{"id":9496,"date":"2018-06-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/article\/2018\/charles-king-back-19th-century\/"},"modified":"2024-09-30T20:36:42","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T18:36:42","slug":"charles-king-back-19th-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/article\/2018\/charles-king-back-19th-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles King: We Are Back in the 19th Century"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you ask average students about differences between human beings, the first division is race, next comes ethnicity. They believe that it is real. Not just that it\u2019s a powerful sort of idea\u2014says Charles King, professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University in an interview with Aleksander Kaczorowski.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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ALEKSANDER KACZOROWSKI: You have written some excellent books on the Black Sea, Caucasus, Istanbul, and Odessa. How did you get involved in these Eastern Europe issues?<\/h2>\n

CHARLES KING: Where I grew up, if you wanted to be strange at the time when I grew up, the best way to be strange was by being interested in the Communists. I grew up in a rather conservative part of the United States, in the South, in Arkansas. During the Cold War in the 1980s this part of the world might as well have been on another planet, at least the society that I grew up in. And I think I was always fascinated by the idea that people who live as far away as Europe or even in the Soviet Union must be real people, need not have two heads.<\/p>\n

You know, \u201cthe Russians love their children too?\u201d<\/h2>\n

Yeah, you know, you mention this song that, of course it was a silly pop song in a way, but I think to the 15-year-old me that was a bit of a revelation: \u201cOh yes, I guess they must.\u201d So then I just became fascinated by the Communist world, as we used to call it, and my first time out of the US was to the Soviet Union. I had never left the US before. I got my passport, they sent it to you through your post office back then. So I got a passport to go with my Russian class to Leningrad and Moscow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That was the spring of 1987, which was of course an interesting time. The beginning of Perestroika, the beginning of glasnost. The circumstances, the places, the people, all that was fascinating. It had a particular kind of smell, the place, the particular Soviet smell and it was some combination of a very cheap tobacco and grease from the wheels of the metro cars. I still remember being fascinated by it. I had no business caring about anything like that, I mean, I grew up on a farm,\u00a0my mom still lives on the family farm, but I think I was just thrown into a thing that was as different from what I knew as I could imagine. And then I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in that eld. I got a scholarship after I finished my undergraduate degree, to do a master\u2019s degree in Russian and East European studies and I kind of landed by chance in the best possible place, at Oxford. The main person teaching Eastern European history and politics was Timothy Garton Ash. I was in the same class with PhD student Timothy Snyder and there was a guy, a visiting student from Bulgaria, Ivan Krastev. I think we all felt we were experiencing something special.<\/p>\n

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Was it 1989?<\/h2>\n

It was right after. It was in 1990 that I came to Oxford. So everything was still fresh and I signed up for a two years\u2019 master\u2019s degree in the middle of which, of course, the August coup happened in Moscow so I started a degree which was called \u201cSoviet studies\u201d and by the time I graduated it\u2019s changed its name to \u201cRussian…\u201d. Then I was searching around for something to write my dissertation on, and I remember Tim Snyder, who came a year after me and we both had the same scholarship. I remember talking with him about what he wanted to do and he said \u201cI\u2019m gonna go o this summer and study Polish.\u201d I thought I should learn a new language too. I learned Russian as an undergraduate and I thought I should pick up another language.<\/p>\n

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I think I was always fascinated by the idea that people who live as far away as Europe or even in the Soviet Union must be real people, need not have two heads.<\/p>\n

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I thought Tim is doing Polish, so I should pick something different. There was an ad on the language center board that you could learn Romanian, so I called the place and I started working with a guy, he was another student from Romania. And one thing led into another, I started to focus more on South-Eastern Europe and that part of the world. And I think, I\u2019ve really been fascinated, for some time, by this kind of meeting place of the Islamic world and Europe. And much of the history of Eastern Europe is about that meeting.<\/p>\n

And that, over time, owed into being very concerned with nationalism and national issues and I found myself increasingly writing books about things that were sort of against a national story. My dissertation was about Moldova, about Romanian and Russian relations over this territory. It was really a story about how national identity gets constructed or deconstructed. Over time I picked some topics that allowed me to talk about the past in a way that is something other than national. History writing is done in museums, history curricula are taught as if the only way to talk about the past is to talk through something called the nation. I wanted to pick subjects where you cannot lie about nations.<\/p>\n

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But why did you choose the Black Sea?<\/h2>\n

I wanted to write a book that moved away from my main concern, which was Romania, Romanian speaking lands. I had a Fulbright scholarship in Istanbul in 1998, so I was almost on the Bosphorus, I was renting an apartment up above the Bosphorus. And it dawned on me that one way in which you could write about history that didn\u2019t just take the nation as\u00a0a given was by picking some\u00a0geographical\u00a0feature and writing on it from\u00a0a\u00a0historical\u00a0perspective.<\/p>\n

History writing is done in museums, history curricula are taught as if the only way to talk about the past is to talk through something called the nation. History writing is done in museums, history curricula are taught as if the only way to talk about the past is to talk through something called the nation.<\/p>\n

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Because it\u2019s strange that we think it\u2019s totally unproblematic to write big, thick history books called \u201cThe Bulgarians\u201d or \u201cThe Poles\u201d. When that\u2019s a very problematic thing to do. Especially if you want to cover a long historical era as you have to assume that those who you try to call Bulgarians today existed 5 or 15 centuries ago.<\/p>\n

I guess you could just write the history of the Black Sea that revolves around the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the Turks, but that would be a very boring book. And
\nI wanted my books to talk about the way in which people interacted across this landscape. Nationality as we know it now was non-existent. It doesn\u2019t of course mean that there weren\u2019t conflicts, it just means that the unit of conflict or cooperation wasn\u2019t something called the ethnic nation.<\/p>\n

What struck me about this book was your positive view on the Russian empowerment in this area. It was the Russian state which modernized the northern part of the seaside and brought modernity to this mixture of cultures that had existed for a few thousand years.<\/h2>\n

Of course it depends on the period. For the territory which was a part of the Soviet Union it is rather a de-modernizing force between 1970-80. But if you\u2019re talking about the 1870-80s, then yes, this is the periphery of the modernizing empire. And especially for 50 years now historians of Russia in the US and Europe have realized that you actually can\u2019t tell Russian imperial history without understanding something about empires and disarray.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s now a new generation of younger historians of the Russian empire who realize that they have to be multilingual. If you\u2019re going to do anything on the Black Sea you have to have very good\u00a0Russian and Turkish to use the Ottoman sources.<\/p>\n

Nationality as we know it now was non-existent. It doesn\u2019t of course mean that there weren\u2019t conflicts, it just means that the unit of conflict or cooperation wasn\u2019t something called the ethnic nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There was a wonderful PhD student at Georgetown University who wrote about diseases around the Black Sea and realized that in the 19th century the growth of the modern border guard systems was largely a result of the quarantine system. The border guards were there essentially as disease control agents. And the modern system of guards grew on top of that system of disease control. It\u2019s almost like a microbial history of the Black Sea. So there\u2019s so much good work now that begins to transform some of those old narratives.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with those old narratives?<\/h2>\n

Well, it\u2019s amazing to me that when you go to things called \u201cnational museum\u201d across the region from the Baltic to the Black Sea the structure of the story is exactly the same. Like, when you walk in the first room there\u2019s going to be a mock-up of an archaeological dig with some bone in it. The first thing you see is a big map and the map shows your country at its greatest expanse. And you kind of think \u201cWhy would you do that? Why wouldn\u2019t you show your country when it was the smallest it ever was?\u201d You could do that, but now we\u2019re gonna show the greatest expanse, go through rooms that are about the growth of some kind of a local culture, which won\u2019t have a name like \u201cHungarian\u201d or \u201cRomanian,\u201d it will have some archaeological name but you\u2019ll discover that the people in this place painted their pots in a very particular way, so that tells you that they were a uni ed culture, civilization, and then there were some invasions. Then you had an invader for too long and then you\u2019re going to have a national poet.<\/p>\n

I always think that if it was a detective story, the detective at some point would say: \u201cWait a minute. Nobody\u2019s telling exactly the same story about what happened.\u201d I would be suspicious that everybody is lying. But we never get suspicious like a detective.<\/p>\n

We should do better at that. The nature of modern nationalism is that you can take exactly the same museum and transplant it to a different place and change the proper nouns and you have got exactly the same story.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s now a new generation of younger historians of the Russian empire who realize that they have to be multilingual.<\/p>\n

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And we repeat that over and over, we repeat the national symbolism in the museum and in the school curricula. This thing kind of perpetuates itself. And it gets to this point where it can cause people to lose any sense of moral perspective whatsoever. There are a lot of things that do that, this erosion, like communism and authoritarianism but nationalism does that, too. Is it really more important that you conjugate a verb in a particular way and you get everybody else to conjugate the verb in a particular way rather than letting in a Syrian family who will die? When you think about it what a bizarre thing to believe that this.<\/p>\n

Why do we believe in this, then?<\/h2>\n

Because we believe in the idea of modern states and modern states are deeply intrusive ways of organizing your political life. I mean the modern state that cares how you educate your kids or a modern state that cares whether it treats you for disease or not, or a modern state that cares what version of history you tell yourself and your children and repeat it. But what we should be worried about is whether people are living the values of freedom, openness, democracy, responsive government, the sanctity of the individual, the rights of women. Those are the things that we should be really focused on. But the political debate is all about what does the national museum look like. It\u2019s really the wrong set of things.<\/p>\n

Are you talking about Europe?<\/h2>\n

The US is going through the same version of the same kind of thing. It\u2019s complicated in America because our version of nation is a thing we call \u201crace\u201d and we divide our society along this line. It\u2019s just that the American translation of the word \u201cnationalism\u201d is \u201cracism.\u201d It has its peculiarities but historically it\u2019s the same phenomenon. And so in our debates about passing along values they sometime get hijacked in the same way that they might in the European context.<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re witnessing the natural outcome of some tensions that were there all along. The American view of Central Europe and, for that matter, of the Soviet Union during the Communist period, was as a prison house of nations. Not really a prison house of people, but of peoples. It was not the idea of captive individuals or human rights, but the nation was somehow captive to the foreign influence. And so that train of thought was always there during the Cold War, this tension between the human rights idea and a deeply nationalist vision of political community. And in a way in this moment you see a separation between those different ideas.<\/p>\n

The best example of this is, of course, Hungary, where you rewind the tape 20 years. And I remember conference after conference, seminar after seminar where 35-year-old Fidesz representatives were talking about European values, freedom, and democracy, doing it in excellent English and all of the ex-cold warriors from America and Britain were sitting around the table nodding and saying \u201cYes! That\u2019s the future of Europe.\u201d But then I also remember some of the same Fidesz folks when they started talking about Treaty of Trianon. Do you know the late train theory of nationalism?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No.<\/h2>\n

The Hungarian train pulls up at the station just at the time that the station announcer announces the end of the nation state. And the Hungarians arrive and shout \u201cWait a minute! We just got here and now you\u2019re telling us that in the era of globalization you don\u2019t need the nation state anymore?! We\u2019ve only just thrown o the shackles of foreign occupation!\u201d And that, I think, is the essential Fidesz message now. So their approach to things like multilingualism and immigration looks very 19th century. Because it is very 19th century.<\/p>\n

But then of course the thing being proclaimed in Britain, France, US, or elsewhere is also increasingly 19th century. Even in America.<\/p>\n

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The nature of modern nationalism is that you can take exactly the same museum and transplant it to a different place and change the proper nouns and you have got exactly the same story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am always amazed by this and I think that many Europeans don\u2019t understand it but America has long had its nationalist narrative. It\u2019s a deeply European-style nationalism that privileges the role of people, particularly those of a British Isles origin and of Nordic heritage. It was called in the 19th century the \u201cnativist movement.\u201d In the period from the 1930s to the 1960s or so the real inheritors of it were mainly southern politicians in the segregated states in the South. It\u2019s always been there and \u201cTrumpism\u201d is just the latest version of it.<\/p>\n

What is your next book about?<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m doing something different now. I realized that over the years I\u2019ve learned something about nations and nationalism and ethnicity and conflicts. So I\u2019m going to turn around and write about my own country. I\u2019m writing a book about a group of intellectuals in the 1920s-30s in the US at the time of restrictions on immigration, rising nationalism, racism, on the eugenics movement in America, who argued deeply against the scientific reality of all of those things. They were people who were quite well-known in the US, such as Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, but they found themselves at a\u00a0moment in the history of their own country when they had to argue forcefully against the received wisdom. And I\u00a0think we\u2019re increasingly in that moment now.<\/p>\n

What we should be worried about is whether people are living the values of freedom, openness, democracy, responsive government, the sanctity of the individual, the rights of women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you ask average American students on the difference between human beings, the first division is race, next comes ethnicity, and then, further down the line, you have religion. They have in their heads this 19th century division of society and they believe that it is really real. Not that it\u2019s\u00a0just a\u00a0powerful sort of idea. They believe that it\u2019s\u00a0biology. And it astounds me that in the 21th century this pseudo-scientific vision, which they took from school, from their parents, still exists.<\/p>\n

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Collaboration Aleksandra Kaczorowska<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Charles King<\/h1>\n

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is Professor of International A airs and Government and chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He previously served as chair of the faculty of Georgetown\u2019s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the country\u2019s premier school of global a airs. King\u2019s research has focused on nationalism, ethnic politics, transi- tions from authoritarianism, urban history, and the relationship between history and the social sciences. He is the author of Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul; Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams; The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus; The Black Sea: A History<\/em>, and other books. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan and Bosphorus University in Istanbul. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A frequent speaker and commentator on global a airs<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you ask average students about differences between human beings, the first division is race, next comes ethnicity. They believe that it is real. Not just that it\u2019s a powerful sort of idea\u2014says Charles King, professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University in an interview with Aleksander Kaczorowski. ALEKSANDER KACZOROWSKI: You have written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[324,109,112,325],"class_list":["post-9496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-ethnicity","tag-interview","tag-nationalism","tag-racism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9496"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11096,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9496\/revisions\/11096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}