I Thought It Was The UK, Or Just Another Country

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

Na Nož, Jaroslav Věšin, 1913

Britain isn't cool you know, it's really not that great / It's not a proper country, doesn't even have a patron saint / It's just an economic union that's past its sell-by date
-Take Down the Union Jack, Billy Bragg, 2002

At the deepest historical time-depths there is a very basic notion of identity between the self-identified civilised peoples and the barbarians. While the concept of being Greek (Hellenes) didn't yet exist, the city states at the base of the Balkan peninsula saw a commonality between themselves but not with others to the uncharted North or in the later conquered territories of Alexander's empire. The genesis of this fraternity also lies in transmission of culture as the Greek alphabet (save for some regional variations) allowed folk culture to be stored. The established alphabet may also have smoothed over the dialects as it only represents the sounds distinguished within a dialect and not the phonlogical distinctions between the dialects. That would not be unlike the unifying force that Hanzi had on the disparate Chinese languages by representing words and not the component sounds of the languages (which are as wildly different though related as French and Romanian). Indeed, language is one of the most prominent pillars of ethnic identity along with religion (historically Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, etc paganism for pre-modern Europe) and, of course, land.

In Central Europe Men Are Marching

A PROLOGUE TO A SERIES.

The Frankfurt Parliament, Public Domain

In the same year of the publication of The Communist Manifesto the Western hemisphere experienced a wave of revolutionary upheaval akin to contemporary events in the Middle East. The 1848 revolutions were about many things to many people - democracy, nationalism, liberalism, socialism. As I draw my series of essays on my political outlook, in particular the evolution of my relationship with revolutionary socialism (ie, Marxism), to an eventual close after two years; on this national day I look to begin a new series on another of the major ideologies of 1848 - nationalism.

As the European Union appears to be unfurling and prominent independence movements are afoot in Scotland and Catalonia; it seems relevant to discuss ethnicity and nationalism. The primary aim of the series will be to identify the origin of national identity - the interplay of history, geography, culture, and language in binding populations together in shared character. In the same vein as my political series this set on nationalism will start with a republished college essay - in this case an essay on Bismarck's role in the unification of Germany from HND History. While it doesn't deal with issues of national identity, it does discuss the historical processes that led to the unification of one of Europe's last fractured lands into a great power.