can also call into question findings of national indifference. A state-centered approach that downplays nationalist motives has been in the ascendancy in recent works on the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of the Second World War. Historians have demonstrated the importance of states in generating forced migration. Soviet advances in the east helped to form postwar borders and international arrangements provided for population transfer. Military formations took the lead in expelling populations (Frank Reference Frank2007; Service Reference Service2013).
States undoubtedly played key roles in the expulsion and transfer of ethnic Germans, but it is difficult to reconcile many details from the case of flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia with the concept of widespread national indifference. Czechs, for example, engaged in national marking, both with objects and words. A German from Luditz (Zlutice) in western Bohemia described how Czechs employed national symbols as they took over Germans’ properties. Czechs arrived in “the very worst clothing, they have nothing but a brief case, usually with a piece of bread, a picture of Benes, and a little blue, white, red flag. They come in our houses and say, ‘I am now the owner.’”Footnote 1 Insults directed against Germans deployed national symbols. A German from Kreis Neustadt told of being transported in a railway car bearing the slogans, “‘We thank our Fuhrer!’ ‘We return home to the Reich!’ ‘Sieg Heil.’”Footnote 2 A German interned at Wichau near Brono/Brünn recalled having to sweep street and pick up trash with the daily insults, “German Swine,” and “whore,” all he while wearing an armband.Footnote 3
In downplaying ideological and national motives for expulsion, historians have stressed the limited number of cases of spontaneous mob violence, but Germans experienced a massive wave of violence in Prague, by far Czechoslovakia’s largest city: it was an exception that mattered. Historians have attributed the scenes in Prague to intense fighting in the war’s last days, when German forces suppressed a Czech uprising launched days before Soviet forces entered the city on May 9. These were indeed key factors; however, the details of revenge also suggested widespread anger that extended far beyond the chance to make economic gains. The historian Tomas Stanek described “people hunted down” on the streets and even reports of “human torches” (Stanek Reference Stanek2002, 94–95).
Germans’ accounts showed not only violence, but also rituals of public humiliation, in particular of German women. In one such case, a German woman recounted her misfortune after venturing out onto the streets. A man from her building identified her as German and said she would have to clean up the paving stones used to build barricades during the uprising. A mob spat at her, boxed her ears, and she had to give up her coat, shoes and stockings. Czech women sheared off her hair. When her ill son tried to help her, he was beaten until blood streamed from his face.Footnote 4 A German widow, a resident of Prague for years, described being subjected to an ordeal along with other older women. Their hair was cut off, with swastikas drawn on their foreheads. They were driven onto the streets and forced to call out, “We are Hitler whores.”Footnote 5 Another victim of the mob spoke of the worst day of her life: she was forced to march down a street thronged by people, clapping their hands, mocking with roars of “Sieg Heil” and filming the proceedings. As partisans with Red Guard Armbands accompanied the procession, women armed with shears ran out and cut off one side of their hair, before shoving the hair in the German women’s mouths. Men and women left their houses to dowse the German women with cold or dirty water.Footnote 6 A German woman evacuated from Brno/Brünn ended up in Prague and suffered much the normal assault for the day: Czech women “cut off our hair, smeared our face with oil paints, and took away all rings, watches, shoes and stockings, in individual cases, even the clothing which pleased them.”Footnote 7
The scenes from Prague are hard to reconcile with a thesis of widespread national indifference, and even if Prague was an exception, it was one with a large population. Popular participation in dispossessing Germans more often took the form of removing Germans’ property and possessions, but drawing a boundary between humiliation along national lines and expropriation driven by economic need and opportunism rests on questionable assumptions. Yes, economic motives contributed to grassroots dispossessions of Germans, but an economic motive could always be present and does not by itself explain the singling out of a particular group, defined by nationality, or breaching normal rules of conduct in targeting that group. Moreover, symbolic violence, as at Prague, was not necessary to take over others’ possessions.
Binary Logic
The new approaches to national indifference increase understanding of the range of expression or the lack thereof of nationalism, but key works incorporate questionable assumptions and reach fanciful endpoints. At core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity. Evaluating binary choices, such as being Greek or Turkish, or German or Polish, historians of indifference make the strong case that people did not necessary fall into a single category. However, non-binary or fluid identity does not necessarily equate to either weak identity or indifference.
Secondly, the works in the non-national narrative frequently pair motives as mutually exclusive binary options in distinguishing between purportedly paramount motives, whether state interest or economic need, and allegedly superficial motives such as nationalism. According to this logic, nationalism is not a significant motive for conflict or violence at the grassroots level if state interest informs policy, and nationalism similarly counts for little as a motive for popular participation in violence if economic opportunism is also present. It is not clear, however, why it is only possible to choose between two motives or causes. Establishing the importance of state actors does not disprove the influence of nationalism, and an economic motive for taking part in pogroms or ethnic cleansing would not by itself remove a nationalist motive for attacking or driving out an unwanted population.
Thirdly, new approaches to nationalism adopt a binary approach to the very category of nationalism with two options: strong nationalism or national indifference. Again, it is valuable to recover fluid identities and the histories of those who, at particular times, did not clearly fit into a single national category, but that does not disprove the power of these categories. For example, the existence of people in the early 1920s who did not fit easily into categories of being Greek or Turkish, German, or Polish does not show the general weakness of any of these national identities.
Fourthly, national indifference incorporates the assumption that nationalism itself is either strong or weak. This position overlooks the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism as potentially both strong and weak. Indeed, establishing relative indifference in a particular area such as the choice of a school for a child, does not demonstrate the absence of nationalism in another area or sphere. As a fluid force, nationalism resembles a wave with moments of high and low amplitude, sometimes in quick succession.
Addressing the tension between historians such as Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson, and Hroch, who identified nationalism as a developmental stage of modernism, and critics such as Judson, King, Bjork, and Zahra, who have pointed to persistent national indifference, the historian Max Bergholz discussed “sudden nationhood” in Yugoslavia (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 267–96). Scholars who point to “sudden” nationhood or nationalism identify moments of change in amplitude. The history of the former Yugoslavia, in particular, presents a puzzle with evidence of both national antagonism and of generally amicable relations between people of different ethnicities or nationalities.
In his study of the Kulen Vakuf region of Bosnia, Bergholz employed microhistory to describe and analyze violence. Bergholz emphasized the limited appeal of nationalism in the region beyond activists in the 19th century and in the early 20th century (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 33, 46, 52). As for the category of nation, early in his book he described ethnicity and nation as “mental frames or ways of seeing and interpreting one’s world” (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 19).
Bergholz made the important point that violence itself is a generative force (Reference Bergholz2016, 16). Sorting through different motives for violence during the Second World War, including the opportunity to settle scores and gain plunder (Reference Bergholz2016, 80, 91, 119, 171) and revenge (Reference Bergholz2016, 120, 123, 154, 163), Bergholz attributed killings at Kulen Vakuf as well to fear and rumors and argues that violence itself then changed how people categorized themselves and others (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 111–112, 151–152, 162–163, 176, 178, 263). Violence during the Second World War “created new perceptions of extremely polarized group identities by inscribing hard boundaries through the act of killing” (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2013, 680; Bergholz, Reference Bergholz2016, 112).
For the postwar era, Bergholz identified three mental schemas, including harmony; state-enforced brotherhood and unity; and discord rooted in war time violence (Reference Bergholz2016, 273, 278, 280). State-enforced efforts revealed cases in which some insulted “neighbors on the basis of ethnicity” and made clear official rejection of this (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 275). In this model, nationalism of ordinary people is no longer the mere product of manipulation—something bad states do to good people. During periods of abrupt shift, people would rapidly interpret causes of incidents in ethnic terms. Bergholz made evocative comparison to a scenario “in which like a train switching tracks, an abrupt shift takes place, leading to the emergence of a sense of ‘sudden nationhood,’”—their interpretations did not just describe “incidents as ‘ethnically based,’ they actually constituted them in such terms” (Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 272, 281).
A tension over time lies at the heart of Bergholz’s sophisticated analysis. On the one hand, Bergholz documented the effects of the legacy of the Second World War. He noted the possibility of fluidity between the schemes that he charts, or of a “much more fluid and volatile dynamic” (280), adding that “ … ethnic categories retained their salience for some people after the war,” though this was not the case for “a majority of people on an everyday basis” (281). Here, Bergholz distinguished between “some people” and “a majority.” To use a different set of terms, “some people” employed a nationalist frame attached to a historical sense of time, while the majority used a normal frame attached to everyday time or to what Bergholz terms “an everyday basis” (281). Certainly, he had reason to refer to those using the normal frame as the majority, but there is another non-binary possibility: the second, larger group could have employed both frames. Further describing the influence of history, Bergholz observed “that the shadow of wartime violence was in the background, structuring and giving amplification to the ways in which certain people interpreted rumors and actual incidents of conflict” (284). However, the reference to a shadow indicates that the schema of discord was already present, if partially submerged.(Bergholz Reference Bergholz2013, 697, Bergholz Reference Bergholz2016, 284–85).
Nevertheless, in Bergholz’s account, ethnic and national categories or identity nearly universally come after other events. Thus, ethnic or national antagonism had little to do with postwar conflict. Instead, “it was the after-the fact coding of incidents as ‘ethnic conflict’ due in large part to war-time created mental templates—not a preexisting widespread sense of antagonistic nationhood—that often led to their being more broadly interpreted as ‘ethnic conflict’” (291). As a motive or cause, nationalism or ethnicity always comes after the fact. Nationalism and ethnicity are always becoming—but why is this the case if ethnicity and nationalism are truly so irrelevant to the point where the words “ethnic” or “ethnicity” are always introduced in quotes? Indeed, the very term ethnic is a kind of phantom, a category of analysis that exists to be disproven.
Bergholz’s reference to “mental templates” again suggests an alternative approach to charting a possible relationship between the “canonical” approaches and “national” indifference. Toward the start of his award-winning study, Bergholz introduced the concepts of frames but then largely dropped this device (Reference Bergholz2016, 19). Certainly, there were groups more or less inclined to see events through a national frame linked to a sense of historical time, but there is another possibility—that some simultaneously possessed two frames attached to two different senses of time. Witnessing or hearing of violence, people did not simply switch after the fact to code violence as ethnic. With both frames, a nationalist frame and a normal frame, they could immediately interpret acts of violence or insults though the nationalist frame that placed events not simply in the everyday, but also in historical time. In this model, moments of convergence or of fusion of the sense of historical time with the sense of everyday time created higher potential for violence.
Frames, Sense of Time, and Nationalism
Once we recognize the coexistence of multiple frames attached to different senses of time, it is possible both to begin to reconcile the classical or canonical modernist approach with the idea of national indifference and to sketch out the outlines for a history of frames and sense of time in 20th century nationalism. Based on abundant, detailed research, both the modernist approach to nationalism (with all of its particular forms) and the historians of national indifference provide at least partially convincing arguments and models. To take just a few examples, Zahra (Reference Zahra2008) drew on sophisticated research to show that modernization, with all of its changes, may have left many more indifferent to the idea of belonging to a nation than works such as Weber’s may have suggested. However, Peasants into Frenchmen (Reference Weber1976) still detailed the myriad ways in which connections to the idea of France expanded into rural areas and linked peasants more closely to the concept of being Frenchmen.
To recap, if we apply frames and sense of time to both the canonical modernist approach and to the counter-argument of national indifference, a specific cohort employs a particular frame with an associated sense of time during a particular period. In both approaches, active nationalists employ a national frame that they often attach to a historical sense of time. This could easily apply, for example, to Hroch’s Phase B. For Zahra’s Kidnapped Souls (Reference Zahra2008): we could suggest that ambitious and frustrated national activists operated with a national frame and a keen sense of historical time, but that others, their targets, used a normal frame focused more on a sense of everyday time.
Breaking down this binary distinction, historians could instead investigate the interaction in multiple periods between more than one frame and associated sense of time. For the interwar era, historians could investigate the interplay between a national and normal frame to question the distinction between national activists with the national frame and others attached to the normal frame and a sense of everyday time. Many parents, for example, employed a normal frame for everyday matters such as preparing their children for careers, but that does not demonstrate that some did not also possess a national frame anchored in an historical sense of time, which could apply to other decisions. Brendan Karch, has suggested a distinction for the case of Upper Silesia between the “value-driven” nationalism of activists and “instrumental stance” of others who “balanced national loyalties against a field of other commitments and values” (Karch Reference Karch, Van Ginderachter and Fox2019, 181–82).
For the history of the Second World War, taking into account the use of multiple frames would further call into question the binary division between ideological and other motives in some accounts of violence during the war. Without the scorn, there is an almost classical Marxist assumption embedded in the literature that rural peoples of eastern Europe remained detached from the national frame with its sense of historical time when it came to taking part in wartime violence against Jews, but a national frame, often associated with anti-Semitism and a historical sense of time, was already well established by the interwar era. For the period of the end of the war and the immediate postwar era, it would then be possible to reconcile accounts of the powerful material motives for taking part in dispossessing Germans to win immediate advantage with the influence of a national frame that connected Germans with an historical narrative in which they victimized occupied populations.
For the late twentieth century, charting the interaction between coexisting frames is well suited to apply to the history of postwar Yugoslavia. Survey data suggests that many operated with a normal frame attached to a sense of daily time in which it was possible to enjoy amicable relations with neighbors and colleagues of a different ethnicity: respondents to a 1990 public opinion survey in Bosnia generally rated ethnic relations in their own communities as very good or good (Gagnon Reference Gagnon2004, 41). Memoirs have affirmed this, such as the works of Slavenka Drakulic, and the compilations of interviews from Svetlana Broz’s Good People in an Evil Time (Broz Reference Broz, Hart and Elias-Bursac2004). As the title of Broz’s book suggest, the vast majority of those interviewed continued to hold to a normal frame in the midst of war. One, from the Ilidza suburb of Sarajevo told how “We spent four months in a cellar with our Serbian neighbors … like one family. We shared everything down to the last crumb because there was nearly nothing to eat” (Broz Reference Broz, Hart and Elias-Bursac2004, 152). Amidst similar positive recollections, some of Broz’s witnesses suggested the power of the national frame. One told of old friends who “turned their heads when the met me on the street. I know that some of the did it out of fear …, but there were others who had been carrying evil in them from before, but now they could flaunt it without fearing punishment” (Broz Reference Broz, Hart and Elias-Bursac2004, 243).
Drakulic’s work suggested that a powerful normal frame did not erase a national frame. In her memorable work Balkan Express, Drakulic recalled, how “for me, as for many of my friends born after World War II, being Croat has no special meaning,” writing that “along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood …” (Drakulic Reference Drakulic1993, 50–51). Without using the term frame, Drakulic described how she lived with a normal frame attached to a strong sense of everyday time. Nonetheless, she recalled episodes and stories that hinted at the survival of a national frame attached to a historical sense of time. She recalled the Yugoslav war movies of her childhood with “bloodthirsty troops from the Serbian ex-royal army, the Chetniks, or of savage Croat Nazis, the Ustashe” (Drakulic Reference Drakulic1993, 11). In the prelude to Yugoslavia’s breakup, people began to shift quickly between frames and between daily and historical senses of time. A friend described a train ride in which Serbs noticed her reading a book with Roman lettering: “‘Surely the lady must be Croat. How about a nice fuck, you bloody bitch? Or would you prefer this?’ one asked, sliding the edge of his palm across her neck, as if he was holding a knife” (Drakulic Reference Drakulic1993, 15). Drakulic herself could be described as having been nationally indifferent (at least to the idea of being Croat), but her account of rapid shifts suggests not only the power of witnessing or hearing about violence as a generative force, but also the rapid, fluid interplay between coexisting national and normal frames as well as moments of fusion between the sense of historical time and the sense of daily time that led to dehumanizing people based on categories we would have to believe were otherwise almost irrelevant.
The account of Cvijeto Job, a long-time Yugoslav diplomat, provides another glimpse into the coexistence of a national frame and normal frame. Job, in an article from 1993 asked, “Are the roots and causes of the war ancient or recent” (52)? He rejected the notion that Balkan peoples were somehow more prone to violence (1993, 54–55) and described himself as a believer in the slogan of “Brotherhood and Unity,” but he also recalled evidence of a national frame attached to a historical sense of time: “In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as I traveled inside the country, I was disturbed by undisciplined hordes of young army draftees and volunteer youth workers, mostly village youths from the provinces. What disturbed me was not their rough joshing or their customary drinking but their songs—monotonous, grim, dark, like the howling of wolves, frightening sounds from the tortured depth of our past. I remembered such songs from wartime …” (Job 1993, 58).
A full study of frames and sense of time in the case of the former Yugoslavia could amount to a book, but these works provide examples of both a normal frame of national indifference and of powerful national frames, of both attachment to everyday time and to a sense of historical time. National indifference was real, but its existence did not disprove the power of nationalism on the grassroots level or its importance as a motive for action. The sudden shifts between nationalism and national indifference stemmed, in part, not from the absence or very late emergence of nationalism, but from how nationalism became attached to different senses of time. During the most explosive phases of violence, the daily and historical senses of time converged, helping some to dehumanize others who had grown up and lived in the same country.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Raffael M. Scheck for helpful advice as well as the external reviewers for useful comments and suggestions. I also thank the Fitchburg State University Foundation for making possible a research trip.
Disclosure
Author has nothing to disclose.
Funding information
The Fitchburg University Foundation supported a research trip.
