Peoples without nation-states embraced ethnicity as portable personal identity instead of territorial patriotism.
Evidence
Quite different was the first national reaction of peoples for whom nationality had not yet developed beyond the inarticulateness of ethnic consciousness, whose languages had not yet outgrown the dialect stage through which all European languages went before they became suited for literary purposes, whose peasant classes had not struck deep roots in the country and were not on the verge of emancipation, and to whom, consequently, their national quality appeared to be much more a portable private matter, inherent in their very personality, than a matter of public concern and civilization. If they wanted to match the national pride of Western nations, they had no country, no state, no historic achievement to show but could only point to themselves, and that meant, at best, to their language—as though language by itself were already an achievement—at worst, to their Slavic, or Germanic, or God-knows-what soul. Yet in a century which naively assumed that all peoples were virtually nations there was hardly anything else left to the oppressed peoples of Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, or the Balkan countries, where no conditions existed for the realization of the Western national trinity of people-territory-state, where frontiers had changed constantly for many centuries and populations had been in a stage of more or less continuous migration. Here were masses who had not the slightest idea of the meaning of patria and patriotism, not the vaguest notion of responsibility for a common, limited community. This was the trouble with the “belt of mixed populations” (Macartney) that stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic and found its most articulate expression in the Dual Monarchy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 589
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sets up the distinction between Western territorial nationalism (people-territory-state trinity) and the ethnic, portable nationality of the oppressed peoples in the mixed-population belt.
- XREF: Foundation for later Islamophobia readings about identity not tied to territory — diaspora and ummah as portable identity markers instead of patria.