Language and Nationalism

Author(s): David Greene

Source: The Crane Bag , 1978, Vol. 2, No. 1/2, The Other Ireland (1978), pp. 183-188
Published by: Richard Kearney

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30059479

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Language and Nationalism
(Reply to John Macnamara)

David Greene

Pierre Trudeau recently spoke of the necessity of distinguishing between '

nationalism', which recognises cultural diversity within a nation-state, and 'b
nationalism', where each ethnic group seeks to express itself through pol
sovereignty. This sounds fine, until we remember that the nation-state in its prese
form is a European development, and that the vast majority of European state
precisely the political expression of ethnic, or, more accurately, linguistic gro
It was probably this fact that Professor MacNamara had in mind when he wrot
the last number of the Crane Bag, that 'language is as good an initial grid as any
dividing the world's people into states' (and it is worth noting that if we apply
principle to the province of Quebec, where Professor MacNamara works, it w
seem to give a different result to that desired by Trudeau). In Europe, lingui
diversity within the nation-state always leads to friction, as witness Belgium a
Yugoslavia; even Switzerland, that paradigm of a future United Europe, has had
linguistic difficulties very recently indeed. We can go further, and suggest t
nation-states whose boundaries have been fixed on principles other than that o
linguistic and ethnic unity suffer from very serious structural weaknessess.
boundaries of the black African states were drawn by their former imperial
rulers, with complete disregard for ethnic and linguistic considerations, and
the great majority of these states the citizens are bound together by nothing
than a shared experience of foreign domination. In only a handful of them i
language of government related in any way to that of the masses of the peop
in the vast majority the new rulers, political and economic, use the former imp
language - English, French, Portuguese or Spanish - which is quite unknown
the majority of the governed. These structural weaknessess are a very seriou
obstacle to the development of these states, but so overwhelming are the diffic
of boundary revisions on ethnic and linguistic lines that the Organisation of Af
Unity has outlawed any discussion of the subject, and there was general appr
for the crushing of the Somali attempt to unite its people by taking over the S
area of Ethiopia. The nation-state has done little to help Africa, precisely bec
the historical conditions made it impossible to apply the initial grid which has
us the European system.
When we talk about Ireland, we must do so in a European context, and it is

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clear that, if Irish nationalism exists at all, it will attempt to develop the patterns
which exist elsewhere in Europe. We have an instructive example of such a process
in the peaceful and democratic state of Norway, which gained its independence from
Denmark in 1814, though having to enter into a dual monarchy with Sweden. As
Professor Einar Haugen puts it: 'Norwegians in the generation after 1814 faced the
reality that the country, after 400 years of union with Denmark, lacked its own
voice. The tradition of Norway as an independent nation had never died, but there
was very little which could sustain it . . . The nation had an apparatus for democratic
rule, together with the administrative system left over from the Danish period, but
little else which could further the growth of a genuine national consciousness. It
was a matter of life or death for the nation to give the state apparatus a specific
Norwegian content with a solid backing from the people ...
The linguistic situation was that Danish was the language of administration and
education, while the common people spoke d.ialects which directly continued the
older Norwegian tongue, which had ceased to be cultivated, or even written, after
the union with Denmark. During the nineteenth century the opinion was increasingly
voiced that these dialects should form the basis for a new Norwegian language, and a
standardisation was carried out. Not all Norwegians were convinced of the necessity
of such a move; Ibsen, whose great works were written in a language almost in-
distinguishable from Danish, attacked it bitterly. But by the 1 880's Danish and New
Norwegian were both recognised as official languages, and even the former had
received such a Norwegian impregnation that is was necessary to describe it as Dano-
Norwegian. The possibility of interpenetration existed because the two languages were
in fact closely related, the differences between them being of the order of those
between Portuguese and Spanish, or between Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In fact,
Norway had by this time developed two national languages, one of them based on
Danish, but now diverging from it, and the other based on the speech of the
Norwegian people. The two-language policy has continued down to the present day;
it is a fruitful source of political disagreement, and is, of course, like any other
bilingual system, wasteful in terms of both time and money. But it is also felt
by Norwegians to be part of the national life; there is even a writer who draws the
material for a humorous column entirely from the results of this linguistic diversity,
and who is very widely read and enjoyed.
Now, to talk of this movement as springing from the theories of Herder would be
the most arrant pseudo-science; what the Norwegians were trying to do was to
strengthen a national consciousness gravely weakened by four centuries of regarding
themselves as Danish citizens of Norwegian origin, Nobody said that Danish was
degrading, but merely that it was not Norwegian. Their linguistic experiments were
contemporary with those of the Finns who had, also in 1814, found themselves
detached from Sweden and handed over to Russia, and whose attitude was summed
up in the famous slogan: 'We are no longer Swedes, we do not wish to be Russians,

let us be Finns!' Again,. only a lunatic fringe suggested that Finnish was a better
language than Swedish, or more closely adapted to the Finnish mind; the clinching
argument was that it was the only language specific to the emergent Finnish nation.
I have mentioned these two examples because the circumstances in which Norway

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and Finland found themselves faced with the task of strengthening their national
consciousness arose from events over which they had no control; in neither country
had there been political activity, much less armed rebellion, directed towards
national independence. They were 'good nationalists', in Trudeau's use of the term,
whose link with their former rulers was broken not by their own desire, but by the
arbitrary decision of the victors in a European war. I do not know whether Trudeau
would suggest that the efforts which they made to strengthen their newly acquired
and fragile national consciousness turned them into 'bad nationalists', but this is
not a description which would be widely accepted, even though some may hold
the view that the Finns continued their alliance with Germany beyond the bounds
of prudence; certainly the Norwegians are a model of what a democratic state should
be, however eccentric their linguistic behaviour may seem to others.
If nation-states which have achieved that status by accident, so to speak, feel that
they must reinforce their identity by the development of a national language, it is
inevitable that those which are prepared to use armed force to achieve their ends
should be even more dedicated to linguistic unity. In one outstanding example,
that of Israel, it is indeed more than likely that the intense nationalist feeling which
has made possible the foundation and survival of that state could never have
developed if the revival of Hebrew had not been added to the tenets of the Zionist
programme. The enormous sacrifices necessary to change the language of every
Jewish settler in Palestine served to forge a new nation from what might otherwise
have been scattered colonies of immigrants. No doubt, however, Trudeau would
consider the Israelis to be 'bad nationalists'. though he might be careful of the
audiences before which he drew such conclusions.
Returning to Ireland, we see Douglas Hyde's policy of de-anglicisation as a peace-
ful and necessary development of the political nationalism which, at the time when
Hyde first spoke on the subject, alfready commanded the allegiance of the majority
of the Irish people. Hyde, like most other nationally-minded Irishmen of that
period, expected Home Rule for the whole of Ireland in the near future; unlike most
of them, he saw that the national identity had been seriously eroded during the
centuries of British rule, and he wished to ensure that an Irish parliament would
undertake policies similar to those which were already bearing fruit in Norway and
Finland. It is not correct to say that he ignored the problem of Ulster. On the
contrary, he specifically addressed himself to his fellow-Protestants both north and
south, inviting them to accept the Irish language and its culture as part of the
heritage of every Irishman, whatever his political views might be. It is possible to
say that such overtures were disingenuous, since Hyde himself saw the revival of Irish
as an essential element in the separatist movement; it was, for example, quite differ-
ent from the cultivation of Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, where the
people at that time were intensely loyal to the British Crown. But, when Hyde first
put forward his programme, most people in Ireland expected that Home Rule
would come in the near future, and Hyde was in fact attempting to soften the
shock to his co-religionists by showing them that a united Ireland had better things
to offer them than Rome Rule. He had some modest successes and, indeed, northern
Protestants still occasionally show some interest in the Irish language, as we have

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seen recently.
But events moved too quickly for Hyde; I share Professor MacNamara's suspicion
that linguistic behaviour since 1922 reveals that Irish was not one of the main forces
behind the armed force movement - indeed, he could have put the date ten years
further back, when we find de Valera and Pearse exchanging letters on military
matters in English!If this was the attitude of the intellectual leaders of the armed
force movement, we need not expect greater insight from their followers. Both the
fighting against the English, and the civil war which followed, were carried out
through the medium of English. No doubt some readers will feel that this is merely
stating the obvious; military matters are too important for those engaged in them to
add the complication of using a language which is not native to them. Yet the
language of the illegal Jewish forces in Palestine before 1948, and that of the Israeli
army since then, has always been exclusively Hebrew; the learning of military skills
and of the national language were so closely entwined as to be indistinguishable.
Such breadth of imagination was not within the grasp of any of our national leaders.
Even when de Valera became head of the Free State government, with such a
remarkable hold of the Irish people that he could take them into a devastating
economic confrontation with Britain without risking political defeat, he showed no
signs of taking any steps to give Irish a real, rather than ritual, status. Ben Gurion's
first Israeli government consisted entirely of people whose native language was
Yiddish. Since all government meetings are held in camera we do not know what
language they spoke among themselves; what we do know is that all their public
utterances, both in the Knesset and outside, were solely in Hebrew. De Valera had
enough talent at his disposal, and enough political power, to have imposed the same
restrictions on his own government, but there is no evidence that the thought ever
crossed his mind, still less the minds of his successors. The result was an Irish State
which Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien described twelve years ago as 'culturally part of
Britain, distinguished from the rest of the archipelago mainly by its practice of
a Puritanical form of the Roman Catholic religion and by marked deference to
ecclesiastical authority'. This was substantially true at the time he wrote, and the
only change to be recorded since is a slight weakening of deference to ecclesiastical
authority as a result of a rising materialism ('consumerism' is the popular word);
this, of course, has the effect of lessening our distinction from the rest of the archi-
pelago. One only wonders why Dr O'Brien was so anxious to take a minor role in
the government of so ramshackle a country.
For ramshackle it is, with a long history of failure - failure to establish any
distinctive institutions, to cherish all the children of the nation equally, to utilise
our national resources for our own benefit, to halt the emigration which drained an
underpopulated country of its best people. All this is part and parcel of the lack of
a national will which reduced Irish to the status of a ritual language; the act of
switching from Irish to English would not in itself have made us a nation, but the
willingness to do so would have been the manifestation of a national pride and
vigour which has in the event been sadly lacking. It is almost unbelievable that
a large part of the programme that motivated the setting up of the Free State has
been realised, by the achievement of political independence, and a securely based

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tradition of Irish literature in English! Political independence is perhaps good
per se (though Mr Trudeau would not necessarily agree), but its benefits depend
on what is done with it; it hasn't done much for Uganda or Equatorial Guinea,
or for some other countries nearer home. We Irish are plainly terrified by it, because
we have made so pitifully little use of it. We miss the British, but history prevents
us from lining up again with the United Kingdom. Hence the overwhelming vote
in favour of joining the EEC; since pride prevents us from asking the Brits to look
after us, let us ask Brussels to do it, especially since the Germans have far more
money to hand out in doles than the poor Brits have. As for literature, whether in
Irish or English - well, I am a professor too, but I manage to note on my descents
from my ivory tower that there is not one country in the world where ten per cent
of the population have read the work of their leading contemporary writer, or
where as many as fifty per cent of them have never heard his name. Beckett's
juvenile jibe, that the Irish people never gave a fart in its corduroys for any form
of art whatsoever, is equally applicable to the masses of Britain and France, to
whose intellectuals he has addressed himself with such success. And it is on the
masses that nations are built.
Professor MacNamara's facile complacency is in striking contrast with Dr O'Brien's
cold but salutary realism. It is also in striking contrast with the disillusionment and
despair of such outstanding military leaders as Dan Breen and Ernie O'Malley and,
significantly enough, of such pillars of 'Irish literature in English' as Frank O'Connor
and Sean O Faolain. All four of these were deeply involved in that 'delirium of the
brave' that gave us the Ireland of to-day, and all of them ultimately came to regard
that Ireland as a maimed and imperfect nation, if indeed a nation at all. Indeed,
what more cogent support could there be for such a view than the last number of
the Crane Bag? In what other European country could an issue of a responsible
intellectual journal be devoted to' the question: What makes you 'feel' British/
French/Italian/Swedish... or know that you are British/French/Italian/Swedish.. .?
Still, here we are. To adapt Joyce's phrase, some of us have chosen silence,
others exile, and the great majority, including our politicians, cunning; that is to
say, while knowing inwardly what a sham our state is, we choose to work it for
what we can get out of it. But others believe that the cause is not entirely lost,
and that this state can still be made into something like a European nation, even if
one very unlike what the founders of Sinn Fein had in mind. To some of us, our
entry into the EEC seemed a very dangerous experiment, especially since the
enormous popular backing for it derived, as has been suggested above, more from a
sense of inferiority than from any other motive. But, in the outcome, the fact that
Ireland has had to play the part of an equal and independent nation in day-to-day
economic and political bargaining has helped to reinforce the national identity;
the assumption of a role has led to a change in personality. The discovery that
the EEC has already six working languages, and that the expansion now under
consideration will add three more, was a salutary experience for the monoglot
Paddies who justified their abandonment of their own national language with the
slogan that English will get you everywhere. I make no apologies for suggesting
that this gradually emerging and still very fragile national identity would be greatly

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strengthened by the movement of Irish from a ritual role to that of a working
language both at home and in the Community.

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