On the Origins and Causes of the French Revolution

Although the financial crisis of the ancien regime was the immediate spark that set off the French Revolution, which broader factors within France contributed to the Revolution?

 

Prior to the evolution of the Estates-General into the National Assembly on the 17^th of June, 1789 and the taking of the Tennis Court Oath three days later, the state of France had been lumbering along in its burdensome way for generations. With French involvement in the American War of Independence pushing the intolerable and unsustainable financial administration of the country beyond breaking point, and the privileged orders anxious to maintain their status quo, it created the catalyst for the wealthy, professional and ambitious representatives of the 3^rd Estate to take up and claim political change and reform as their sacred and inviolable right.

This essay seeks to explore how other factors, in addition to the immediate bankruptcy of the monarchy, were to contribute to the causes of the French Revolution. It shall examine how factors such as the Enlightenment, although played down by many historians, provided the spirit and language of a newly politicised class, and how the manifest of this spirit in 1789 provided the recognition, justification and impetus for those feeling the more material pinch of the ancien regime to act, in the taking of the Bastille on the 14^th of July, 1789. It shall explore how the consistently blocked attempts at financial and administrative reform which could perhaps have satisfied most of the fairly moderate aims that found themselves presented in the cahiers de doleances. How these ‘cahiers’ in their turn allowed political thought to become a popular interest, but as McPhee points out, it is necessary to remember that “people were being consulted about reform proposals, not about whether they wanted a revolution.” [1]

With this in mind, it is important to look at how the ideas of the Enlightenment are both the product of their age – following industrialisation especially, but also advancements in science, and the relaxation of the influence of the church amongst thought and expression – and the expression of hope for a new age.

In his book Will and Circumstance, Norman Hampson looks at the writings of men like Marat, Robespierre and Brissot in the years preceding the Revolution and how they were influenced by the writers of the Enlightenment. He asserts that Montesquieu and Rousseau “were quoted, paraphrased and misunderstood by everyone who wrote about politics.”[2] These two men were to form the language and ideas that the men of the Revolution would take up and champion during the years of political change, reform and terror that followed the forming of the National Assembly in 1789. Ideas of the separation of judicial, legislative and executive powers and governments respecting the much confused concept of the ‘general will’ of the population became intermingled with the notion of the government playing an active role in the moral regeneration of its people.

Although these two positions seem at odds with one another, they were both drawn upon regularly to form a common and fairly moderate political ideology aimed at “the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man; …liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”[3] These ideas had been written and debated upon for decades preceding the French Revolution, and while their direct role in the events of June and July 1789 is demonstrably limited, their contribution to the emerging ideologies of the following years is almost total. As Duncan Townson argues, the philosophes were not revolutionary nor even opposed to the ancien regime itself, but that it was “only when the ancien regime had collapsed and new institutions had to be constructed did the ideas of the Enlightenment produce a revolutionary ideology.”[4]

Considering this view, the question to be asked is what constituted the collapse of the ancien regime. It could be argued that it was with the fall of the Bastille on the 14^th of July 1789 that the monarchy failed, however its role beyond this date is prominent but ineffectual, with the power of veto still legally available to Louis in late 1791, and also a remaining willingness to retain him as head of state.

Whatever the clear sign that power had changed hands, it remains that it was the calling for the meeting of the Estates-General in 1788 that began the events leading to revolution. What led to the calls for this group to meet again for the first time in over 150 years were the constant power struggles that were occurring between the King’s financial ministers like Necker, Calonne and Brienne, and the Paris Parlement and later the Assembly of Notables. These men saw that extensive changes needed to be made in order for the French economy to survive, whereas the Notables and Parlement saw the proposals as a danger to their own privileges and to the social order itself. Townson identifies the fact that Montesquieu saw the parlements, dominated by the nobility, as playing an intermediary role between King and subjects, preventing despotism of Louis and his ministers,[5] but it is precisely this role that was to block the reforms that may have prevented, or at least delayed the Revolution. As Albert Soboul saw it: “the aristocracy had undertaken the struggle against absolutism in order to recover its political dominance and preserve its outworn social privileges.”[6]

Following the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who had been Controller-General of finance and responsible for initiating many reforms such as a central treasury and the issuing of the statement of royal finances, the Compte Rendu in the late 1770s and early 1780s, one of the more prominent reforming ministers of the 1780’s was Calonne. When no longer able to secure loans to keep the French economy from collapsing after the American War of Independence, Calonne also found fiscal reform to be inevitable. In seeking to reform the tax system he came into conflict with members of the clergy and nobility. While these orders could see that reform was indeed necessary, and were willing to make concessions, they were unwilling to tolerate any changes that would affect their social position.

As Georges Lefebvre saw it, “by threatening the tax privileges, it [the reforms] aimed a blow at the social structure of the Old Regime.”[7] In an effort to bypass the opposition he expected from the Paris Parlement, and unwilling to trust in support from the King, Calonne arranged for an Assembly of Notables to consider his proposals. They met in the first half of 1787, and like the Paris Parlement who adopted a similar position, claimed that only an assembly with representatives from all three estates could decide upon questions of tax reform. Thus with the calling of the Estates-General and the cahiers de doleances was the way set out for the rising middle classes to be able to dominate the political debate that had previously been monopolised by the king’s ministers and the parlements, or in effect, the nobility.

The Estates-General convened on the 3^rd of May 1789, with changes having been made to allow for double representation for the Third Estate, so that they more or less equaled the number of deputies of the first two orders. It was assumed by the Third Estate deputies that voting would now be by head, and not as had previously been the case, by order, where each estate decided upon an issue and then cast one vote. It was thought that this would effectively negate the gesture of doubling the 3^rd Estate. What this effectively did was to put the first two orders at odds with the third, as observed by Mallet du Pan, “Public debate has assumed a different character. King, despotism and constitution have become only secondary questions. Now it is war between the Third Estate and the other two orders.”[8]

The men of the Third Estate elected to the Estates-General were the rising professional and mercantile classes. Doctors and lawyers as well as bankers and merchants. They were literate in legal matters and had experience in financial administration. They were well versed in the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu and interested in furthering their own aims and positions, which previously they had to do under the ancien regime by aspiring to noble office. Now they were presented with the opportunity to achieve the bourgeois aims that had arisen out of years of the slow move towards the industrialisation of the French economy, whilst also improving the lot of their fellow countrymen. It was this class of men who had learned the ideas for revolution, had been given the opportunity by the feuding ministers and nobles, and who possessed the financial means and independence to take part.

It could be said that the Revolution took almost everyone by surprise, although many had called for it, they had not necessarily envisaged it as it was to play out over the next five years. While many motives at work were purely for financial reform, the revolutionaries had been won over by the hyperbole of the Enlightenment writers. In this way the moral aspirations and political ideologies of writers like Rousseau and Montesquieu were to find themselves expressed in the reforms of the new governments, securing their contribution to the Revolution.

In terms of setting off the events of 1789, the financial reforms and counter-reforms over much of the 1780’s created an almost stalemate situation where stalling tactics led to the involvement of the new political breed, the representatives of the Third Estate who were to become the driving force behind the Revolution. In this way it was not just the bankruptcy of 1788 that sparked revolution, but financial mismanagement from the mid 1770s and earlier.

If it were the bourgeoisie who made the Revolution, the perspective that then follows is that the industrial revolution which made them, combined with the Enlightenment which shaped their ideas and thoughts, became the sufficient wedge to drive them between the administration of the Monarchy and the nobility at a time when both were weakened by their division from the other.

Bibliography:

Declaration of the Rights of Man

Hampson, Norman., Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

Lefebvre, Georges., The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962.

McPhee, Peter., The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Soboul, Albert ., A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.

Townson, Duncan., France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.

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[1] Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 45.

[2] Norman Hampson, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, p. viii.

[3] Declaration of the Rights of Man.

[4] Duncan Townson, France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12

[5] Ibid., p. 11.

[6] Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 14.

[7] Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, p. 22.

[8] Mallet du Pan in Townson, p. 26.

The Enlightenment, The French Revolution, and Edmund Burke

‘Burke was a lifelong student of the Enlightenment who saw in the French Revolution the ultimate threat to those modern, rational, libertarian, enlightened values that he sought to defend.’ Discuss.

The particular course of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution through to the Cold War which spanned almost five decades following the second world war, revived Edmund Burke from his eighteenth-century obscurity. Burke’s most famous work, his ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ offered a conservative moral and political philosophy which leant hope to those who held hopes of preservation – of religion, liberty, morality – in the most destructive century the world had yet known. This hope is able to be found in the writings of Burke because he clearly articulated the threats posed by ideology and revolution; because he was explicit in the values he supported; and staunch in their defense, from whatever threat. The following is an exploration of these three aspects of Edmund Burke.

Burke, unlike Nietzsche, did not suffer the fate of being largely ignored in the times in which he lived, before later being revived by the interest of scholars. Burke lived a public life as parliamentarian and writer, although he much abhorred the possibility of his private life being made public.[1]

On publication, his ‘Reflections’ sold extremely well with several new editions produced within a year of the first. Peter J. Stanlis, one of the most prominent Burkean scholars, believes the true success of the ‘Reflections’ is qualitatively different to that measured only by sales figures;

If we consider only Burke’s immediate practical intention, to warn against French revolutionary principles and to exalt a Christian and Natural Law conception of civil society, the Reflections was the most successful book of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and it was almost totally opposed to the prevailing spirit of the age.[2]

Burke confronted the general optimism which initially greeted the French Revolution in England with stern and dire warnings, delivered eloquently and with a modest wisdom in prose which sought not to dazzle the mind with its cleverness, but to appeal to the moral sense, heart and entrails of its reader.

Frederick Dreyer prefers to downplay this successful image of Burke. He argues, “that Burke condemned the French Revolution should cause no surprise. Eventually most Englishmen of his class would come to condemn it as well.”[3] Burke however, was Irish, which combined with false insinuations he was a catholic, created a tension within his identity as a British Parliamentarian. As for the reference to class, does Dreyer here mean the political ruling-class? If class were a determining and useful referent then perhaps Burke’s being the son of a successful lawyer, and his own experience of upward social mobility would suggest more affinity with the class of professionals that formed the vanguard of the French Revolution.

There was absolutely nothing “eventual” about Burke’s opposition to the Revolution, the quality of which was first articulated in 1756 in his satirical ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’. With “eventually” being the key word, the descent into violence of the Revolution may have been what “eventually” turned much of British opinion. But Burke had foreseen this, and in 1790 his highly successful and immediately influential ‘Reflections’ became the axis – and the dividing ground – upon which this opinion turned.

More usefully, Dreyer argues that much of the ‘Reflections’ is best understood as an attack or response to the Reverend Dr. Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’;

Without Price, Burke would not have started the ‘Reflections’ when he did; without Price the ‘Reflections’ would have turned into a different kind of book. It is not too much to say that unless we keep Price in mind it is impossible to understand fully the logic of Burke’s argument against the French Revolution.[4]

That is, many of the attacks in the ‘Reflections’ ostensibly directed at the French were a reflection of threats to English circumstances.[5]  J. G. A. Pocock concurs with Dreyer that the Reverend Dr. Price spurred on Burke to write the ‘Reflections’,[6] however the substance each attributes to this is different. Dreyer for instance, argues the passage on Marie Antoinette only makes sense when read with Price in mind.[7] On the other hand, Pocock sees at the heart of the ‘Reflections’ a question of political economy relating to the seizure of Church lands to use them as security for paper assignats (an action analogous to the spoliation of the monasteries under Henry VIII);

it is not possible to read Burke’s Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents this action – and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette – as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.[8]

This variance in possible readings of the ‘Reflections’ is indicative generally of the unsystematic nature of Burke’s writings. As with the work of Nietzsche, this has seen Burke’s writing interpreted as the needs of different readers arose. And yet it remains, despite any charge of Burke’s writings being unsystematic (spread as they were across pamphlets, books, records of parliamentary speeches, and public and private letters), that his ‘Reflections’ were comprehensive; as Seamus F. Deane notes,

Few authors, important or obscure, managed in the following two decades to raise any objection to the philosophes which had not already been expressed by Burke; he reaped the whole harvest of disagreement, insult, and invective in that one sweeping and memorable attack.[9]

Despite his opposition to the French philosophes, which will be discussed later in more detail, there is little doubt that Edmund Burke indeed was a ‘lifelong student of the Enlightenment’, or that he was consistent in his feelings toward it.[10]

Dreyer argues “Burke can be seen as an eccentric thinker only if we define the Enlightenment in perverse and narrow terms.”[11] Burke was much involved in the thinking, writing and ideas of the age, and although his work can be seen as running counter to the ‘prevailing spirit of the age’, he is still of it. If the age of the Enlightenment were to be characterised only by the primacy of rational and scientific enquiry, then it would be no stretch to think of Burke as a nostalgic eccentric. Conservatism and nostalgia, after all, are no strange bedfellows.

Despite Burke’s devout belief in the ‘great chain of being’, he seemed ill-content with his place in it, not following in his father’s footsteps to the bar, instead pursuing a career of letters and politics. This is not to suggest that this ambiguity is the result of hypocrisy or vanity on Burke’s part. Rather, as Isaac Kramnick puts forward, “the beginning of wisdom in understanding Edmund Burke is… in discerning his basic ambivalence to the two great ideological currents whose confrontation dominated his age.”[12]

While this is good advice to keep in mind, I’m not sure it does sufficient justice to the strength of Burke’s convictions. His first published work ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’ demonstrated the need Burke felt to engage with and respond to the main current of the Enlightenment;

Burke’s satire reveals that even in his early twenties he was increasingly aware that the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment encouraged men to submit to destructive analysis and criticism all the achievements of men throughout history.[13]

The writing of ‘Vindications’ and its being misunderstood as a serious work by Bolingbroke, whom Burke was satirizing, highlighted to Burke the danger of moral and social theories and speculation. At the heart of Burke’s study and feelings on the Enlightenment is the perilous nature of ideas and words;

When men find that something can be said in favor of what… they have thought utterly indefensible, they grow doubtful of their own reason; they are thrown into a sort of pleasing surprise; they run along with the speaker, charmed and captivated to find such a plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. This is the fairy land of philosophy… There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober part of truth…[14]

Stanlis is emphatic on this point; Burke “was convinced that words continue to influence people psychologically, even after they have rejected any belief in a historical state of nature.”[15] There can be little doubt that what Burke developed from his study of the Enlightenment was an utter revulsion for the immodest, elaborate, and self-contained historical and intellectual fictions such as ‘the state of nature’ and the abstract ‘rights of man’;

We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born…[16]

For Burke, the present state of British government, Constitution and society represented centuries of achievement. The Enlightenment in large part was represented by irreverent and self-satisfied schemers who would dare risk this for the sake of their untested speculations. It is a result of his study of the Enlightenment then that Burke, according to Jeffrey Hart,

was the first to recognize the deep moral division of the West, which was just then opening up, and which today, across the board, is decisive for our moral, political, and metaphysical opinions: and because Burke, having recognized the division and defined its doctrinal grounds, took sides.[17]

If Edmund Burke did not side with the doctrine that asserted no limits to the application of human reason and claimed universal rights and freedom for men, where then, did his values lie? The answer, of course, is that there were many things which Burke held in high esteem, but the three I wish to focus on are his conception of the ‘Moral Natural Law’, civil society, and government. On the ‘natural law’, my understanding of this in relation to Burke comes largely from the work of Peter J. Stanlis. Burke wrote;

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.[18]

God gives man his nature, and although we may not perceive clearly our origins or our end, let alone our purpose, Burke is arguing that we are able to perfectly perceive our ‘moral duties’, our obligation to which is the observance of the ‘natural law’.

Burke understood that there was a fundamental distinction between Natural Law and the philosophes’ natural rights.[19] The leveling zeal of the revolutionaries threatened the natural law, no matter how widely beneficial their egalitarian principles on the surface seemed. For Stanlis, this, rather than Price, or political economy, is the key to Burke’s response to the French Revolution;

To Burke the moral Natural Law was so basic to the ancient inherited social order of Europe that its subversion was enough proof that the revolution was the most extensive project ever launched against all religion, law, property, and real civil order and liberty.[20]

For Burke, because man’s nature was ordained by God, who prescribes his place in the ‘chain of being’, and it is in man’s nature to form society, civil society is then a divine bestowal.[21] Thus the subversion of the moral Natural Law was but one part of the blasphemy of the revolutionaries, in addition to which, Burke understood “that the spirit of the Revolution… was at its roots characterized by a hatred of the very idea of society.”[22]

In imagining a fictitious time where man in a ‘state of nature’ was uncorrupted, freer and supposedly happier than his modern counterpart, due to a lack of social roles and obligation which he must fulfill, the revolutionaries believed they could remove the ‘chains’ of society and free man within it, and without destroying it.

If Burke did imagine a ‘state of nature’, which I am not convinced he did, I imagine it may have been more akin to Hobbes than Rousseau; a ‘war of all against all’. Perhaps more telling than the comment on the ‘state of nature’ in Frank O’Gorman’s assessment is the view of civil society; “for Burke, the state of nature was anarchic and primitive from which civilised social life was a thankful deliverance.”[23] The use of the word ‘deliverance’ is perhaps no accident, through civil society might be achieved the redemption for the ‘fall’ from the biblical ‘state of nature’;

To Burke, man’s relationship to civil society is a moral necessity; it cannot be voluntaristic, for that would exalt will above right reason; nothing could be more false and wicked than the Lockian theory of a voluntary and revocable social contract based upon a hypothetical state of nature.[24]

In that man is a social creature by his ordained nature, and does not choose society but is born into it, he may not choose to forgo society and its rights or obligations. Natural Law, civil society and obligation are inextricably bound with religion. Indeed, Seamus F. Deane argues that;

The belief that the atheist should have no existence in the community because his creed denied the foundations of civil society is one of the most persistent and unshakable of Burke’s convictions.[25]

Thus the separation of church and state pursued by the revolutionaries is to Burke a repudiation of the divine gifts of government, society, and religion. Moreover, it is the interconnection of all these elements, what Rousseau would call ‘chains’, which shelters man and links him with his past and with his species

Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy – all of which radical man would rip off – man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy.[26]

The demystification of institutions removes the awe and respect with which Burke believed they should be viewed. None of these could be perfect for all at any given time, yet they were an inheritance that linked man with his past, and it was their duty to preserve or cautiously reform them as needed for future generations.

Kramnick asserts that “Burke repudiates the fundamental liberal belief that institutions are produced by the willful choice of specific individuals.”[27] Not only would the abolition of social institutions with the view to create new ones in their place not succeed to any specified plan, it would disinherit those yet unborn of the link to their history. Reformers in government, then, should approach with caution, with the preservation of the spirit of their institutions in mind and without false hope or millenarian pretenses; for Burke, “all that wise men ever aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst.”[28]

With more in mind, I believe, than simply preventing things coming to the worst, Burke would actively defend the principles of his convictions and the values of the moral Natural Law wherever he found them to be in danger. These occasions included the attempt to impeach Warren Hastings with regard to the abuses of the East India Company in India, and defense of the British Constitution to the point of sacrificing personal friendships. As a politician, O’Gorman argues, Burke’s

main concern was… to preserve the balanced constitution of the eighteenth century, with the separate spheres of influence apportioned to King, Parliament and People no matter from whatever quarter a threat to it might appear.[29]

The affairs of India, the actions of the East India Company, and the impeachment trial of the Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, were a significant part of the business of Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s. Burke sought to impeach Hastings on the basis of natural law. He argued that no-one had the right to exercise arbitrary power. That the British Parliament enabling Hastings to govern as he saw fit was not a justification for the exercise of arbitrary power, nor was the excuse of arbitrary power being a general and accepted mode of government in Asia.

Stanlis demonstrates that Burke’s attacks against Hastings’s justifications of the exercise of arbitrary power “derives wholly from his ardent faith in Natural Law”.[30] Burke is seeking to defend not only the rights of the people of India as he saw them under the Natural Law, but also to defend against the introduction of “‘Eastern’ principles into England.”[31]

Against what was essentially the cultural relativist position of Hastings, Burke invoked something he believed to be universal;

Mr. Hastings has no refuge… let him fly from common law, and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born; let him fly from acts of parliament… still the Mohammedan law condemns him… Let him fly where he will… law, thank God, meets him everywhere – arbitrary power cannot secure him against law; and I would as soon have him tried on the Koran, or any other eastern code of laws, as on the common law of this kingdom.[32]

Yet what Burke considered to be universal was inimical to the definition supplied by the philosophes. So deep ran the convictions that Burke held regarding the French Revolution, that it had the effect of separating Burke both politically and personally from many of his allies and friends who sympathized with it, notably Charles James Fox and Sir Philip Francis. Burke’s conception of his duty to the British Constitution apparently left him with no other option.[33] His words in Parliament with regard to the break with Fox are included by Jeffrey Hart, and are worth repeating here for the sense they give of Burke;

It is indiscreet at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies or give friends occasion to desert me. Yet firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution places me in such a dilemma; I am ready to risk it, and with my last words exclaim, ‘Fly from the French Constitution’… yes, there is a loss of friends. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.[34]

Far from viewing events in France as a change of government, Burke observed the specter of rational revolution across the channel beginning to haunt the chambers of the British parliament. For Burke, the French Revolution wasn’t merely a turn of events he did not approve of, it was the culmination of decades of the sort of Enlightenment philosophy that he abhorred. The remaking of a constitution upon abstract universal rights and formalities invented through speculation would not be worth the paper it was printed upon. Rather, “Burke insisted upon the concrete realization of man’s natural rights in civil society, through the incorporation of basic moral principles in constitutional law.”[35]

An ailing constitution was neither the grounds for experimental surgery nor drastic doctrinal measures. In the following famous passage from his ‘Reflections’, Burke’s rhetoric paints a macabre and graphic picture of those that would tamper  irreverently with the institutions of state;

he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion… he should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father’s life.[36]

To Burke, who spent his entire adult life in opposition to the main intellectual current of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was the culmination of that movement. In this he saw the Revolution as a continuity of the Enlightenment, rather than an accidental misuse of its principles. Deane argues that in Burke’s view, the philosophes “helped to cause the Revolution. Burke, then, saw the French Enlightenment in terms of the Revolution.”[37] But we know that this is simply not true. Burke had strong feelings toward the Enlightenment thinkers which he expressed decades before revolution.

Burke knew that the threat to Europe didn’t originate in the French Revolution; it was born in the philosophy of sensibility which inspired and found full expression in the revolution. The combining of Cartesian reason with individualism and a conscience based on the feeling of the individual. For Stanlis, Burke’s condemnation of sensibility is the reverse side of the coin which put Natural Law at the heart of his response to the Revolution;

sensibility permeated an epicurean philosophy of pleasure, power, and will with moral feeling; it corrupted people by teaching them to justify evil means in practice for noble ends in theory, to act without restraint or a conscious reference to any legal precedents or moral code.[38]

In this is evidence of an idea that Burke would have found preposterous. The idea that the creation of a better future justified whatever speculative methods the rational politician could devise. As we have seen, Burke did not believe it possible for men to construct institutions according to their will, thus justifying harm to those living for an undeliverable benefit to those yet to be born was a frightful proposition which he saw in naked terms; “justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end.”[39]

Peter Stanlis saw that it was on this reasoning that Burke was able to predict the Terror. The Terror was murder done in the name of public good in the service of abstract rights, and “the ethical norms common to man in civil society would be extinguished in favor of emotional appeals to political slogans favoring the general welfare.”[40]

The attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the principles of government, with the view that through this reason might be discovered the perfect system that would be universal in its application, suitable and true for all men at all times, for Burke is an assault upon society and the divine. Deane remarks it unsurprising that Burke “should connect the abstract, universal theory of the philosophes with atheism” and that to declare this universality “is to assert human despotism against the divine plenitude.”[41]

Indeed, this despotism would also be extended over people in society in the exercise of arbitrary power in the name of abstract speculation and millenarian zeal, with no reference to the moral Natural Law. Burke detested arbitrary power, it is precisely this he sought to defend against in the impeachment of Hastings and his criticisms of Britain’s treatment of the American colonies. His support of the Americans and subsequent condemnation of the French confused many observers, but like his willingness to defend the balance of the British Constitution against the King, Parliament and the people as the need arose, so too would he employ what seemed conflicting intellectual defenses against the varied dangers of the Enlightenment thinkers; “Burke exalted reason over will when he opposed the excesses of Rousseau, and sentiment over reason when he opposed the extremism of the philosophes.”[42]

Government should be formed on a strong foundation of concrete moral standards, not on any formal division of power or scheme which is guided by theoretical and speculative rights. For Burke, the French Revolution simply provided the evidence of the intellectual sin and hubris of the Enlightenment philosophes. It was a realization of his deepest fear

that speculative abstract rationalism had the power to destroy all social institutions and conventions, all that people had constructed with great care and labor over centuries of building civilization up from crude barbarism to its present degree of perfection.[43]

What right had the philosophes to disinherit future generations of their property in society? What right to, at their fancy, undo the legacy left for them? While the philosophes would justify such actions against the universal freedom which they believed was the right of man, to Burke, this would be a liberty that encroached arbitrarily on others, those yet unborn. Sovereignty placed in the hands and whims of a majority of the people was neither legitimate or just. It was arbitrary power without check, and without deference to a moral code; and Burke would have none of it;

The French Revolution, say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority of any other people, the people of England for instance, wish to make the same change, they have the same right. Just the same undoubtedly. That is, none at all.[44]

Burke’s opposite conception of freedom and rights, argues Jeffrey Hart, was the essential element in Burke’s reaction to the Revolution; “ for Burke, freedom was a concrete and historical thing, the actual freedoms enjoyed by actual Englishmen: they enjoyed the historic rights of Englishmen.”[45] This is by no means to say that, because Burke regarded his freedom as privilege of being a member of English society, he would thus deny those same freedoms to other societies which had not managed to cultivate their own liberties and freedoms. Burke’s speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings demonstrate this conclusively.

Burke recognised that  “to govern is to restrain man.”[46] Man left to his own devices without the bonds of society, the links rather than the ‘chains’, was corruptible and capable of much darkness and evil. Man’s ‘state of nature’ was civil society, and in this he had proved both wicked and good. “The restraints on men,” argued Burke,

as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule: and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.[47]

Man’s place in society was his link to the divine. Although he knew not how this came to be, nor for what purpose, as far as man could perceive what was moral and what was just, such was his duty. So far as man could humbly and venerably influence the institutions of his society, which were the legacy of his ancestors who themselves through civil society were connected to the divine, man’s duty was to infuse these institutions with the moral Natural Law.           

Would the opportunity to create the ‘best of all possible worlds’ justify a sacrifice of human suffering to attain it? No; from this the best that could be created is the ‘second-best of all possible worlds’. The ‘best of all possible worlds’ would not require any extension of human suffering to bring it into being. Burke understood this, that although we could imagine something greater, we are restricted by what is possible. Burke believed that we always have the opportunity to work slowly and cautiously by degrees in effecting our reforms; but we do not have the ability to construct a new society from the wreckage of the old. The descent of the French Revolution into terror and violence is no small vindication of the principles of Edmund Burke.

 

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955.

Deane, Seamus F., ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 295-320.

Dreyer, Frederick, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 239-56.

Hart, Jeffrey, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-74.

Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977.

O’Gorman, Frank, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986.

Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 275-94.

Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991.

---

[1] Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977, p. 68.

[2] Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991, p. 39.

[3] Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 239.

[4] Dreyer, p. 241.

[5] Ibid., p. 253.

[6] J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 278.

[7] Dreyer, p. 251.

[8] Pocock, p. 278.

[9] Seamus F. Deane, ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 319.

[10] Stanlis, p. 163.

[11] Dreyer, p. 256.

[12] Kramnick, p. 7.

[13] Stanlis, p. 150.

[14] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 148.

[15] Stanlis, p. 167.

[16] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 178.

[17] Jeffrey Hart, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-8.

[18] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 47.

[19] Stanlis, p. 39.

[20] Ibid., p. 49.

[21] Ibid., p. 43.

[22] Hart, p. 262.

[23] Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986, p. 14.

[24] Stanlis, p. 42.

[25] Deane, p. 301.

[26] Kramnick, p. 33.

[27] Ibid., p. 25.

[28] Ibid., p. 22.

[29] O’Gorman, p. 13.

[30] Stanlis, p. 33.

[31] Ibid., p. 34.

[32] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 35.

[33] Hart, p. 259.

[34] Edmund Burke, quoted in Hart, p. 259.

[35] Stanlis, p. 45.

[36] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955, pp. 109-110.

[37] Seamus F. Deane in Hampsher-Monk p316

[38] Stanlis, pp. 186-7.

[39] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 177.

[40] Stanlis, p. 177.

[41] Deane, p. 317.

[42] Ibid., p. 310.

[43] Stanlis, pp. 149-50.

[44] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 93.

[45] Hart, p. 260.

[46] Kramnick, p. 30.

[47] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 67.

From Fallacy to Fable? Reading the Currie Diary against the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend.

The story of the farming life of the Currie family can be placed within two larger narratives of Victorian farming and rural life. The first is the yeoman small independent farmer ideal championed by the land reformers of the 1850s and 1860s. This was not just an agricultural ideal designed to foster a strong rural economy, but also a social and political agenda dedicated to some democratic principles and the opportunity for many to share in land and the status it could bring.

The yeoman ideal was a vision of the new Victorian society that would be created in the ensuing decades. Indeed, we shall see from our reading of the Currie diary that this new class of farmers would be active in creating and maintaining their communities.

But not only was the yeoman ideal a vision of the future, it was also rooted in the past. It was linked to romantic notions of a similar class of English farmers and to political philosophy which argued the moral, social and political benefits of property ownership in land. It was a political reaction to the ‘squattocracy’ and their control of vast tracts of land.

But just as the land reformers cast their eyes backward when creating land policy for the yeoman ideal, so too has Australian history and sentimentalism cast its eyes back to the selectors and created from their experience the pioneering bush legend. The story of the young man with his family carving a farm and prosperity out of the bush with nothing but his labour and an axe. It was pioneers, we are told, who made this country.

This view has been justly criticized in recent decades as simplifying and excluding the complexity of rural Victoria, but there is an underlying current of truth in relation to the resourcefulness, courage and achievement demonstrated by many selectors.

But while there are those who look to this period and to the pioneer for the formation of our national character, the result will be an homogenous European male character. The Currie diary can provide evidence that might simultaneously embrace and confound the pioneer legend.

We can use the Currie diary to test each of these narratives, if not to explode them, then at least to concede their limitations and attempt to colour a richer picture of rural life in the latter half of nineteenth century Victoria.

In this way, we can not only think critically about an historic political issue such as land reform, but also a modern one; one that is tied up with issues of heritage, values and identity.

The following quote from Charles Daley seems particularly pertinent when reading the Currie diary following the relocation of the family to Gippsland. Daley writes,

There was a curiously naïve idea, very prevalent at this time, that the more heavily timbered the country was, the more productive it would be, and so the fledgling pioneers rushed to peg the densest scrub, thus serving themselves a maximum sentence of back-breaking work and unremitting poverty.[1]

The diary shows, that for John Currie, clearing was practically a daily ritual. The notion of heavily timbered land holding the most productive soil is also referred to by Dingle, in that selectors had little else to judge land by other than the vegetation growing upon it.[2] But did the move from Ballan to Lardner bring ‘unremitting poverty’ to the Curries? If so, was this caused specifically by the labour of clearing, or as a result of being further from a large local market for their produce, such as Ballarat had been. The diary can help to answer these questions and test the assumptions prevalent in the historiography.

Daley reserves most of his attention to the nature of work performed by the men. He mentions techniques used for clearing, and the tools and clothing used and worn. He describes a McCubbin-like transition from the selection being little more than a tent in the scrub to shelter the men, to eventually comprising of a log house in a clearing suitable for the arrival of wife and family. But the hauntingly lonely image inspired by Frederick McCubbin’s ‘The Pioneer’ is at odds with the social and community life that even the perhaps somewhat anti-social Anne Currie describes and participates in.

Russel Ward in ‘The Australian Legend’ argues that the pioneers of the bush had a disproportionate influence on the shaping of the Australian mystique.[3] Indeed, can we truthfully assert that a national character and spirit can be defined by a group who were a minority both socially and economically? This disproportionate influence is the link between the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend, and the success or failure of a family like the Curries as documented by their diary is where it can be tested.

Daley accounts for the eventual abandonment of a third of the selected hill country of Gippsland being due to the 320 acre allotments being too large for a single family to manage, and laid out with a regularity that did not allow for variations of terrain and soil quality.[4] This perspective is clearly different to the view that, in other areas of Victoria, 320 acre allotments were much too small for a family to make a successful living from. John Currie selected 110 acres in Gippsland, so the diary might prove able to test Daley’s thesis, however we also know that John spent much time working James Currie’s selection.

In ‘The Tyranny of Distance’, Geoffrey Blainey continues this theme of small acreages and high land prices, when compared with North America

Dear land cursed farmers. One of Australia’s tragedies in the second half of the nineteenth century was the failure of tens of thousands of farmers and their families to make a living from small farms after slaving for years.[5]

But even if the land prices made Australia unattractive for new migrants, for John Currie the arduous move to Gippsland was in search of better quality land. The squatters had used many nefarious means to preserve their runs, or cherry-pick the best land on it. The heavily forested land in Gippsland was of little interest to pastoralists.

Michael Cannon in ‘Life in the Country’ argues

Much of the deplorable state of political morality in the eastern colonies during the remainder of the century, and the evil flowering of the urban land boom, had their origin in the corruption encouraged by evasion of the land acts.[6]

He is referring to the corruption of the squatters and elements of the Lands Department and the surveyors. It is cautionary to note that the legislation designed to create a conservative, democratic and respectable rural class initially had the opposite effect of encouraging corrupt behaviour and consolidating the power of the squatters.

John McQuilton in his chapter on selection from ‘The Kelly Outbreak’ also links this yeoman ideal with the ideals of the Chartist movement. Land reform undertaken on these principles could allow the ‘democratic’ diggers to take up land and create a rural class to rival the squatters. But he describes this as an initial failure, as the established squatters were able to make conniving and illegal use of their resources as a means to select the best land. This paints a corrupt image of the squatters who otherwise have been considered to embody part of the pioneering legend.[7]

For Cannon, the yeoman selector as a new class was doomed to fail;

The old ideal of a huge self-sufficient ‘yeoman’ population covering the nation always was a fallacy under Australian conditions, and led to wide-spread unnecessary hardship for as long as the dream persisted.[8]

Selectors often required large families to succeed on their small allotments, indeed a large family was sometimes seen as a substitute for sufficient capital. But the children of large families raised on selections had little choice but to eventually leave to find employment or new land. A 320 acre selection could not be divided between several children with any hope of it supporting all their families.

John Hirst argues that the pioneer legend is an empty myth, which although democratic in its pretense is fundamentally conservative, and does little to reveal the complex nature of social and economic life in rural Victoria in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [9] We can read the Currie diary with this criticism in mind, and use it to highlight the complexities of life as experienced by the Currie family.

For Dingle as well as Hirst, the yeoman farmer ideal was also a conservative notion that romanticized a particular class of farmers in English history that had been threatened by the industrial revolution. They were seen as the backbone of a rural and pre-capitalist England that was quickly disappearing.

Dingle concurs with McQuilton that the initial experience of the Land Acts and selection was one of failure. The land reformers and many of the selectors were inexperienced when it came to farming in Victorian conditions, and, Dingle argues, the attempt to plant families on the land was both daring and foolhardy, but would eventually succeed.[10] But this success would always be limited by the number of viable small farms and the limit to how many families they could support.

It is worth considering then the difference between viewing the selectors as a pioneering class that created or served as the basis for the pioneer legend, and considering them as a created class that was based upon a social idea that was at once both radical and conservative.

When looking at the wider history of rural settlement in Victoria, observing the changing trend from pastoralism to agriculture, the yeoman ideal must be considered. Certainly, by historians writing of the land reform movements which followed the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s, it seldom is ignored. The yeoman ideal was a vision of a rural landscape dominated by small landowners. These small farmers would be free of the corrupting vices of the cities, living a simpler and more virtuous agricultural life. Owning property would give them a vested interest in the state and create a stable, dependable and conservative political class.

Furthermore, land in Europe was a cornerstone of status and wealth, and almost totally inaccessible to those without significant means. Settler colonialism in both North America and Australia was fuelled by the promise of land for all. In his chapter in Greenwood’s ‘Australia: a Social and Political History’, McNaughtan argues

The spectacle of Australia as a “vast sheepwalk” was distasteful to the overwhelming majority of settlers who had not been bred in the Colony and who carried with them from the old country an unvarying picture of a proper rural landscape. It is curious that the ideal of an Australia peopled by a “sturdy peasantry” or “industrious yeomanry” should have made such an irresistible appeal among all classes of people which, in the British Isles, had long since extinguished its own peasant class and was even then in process of reducing its yeomen to beggary.[11]

The yeoman ideal then, similarly to Australia’s conservative notion of the pioneer legend, was thus also part of a romantic view of the English past. But what is interesting is that this romanticized view of England’s rural past was not revived in Australia by immigrants from conservative land-owning families, but rather from those who in England were both urban and radical. Williams argues that the Chartist Movement in Britain cannot be ignored when considering the theoretical underpinnings of the debate and anxieties over land reform in Australia.[12]

Is it a paradox then, that the yeoman ideal in Victoria was composed and enacted as a mixture of radicalism and conservatism? Not exactly, because although land reform as a way of further democratizing the ‘old societies’ threatened longstanding and powerful interests, the same sorts of reform in Australia had to contend with the only recently established squatters and pastoralists. In this case, the evocation of the yeoman ideal could be used to prevent the further entrenchment of a landed elite in Australia; as F.G. Clarke argues

one of the greatest stimulants to electoral reform and universal manhood suffrage in all colonies stemmed from the realisation by liberals and radicals that the pastoralists’ grip on the lands of Australia could only be broken once their control over the colonial legislatures was also reduced.[13]

Ultimately, the image of the yeoman farmer was an idealistic rather than practical approach which focused on an abstract creation of an orderly system rather than any tangible reality. It was as much about politics as it was about farming.

But why might it be important when studying the Currie diary and the fortunes of that family? The almost universal appeal in Victoria of the yeoman farmer ideal is what later made selection possible for the Currie’s. Without this mythic ideal, and the Land Acts which embraced it, the family would not have been farmers at either Ballan or Lardner. It is important to consider the yeoman ideal when reading the Currie diary because it reminds us of the pattern of ideas behind the forming of legislation, which in turn has influence on the behaviour of people. As Williams suggests

rural settlement was seen as a vehicle for influencing the type of society that the colonies   wanted, or at least, thought that they wanted; it was an early example of a type of social engineering.[14]

The Curries then, were a living part of that particular rural vision of Victoria, but they were by no means passive participants. There were many other factors which would influence the fortunes of the Currie family; personal and environmental factors. It is however, important to remember that in some respects, their course had been charted by the aspirations of an earlier generation.

The pioneer legend is one of the many narratives of Australian history. For Russel Ward, it is part of the search to find what is unique in the Australian character and identity, and he argues that it developed first amongst the workers employed by squatters and pastoralists.[15] The pioneer legend assumes that unique Australian character was both the product and the requirement for settling the frontier, or at least that they developed mutually. Donley argues that

Whether they succeeded or not depended on their personal qualities. Good judgement,       perseverance and the ability to withstand loneliness and hardship – with the aid of good fortune – decided whether a squatter made or broke himself in the outback.[16]

Broadly, the pioneer legend embraces groups as varied as the first squatters and pastoralists, and the labourers they employed, to the stockmen who worked the cattle stations, shearers, and the bullock drivers who were relied on for the transport of goods before the railway networks spread. It celebrates a male-dominated world of hard work and self-sufficiency, both of which are considered impeccable conservative values.

It is curious that the life of the itinerant rural labourers like the shearers or the swagmen venerated by the pioneer legend was in some ways an impediment to the success of selection. Furthermore, that many selectors had to resort to this life was also a demonstration of the short-comings of the Selection Acts. As Bessant argues

Legislation alone was seen to be all that was required to establish this yeomanry. Hard work and sacrifice which it was assumed every selector would enjoy, would do the rest. It was taken for granted that the selector and his family would be on the farm for life. Yet the Australian rural worker was notoriously nomadic, quite out of character with the demands of the Land Acts.[17]

At its most superficial, the pioneer legend implies a homogenous class of men, white and of European origin. Frederick McCubbin’s most famous work is titled ‘The Pioneer’, referring singularly to the man in the painting and not his wife. The Currie diary is useful here, in that it gives a voice to the sort of woman depicted in this painting. The bleak, lonely image inspired by ‘The Pioneer’ is contradicted in the Currie diary by the almost daily recording of visitors to the farm, whether they be social calls or visits to borrow equipment or goods

Part of the mystique of the pioneer legend is not just in the character of the pioneers, but also in the landscape they went into. The Australian bush could be a dangerous place. Peter Pierce writes of the ‘lost child’ in Australian mythology who gets lost in the Australian bush

the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia. More profoundly though, the lost child is the symbol of essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country.[18]

In some ways this tragic mythology is also experienced by the Currie’s in 1880 when their young daughter drowns in the waterhole after wandering away from the house

I had no heart to fill up my book since we lost our wee pet on the 24^th of the last month, it was oh so sudden… I carried her to the hole to dip a bucket of water. I stood her down and dipped it and she had a drink out the bucket, I led her by the hand to the door and said to her come in…I   feel sure she came in and went back to see where I got the water… I then ran to the water hole. The first thing I saw was a little foam on the water. My heart told me what that was oh shall I ever forget it, I looked under the sticks and saw my wee pet, but oh dear I never thought I was too late, as she was such a short time in… I’ve lost her my heart is breaking and I feel frightened to grieve for fear I am punished even more severely for it must have been as a punishment that she was taken from us like that. I can’t help blaming myself for letting her out of my mind… but she was so clever. There was never one so knowing of her age.[19]

In his book ‘The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety’, Pierce discusses the contemporary illustrations, literature and paintings which showed or described lost children in nineteenth century Australia as ‘asleep’. The viewer, like perhaps the rescuer when they first come upon the child, cannot be sure if the child is sleeping or dead. Likewise Catherine Currie thought it might not be too late.

Writing about Frederick McCubbin’s ‘What the Little Girl Saw in the Bush’ and ‘Childhood Fancies’, Pierce argues McCubbin “made visible… that nameless force which had for so long attracted children across boundaries, so that they wonder and wander, then become lost. This innocent attraction to the bush can be fatal.”[20] Was Catherine’s daughter perhaps attracted by her prior view of the waterhole to return for another look?

Almost three weeks passes before Catherine resumes her almost infallible daily journal entry. There is a strangely selfish sensation in reading this series of entries of Catherine having held back on this significant event, as though the information was being kept from the reader. It makes one wonder if the diary was a largely personal task, or whether it had been intended as a simple chronicle which from time to time happened to expand to include her thoughts, anxieties and feelings. We can perhaps surmise from the fact that no entry whatsoever was written on the fatal day of 24 November 1880 that diary entries may have been generally a task reserved for the evening, despite Catherine’s immediate writing style which often reads like it has been set down as events were occurring.

When Catherine Currie does resume making entries on 14 December 1880, she initially talks about John’s work and other comings and goings before mentioning her child dying. Had she not intended to write about it when she first sat down to make her next entry? Perhaps the process of writing brought forth the feelings and emotions which cover the rest of the page and a large part of the next one.

After the Curries along with many of their neighbours moved from Ballan to take up their new selections at Lardner, the task of building a new community existed alongside the building of new farms. John Currie was regularly involved in these processes. Catherine records in her entry for 15 January 1876, “John away to Brandy Creek to attend a meeting to get a Shire Council.”[21]

Several years later on 7 September 1879, and 15 September 1879, the diary records John organizing and collecting signatures from neighbours for a petition, which he then presents to the Council about clearing the road running near or past Rintel’s store. A later entry on 13 October 1879 records that this petition is read at a Council meeting, and it is decided to take action about “our road.”[22]

These are just some of the many occasions that John attends meetings, or is active in community business. The selector did not farm his selection in isolation. Support and links with neighbours and the community were essential to selection life. Although land reforms enacted in the spirit of the yeoman ideal may have envisioned a certain sort of rural society, it remained that it was up to families like the Curries and their neighbours to build their own community.

Catherine Currie may have rarely mentioned her own attendance at church after the family had moved to Lardner, but her diary entries reveal interest in the members of her family attending, and who they met there. She also often recorded who gave the service, which early on would often be John Currie. Sometimes the quality or punctuality of the minister would be worthy of being  recorded. For example on 20 April 1879 and 27 April 1879 the family went to church, but both times the minister did not attend; “the minister did not attend again”, wrote Catherine, “he must not be [of] much account.”[23]

Catherine also very regularly mentions the attendance of the children at school and Sunday school, and also occasions when either Katie or Tom might be home from school to help John or if the schoolmaster had given them holidays.

Whether the minister was on time for church on Sunday, or indeed whether he showed up at all, were not the most serious sorts of incidents which occurred in the new community. The hardships endured by the selectors and their families may have created a higher level of social tension than might otherwise have been experienced. We might never know the precise circumstances behind the incident which Catherine records in her entry of 26 September 1878, and it is of limited use to speculate whether it was due to personal differences, or an argument over borrowed money or equipment. But we can learn something from the various responses to the incident which Catherine records

we are all upset… we were called up at about 12 o’clock last night by Hamilton and Gregory. They told us that Syme had nearly killed McKay on Monday evening and they wanted John to go over at once to see him… John got a great fright when they told him as we never expected anything to happen old Mac he was such a quiet old fellow. John has taken him to Drouin today, he lent the poor old man £2-16/ and paid other expenses for him. I am afraid it will be all lost as John thinks he will not get better.[24]

This entry shows that beneath the rhythms of farm life recorded in the diary there were similar tensions and violence which have always occurred in human society. Also interesting are the circumstances in which John is called upon to go and see McKay. Was he perhaps an older man looked up to by the others? We might also surmise something of John possessing a generous and charitable nature by his lending of money to McKay, especially considering John thought he would not recover. It shows also that the Curries could spare money at this time, whereas almost a decade later this may not have been so. Even so, it is difficult to escape how valuable money was to the selectors. Two days later on 28 September 1878, when Catherine records that McKay had died, as much on her mind as what might be Syme’s fate because of the incident, is whether Syme will pay them the money he owes; “McKay… died yesterday morning. I wonder how it will be for Syme now and if we will get the money he owed us.”[25]

From the diary, it appears that not much in the way of consequences befell Syme, although it is possible that the Currie’s opinion of him had diminished. The following year there is an entry mentioning Syme “John… saw Syme, and he say the post office has been robbed last night, we don’t think it, there has been something else behind the scene that we do not understand.”[26] The suggestion that the Currie’s don’t trust Syme’s account of the robbery is intriguing.

In ‘The Land Hunger’, Bessant argues that “the most common picture of the lives of the selectors painted by historians and writers is one of poverty, hardship, ignorance, struggle against the wicked squatter, desperation and defeat in the end.”[27] Indeed, Bessant also includes excerpts from the works of Steele Rudd and Henry Lawson to illustrate the hardships of the selectors.[28]

These sources, along with some of the mentioned works of McCubbin, provide much of the imagery for imagining what life looked like, and how people experienced it. But we must remember that these are all produced for an audience in a very different way to what the Currie diary is. Still, we should take note where parallels in subject matter occur. For example, the anxiety produced by the use of fire to clear scrub and bush is described by Steele Rudd in ‘On Our Selection’

It was a delightful topic before we started, but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illuminated the whooping bush in the night and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry.[29]

The enormous task of clearing, and the fears of falling trees and fires are echoed in the Currie diary in a series of entries in January and February of 1880. On 30 January 1880, Catherine writes “James’ new hut was burned down sometime yesterday, and everything in it, we never saw anything of it”,[30] and a week later in February she records, “I am so afraid of the fires that I am wishing for rain.”[31] To be effective in clearing the land, the burn required hot dry weather. Although rain would bring greater safety, it might also undo much of the hard labour of clearing.

As the decade progresses, farm life on the Currie selection and in the surrounding area seems to become more precarious. Catherine Currie’s diary shows how setbacks such as the one described 10 October 1887 could take a heavy emotional toll on the morale of the family

I feel quite unhappy this morning. I suppose Judy and all her pigs being dead has something to do with it. I don’t seem to see how we are going to manage to get through at all if something don’t turn up and I don’t know of any possibility of a turn for the better.[32]

These hard times continued throughout October of that year. Catherine makes an entry on 21 October 1887 recording Mr. George’s selection being sold; “I should be very sorry to leave it if it was mine,” she writes, “I suppose they all are it is one of the signs of the hard times as I am sure they would not leave it if they could help it.”[33]

The summer of 1887-88 must have brought no respite to this trend, but there is not a sense of defeat comparable to this stanza of Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Past Carin’’, which Bessant includes in full to illustrate the despair experienced by some selectors

            My eyes are dry, I cannot cry,

I’ve got no heart for breakin’,

But where it was, in days gone by,

A dull and empty achin’.

My last boy ran away from me –

I know my temper’s wearin’ –

But now I only wish to be

Beyond all signs of carin’.[34]

When Catherine’s son Tom leaves in January 1888 to find work her entry is not despairing like Lawson’s poem, nor like her entry describing the dead pigs. Rather, there is a sort of wry irony to the tone; “Tom went off this morn I am so sorry he has to go… of course it must be for the best, how can we make anything farming the grasshoppers.”[35]

The Currie diary lets us explore notions like the pioneer legend and the yeoman ideal against the experience of the people that each of these meta-narratives encompasses. It allows us to see that there could be both good times and bad times, and successes and failures. It removes the temptation to generalize judgements of success, failure, hardship or happy times on the story of selection. Success varied from district to district, family to family, and from year to year. The diary demonstrates that although the larger narrative stories are important and useful for conceptualizing history, they can have a tendency to be both mythic and shallow.

Yet it is also somewhat reassuring to find in the Catherine Currie’s diary a very small hint of the sort of humour the likes of which Steele Rudd and others have given to selection life. The Australian landscape and its wildlife brought many hardships and difficulties to the selectors, especially the wallabies and parrots getting into the crops, but as Catherine’s entry of 8 November 1879 shows, the Currie’s had the resourcefulness and endurance to meet them: “we catched a King Parrot in the trap, we tied it to a stick to frighten the rest, and it laid an egg.”[36]

Bibliography

Bessant, B., The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980.

McNaughtan, I.D., ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.) Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, pp. 98-144.

Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966.

Cannon, Michael, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973.

Clarke, F. G., Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992.

Daley, Charles, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960.

Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Dingle, A.E., The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984.

Donley, R.J.R., Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979.

Hirst, John in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008.

McQuilton, John, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979.

Pierce, P., The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Williams, M.,  ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 61-103.

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[1] Charles Daley, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960, p. 96.

[2]A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 64.

[3] Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

[4] Daley, p. 101.

[5] Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966, p. 166.

[6] Michael Cannon, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973, p. 139.

[7] John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp. 25-60.

[8] Cannon, p. 176.

[9] John Hirst in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, South Melbourne, Thomson, 2008, p. 139.

[10] A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 74.

[11] I.D., McNaughtan, ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.)  Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, p. 115.

[12] M. Williams, ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 72.

[13] F. G. Clarke, Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992, p. 128.

[14] Williams, p. 61.

[15] Ward, p. v.

[16] R.J.R. Donley, Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979, p. 8.

[17] B. Bessant, The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980, p. 51.

[18] Peter Pierce, The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xi.

[19] Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, 14 December 1880.

[20] Pierce, p. 58.

[21] Currie, ‘Diary 15 January 1876’.

[22] Currie, ‘Diary 7 September 1879’, ‘Diary 15 September 1879’, ‘Diary 13 October 1879’.

[23] Currie, ‘Diary 20 April 1879’, ‘Diary 27 April 1879’.

[24] Currie, ‘Diary 26 September 1878’.

[25] Currie, ‘Diary 28 September 1878’.

[26] Currie, ‘Diary 18 July 1879’.

[27] Bessant, pp. 58-9.

[28] Bessant,  pp. 58-62.

[29] Steele Rudd, in Bessant, p. 58.

[30] Currie, ‘Diary 30 January 1880’.

[31] Currie, ‘Diary 7 February 1880’.

[32] Currie, ‘Diary 10 October 1887’.

[33] Currie, ‘Diary 21 October 1887’.

[34] Henry Lawson, in Bessant, p. 66.

[35] Currie, ‘Diary 3 January 1888’.

[36] Currie, ‘Diary 8 November 1879’.

Nietzsche and the Enlightenment

A response to Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is often rightly considered a break with the Enlightenment. However, a close reading of his 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ reveals that it very much is a work of the Enlightenment, in that it deals with some of its claims and key concerns. Herein, we can discover thoughts on human nature, society, morality, rational man and truth. But do we need to understand Nietzsche himself to understand the ideas in his writing? The substance of the essay in question suggests Nietzsche might be unsympathetic to our claims of understanding. Indeed, were such a thing as understanding possible, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, it might yet still remain impossible.

Two popular interpretations of Nietzsche have been; first, that he was a sort of proto-Nazi, an idea which has since been discredited as stemming from deliberate misinterpretation and integration of his work into Nazi philosophy; and second, that his writings were contradictory and inconsistent, which has in part been blamed by scholars on Nietzsche’s sister, who herself edited and published some of his work posthumously. Nietzsche perhaps would not have been concerned with inconsistency or contradiction. His writings are very different in style to the orderly presentation of Descartes’ ‘Discourse on the Method’ or Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History’, and yet, especially in the case of this essay in question, they remain  powerful, lucid and rich.

Nietzsche is well known for the proclamation ‘God is Dead’. The controversial phrasing means this expression is not surprisingly often misunderstood, but for Nietzsche it means that the idea, the belief, the possibility, the illusion and the need for god is dead. Heidegger understood this as the death of metaphysics, although Nietzsche himself saw the metaphysical need as an offshoot of religion, rather than a precursor to religion. But if there is no god, then the foundation of morality and truth is removed, and anything might be possible. Nietzsche realized that the consequences of this could be terrible.

Dorinda Outram describes a common interpretation of the Enlightenment as

a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.[1]

Against this reading, it is relatively unproblematic to present Nietzsche as a break with the Enlightenment project. Indeed, Nietzsche is often placed by scholars as a descendant of the German Romantic movement. This movement was in part a reaction to the ideal of rationalism as presented by the Enlightenment. He was influenced by or admired men such as Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Wagner, among many others, although many would eventually fall out of his favour. As an anti-Enlightenment thinker, Nietzsche seriously questioned the idea of progress, and of the perfectibility of man or society.

While some writers such as Hobbes and Rousseau have rather distinct views of human nature when it is not constrained by society, Nietzsche, in this piece, has little interest in portraying human nature as either fundamentally good or bad. Human nature is what it is. What others with a pessimistic view of human nature might call bad, would perhaps be of little concern to Nietzsche. Indeed, it is precisely the capacity and desire for deception in man which shields him from the true nature of his existence,

And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous.[2]

While Nietzsche may have been angered by some of the ‘life-denying’ aspects of Christian morality, there is a sense that despite this general ‘self-deception’ toward human nature, he might have tentatively approved, if not with the means then at least with the end. According to Graeme Garrard, Nietzsche “thought that Voltaire had correctly realized that man is a ‘beast of prey’ and that civilization is a ‘tremendous triumph’ over his bestial nature.”[3]

One cannot help but get the impression from Nietzsche that he felt society to be limiting both to species and individual. In Nietzsche’s view of society, where ‘truth’ and morality are derived from using the established conventions, there arises a contradiction or tension between the unrestricted inquiry encouraged by the Enlightenment and the stability of the society. This can be linked to Nietzsche’s concept of herd morality, where truth means using the accepted designations for things, and the resisting of both lies and truths which could prove harmful. Unrestricted inquiry could challenge the accepted metaphors. But Nietzsche, as evidenced by his essay, does not hesitate to question the accepted metaphors and concepts.

For Nietzsche, it remains that man chooses for himself these limitations to form a society

From boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes – war of all against all.[4]

The use of the phrase ‘war of all against all’ demonstrates an intellectual link with Hobbes,[5] and is at odds with Rousseau’s conception of man in the ‘state of nature’. For Nietzsche, society is at least a ‘cease-fire’ if not a peace treaty, and also a first step in the origin of the puzzling human drive for ‘truth’.[6]

While society here may be considered a choice, humans are almost always born into society, the only choice being perhaps the unlikely decision to leave it. The consensus of society may equally be one of superstition, rather than that of reasoned explanation. According to Garrard, “Nietzsche enthusiastically commends the Enlightenment for its attacks on Christianity and its elitist disdain for la canaille, as Voltaire sometimes contemptuously referred to the masses.”[7]

But this disdain for the unenlightened mass, the mass which may not make as full a use of the faculty of reason, or adequate use of rationalism and skepticism, which may favour traditions and religion over science and critical enquiry; this disdain suggests that a rational education is a prerequisite for human value, for that is what the class whom Voltaire criticized lacked. Despite the heralding of universal and inalienable rights in the political movements which embraced the Enlightenment, it yet remained that the worthy person was the educated person.

In ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, Nietzsche unravels the web of pretensions which comprise the human intellect. The first pretension is the invention of ‘knowing’, the supposed ability to grasp ‘truth’. ‘Knowing’ is the source of pride which validates for man the value of his existence. Intertwined with this pride is deception, which the individual uses several forms of in maintaining himself against others, and which his nature leads him to use against himself.

In relation to the title of this essay, Nietzsche distinguishes lies from truth as a misuse of the fixed conventions of language. Lies or deception are not hated in themselves, but their harmful consequences are. Nietzsche considers any pretension to the possession of pure truth to be the result of forgetfulness; thus any moral obligation toward truth and away from lies is in the service of minimizing harm, and is a social obligation not stemming from any truth in itself.

“So far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.”[8] That is, to lie with the herd. The morality of truth is derived from the social obligation to comply with the fixed conventions and metaphors.

For Nietzsche, language demonstrates not only the subjective nature of perception (and thus the myth of objectivity) but also the human disregard for pure truth .

The formation of language is the result of metaphors built upon metaphors into the creation of concepts, which themselves have no direct relationship with the original unique experience, or the thing in itself. This concern partially echoes Descartes geometric argument involving a triangle; we know of a perfect triangle but have “no reason to be assured that there was any such triangle in existence”.[9]

The philosophical claim to truth is parallel to the claim of science to see material reality objectively. Both are impossible as they involve the subject. Logic, reason, time, space and numbers are all constructs, those means by which we attempt to ‘know’ are also the barriers to truth, dividing us from the ‘thing in itself’.

Towards the end of the essay, Nietzsche makes a distinction between intuitive and rational man. What they have in common is that the “drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive”[10]; but this drive is by its nature a creative drive. They are both creative in the sense above, yet have different aims. The creativity of rational man is used in concepts which can be used to guard against the uncertainties of life, whereas intuitive man regards life as something good in itself and uses his creativity to celebrate life. For Nietzsche this is a deception of a different nature, but one he seems more sympathetic towards.

The final paragraph of the essay is used to mock rational man. His ability to learn from and master circumstances which bring misfortune and thus not be perturbed by it, results in his deception being executed precisely when misfortune arises. The rational man who understands weather and can make the causal link between thunderous dark clouds overhead and imminent soaking rain, instead of using this knowledge to protect himself from the elements, must otherwise maintain his dignity and composure, to surrender to the elements he understands precisely because he understands them, rather than to flee from beneath them.

Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ constitutes an attack on the very foundation of the Enlightenment project; an undermining of the idea that man can objectively harness this faculty called reason and apply it to the world, in a sense, knowing and wielding truth. But with truth thus undermined, without subsequent destruction of the belief in reason and truth, we are left with a feeling of teetering and sinking, perhaps even of imminent collapse. Nietzsche has torn back the veil of concepts and shown us metaphors, the shedding of a façade revealing a rotting frame, safe perhaps only while all agree that it is so.

 

Bibliography

Descartes, Rene, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 3-26.

Garrard, Graeme, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4;  pp. 595-608.

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 114-23.

Outram, Dorinda, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-13.

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[1] Dorinda Outram, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 3.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, p. 117.

[3] Graeme Garrard, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4;  p. 607.

[4] Nietzsche, p. 115.

[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 185. “They are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man”.

[6] Nietzsche, p. 115.

[7] Garrard, pp. 599-600.

[8] Nietzsche, p. 117.

[9] Rene Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 25.

[10] Nietzsche, p. 121.

Heritage and Identity

The heritage of a group or community plays a major role in establishing and maintaining a sense of identity, pride and self-worth. Recognition of heritage and group morale often go hand in hand. Excluding or marginalizing a group’s heritage can have the effect of marginalizing the group, and reducing their sense of pride and identity. The heritage of any nation, as it is defined and regulated, and at least partially managed and financed by the national government, should be inclusive.[1]

The position which Graeme Aplin takes on the issue of minority heritage and marginalisation in the conclusion to his 2002 work  Heritage: Identification, Conservation, and Management is commendable, even if its expression carries problematic terms. If we are to achieve a sound theoretical basis for the application of heritage management then it is important to understand and be wary of the complexity of the terms we use, and the values or meanings often implicitly associated with them.

To this end, the following discussion shall consider the nature of heritage and how it plays a role in the formation of identity and pride within a group. What exactly is heritage and what difficulties does it present? An answer to this question shall be explored through a reflection on the Port Arthur Historic Site (PAHS), as within this example can be observed changing ideas about what constitutes heritage, the ability to openly confront a dark past, and the difficulties created when the present left a violent and indelible mark in 1996, in a place that otherwise was carefully frozen in time.

In turn, this will allow a greater appreciation of the importance of heritage to minority groups, especially those that perceive themselves as being threatened by assimilation into a dominant culture. This part of the discussion will focus on the issue of indigenous heritage in Australia, and indentify the many challenges that must be faced in order for it to be managed sensitively.

It is tempting to consider history and heritage as having a relationship as simple as perhaps ‘two sides of the same coin’. Yet while both deal with the past, the differences are much stronger and more complicated than saying that history has to do with recording and understanding the past, and that heritage is the objects and buildings that have survived from the past. While it is true that these things can be considered heritage, just as important is the understanding that ‘a people’s cultural heritage is also reflected in non-physical forms such as music, dance, drama, folklife, unwritten languages, scriptures, prose, poetry.’[2]

With these more nebulous aspects in mind, it is relatively easy to appreciate the difficulties that surround managing or making policy for these forms of heritage. Some, for example like language, might only be kept alive through practice, in which case they are just as much a part of living culture as they are heritage. [3]

Graham et al see the origins of heritage ‘in the tastes and values of a nineteenth-century educated elite’.[4] The nineteenth century was a time of rapid and dramatic changes and upheavals. Changing modes of production and social relationships gave rise to a yearning for a simpler and romantic past and a need to preserve its grander elements. Often heritage in this sense was valued for its aesthetic qualities rather than its role in an objective history of the past. An Australian example of this can be seen at the PAHS, in that

fifty years ago Australia’s convict past was not celebrated, nor were the sites associated with it. The name ‘Port Arthur’ was actually expunged in the late nineteenth century, and the town was renamed Carnarvon in the hope that its convict past would similarly disappear.[5]

Rather the site had become a sort of Arcadian parkland by the sea, with some of the original cottages converted for holiday-makers. If, as Trotter argues, ‘history is about knowing the past, warts and all, while heritage is about celebrating the past’,[6] early visitors to the PAHS may have found little in its past to celebrate. This in itself illustrates that there is little in the concept of heritage which is objective. From a physical manifestation of Australia’s ‘convict stain’ and shameful history (at this time a shameful history that still did not include acknowledgement of the poor treatment of minority groups or indigenous peoples), the site has since become one of Australia’s top ten most visited attractions, and attended by 90 per cent of tourists who visit Tasmania.[7]

This number of tourists demonstrates both the importance of heritage to tourism, and the importance of tourism to heritage. Heritage can be seen as a resource that takes several forms; economic, social and political. It can be exploited for financial gain or simply to sustain its management. It can provide educational and social experiences. And it can contain implicit political messages. It is for all of these reasons that Aplin insists that ‘heritage is both contested and culturally constructed, which inevitably makes it a highly political topic and one with a scarcity of clear-cut definitions or answers.’[8]

When Aplin uses the term ‘culturally constructed’,[9] he is referring to the fact that although heritage is concerned with the past, it is created in the present. Every decision that is made with regard its management – such as what to preserve, how to preserve and interpret it, and why – are all answered with reference to the values of the individuals and groups who must make these decisions. These values might almost always reflect the values, self-perceptions and preoccupations of the wider society. ‘Heritage… says a lot about who we think we are, as the things we save from change make certain ideals real and reinforce our identity.’[10]

Heritage is concerned with the preservation of a past that is no longer directly accessible and at best may still only continue in the memories of some individuals. Yet I would argue that heritage can tell us more about where we have come from than it can tell us about who we are, or where we might be going – although admittedly this may reflect the relative youth of European settlement in Australia. We might believe that as a society Australia has inherited the values of its early colonisers and immigrants – mate-ship, self-sufficiency, a fair-go – and we hear this often. There is however a tendency to only remember those values that are still acceptable today. Our collective memories are a part of heritage, a part that is shaped by the stories we tell.

Andrew Newman argues that museums and galleries (often the repositories of heritage) play a role in individual and community identity and that ‘this contribution appears to go beyond simple validation of identity and plays a role in its construction. How this occurs is a complex process that may be related to memory.’[11]

Heritage professionals then, need to approach the interpretation and display of objects and stories carefully and with sensitivity to their audiences, particularly when it comes to difficult events or periods in the past. ‘Individuals use museums and galleries in ways that respond to their own and their group’s needs. The stories that curators want to tell might not be those that the visitor or participant in a project takes away.’[12]

Are we, for example, able to display the PAHS with pride because we have as a society accepted this dark and inhumane aspect of European settlement, or is it because we do not feel a direct link between ourselves and the society that produced the convict penal system? If it is the latter, and we accept the argument of Graham et al that ‘preservation and restoration freezes artifacts in time whereas previously they had been constantly changing’,[13] does the act of preserving the PAHS help to make it recede into an ever more distant past? How does the 1996 massacre at the Broad Arrow Café fit into the story of the PAHS? Is it connected to the earlier history or is it an aberration, and at what point does it become part of the history and heritage of the site?

Heritage is not so much a window to the past in that it allows us access, but rather a still image constructed from an imagined past, however objective that imagining purports to be.

When an indigenous people is colonised by a foreign power that wishes to create a settler society in the ‘new’ land, a rift is created between the indigenous people and the new arrivals. I perceive a deep and potentially irresolvable conflict with regard to the history and heritage of European settlement in Australia and the indigenous experience of this. Is there a single story that could be told that would satisfy the role of heritage in creating identity, pride and a sense of self-worth for both groups?

Aplin argues that ‘while heritage of all groups should be sensitively dealt with, indigenous heritage is often the form that is most removed from dominant groups and governments and also most under threat.’[14] If so, must it be the majority who tells the more humbling story?

I would argue that in Australia’s case the dominant culture must be just as prepared to humbly face its dark past as it must be to include indigenous culture in its wider story. We may not be content with telling two separate and seemingly conflicting stories, but we must recognise difference in valid readings of history, or risk forsaking the potential of history and heritage as means of critical enquiry in helping us to understand how our identities have developed.

One means of Australia including Aboriginal heritage is through tourism, through both indigenous initiatives and partnerships with non-indigenous tourism operators. Trotter explains that ‘some Aboriginal people are critical of tourism because tourism programs focus on traditional culture, tend to ignore cultural differences and construct a pan-Aboriginality in place of cultural diversity as well as acting as a form of exploitation.’[15]

This sentiment is echoed by Aplin, when discussing how  ‘minority heritage gains its significance from being part of a living culture and way of life.’[16] There is a danger here of constructing an image of indigenous heritage and culture as something antiquated and needing preservation for it to survive, when in actuality it is one of the oldest surviving living cultures. As such, it does not so much need protection from the passage of time as it requires the freedom to exist and continue to develop.

Thus, according to Aplin, ‘even when the majority government is keen to officially recognise minority heritage as part of the national heritage, this can only be successfully achieved with the full cooperation of the primary owners of that heritage.’[17] There are many examples of cooperation, joint management and consultation in Australia with regards Aboriginal tourism and heritage, and this is something that needs to continue in order to avoid the danger identified by Linda Richter, that ‘in some cases, it may be more infuriating to be included if one finds the interpretation unacceptable.’[18]

The idea of including minorities in a national heritage can be celebratory, but also potentially assimilative. There is a suggestion of a need for wariness of this when Aplin argues that ‘national heritage is sometimes used by a government or dominant group in society as a concept to legitimise the state, to help define it, and to advance individuals’ identification with it.’[19] This can be observed in Australia’s use of a citizenship test requiring applicants to answer questions considered important for Australians to know. This sort of civic nationalism can be inclusive, but only to the extent that individuals are willing to subscribe to the values therein. Does it also mean that those who are born into Australian citizenship implicitly support these values?

How do we pin down the values of a nation? Are they manifest in those differences that some tourists travel to experience? The values that heritage can represent are generally the values of those making the decisions about the preservation, interpretation and managing of heritage. If the presentation of heritage is seen to be inclusive and sensitive it indicates that those responsible for its management share those values.

All this suggests that it is not possible to attempt to manage heritage objectively or dispassionately, but perhaps only to present it from several subjectivities at once. There is as much danger in concentrating too much on the negative and shameful aspects of a group’s history and heritage as there is in glossing over it entirely.

Bibliography

Aplin, Graeme,  Heritage: Identification, conservation, and management, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Graham et al., ‘The uses and abuses of heritage’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 26-37.

Newman, Andrew, ‘‘Social exclusion zone’ and ‘The feelgood factor’’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 325-32.

Pearson, M., and Sullivan, S., Looking After Heritage Places: The basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1996.

Richter, Linda, ‘The politics of heritage tourism development’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, pp. 257-71.

Trotter, Robin, ‘Heritage Tourism’, in Norman Douglas et al (eds.), Special Interest Tourism, Brisbane, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2001, pp. 140-63.

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[1] Graeme Aplin, Heritage: Identification, conservation, and management, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 352.

[2] Makaminan Makagiansar, The Work of UNESCO: Protection or Plunder? Safeguarding the future of our cultural heritage , p. 9, quoted in Robin Trotter, ‘Heritage Tourism’, in Norman Douglas et al (eds.), Special Interest Tourism, Brisbane, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2001, p. 143.

[3] Trotter, p. 148.

[4] Brian Graham et al., ‘The uses and abuses of heritage’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 29.

[5] Michael Pearson and Sharon Sullivan, Looking After Heritage Places: The basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1996, p. 170.

[6] Trotter, p. 154.

[7] Pearson and Sullivan, p. 170.

[8] Aplin, pp. 27-8.

[9] Aplin, pp. 27-8.

[10]Aplin, p. 15.

[11] Andrew Newman, ‘‘Social exclusion zone’ and ‘The feelgood factor’’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 331.

[12] Newman, p. 332.

[13] Graham et al., p. 31.

[14] Aplin, p. 140.

[15] Trotter, p. 156.

[16] Aplin, p. 142.

[17] Aplin, p. 143.

[18] Linda K. Richter, ‘The politics of heritage tourism development’, in Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries an introductory reader,  Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, p. 264.

[19] Aplin, p. 16.

Conflict in the Cultural Landscape

Discuss the Kulin people’s mode of utilizing and culturally constituting the landscape of the region. Compare it to that of the European invaders. How did these differences shape the struggle for control of that landscape?

Many years ago on the open plains of Victoria two very different and internally diverse societies and cultures met with one another and reached an inevitable nexus of conflict. To understand the reasons for this we need to examine the different ways the Kulin people and the European settlers used and culturally understood and identified with the landscape. The exploration of these differences will show how the conflict on the frontier and the struggle for control of the landscape would fall inevitably in favour of the European settlers. However, I hope that it will also show that this conflict was much deeper than a fight for the resources of the land. On the frontier were found to be social and cultural imperatives and incompatibilities which could not be resolved and were not able to coexist.

The Kulin people, that nation who occupied southern and central Victoria, like most Aborigines, were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.[1] They relied on a number of different food sources and great care was taken not to exhaust any of these. Food it seems was plentiful. At the time of settlement, Richard Broome advises us that “[e]arly European observations of Aboriginal eeling, fishing, vegetable gathering or possum hunting, reveal that a family could be fed with less than five hours of work.”[2] This was certainly remarkable to Europeans, and may well have helped give credence to both dubious myths that Australia was a land of plenty, and that the Aborigines were lazy. W.B. Kimberly, in the passage titled ‘A Retrospect’ in Bendigo and Vicinity describes the Aborigine’s labour as “simple, and needed no great exercise of ingenuity”[3], with Aborigines “living as did the people of the days of Nimrod”.[4] This we shall see, was a condescending over-simplification.

There is perhaps a much darker side to this early impression of plentiful food sources for Aborigines and the perceived ease of their acquiring food. Heather Goodall reminds us of the impact of diseases, both before and after the First Fleet, when she writes that it “may have been that in the aftermath of the 1789 epidemic, Aboriginal population numbers had not recovered sufficiently to exhaust the alternative sources of subsistence”.[5] Plagues of this nature were ‘imagined’ among the Kulin people as being spread by the Myndie, a snake-like creature that could stretch out it’s body from a tree to reach the farthest tribes and spread disease.[6] It is also likely that disease arrived in the region later than the outbreak of 1789, but occurred with similar effect.[7]

More sympathetic contemporary observers, such as Major Thomas Mitchell, were more aware of the unique skills and knowledge of the landscape that the Aborigines possessed, and found their guidance on his expeditions invaluable.[8] How was it then, that Europeans very quickly managed to fish out waterholes and creeks and decimate wildlife populations through their hunting?

It may be that the indigenous population reduced significantly in number by introduced diseases meant that for a time there were larger than usual stocks of wildlife food sources. Yet this also would be a shallow analysis. Before beginning the next section on specific practices, there are two ideas which should be reflected upon. Firstly, that “[t]he efficiency of Aboriginal occupation of the whole landscape and the exploitation of its resources rested on the network of Dreaming connections and kinship links”.[9] Secondly, that “[t]hroughout 1500 generations, ten times the gestation of the agricultural mode of production, Aboriginal Victorians shaped their relationship to the land”.[10] Clearly, to achieve subsistence for this length of time required the development of a refined, cautious and balanced approach to the practices of survival. We shall now investigate these practices in closer detail.

The use of a form of proto-agriculture known as ‘fire-stick farming’ was practiced by Aborigines across almost the whole of the continent. It served often multiple purposes and had a direct effect on early European perceptions of Australia. A primary purpose was to open up the country to travel and game species that like to feed on new grasses. In this way indigenous hunters were able to encourage kangaroos and other species to feed in certain areas suited to hunting. It also encouraged the growth of particular species of edible plants, whilst ash provided nutrients for the soil. The processes of burning and hunting were also excluded from certain areas for cultural and spiritual reasons. “Aboriginal people believe that their resources will decline through any lack of observance towards rituals set down in the Dreaming.”[11]

Although he is writing of the area around Adelaide and not that of our specific interest, the sentiment is accurately transferable to this region when Philip Clarke writes “[i]t is ironic that the open landscape that Aboriginal action created was undoubtedly a major attraction of the Adelaide Plains for European colonisers.”[12] In many cases Europeans interpreted this as a natural feature of a landscape destined for their needs.

When Major Mitchell was surveying the region on September 21, 1836, he recorded

[c]ertainly a land more favourable for colonization could not be found. Flocks might be turned out upon its hills, or the plough at once set to work in the plains. No primeval forests required to be first rooted out, although there was enough wood for all purposes of utility, and as much also for embellishment as even a painter could wish.[13]

There are a number of interesting ideas in this passage. Mitchell is trying to sell the landscape to his eventual readers, pastoralists and squatters. We have learned that a landscape like this is the product of Aboriginal burning, but we know that Mitchell was not exaggerating when he claimed it was perfect for sheep, despite the considerable degradation they would eventually cause to the landscape.

According to Broome, pastoralism in the four years between 1836 and 1840 saw the economic life of central and south-western Victoria change forever.[14] It was a time of confusion, contradiction and ultimately conflict. The sheep drove out the kangaroos and the emus, and ate out the murnong (daisy yam), which were a staple of Aboriginal diets in the region within a few seasons.[15] The Aboriginal response to this incursion was not passive, but the active responses to the invaders were anything but consistent.

Ann McGrath writes that the “Kulin were active agents who negotiated and permitted temporary access to their land in exchange for reciprocal rights to European resources.”[16] Being aware of this notion of reciprocity and willingness to share resources is essential to understanding aboriginal/settler relations. Assistant Protector Parker recorded in his Journal in February 1841 of an instance where “lower down the Loddon, 200 sheep had died from severe dressing since 1^st January, and this had given the men ample means of alluring the Aborigines around them.”[17] This sort of encouragement is a contradiction to the later attitude of the holders of the pastoral leases, who, according to Protector George Augustus Robinson, seem to “think it a hardship if a native appears on their run, imagining that a ₤10 licence gives them a legal right to expel the blacks.”[18]

This hypocrisy, on the one hand showing the Kulin they were welcome to injured sheep, or to share in the resources in exchange for the settler’s use of the land; and on the other driving them off their traditional lands. It is also likely that women would have been offered, in an increasingly complicating network of social relations and responsibilities. These sorts of contradictory exchanges created, in an atmosphere of tension, situations that caused Aborigines to respond with actions against Europeans “in the traditional mode of feud, and the upholding of traditional Aboriginal law over ritual or social transgressions.”[19]

We can find this sense of contradiction at the level of personality within Major Mitchell himself. On the one hand he is the surveyor, mapping the country, describing it and naming it in such a way to sell it to the pastoralists and agriculturalists. But on the other hand there is a sense of lament, because Mitchell knows the devastating effect that the spread of settlement is having on the Aboriginal populations. His time spent with them on his expeditions fostered a measured respect for the Aborigines. Baker argues that

Mitchell believed, it would be an act merely of justice, not generosity, to prohibit white men from killing kangaroos and emus which were as essential to Aborigines as sheep and cattle were to Europeans.[20]

This of course would be an insufficient measure and probably reflects sentiment rather than a practical suggestion. It was the herds of sheep and cattle that were more efficient in marginalizing these game animals than European hunters. To add further to the impracticality, it would have been impossible to police. One can feel the palpable sense of frustration in the journals of Robinson and Parker trying to bring those guilty even of murder before the courts. Robinson writes in his journal of a conversation between Assistant Protector Parker and the squatter Hutton in January 1840

Mr Parker was talking about the rights of the natives to the soil. Mr Hutton said he could not give in to that – it was never intended that a few miserable savages were to have this fine country. This is a prevailing opinion of the squatters.[21]

The language suggests Hutton was being asked to make unfair concessions to the land. The imperatives of colonization, it seems, allowed for no compromise.

Although Mitchell was anxious to be known and regarded for opening up the country, there is much evidence even in his own accounts of the cultural artifacts of European colonization preceding him. This was a third tier in the ultimate disruption of a way of life that had developed for tens of thousands of years, and also clear testament to the mobility of the Aboriginal people. In Baker’s book studying Mitchell’s experiences with Aborigines in ‘Australia Felix’ he recounts the time Piper discovered a razor in a deserted camp near Heathcote marked ‘Old English’.[22] Earlier in the expedition they had met with Aborigines whom Piper could not at once understand as they called out to him in Irish.[23]

With the European settlers came an abundance of cheap handmade tools, in many cases superior to those used by the Kulin people. Mitchell would frequently reward helpful Aborigines with ‘tomahawks’ on his expeditions.[24] These without doubt were much more effective and durable than the stone hatchets fashioned from the greenstone quarried at Mount William. The preparation of axe blanks at Mount William was the responsibility of a clan known as the Wurundjeri-willam, who traded these for possum-skin cloaks and other valuable items. Other clans traveled significant distances to obtain these important tools.[25] The proliferation of cheap European tools however, put the economic life of this particular clan in jeopardy, and it is thought the quarry at Mount William was abandoned within only a few years of settlement in the region.

As we have seen, the arrival of Europeans in the Kulin lands proved devastating to their way of life. Their resources were destroyed or made redundant, and their lives were considered by many to be worthless. It is difficult to interpret how the Kulin people would have made sense of what was happening around them. Clarke writes

According to early colonists, in Victoria people believed that in the farthest reaches of their known landscape there were wooden props which held up the Skyworld. Apparently the eastern prop, where British expansion was gaining, had rotted and unless gifts of possum skins and stone hatchet heads were sent straight away to the old man who looked after it, everyone would be crushed by the falling vault of the heavens… There was fear that the divide between the lands of the living and the dead would be permanently ruptured.[26]

To unfairly translate this into a ‘western’ worldview, the coming of the Europeans to Australia could be compared to the coming of the apocalypse.

Thus long before Cook landed at Sydney Cove, and long before Major Thomas Mitchell published his survey of ‘Australia Felix’ elucidating and confirming (if not the reality then certainly the expectation of) the rich prospects of this new land, the machine of British society had been geared to the purpose of colonizing a land such as this. It was both powerful and relentless. It would offer disease, displacement and ultimately a form of cultural redundancy to the Aborigines.

Conflict then with the indigenous population of Australia was inevitable, as the only thing they possessed of value to the invaders was the land itself. Their knowledge of the landscape may have been valuable to men like Mitchell, but it was scorned by the squatters. If the law lacked the will and capability to uphold the rights of Aborigines being as they were considered British subjects of Empire, then the squatters and frontiersmen seldom recognised that these rights even existed.

References:

Baker, D. W. A., The Civilised Surveyor, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1997.

Broome, Richard, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 121-167.

Brough-Smyth, R., Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne, John Currey, O’Neil.

Clarke, Philip, ‘Adelaide as an Aboriginal Landscape’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 69-93.

Clarke, Philip,  Where the Ancestors Walked, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2003.

Goodall, Heather, ‘Land in our own country’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 167-201.

Kimberly, W. B., Bendigo and Vicinity, Melbourne, F. W. Niven and CO., 1895.

McGrath, Ann, ‘A National Story’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 1-54.

Mitchell, T. L., Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, London, T. & W. Boone.

Mulvaney, J. and Kaminga, J., Prehistory of Australia, . Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999.

Parker, Journal of Assistant Protector Parker, month of February 1841.

Robinson, G. A., Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998.

---

[1] John Mulvaney and Johan Kaminga, Prehistory of Australia, . Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 79.

[2] Richard Broome, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, p. 123.

[3] W. B. Kimberly, Bendigo and Vicinity, Melbourne, F. W. Niven and CO., 1895, p. 5.

[4] Ibid.,.

[5] Heather Goodall, ‘Land in our own country’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. 169.

[6] R. Brough-Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne, John Currey, O’Neil, p. 445.

[7] Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2003, pp. 192-3.

[8] D. W. A. Baker, The Civilised Surveyor, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp. 106-147.

[9] Clarke, p. 21.

[10] Broome, p. 123.

[11] Clarke, p. 64.

[12] Philip Clarke, ‘Adelaide as an Aboriginal Landscape’, in Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible Hard Biscuits, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. 76.

[13] T. L. Mitchell, Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, London, T. & W. Boone,  p. 271.

[14] Broome, p. 129.

[15] Ibid.,.

[16] Ann McGrath, ‘A National Story’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, p. 14.

[17] Journal of Assistant Protector Parker, month of February, 1841.

[18] Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998, pp. 127-8.

[19] Broome, pp. 127-8.

[20] Baker, p. 146.

[21] Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 25 January, 1840. Volume 1, Melbourne, Heritage Matters, 1998, p. 139.

[22] Baker, p. 139.

[23] Ibid., p. 117.

[24] Ibid., pp. 106-147.

[25] Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked, p. 111.

[26] Ibid., p. 194.

The Machine-Breaking Movement

Was the machine-breaking movement aimed at destroying the entire industrial economy?

This essay on the use of ‘machine-breaking’ as a form of industrial protest in England in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century shall make use of the following question to frame an exploration of the themes surrounding the movement: was the machine-breaking movement aimed at destroying the entire industrial economy?

In deriving an answer to this, we must consider both the themes commonly expressed in the historiography relating to the disturbances in England between 1778 and 1831, as well as the deeper economic forces responsible for driving these arguably separate movements. This emphasis on themes will come at the expense of more rigorous case-study-like analyses, yet I believe that in the confines of this work that this approach will allow for a greater understanding of the deep and wide social changes occurring in England in these decades.

I shall approach this essay in three sections. The first shall seek to understand what the industrial economy looks like in England in these years, while also giving some consideration to the wider political context. It shall examine what sort of machine-breaking occurred where and when, and what historians have cited as the principal causes of this form of protest.

The second section shall narrow its focus towards the Luddite disturbances and consider the usefulness of analyses based on class and on E.P. Thompson’s concept of ‘moral economy’. Is the trouble simply a question of fair wages?

Lastly, the third section shall consider more directly the aims of machine-breaking during this period of seemingly relentless encroachment of capitalism and industrialisation into the working lives of England’s labouring classes. Perhaps it is not all quite as it seems: how had this way of life the machine-breakers were trying to protect really come about, and what are the meaning or lessons of its long-term defeat?

I

This section deals with some important background which will aid our understanding of the machine-breaking movement. It introduces the wider political and legal context, the scope and types of machine-breaking, and some historical perspectives. However, as we begin, it is important to comprehend that by the end of the eighteenth century industrialisation in England had reached a significant point of maturity. This maturity is not necessarily characterised by steam-engines, mills and factories; nor was the application of technology evenly spread, reliant as it was upon large amounts of capital.

John Rule puts forward the case that industrialisation in England depended upon and was preceded by a large pool of labour divorced from the land: “[t]he industrial revolution came at the end of extended and varied processes which formed the waged labour force.”[1] He argues that both skilled artisans in urban areas, and importantly labourers living in the countryside were dependent on a wage. These labourers living in rural England played a key role in what is known as proto-industrialisation. Rather than a factory system, it involved delivering work to labourers and their families who would work from home or in small workshops in trades such as textiles, nail-making or cutlery-making, and who were paid by the piece.[2]

In manufacturing industries where mechanisation was available, however, it usually only accounted for certain stages in the creation of the finished product. Thus;

[e]ighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton manufacturers, serving domestic as well as foreign markets, typically combined steam-powered spinning in factories with large-scale employment of domestic handloom weavers and often kept a mix of powered and domestic hand weaving long after the powered technology became available.[3]

This approach not only reflected the uneven nature of technological innovation, whereby some processes were more easily mechanised, but also the prohibitive cost of investing in steam-powered machinery or water-powered mills. Yet we read in Chapman that even by 1833, handloom weavers still outnumbered power-looms two and a half times over.[4] While on the surface this may seem that conditions are still weighted in the handloomer’s favour, we shall later investigate what this growth in power-loom use actually meant.

Finally, to complete the picture of industrialisation in England relevant to this essay, is to distinguish between factory production and that of workshops, which still retained and allowed for irregular work habits[5]; that the former “requires concentration of the processes of manufacture under one roof, the use of specialised machines, and the organisation and direction of the labour force by specialised management.”[6]

I wish now to briefly introduce the political context of the period we are interested in. The spectre of the French Revolution loomed disquietingly across the channel, and many popular disturbances in England in subsequent decades led some in authority to recall it. Britain was involved for the duration of the Napoleonic wars from 1803 to 1814, which had at times a negative effect on food prices; and on exports, resulting from blockades restricting access to foreign markets.[7] 1776 saw the publishing of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the birth of the age of political economy.

Parliament was quite active in passing legislation in these years. There were the Combination Acts of 1799-1800, earlier Acts against seditious meetings, the Unlawful Oaths Act, The Factory Acts of 1833. More relevant to the form and context of protest that we are interested in, was

the repeal in 1813 of the clauses of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers which had allowed magistrates to fix wages and, in 1814 of the clauses restricting trades to those who had served apprenticeships to them.[8]

Additionally, “in 1823, it ceased to be a capital offence to destroy silk or cloth in a loom or frame.”[9] But the spread of mechanisation in the textiles industry was also having its effect on labourers and their families; “handloom weavers’ wages tumbled. In 1800, these men could earn 30s per week; thirty years later this was down to perhaps 5s or so.”[10] Some of the reasons and implications of this will be looked at more closely in section three.

A significant proportion of machine-breaking that occurred in the period of 1788 to 1831 was a form of bargaining with employers for better conditions or wages. A tradition of direct action had grown up around the food riots of the early eighteenth-century[11], and arguably this had carried over to this form of protest. Numerous references are made to the restraint, discipline and leadership of the crowds.[12] But these qualities in the crowds also generated fear, as the example given by Randall shows.[13] Yet, the crowds also inspired fear of a more conventional kind, that left employers in many cases afraid to introduce machinery to their operations.[14]

Hobsbawm identifies two different types of machine breaking – one without any particular hostility towards the machines themselves but as a method of exerting pressure on employers, as seen above. The second Hobsbawm explains as “the expression of working class hostility to the new machines of the industrial revolution, especially labour-saving ones.”[15]

The power-loom seems to have met with the most opposition and angst from the handloom weavers. David Walsh writes “[t]he power loom was both a real and symbolic manifestation of the loss of the weaver’s independence as well as a threat to their livelihood”[16]; and, in the same work on the Lancashire risings of 1826 – “[i]t is clear that the precise objects of the worker’s anger were the power looms and nothing else.”[17]

However, an important reminder is provided by Munby, which brings us closer to the answer of the question at hand, when he writes of the Nottinghamshire Luddites in 1811: “the Nottinghamshire campaign was for a very special purpose. It was not directed against new machinery – there was no new machinery in the trade.”[18] This campaign was directed against practices which resulted in inferior quality goods and brought the trade into ‘disrepute’. In this we can see a notion of protecting the trade and an attempt to maintain standards by those who John Rule demonstrated as essentially wage labourers.

More generally, historians cite other reasons for outbreaks of rioting and machine-breaking. Munby largely argues a conventional line of unemployment and poor wages[19], and; “[m]achine-breaking, whether seen as part of an industrial struggle or as an unemployed campaign against the machine itself, was merely one form of the struggle against poverty.”[20] However, there usually needed to be some sort of catalyst or provocation to encourage such extreme behaviour and such resolve[21], and Walsh argues

The outbreaks of machine-breaking can been seen as the response of a community when all non-violent means of redress (appeals to magistrates, petitions and memorials to statesmen, deputations to employers, peaceful trades union bargaining, and the withdrawal of labor) had failed.[22]

While this shows that without doubt significant efforts were made to approach the problem through ‘legitimate’ means, the motivation seems to be for security and independence in their trade. To assess whether some of the examples above show the machine-breaking movement to be aimed at destroying the industrial economy is problematic, as essentially, these protesters were a product of and dependent upon the industrial economy. This idea will be examined further in section three.

II

Perhaps the most famous incidences of machine-breaking are those known by the term Luddite. These occurred primarily between 1811 and 1812 and predominantly in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Lancashire. The name comes from the semi-mythical figure Ned Ludd (or Lud) which was often used to sign Declarations or Letters from the movement.[23] Perhaps unfairly the term has since become somewhat synonymous with a devout opposition to technology.[24] But to base an assessment of Luddism on this, or on a simple but hard to refute story of economic hardship is to perhaps miss some of its complexity and nuance. We shall see that historians opinions of the aims of the movement differ, but then also did the aims and methods of the Luddites. Randall argues that;

[t]he single defining feature of Luddism was a common resistance to labour-saving technology… Moreover, Luddism, although characterized as a movement against new labour-saving technology, was in fact a complex amalgam of protests shaped by their local industrial, political, and historical contexts.[25]

There are perhaps complex reasons for the development of this resistance to labour-saving machinery, which I shall put forward in the last section; but it is just as relevant to take it at face value. And while Randall is correct in pointing to this common feature, just as important were the local contexts. As Patterson argues of the first Luddite riots of stocking and lace makers;

Contrary to a common impression, these were not – or only secondarily- directed against new machinery as such. What the Midland Luddites wanted was, by smashing machinery old or new, to force their employers into wage-concessions and stop the manufacture of the shoddy, ‘cut-up’ goods which they held responsible for the decline in trade, employment, and wages.[26]

This desire to protect the trade is a theme common to many of the examples of machine-breaking in the textile industry, where a decline in the demand or quality of goods had the potential to threaten a way of life.[27] Further evidence of this can be found in the Declaration of the Framework Knitters in 1812;

the Framework knitters do hereby declare the aforesaid Act to be null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever as by the passing of this act villainous and imposing persons are enabled to make fraudulent and deceitful manufactures to the discredit and utter ruin of our Trade.[28]

Patterson maintains that “even the active Luddites were not revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the social system, but men with concrete grievances which they hoped (however mistakenly) to remedy by a few displays of violence.”[29] This may seem at odds with the a letter sent by the Yorkshire Luddites to a master in Huddersfield in 1812 that spoke in such terms as

we hope for assistance from the French Emperor in shaking off the Yoke of the Rottenest, wickedest and most Tyrannical Government that ever existed, then down comes the Hanover Tyrants and all our tyrants from the greatest to the smallest, and we will be governed by a just Republic[30]

It is thus not surprising that considerable alarm developed amongst the authorities as to the actual revolutionary nature of the protesters, as strong and fearful memories remained of the French Revolution. Although the official response was to send a large military force to occupy the disturbed areas, there seems to have been little extensive violence, with only eight rioters killed.[31]

This military presence must have had its effect though, as by the time this period of Luddism drew to a close, the mobs had been replaced by “small gangs of stockingers, young men for the most part, who were prepared to do ‘jobs’ of machine-breaking for hire.”[32] It is also possible that this suggests a remnant core of die-hards, clinging on after popular support had waned.

I wish to consider also in this section whether an analysis based upon theories of class or on E.P. Thompson’s concept of ‘moral economy’ is a useful way of approaching this topic. While on the surface machine-breaking may seem a class movement, the reality is more complex. There certainly existed a sense of solidarity; as Munby points out, in the face of capitalist propaganda arguing the necessity of machinery to devastate foreign industry “[i]t is to the credit of the victims of ‘unrestricted machinery’ that… they refused to see foreign workers as their enemy.”[33]  This, however, does not necessarily correspond to it being a ‘class for itself’, but perhaps a class against capital.[34]

To adopt for a moment Andrew’s interpretation of E.P. Thompson’s view on class “as constituted by a form of conflictive behaviour generated primarily but not exclusively by common experiences in the production process”[35], then even this cannot fully explain the movement. What of the protests involving the support and ‘patronage’ of Sheppard and Aldridge in Gloucester in 1825?[36]

Yet if the machine-breaking movement were to be seen as a ‘class against capital’ then this should definitely not be mistaken with a desire for class ascendancy. Despite the political rhetoric present in letters and declarations, there is something in the actions of the protestors that harks more of traditionalism than radicalism. While to modern eyes machine-breaking may seem radical and dramatic, in actuality it was part of a tradition of direct action.

Walsh cites Randall’s view that “that even in the industrial sphere a ‘moral economy’ on E. P. Thompson’s model can be detected in the actions of working people and their social superiors.” [37] It is consistent in the sense that appeals were made to local authority figures such as the magistrates to intervene. Yet, assuming they had the will, the political,[38] legal,[39] and economic[40] realities had moved beyond their abilities to influence the situation. But within this context, it still remains doubtful that the machine-breakers were trying to destroy the entire industrial economy. As Randall instructs; for

Entrepreneurs… made no secret of their determination to press ahead with machinery… For them the old reciprocity between master and journeymen, between merchant and master clothier, was dead. The power of capital now knew no constraints. So the Yorkshire croppers were under no illusion about what they faced. Direct action was now the sole weapon in their armoury, for there was no point in persisting in a dialogue with no listeners.[41]

III

This last section deals with the inevitability of the conflict that would arise from the introduction of machinery. I do not wish to argue that the outcome was inevitable, but the odds certainly were against the working people who had been driven to these extreme measures. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the story of the hand-loom weavers is that, although many were artisans and journeymen who had served apprenticeships, very few actually owned their weaving frame.[42] The majority of weavers would rent their frames for themselves and their family to use. In this, there are two problems. Firstly it made access to the trade seem much easier than if one had to outlay the capital for a frame, as such

cotton weaving became a debased trade, the refuge of those displaced temporarily or permanently from other jobs, and the only hope for all who could not get factory work. For many, particularly women, the children and the aged who might be called the ‘subordinate’ members of a family, hand-loom weaving was in effect the same kind of by- occupation which domestic spinning had traditionally been.[43]

Not only was there a large pool of rural people available for wage labour interested in supplementing their income by taking up what had earlier been a profitable occupation, let alone just a sideline; speculators and small manufacturers would deliberately

spread the work over as many frames as possible, by giving each worker less than a full week’s material at the weekly distribution. It therefore suited the book of such employers that there should be a surplus of labour in the industry.[44]

In this we can see that these working people, as much as they were rallying against the forces of industrialisation, capital and markets, were actually a creation of the industrial economy. Investors thought legitimately, if unscrupulously, that there were profits to be made by leasing out as many frames as possible.

Thus the demands of the master weavers that Purnell was so dismissive of, fixed rates rather than increased prices, “hierarchical distinctions between master, journeyman, and apprentice, [and] making these designations universally applicable”, and limiting the number of looms per workshop,[45] was a grasp at a more traditional way of conducting business. These small manufacturers could not generate the amount of capital required to build water-mills or operate machinery and found themselves being squeezed from the trade, like the humble weavers, by the encroachment of larger operations.

This grasp at tradition is part of a bid for security amongst the changing social relationships of time. There were multiple reasons why workers opposed the new factories. Chapman cites the similarity they held to the parish workhouses, “not so much a question of architecture, or of the stigma attached to workhouse labour, so much as the insistence in both on close and continuous supervision of work by overseers.”[46] Workers valued their independence and being master of their own craft.[47]

Workers were not frightened by the machinery itself, but by the effect it would have upon them that they could clearly envisage. It meant they could not work at their own pace, but must be regulated by the demands of the machine. In itself, the increased output was not seen as an improvement, but as a threat to secure employment and wages – “a frightening total product – frightening to workers whose sense of what it was permissible for man to achieve” [48]

The effectiveness of the different outbreaks of machine-breaking varied considerably, but the authorities were willing to make examples. Thirty Luddites were hanged between 1812 and 1817[49] and several hundred machine-breakers and rioters were transported in the years until 1830.[50] Hobsbawm argues that on a small scale, machine-breaking was an effective tool, although “it could not hold up the triumph of industrial capitalism as a whole.”[51] In this he reminds us of the question, were the machine-breakers trying to destroy the entire industrial economy?

The answer is no. Such a movement would not only have been revolutionary, it would also have been more comprehensive in its targets. As this essay has shown, it was the power-looms and the factory system which raised the worker’s ire. It is worth reflecting upon, however, that it was due to a belief in laissez-faire political economy that led to an oversupply of hand-loom weavers that was unable to contract and expand with the laws of supply and demand.

John Papworth argues that the protestors were possessed of “a sense that human life was embarked on wholly new courses and one for which none of the traditional navigational aids seemed to be of any help in determining their nature.”[52] It may be that the inability to foresee even greater changes still to come led to the eventual defeat of the machine-breaking movement. But it was not to the future that they were looking, but rather to a belief in the certainties, securities, and prosperities of the past.

Bibliography

Andrew, Edward, ‘Class in Itself and Class Against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 16, no. 3  (September 1983), pp. 577-84.

Berg, Maxine, and Hudson, Pat, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 45, no. 1  (February 1992), pp. 24-50.

Black, Jeremy and MacRaild, Donald, Nineteenth Century Britain, London, Palgrave, 2003.

Bythell, Duncan, ‘The Hand-Loom Weavers in the English Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution: Some Problems’, The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 17, no. 2  (1964), pp. 339-353.

Chapman, S.D., The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, London, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1977.

Cole, G.D.H. and Filson, A.W., British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789-1875, London, MacMillan, 1967, pp. 111-115.

Hobsbawm, E.J., ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, no. 1  (February 1952), pp. 57-70.

Munby, Lionel, ‘The Luddites in the Period 1779-1830’, in Lionel Munby (ed.), The Luddites and other Essays, London, Michael Katanka Books, 1971, pp. 33-56.

Papworth, John, Small is Powerful: the future as if people really mattered, Westport, Praeger Publishers, 1995.

Patterson, A. Temple, ‘Luddism, Hampden Clubs, and Trade Unions in Leicestershire, 1816-17’, The English Historical Review, vol. 63, no. 247  (April 1948), pp. 170-188.

Randall, Adrian, Riotous Assemblies: popular protest in Hanoverian England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Rudé, George, ‘Protest and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Violence and Social Control  (Spring 1973), pp. 1-23.

Rule, John, ‘Labour in a Changing Economy, 1700-1850’, Refresh, 12 (Spring 1991), pp. 5-8.

Stearns, Peter. N., ‘The Effort at Continuity in Working-Class Culture’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 52, no. 4  (December 1980), pp. 626-655.

Thompson, E. P., ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 50  (February 1971), pp. 76-136.

Urdank, Albion M., ‘Custom, Conflict, and Traditional Authority in the Gloucester Weaver Strike of 1825’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, no. 2  (April 1986), pp. 193-226.

Walsh, David, ‘The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 26, no. 4  (Winter, 1994), pp. 601-621.

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[1] John Rule, ‘Labour in a Changing Economy, 1700-1850’, Refresh, 12 (Spring 1991), p. 6.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 45, no. 1  (February 1992), p. 31.

[4] S.D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, London, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1977, pp. 25-6.  A source quoted in Bythell, p. 342. puts this figure at 60,000 power-looms and 240,000 handlooms in 1833 in England and Scotland.

[5] Rule, p. 7.

[6] Chapman, p. 17. Emphasis added.

[7] Lionel Munby, ‘The Luddites in the Period 1779-1830’, in Lionel Munby (ed.), The Luddites and other Essays, London, Michael Katanka Books, 1971, p. 38.

[8] Rule, p. 8.

[9] George Rudé, ‘Protest and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Violence and Social Control  (Spring 1973), p. 20.

[10] Jeremy Black and Donald MacRaild, Nineteenth Century Britain, London, Palgrave, 2003, p. 102.

[11] E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 50  (February 1971), pp. 76-136.

[12] David Walsh, ‘The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 26, no. 4  (Winter, 1994), p. 610.

[13] Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: popular protest in Hanoverian England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 291.

[14] Munby, p. 36.

[15] E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, no. 1  (February 1952), p. 61.

[16] Walsh, p. 607.

[17] Ibid., p. 610.

[18] Munby, p. 38.

[19] Munby, p. 38.

[20] Ibid., p. 55.

[21] Walsh, p. 608. Evidence of Thomas Duckworth cited in C. Aspin, A Local History of Helmshore (Helmshore, 1969), p. 48.

[22] Ibid., p. 604.

[23] G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Filson, British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789-1875, London, MacMillan, 1967, pp. 111-115.

[24] John Papworth, Small is Powerful: the future as if people really mattered, Westport, Praeger Publishers, 1995, p. 30.

[25] Randall, p. 274.

[26] A. Temple Patterson, ‘Luddism, Hampden Clubs, and Trade Unions in Leicestershire, 1816-17’, The English Historical Review, vol. 63, no. 247  (April 1948), pp. 171-2.

[27] Black and MacRaild, p. 102.

[28] The Declaration of the Framework Knitters, Home Office Papers, 42/119. in G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Filson, pp. 112-113. The Act referred to is the 1788 Act for the Protection of Stocking Frames.

[29] Patterson, p. 175.

[30] A copy of a letter sent to a Huddersfield Master, 1812. Home Office Papers, 40/41. in G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Filson, pp. 114-115.

[31] Rudé, p. 17.

[32] Patterson, p. 174.

[33] Munby, p. 52.

[34] Edward Andrew, ‘Class in Itself and Class Against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 16, no. 3  (September 1983), pp. 577-84.

[35] Ibid., p. 579.

[36] Albion M. Urdank, ‘Custom, Conflict, and Traditional Authority in the Gloucester Weaver Strike of 1825’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, no. 2  (April 1986), pp. 214-221.

[37] Walsh, p. 614.

[38] Cited in Hobsbawm, p. 67. – “In I829 a leading colliery manager was asked by the Lords’ Committee, whether a reduction of wages in the Tyne and Wearside coal mines could ” be effected without danger to the tranquillity of the district, or risking the destruction of all the mines, with all the machinery, and the valuable stock vested in them.” He thought not.”

[39] Rule, p. 8.  The repeal in 1813 of the clauses of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers which had allowed magistrates to fix wages.

[40] Duncan Bythell, ‘The Hand-Loom Weavers in the English Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution: Some Problems’, The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 17, no. 2  (1964), p. 346.  Bythell makes the point that the distribution of factories, reliant as they were upon water power etc meant that weavers made redundant could not necessarily find work operation power-looms in factories.

[41] Randall, pp. 298-9.

[42] Patterson, p. 173.

[43] Bythell, p. 345.

[44] Patterson, p. 173.

[45] Urdank, pp. 223-224.

[46] Chapman, p. 54.

[47] Papworth, p. 33.

[48] Peter. N. Stearns, ‘The Effort at Continuity in Working-Class Culture’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 52, no. 4  (December 1980), p. 633.

[49] Rudé, pp. 18-19.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Hobsbawm, p. 67.

[52] Papworth, p. 39.

The European Union and the Schuman Declaration

Despite its political rhetoric, the European Union (and its predecessors) has been, from the very beginning, primarily an economic project. Its main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe. Do you agree?

Synopsis: The intention behind this essay is to investigate the rhetoric in the founding declaration of the European Coal and Steel Community. The ECSC was an economic project that was intended to pave the way towards closer integration of the original signatories. Because the plan was created with ‘functional spillover’ in mind, and because the EU considers the date of the Schuman Declaration to be its own beginning, I thought it would be interesting to consider whether the rhetoric in Schuman’s declaration could be taken seriously, or whether it was simply gloss for an economic project. This examination found that many of the key themes and ideas expressed in the declaration are part of the core values and aims of the European Union today.

This essay shall investigate the claim that the European Union (EU) and its predecessors have been primarily an economic project; and that its main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe. In this essay, unless stated or a distinction is otherwise required, I shall use ‘European Union (EU)’ as an umbrella term for it and its predecessors.

I shall argue that it was primarily an economic project, but that the ‘competences’ (to adopt the jargon) of the EU have expanded to include many social and cultural projects which manage to defy the primacy of economics in the agenda. In addition, I shall consider how some of the early rhetoric has paved the way for future projects and initiatives.

To do this, I plan to discuss the rhetoric of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), particularly the text of the Schuman Declaration; and its present day significance in the newer institutions like the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the Single Market. I think to argue that the EU’s main achievement has been the economic recovery and development of Europe is problematic. One would have to critique the contribution of the Marshall Plan to European recovery; and also, to try to understand what the individual states might have achieved without the EU. Instead I shall argue that the EU has been successful in shaping the way Europe is today – that is, yes, recovery and development were largely its achievement – but not necessarily that these would have been impossible or more successful without the EU.

This essay is written with an awareness of the causal relationship between economic policy and the society it in which it operates, thus arguing that the European Union has always been an economic project is not to suggest that there exists a disregard of European polity or society. The European project has undeniably been radically political, however a critique on the effectiveness or legitimacy of the EU’s political institutions are beyond the scope of this work.

I want to begin this essay by talking about the ECSC, which is officially regarded as the foundation of the European Union that we know today.[1] I want to assess this idea against the question of economics and political rhetoric. The brainchild of French bureaucrat Jean Monnet, the ECSC was brought into being with the Treaty of Paris 14^th April 1951,[2] and was predicated upon the idea that Franco-German political and economic relations were central to the reconstruction of Europe.

The most explicit aim of the plan was to prevent the threat of war by elevating all responsibility and authority for coal and steel production of the joining nations (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the original signatories to the 1957 Treaty of Rome) to a supranational body, theoretically making it impossible for one country to arm itself against another. Implicitly, it had grown from a plan to rebuild the French economy with German coal and steel.[3] Yet, despite its somewhat radical nature, it was not an ambitious project along the political lines of the Pan-European Union, which had sought to implement a parliamentary system of representation both for the people of Europe, and for its states. Instead, its influence has been felt in other ways.

In the post-war years there was much talk and campaigning for a federation of Europe, including a strong voice from Winston Churchill (who had no desire for Britain to be part of this).[4] Grand political schemes like the Pan-European Union never really made the leap from vision to reality, however it is interesting to note that similar rhetoric is not at all downplayed in the functionalist approach of the ECSC. In my view, the declaration delivered by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on the 9^th of May1950 has served to enshrine many of the core values of the present day EU.

It states that “[t]he pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe.”[5] Here Schuman links the acceptable economic to the controversial political. ‘Common foundations’ is a principle that has gone on to inform initiatives such as the EMU and the contentious Common Agricultural Policy, whereas ‘federation’ to this day remains a divisive subject, and instead, the less controversial and less constitutionally predicated principle of ‘subsidiarity’ is adhered to.[6]

Yet Schuman goes further, touching upon the historical, cultural and the ethnic divisions of Europe, saying that the ECSC “may be the leaven from which may grow a wider and deeper community between countries long opposed to one another by sanguinary divisions.”[7]

Not only have the language of the ideas of ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’ – whether considered complimentary or opposing – continued to be expressed in the debates over EU enlargement and expansion of competences, but we can see also that this is a process (rhetoric or not) that has been consistently engaged. As an example of widening we can observe the increases in member states in 1973, 1981, 1986, 1995, 2004, and finally 2007, bring the total number to 27 (with currently three more candidate countries). For an example of deepening, the direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979 and the introduction of the Euro in 2002 (although not its stated intention) shows some of the ways the EU has attempted or been able to come closer to its citizens.[8]

Consistent with this theme of the evolution of rhetoric into policy agenda is the vision of community between ‘sanguinary divisions’ put forward in the same quote above. In this context, I take ‘sanguinary’ to refer both to the idea that the peoples of the different nations of Europe are in fact different peoples by blood (a dubious, yet popular assumption), and to the destructive nature of the conflicts between them. 2008 has been proclaimed the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and the Europe Day poster for this occasion sports the slogan “It’s not them and us, it’s you and me”.[9] The poster depicts two children of distinguishable ‘sanguinary’ origins interacting (finger-painting a picture of Earth). What this shows is a consistent commitment to bridging both the perceived and real ethnic and cultural divisions which abound in Europe. Yet this also highlights what remains one of the EU’s most significant challenges as it works with Turkey on its accession process in what could be a very complicated integration project fraught with many similar difficulties as are faced by Germany with regard to its own Turkish minority.[10]

A further idea I wish to draw attention to in the Schuman Declaration is one based primarily on the economic rationalism of facilitating and not restricting trade, yet its evolution has had profound implications for the people and visitors to Europe, and to the process of enlargement itself. Schuman states that “[t]he movement of coal and steel between member countries will immediately be freed from all customs duty, and will not be affected by differential transport rates.”[11] This freedom of movement was to provide the precedent for the future creation of the Common Market and later the Single Market in 1993.[12] Now, in addition to coal and steel, people, goods, services and capital all enjoy a previously unprecedented freedom in moving between the states of Europe. Europeans have regularly crossed borders, but now in what is known as the Schengen area they can move from one state to the next without passing through border controls.

It is interesting to see an economic project being expressed in the above terms. It is true that a certain degree of rhetoric might be required to ‘sell’ an initiative like the ECSC, but still we must not forget that Monnet had already gained private approval from many of the key figures such as Konrad Adenauer and the US Secretary of State (as a step towards securing US presidential support) before Schuman made his address.[13] The ECSC was partly formed in the interests of securing peace and to meet US political pressure against imposing punitive measures against Germany in the style of the Versailles Treaty.[14]

Yet, other parts of the Declaration perhaps are not so benign or benevolent as they seem. Schuman makes a reference to one of Europe’s “essential tasks” being “the development of the African continent.”[15] At the time of the address, France still retained extensive colonial possessions in Africa and was involved in a war in Asia to retain its possession of what is now Vietnam, and by 1954, became involved in a long war against independence movements in Algeria.

What I hope I have demonstrated with this essay is that, behind the somewhat lofty and inflated language of the Schuman Declaration has been a theme of integration simultaneously economic, political and social that has since come into being in various guises.

The recovery of Europe is perhaps a misnomer, for prior to the Treaty of Rome founding the European Economic Community in 1957, Europe for centuries had been a peninsula of warring states. In contrast to a Europe resurgent and divided, is a Europe united. Rather, it could be argued that the European Union is responsible for the creation (a continuing process) of Europe, and although considerable differences remain, desire for unification at the political level remains strong. Yet, it’s success has been mixed, while both international and domestic business enjoy the uniformity of regulations and currency within the Single Market and EMU; on the other hand, it is questionable whether citizens of Europe identify with the EU as much as the integration project would hope. Kolakowski identifies that

The greatest achievement of European unification will certainly be a lasting peace. But the possibility of achieving such a peace depends on a number of conditions, nor just on the presence of a bureaucracy in Brussels.[16]

This may be true, but equally important has been the stabilizing effect of European unification. The benefits of joining the Union, primarily access to the Single Market (and it is in fact this which the EU regards as one of its greatest achievements[17]), requires potential members to accept the values of the Union that are formalized as the Copenhagen Criteria. These relate to democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law (among others), in addition to a market economy.[18] The creation of a union of states with a commitment to similar values and with the ability to openly and easily pursue economic relations is largely the result of a bureaucracy following the lead of the various treaties set out and agreed to by the individual member states. It is in this way that the European Union has been able to create a degree of political unity upon the strengths of its economic project, and, in my view a certain amount of rhetoric is useful in establishing the broader goals of a narrower project like the ECSC.

References

Churchill, Winston, ‘United States of Europe: Extract from speech at the University of Zurich, 19 September 1946,’ in Dick Leonard and Mark Leonard, The Pro-European Reader, London, Palgrave, pp. 13-16.

Cini, Michelle, European Union Politics: Glossary, on Oxford University Press, Available: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199281954/01student/flashcards/glossary.htm#S, last updated 2007, accessed 15 April 2008.

Dinan, Desmond, ‘Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Integration, 1945-1957’, in Ever Closer Union, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005.

The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

Europa, Europe Day Poster Gallery, 2008 ‘It’s not them and us, it’s you and me’, available:   http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/gallery/2008/index_en.htm, accessed 24 April 2008.

Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps,  http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008.

Europa: Ongoing Enlargement, available: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/s40015.htm, Europa, accessed 27 April 2008.

Europa, Overview of the European Union Activities: Internal Market, available: http://europa.eu/pol/singl/overview_en.htm, last updated December 2007, accessed 26 April 2008.

Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.

Europa, What is Europe Day?  http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/euday_en.htm, Europa, accessed 23 April 2008.

Kolakowski, Leszek ‘Can Europe Happen?’, The New Criterion, May 2003, pp. 19-27.

Schuman, Robert, Declaration of 9 May 1950, on Europa, Available: http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm, accessed 15 April 2008.

---

[1] Europa, What is Europe Day?  http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/euday_en.htm, Europa, accessed 23 April 2008.

[2] Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps,  http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008.

[3] Desmond Dinan, ‘Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Integration, 1945-1957’, in Ever Closer Union, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005, pp. 21-22.

[4] Winston Churchill, ‘United States of Europe: Extract from speech at the University of Zurich, 19 September 1946,’ in Dick Leonard and Mark Leonard, The Pro-European Reader, London, Palgrave, pp. 13-16.

[5] Robert Schuman, Declaration of 9 May 1950, on Europa, Available: http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm, accessed 15 April 2008.

[6] Michelle Cini, European Union Politics: Glossary, on Oxford University Press, Available: http://www.oup.com/uk/orc/bin/9780199281954/01student/flashcards/glossary.htm#S, last updated 2007, accessed 15 April 2008.

[7] Schuman Declaration.

[8] Information on newly joined countries found on Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.  Europe in 12 Lessons: 10 Historic Steps, available: http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_2/index_en.htm, Europa, accessed 15 April 2008. Ongoing Enlargement, available: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/s40015.htm, accessed 27 April 2008.

[9] Europa, Europe Day Poster Gallery, 2008 ‘It’s not them and us, it’s you and me’, available:   http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/gallery/2008/index_en.htm, accessed 24 April 2008.

[10] The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

[11] Schuman Declaration.

[12] Europa, Europe in 12 Lessons.

[13] Dinan, p. 24.

[14] Dinan, p. 20.

[15] Schuman Declaration.

[16] Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Can Europe Happen?’, The New Criterion, May 2003, pp. 19-27.  p23

[17] Europa, Overview of the European Union Activities: Internal Market, available: http://europa.eu/pol/singl/overview_en.htm, last updated December 2007, accessed 26 April 2008.

[18] Europa: The 2004 enlargement: the challenge of a 25-member EU, available:  http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/e50017.htm, last updated 23 January 2008, accessed 26 April 2008.

Nationalism and Identity

What major differences exist between historians of nationalism, how do they justify their positions, and are resolutions of those differences possible?

 

The purpose of this essay is to examine some of the major theories which different historians of nationalism hold; how they justify these theories; and further, whether there can be any resolution between these often very different ideas. These examinations by necessity shall be succinct and confined to the primary elements and strongest voices.

During this process we shall observe some common and recurring themes. These will include but are not limited to: the historicity of nations versus the modernity of nations – are they ancient, or a product of modernity; ancestral and cultural myths and memories; the role of ethnicity; the role of elites; the role of institutions; and, primary and secondary nationalism.

The study of nationalism and identity requires many of the concepts I have mentioned above (and others) to be understood in new and complex ways; either more strictly adhering to their definitions or becoming contextually qualified. They are presented here in a way that hopefully make some of their uses in the literature more instructive.

I intend to approach this essay by firstly briefly discussing what nationalism has been understood to mean by some prominent historians. We shall quickly see that this is predicated upon the concept of nation itself. Therefore, a more in-depth discussion of how the major authors have handled this question logically follows. Within this comes an examination of the formation of a national consciousness. That is, if a nation does exist, how did it come to be and what processes have caused its members to consider themselves thus?

Lastly, in observing that historians of nationalism are rarely ever nationalists themselves (although few deny its power), I want to consider what weight they give national identity amongst the plethora of identities which individuals must assume. That is, having seen in the last section how it might have formed, how important is its subsequent role? I am determined to challenge the notion that national identity is the most essential, an idea which I am hoping the preceding discussions shall help make clear.

Throughout this essay will be consideration of the overarching question of whether these theoretical differences can be resolved, and also what might be the purpose of this resolution. I also wish to make clear from the outset that I shall align my own thinking more closely to the ‘modernist’ orientation.

Before I begin the section on nationalism it might prove useful to give a very brief account (necessarily vague, in-exhaustive and inconclusive) of the four paradigms mentioned above. I have relied heavily on the informative work of Anthony Smith in this undertaking. The modernist paradigm see nations as a product of modernity, that is, following events or changes such as industrialisation, capitalism, the enlightenment, and the French Revolution; and/or they were necessary to fill a social-political void and were facilitated by ‘invented traditions’ and the imaginings made possible by ‘print-capitalism’. Primordialism assumes that there is something essential or natural about the nation, that it has been present from the very beginning of human history. It might consider that members of these nations presume that links of blood, language or culture are somehow ineffable. Perennialism is primarily a historical perspective and differs between those who observe the continuity or persistence of particular nations throughout history; and those who see the concept of the nation itself as perennial, if not particular nations themselves. Ethno-Symbolism is more concerned with subjective elements and considers the influence upon nation formation of early collective cultural identities. It sees nations as coexisting with other forms of collective identity yet asserting a peculiar emotional hold over its members, and emphasizes the analyses of the cultural factors of this over an extended period of history.[1]

I shall now turn to talking about the idea of ‘nationalism’ itself. What I want to clarify is this: when we hear the term used in the public discourse or historical literature – whether derogatively, analytically, politically or historically – what exactly is meant?

I owe to Kosaku Yoshina my understanding of the distinction between primary nationalism, aimed at forging national identity and realising specific goals; and secondary nationalism, aimed at the maintenance or re-invigoration of identity in established nations.[2] The focus of this essay will be almost exclusively on primary nationalism.

Nationalism is often popularly confused with patriotism. This confusion could forgivably be attributed to the conflation of the separate concepts of nation and state. Historians generally agree that patriotism and nationalism do have a relationship of sorts, but conceptually they remain quite separate. Nationalism, although often coloured with patriotic language of love of one’s country, in reality embodies much more specific aims that are not necessarily consistent with that of the regime or state it finds itself within. As Daniele Conversi points out “[n]ationalism is indeed a movement aimed at challenging or capturing the existing political order’s legitimacy”[3]

Therefore nationalism can be seen as something that can exist independently of the state,[4] whereas patriotism is considered a product of, or even sometimes a reaction to the state.[5] Yet, to John Breuilly “[n]ationalism is inconceivable without the state and vice versa.”[6] He writes that “the concept of state modernization provides the key to contextualizing nationalism.”[7] This is a common understanding that sees nationalism as a prominent feature of modernity. Yet despite the readily accepted power of nationalism, there is some disagreement over its role as an ideology. Benedict Anderson speaks of its “philosophical poverty and… incoherence”[8], whereas the staunch modernist Elie Kedouri considered it in the 1960s as “a comprehensive doctrine which leads to a distinctive style of politics. But far from being a universal phenomenon, it is a product of European thought in the last 150 years.”[9]

The modernist theme continues, perhaps because, even if nations did exist in medieval or ancient times, their being the primary concern of a political or cultural movement is a modern phenomena. Ernest Gellner has to some extent tried to explain it in loose economic terms as “a phenomenon connected not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but with its uneven diffusion.”[10]  That is to say, that the competitive forces and imbalances of power associated with these created the perfect ‘other’ for both the powerful and the powerless to oppose themselves against. An example of this might be the Nazi rhetoric concerning the perceived affluence of German Jews limiting the opportunities of other Germans; or, conversely, the sort of rhetoric one heard from the One Nation Party in Australia in the late 1990s, aimed at limiting the sharing of ‘wealth’ perceived as belonging to the nation

The immigration policies of the major political parties during the 1980s and 1990s have proven disastrous, proceeding as if there was no balance of payments problem, no foreign debt and no geographical or environmental constraints to population growth. If continued, such immigration policy will irreversibly alter the natural and urban environments, economic viability as well and [sic] undermining the maintenance and further development of a unique and valuable Australian identity and culture.[11]

Notice herein the themes of maintaining unique culture and identity. The idea of maintaining an identity is a part of what is known as secondary nationalism, as mentioned at the start of this section. This is where the state (and, for Yoshino the marketplace of ideas and culture[12]) takes an active role in promoting and preserving the way a nation sees itself. Both of these elements present further complications to our understanding. Anthony Smith manages to connect these elements with the other primary concerns usually involved when defining nationalism. To him, nationalism can be considered an “ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity for a population which some of its members deem to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’.”[13]

Smith’s view encompasses many of the factors which have arisen in this section – although, consistent with the ethno-symbolist paradigm he shies away from any reliance on a modern condition. As such, and albeit with that qualification, I present it here as a more comprehensive definition of nationalism than is offered by other authors, and; one that is less reliant upon – and thus more inclusive of – the specific nuances of a case in point.

As the previous discussion has shown, definitions in the historiography of nationalism elicit less academic opposition the more inclusive they are. Controversy arises when one attempts to say ‘this is how it is’. Hobsbawm shows his awareness of this when he writes “we are trying to fit historically novel, emerging, changing and, even today, far from universal entities into a framework of permanence and universality.”[14]

If we set aside for a moment whatever trepidation we might feel towards Hobsbawm’s overtly modernist approach, the most important lesson this passage yields is an emphasis on change. Whatever a nation has been or may yet become is not what it shall always remain. This is, I believe, where the key differences among historians of nationalism reach an impasse. When a nationalist or an historian of nationalism set out to say ‘this is what a nation is’, their claim must cross the divide between history and modernity; between objectivity and subjectivity; between ethnicity and culture; between territory and homeland.

Yet if we accept the notion of the ‘philosophical poverty’ of nationalism, how can we seriously expect to define a social phenomenon that quite often knowingly relies upon half-truths and fabrications? The problem lies in the disconcerting truth that for every example that exists which fits one’s definition, there are probably several others which do not.

It has been common to focus on the objective elements of nationhood. These are things which are easily measurable and observable. Often quoted is Joseph Stalin’s definition: “a nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”[15] It appears straightforward, yet it runs the risk of becoming a tool of exclusion rather than one of inclusion. But then, this often seems to be a primary aim of nationalism, as illustrated by the One Nation Party policy used as an example earlier.

Whether for better or worse, Benedict Anderson instructs us that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”[16] Therefore, if we rely on an objective definition of the nation such as the one proposed by Stalin, we risk giving legitimacy to the homogenizing forces that history has shown time and again to be more than willing to exclude individuals (often quite violently, though perhaps more often not so violently) from their societies.[17] To further criticize this definition and its approach, one need only ask certain questions of it. Such as, how many years constitutes ‘historical evolution’, and what might have been the role of key actors in shaping that process? If the country we now know as France was once ruled by the descendents of the Franks whilst the majority of the population were peasants descended from Gaulish tribes, then, according to the objective definition – how could a French nation possibly have existed until after the revolution in the late 18^th Century brought forced adherence to the French Language? Did the different regions with their own vernaculars and their own economic life (remember, France was divided into a number of généralités each with quite varied taxes and laws[18]) then fall into this definition of a nation? They could be said to possess all of these objective criteria.

It is precisely problems such as these that has led to criticisms of objective definitions of nations. An approach which differs to this is one that emphasizes the subjective elements that are said to make up the nation. This refers to intangible notions of community, shared memories, common culture and history and so forth. One of the more famous ideas that follows this line of thinking is Benedict Anderson’s concept of the ‘imagined community’ created by the modern forces of ‘print-capitalism’.[19]

Part of his at times confusing argument is the idea that humans required a modern ‘apprehension’ of time (covering notions of ‘empty time’, ‘horizontal time’, history as cause and effect, and calendar time. Time, that is, divorced from the divine) to be able to imagine a community such as a nation existing.[20] This ‘apprehension’ was further enhanced by the advances of the secular sciences and brought to the literate through popular newspapers.

If the role of ‘print-capitalism’ as Anderson instructs us is true – and I don’t suppose that it isn’t – then it is imperative to recognise and observe that the content which thus creates this ‘imagined community’ of the nation is shaped and controlled by forces with their own motives and agendas, be they political, economic or otherwise. Controversy has been used to sell news, just as censorship has been used to suppress it.

Moreover, (and I apologize for the over-simplification) does the reader of one newspaper then ‘imagine’ the community differently from that of a reader of a different newspaper? If one were to survey readers of Melbourne newspapers The Age and The Herald Sun on how they conceive the Australian nation (assuming such a thing exists), would each readership return different results?

Anthony Smith criticizes relying on subjective definitions when creating understanding of the nation as too vague[21], but also finds subjective-objective (an amalgamation of both) definitions problematic for what I will call the ‘glass-slipper effect’, whereby only a true instance of the phenomenon in question (Cinderella’s foot or the nation) can fit the definition (the slipper), and instances which don’t conform (the ugly stepsisters) are either altered to fit (in some stories they mutilated their own feet) or discarded (in other stories the prince cut off their heads). Herein lies the problem of trying to create final definitions for what are – as we have already learned – changing phenomenon.

Despite this, there is something quite important that can be learned from studying subjective definitions of the nation. That is the role of identity. Miroslav Hroch speaks of the various relationships that tie large groupings of people together. The following passage of his work emphasizes three of these as irreplaceable:

a memory of a common past, treated as a destiny of the group; a density of linguistic or religious ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it; and a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society.[22]

Of particular note here is the emphasis on ‘equality of all members’ and ‘civil society’. These are ideas generally only likely to be found articulated in the modern period, rather than the middle-ages or earlier. And yet, is Hroch correct in saying that these three relationships are irreplaceable, and together suggest nation-ness? Maybe, but I think Hobsbawm comes closer to the truth when he argues that “we cannot assume that… national identification… excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being.”[23]

With these two cases in mind, and, to persevere with Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, surely much stronger than the idea of a common history must be the very real, tangible everyday institutional interactions and relationships that people experience and are aware of others experiencing. Hobsbawm manages to eloquently capture this vital perspective in his work ‘Nations and Nationalism Since 1780’. He writes of nations:

For this reason they are, in my view, dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist.[24]

There are times when these factors, which although shared belong exclusively to individuals, override the importance that people might attach to being part of (as opposed to simply belonging to) a nation.

If we consider global migration patterns, particularly following the Second World War but certainly for many centuries prior, there is a clear pattern that shows there exists in individuals minds higher priorities than some definitions of nations and nationalism suggest. Cultural barriers can be reduced through learning, understanding and a willingness to engage. Especially when not fleeing war or natural disaster, migration is generally a permanent or temporary attempt to better the relationship that the individual has with the institutions of society such as employment, education, politics, the community, and so on. Often these needs and hopes are exploited or misused by governments or companies as can be witnessed by cases of indentured labour,[25] and the experiences of Turkish migrants to Germany who were encouraged by the government to supply unskilled labour in the 1950s, then offered cash incentives to leave in the 1980s. The result being that many of Germany’s 2.6 million Turks today do not feel welcome in the only country that they know.[26]

Care must be taken here not to suggest, in the absence of a national identity which Smith defines the ideal as “distinguished by its concern for collective character and its historical-cultural basis”,[27] a reversion to the Marxist view that says individuals posses a single primary identity – economic. While an individuals relationship, participation and sense of opportunity with regard to the economic life that surrounds them is strongly influential, “the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people”[28] extend much further than being simply a product of these circumstances.

George Schöpflin writes of the unwelcome return of identity politics to Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. The reason for this, he says, is because “the supremacy of the state went unquestioned until the 1980s… In this very stable order, collective identities had no serious, explicit role to play.”[29] This theory finds some support in the work of Walker Connor who insightfully highlights what may be a major contradiction of modern state politics. He argues “legitimacy cannot be inferred from a peaceful situation.”[30] Therefore, a state does not need legitimacy to function. To return to the argument of Anderson that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time”,[31] the question which comes to my mind is this: is the political need for nation-ness as rationally obscure as that legitimating rule by ‘divine right’?

As this discussion has revealed, the differences between historians of nationalism are varied and great. What needs to be understood if these differences are ever to be resolved is this: whatever role nations or nationalism may have played in the pre-modern age, much more important are their present manifestations. The notion of relying on such vagaries as a common or shared history might be perfectly adequate when trying to understand what draws large groupings of people together, yet becomes absurd when considering the reasons behind one nation opposing itself to another. In the majority of cases, the reality will be that these opponents have much more in common with each other than either of them have with their ancestral forebears of even one hundred or two hundred years ago. What they have in common is that they are made up of individuals with needs, fears, dreams, hopes and wants who see in the nation something that can protect them from the changing forces in the globalizing world. Conflict arises when groupings find themselves having to share their favourable relationship to a local or global economy with those whom they see as different from themselves, and these fears about sharing are upheld by a perversion of the economic rationale of scarcity, the perception that there is not always enough to ‘go around.’ A society does not distribute benefits to all its members in equal proportion to their contributions. When the welfare state is supposedly governed of the people and by the people, the role nationalism plays is to judge who those people are; but the nation, like the dynastic regimes of old, is also susceptible to the forces of change and the growing consciousness of the people who believe themselves under its protection.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities 2^nd ed., London: Verso, 1991.

Breuilly, John. ‘The State and Nationalism’, in M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson (eds.), Understanding Nationalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, pp.32-53.

Connor, Walker. ‘Nationalism and Political Illegitimacy’ in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. D. Conversi. London: Routledge, 2000.

Conversi, Daniele. Introduction to Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. D. Conversi. London: Routledge, 2000.

Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality 2^nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hroch, Miroslav. ‘Real and constructed: the nature of the nation’ in The State of the Nation. ed. J. A. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.91-107.

Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism 4^th ed., Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1993.

Muller, Jerry Z. ‘Us and them: the enduring power of ethnic nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No 2, March-April 2008, pp. 18-36

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Immigration, Population and Social Cohesion Policy 1998. Available: http://www.australianpolitics.com/parties/onenation/immigration-policy-98.shtml, Accessed: 11/05/2008.

Robertson, Robbie, The Three Waves of Globalization, London: Zed Books, 2004.

Schöpflin, George. Nations, Identity, Power, New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

Szporluk, Roman. ‘Thoughts about change: Ernest Gellner and the history of nationalism’ in The State of the Nation. ed. J. A. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.23-40.

The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

Townson, Duncan France in Revolution, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12

Yoshino, Kosaku. ‘Japan’s Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective’, in M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson (eds.), Understanding Nationalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, pp.142-64.

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[1] Anthony D. Smith. Nationalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2003, pp.45-60.

[2] Kosaku Yoshino, ‘Japan’s Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective’, in M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson (eds.), Understanding Nationalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p.142.

[3] Daniele Conversi. Introduction to Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World, ed. D. Conversi. London: Routledge, 2000, p.6.

[4] Smith, p.16.

[5] E. J. Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism since 1780 programme myth and reality 2^nd ed., Cambridge: Canto, 1992, pp. 89-90.

[6] John Breuilly, ‘The State and Nationalism’, in M. Guibernau and J. Hutchinson (eds.), Understanding Nationalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, p.32.

[7] Breuilly, p.51.

[8] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 2^nd ed. London: Verso, 1991, p.5.

[9] Elie Kedourie, Nationalism 4^th ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1993, p.68.

[10] E. Gellner, Thought and Change, London, 1965, p.72, quoted in Roman Szporluk. ‘Thoughts about change: Ernest Gellner and the history of nationalism’ in The State of the Nation. ed. J. A. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.23-40.

[11] Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Immigration, Population and Social Cohesion Policy 1998. Available: http://www.australianpolitics.com/parties/onenation/immigration-policy-98.shtml, Accessed: 11/05/2008.

[12] Yoshino, p.142.

[13] Smith,  p.9.

[14] Hobsbawm, p.6.

[15] Joseph Stalin. In Smith, p.11.

[16]Anderson, p.3.

[17] Jerry Z. Muller, ‘Us and them: the enduring power of ethnic nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No 2, March-April 2008, pp. 18-36

[18] Duncan Townson, France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12

[19] Anderson, pp.42-5.

[20] Ibid., pp.23-6.

[21] Smith, pp.11-12.

[22] Miroslav Hroch. ‘Real and constructed: the nature of the nation’ in The State of the Nation. ed. J. A. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.93-4.

[23] Hobsbawm, p.11.

[24] Ibid., p.10.

[25] Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization, London: Zed Books, 2004, p.145.

[26] The Economist Magazine website, Germany’s Turkish Minority: two unamalgamated worlds. Available http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10958534&CFID=6452871&CFTOKEN=43293919, Accessed: 22/5/08.

[27] Smith, p.27.

[28] Hobsbawm, p10.

[29] George Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power, New York: New York University Press, 2000, p.13.

[30] Walker Connor, ‘Nationalism and Political Illegitimacy’ in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, ed. D. Conversi. London: Routledge, 2000, pp.37-38.

[31] Anderson, p.3.