(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
shared religious beliefs and the absence of common
political goals makes it more appropriate to designate
such groups by the more neutral term peoples. Nations
may be viewed as peoples who have become group
conscious and politically activated. The process is a
continuing one and now is occurring among Quechua-
speakers of the Oriente of Peru, galvanized by the
Sendero Luminoso guerrillas.
The commonly accepted starting point for the appear-
ance ofnations is the French Revolution. The inhabit-
ants of France not only transformed their state at the
end of the 18th century, but also in a sense they
became Frenchmen for the first time. Before that time
few associated themselves with the Kingdom of
France. Their identities were with family and locality
and, at a higher level, with their true Christian faith.
Following the Revolution they increasingly gained a
sense of personal participation in a greater cultural-
political organism. They were manipulated by the
Iacobins, dedicated believers in “the people,” who
denigrated traditional Catholicism and enthusiasti-
cally preached a new form of belonging that cele-
brated the interests of the “masses.” This
revolutionary system of beliefs took hold because tra-
ditional religion no longer was able to meet spiritual
needs in the challenges of a rapidly changing society.
Urbanization and industrialization presented difficult
problems for individuals for whom traditional reli-
gious establishments had no answers.
From the beginning, language proved a critical ele-
ment in national identity. To be French meant sharing
of French culture, and this meant particularly the
French language. Among proposals voiced in France’s
revolutionary parliament was expulsion of all Alsa-
tians across the country’s “natural border” of the
Rhine because they were “foreigners’; their vemacu-
lar was German, not French.
The new ideas proved exciting and satisfying, and
Napoleon’s troops spread them across the territory
they conquered. I-Iowever, talk of “liberty, equality,
and brotherhood” by enthusiastic French soldiers did
not co-opt civilians speaking German, Italian, and
other languages into becoming part of the new French
nation. Although large numbers readily accepted the
secular ideas oftheir occupiers, each linguistic group
evolved a separate national identity.
Language still plays a fundamental role in the identity
of virtually all nations. Linguistic homogeneity is a
characteristic of every national group, with the notable
exception of the Swiss, and even there group tensions
exist, particularly between the Italian-Swiss and the
German-Swiss. One of the most common causes of
ethnic tensions within a state is a group’s opposition to
perceived threats to its language. Attempts by Mag-
yars to impose Hungarian as a uniform language
throughout their kingdom in the 1870s stimulated
Croatian-speakers to become the nation of Croats. A
century later, Croatian intellectuals again used a lin-
guistic threat as a national rallying symbol, decrying
the degrading of the Croatian literary language by
attempts of the Yugoslav regime to blend it with Ser-
bian vocabulary and usage to form an “artificial”
Serbo-Croatian statewide language.
Religious tradition also plays a role in the identities of
most nations. The militancy of the Croatians about
their literary language was a symptom of deeper divi-
sions among the South Slavs based upon their differ-
ing religious heritages. Croatian culture has been
bound up for more than a millenium with the Roman
Catholic world, while Serbian traditions stem from an
Eastem Orthodox inheritance. It should be stressed
that religious dimensions of modern national identities
need not derive from active worship but generally
come from the shared values, customs, and images
accumulating in a society from a common religious
legacy. Avowedly atheistic members of the League of
Yugoslav Communists, although speaking a common
Serbo-Croatian language, remained always partitioned
into distinctive bodies of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims,
separated from each other by their respective religious
cultures. A similar cultural disparity separates
English-speaking Roman Catholic partisans of the
Irish Revolutionary Army from Protestant supporters
of the Ulster Defence Association.
Thus, although a common language appears to be a
major element of national identity, in itself it does not
provide a sufficient base for identification with a
nation. The -French nation never managed to incorpo-
rate the adjacent French-speaking Belgian Walloons
or the Swiss francophones of Geneva. Closer to home,
although virtually all citizens of"the United States and
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268