It is not often the case that I use this blog in order to share thoughts relating to my former profession as an academic specialist on south-eastern Europe. As I was pottering in the garden this morning, however, a thought came to me that is worth sharing more widely.
In the decades before the Great War the constituent nationalities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire agitated for their liberation from “the prison-house of nations”. At the Versailles conferences and related meetings which produced the succession of treaties clearing up after the war a number of new states were created that were intended to give substance to their search for “liberty”. It didn’t take long, however, for these newly created states to be themselves castigated as “prisons” denying their constituent minorities of their freedom. I am familiar particularly, of course, with the way in which the new Yugoslavia was attacked immediately by advocates of a separate Croatian state, despite the fact that the moving force of the unification of the South Slavs had been in large measure Croatian politicians. Later it was the turn of Czechoslovakia to be represented as an “unnatural union” of the Czechs and the Slovaks.
This process reminds me very much of the current debate in the UK about our membership of the European Union. I have not heard the phrase “prison-house of nations” used, but the tone of the debate is much the same. Advocates of “liberation” see their achievement of separate status entirely in terms of a new freedom. Already, however, nationalist parties in Britain have begun to agitate for their liberation from the British “prison-house”, especially the Scottish National Party, but advocates of greater independence for both Wales and the north of Ireland also are beginning to be heard.
Of course, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was never entirely a prison, and the newly created states after 1918 soon began to discover their losses as well as their gains as independent states.* The European Union has never been a “prison” in which the UK has been confined, and there is something hyperbolical about that as a description of the situation of Scotland within the UK. Nevertheless, I do have a definite feeling of “Here we go again!” and a wish that more people would learn a little more about history.
Sting has a great song entitled “History can teach us nothing”, which includes the refrain, “Sooner or later …. we’re going to throw the past away.” It is an enticing idea in many respects, but of course we can never do that. We can question the illusory and utopian idea that it might be possible for nations to achieve some situation in which their liberty is perfect. In pursuit of that illusion I fear that we are likely to loose more than we will gain.
*This is a bit arcane for most of my readers I guess, but my good friend the late Prof. Mustafa Imamovic, from Sarajevo, stirred up quite a bit of controversy by his pointing out that the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina might actually have had several positive aspects to it.