NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY A N D N AT I O N A L I S M

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Nations and Nationalism 16 (1), 2010, 189200.

Book Reviews
Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds.), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class and Gender in National Identities. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 544 pp. d65 (hbk). Writing about a nations history is not just writing about facts, events, battles and so forth. History writing implies in writing about a national project. No writer is exempt from the inuences of the time. In other words, every nations writing has a context and a purpose. For example, French and German writing have a context of big nation or former empires. In a certain way, it is the same with the Spanish and the Portuguese. In the Iberian case, the lament is the decline of both great empires and is present in their national writing, although each having their own singularity. In the case of East-Central European nations, there is a tradition of looking both inward and outward of their respective countries and comparing their national trajectories with the west. The Contested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, written and edited by Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz is a very important contribution to our understanding of European history. It is a project that assembled a group of scholars to think about how European history was written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They analyze the roles of ethnicity, class, religion and gender in the master narratives of each particular nation and how these elements have inuenced the nationalist character of those nations, including France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, the Nordic nations (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland), the Benelux countries (Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands), Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, the Habsburgs legacy (Austria, Hungary, Czech and Slovak republics), Russia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Turkey and the Balkan nations. It also includes a chapter about narratives of Jewish historiography in Europe. It was made clear in this work that scientic or authoritative history writing never entirely replaced the more popular representations of national history. Although some classical works on nation and nationalism were written in the 1980s (Gellner, Anderson and Hobsbawn), there was an astonishing new interest after 1989. This is explained by the authors to be a result of the unication of Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union which resulted in the return of the East-Central Europe nations. As a consequence, old heroes and narratives were brought again into light, with ethnicity and religion playing a major role in the building process of those nations. Nowadays, at the same time that the role of nation-state is gaining vigour, new concepts such as regionalism and globalization are inuencing the decentralization of the nation-state concept. We are moving, according to the authors, from a view where the nation is only possible through master-narrative in historiography, quoting Pierre Nora, to a more self-reexive historiography, where we have a memory boom through archives, museums and numerous types of memory recording. Quoting Hartogs Time, History and the Writing of History Berger and Lorenz state that our relation to the past is inevitably shaped by our present modes of representation [. . .] and it tries to shape both future and the past according to its own image (p. 19). Hence the nation-state is no longer the custodian of historymemory, as it is rivalled by particular groups, associations, enterprises, communities and so forth,
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

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J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY A N D N AT I O N A L I S M

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Book Reviews

which feel they have the legitimate right to produce the memory according to their point of view. Therefore, there is no real memory anymore. The core subject of this volume is the identication of otherness or difference, which is presented as ethnicity/race, class, gender and religion. All of these are contested concepts. In his chapter, Joep Leerssen afrms that by not having made a clear distinction between race, people and nation, historians of the nineteenth century promoted biological essentialism, cultural determinism and even racism. History, therefore, has played an active role in investigating the nationality, according to Leerssen (p. 84). Ethnic constructions and narratives have played equally key roles in defying states or multinational imperial states, such as the Habsburg, Britain or Spain. They were at the root of the quest for nationalism and independence. On the other hand, dynasty has also played an important function as a symbol of integration, unity and a focus of narration of the nation. Reinforcing ones own narrative by rejecting another was one of the main formats for nation-building in Europe. However, narratives of ethnic minorities were often silenced by the national histories of the hegemonic nations or empires they lived in. Only in the recent past were minorities given a voice and coincidently are represented in the present map of nations in Europe with few exceptions such as the Flemish in Belgium or the Basques in Spain. The authors assert that the power of ethnicity is so strong that it has a deadly and even genocidal force. Equally strong is the power of national narratives. Still today the power of such narratives and ethnicity is such that they are a threat to the building of the national principle of the European Union. The European narrative has not yet replaced the national history narratives. Fratricide and genocidal wars along with a long history full of hatred are a major challenge for building a European identity such is the power of ethnicity and national narratives. However, one must think and this is not made clear by the authors that the European institutional framework has a key role to play in the future of nations, nationalities and ethnic groups in the EU. Religion was certainly a major aspect of national history building. Although it is an important aspect of national identity, it is not sufcient to dene a nation exclusively by its religion. It was well dened by Ernest Renan in his 1882 classic What is a nation?. On the other hand, religion and especially Catholicism guaranteed the survival of nations like Poland and Lithuania during stateless periods, with a similar crucial role in Spain and Portugal. In these nations, state and church went hand-inhand. In some countries, including Greece and Poland, among others, religion is part of their narratives. The authors also state that it is hard to distinguish a good, positive nationalism from a bad, intolerant one. According to Berger and Lorenz both rely on homogenized and exclusive images of national history. [. . .] National histories have often underpinned exclusive, xenophobia and intolerant national identities which were quick to exclude, isolate, persecute and even eradicate those who were represented as not belonging to the (typically homogeneous) national community (p. 550). Class narratives are often related to revolutions, such as in France (1789) and Russia (1917). As Berger and Lorenz assert, the concern about unity linked class and national narratives. Most of the times, class is understood as the working class and these workers forming the true nation or they were perceived as the key adversary to unity of the nation.
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010

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The Writing the Nation Series sets the path but should not be an end in itself. The construction of a nations history is a vast, almost never-ending eld of study. It is a superb work and a valuable contribution to the European historiography and comparative history writing. One of the main tasks of historiography is to write critical analysis and to deconstruct national traditions. It is essentially an epistemological work being done as self-reexive as possible. No doubt all the authors who took part in this project, contributed enormously to the debate about the historiography of their own nation. However, one should not take this book as the nal word on the subject but rather as a contribution to an ongoing debate. RICARDO MARTINS JOSE Universidade Federal do Parana, Curitiba, Brazil

Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (eds.), Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 426 pp. d13.50 (pbk). Selective Remembrances is a collective volume that contributes to the growing body of scholarship on archaeology and nationalism. An extensive introductory chapter by the editors is followed by thirteen case studies organised in four parts by geographical area: Russia and Eastern Europe, The Near East, Israel/Palestine, South and Southeast Asia. This geographical focus introduces the reader to issues of the nationalist uses of archaeology in areas with a recently changed political geography; it also illustrates how geography and history inuence the ways in which politics plays itself out in archaeology (p. 4), rendering archaeology a strictly context-related social practice. The books most signicant contribution to the existing literature is that it offers case studies that have not been covered extensively in the past. Another signicant contribution is that it discusses the relationship of nationalism and archaeology from a new angle: its essays often adopt a bottom-up approach by taking into consideration the voices of amateur archaeologists in the formation of archaeological narratives and the role of religious organisations in the study of the remote past. It is also a multidisciplinary volume, with contributors from the areas of archaeology, anthropology, sociology and history. Finally, as a whole it is balanced between contributions from Anglo-American institutions as well as scholars from institutions at the places under study. As advocated by its editors, Selective Remembrances is a sequel to the book Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Kohl and Fawcett, 1995), which examined the link between nationalism and archaeology in Europe and East Asia by adopting a top-down approach and investigating the relationship between archaeologists and the ofcial state. Selective Remembrances overall follows the same agenda as its predecessor. As a result, some of the views contained in the introduction disclose several aws: while it correctly demonstrates that archaeology is a politicized discipline, it considers the relationship between nationalism and archaeology as an abusive one, given that nationalism distorts disciplinary standards (pp. 4, 24) even when archaeological remains are used to support liberationist agendas. This oversimplied approach advocates the scientic neutrality and expertise of the researchers, who seem to be expected to act as empirical scientists, regardless their initiative,
r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010