Anyway, it was on the eve of independence – or on the brink of the precipice, as it must have seemed to some Czechs – that Thomas Masaryk gave his piece of advice. As a professor and a liberal humanist, he could be long-winded and obscure. This time, however, he was very brief indeed. He said to the Czechs: ‘Don’t be afraid – and don’t steal!’
What did he mean by that? Why should independence suddenly turn the Czechs into a race of thieves, and even if there were to be an outbreak of burglary in Prague after Masaryk had become the first President of the Republic, why should it matter so much? But the Czechs understood him very well. Like the Scots, they had acquired over the years their own double nature, their own Bohemian antisyzygy.
There was the sentimental, emotional side of being Czech: the love of their own history, the telling of tales, the joining in the lovely, melancholy songs everyone knew by heart. But there was also the furtive, sly, materialistic side – the Czechness of the Good Soldier Svejk – with its tendency to malice, envy and selfish greed. When Masaryk said: ‘Don’t steal’, he was telling the Czechs that they would have to rise to their future. If independence was not a moral achievement, it was nothing.
Is there a morality about nationalism? Here at Dunoon, you have been talking about the ‘how’ questions of a free Scotland – how to convince the Scottish people of your capacity for leadership, how to relate to other parties and movements, how to reconstruct the social and material base of this damaged nation. But there are of course also lists of ‘why’ questions. Why do you want Scotland to be independent? Why do you demand that this nation – which continues so doggedly but invincibly to exist – should also have its own state? Why should any nation be independent?
I know that every man and woman here has a personal answer to these ‘why’ questions. Answers like these:- Because if Scotland does not achieve self-government, this society will erode until it loses its identity altogether – ‘Scotland free or a desert’. Because independence is the only position from which the Scottish economy can be rescued. Because independence will release pent-up Scottish initiatives and encourage them to breed. Because the St Andrew’s House anomaly – an executive without a legislature, government without a democratic component – is a political atrocity, all the more in times when Scotland is repeatedly governed by the appointees of a party which has no national mandate.
All of these are cogent and sufficient answers to that ‘why?’ They are at the practical, operational end of the range of possible answers. What about the other end? Here we can find statements like ‘Independence is the destiny of a nation’, or ‘every nation has an inviolable right to govern itself. As far as I am concerned, these remain no more than statements, beyond anyone’s power to verify. Bring me a destiny, so that I can dissect it and see if it contains a hunched-up, embryonic nation-state. Bring an inviolable right down to the yard, so that we can run a violate-to-destruction test on it.
It’s one of the characters of the Scottish national movement that it has swung between extremes: a humane pragmatism which is not much concerned with general principles, on the one hand, and the outer fringe of metaphysical dogmatism on the other. I mean here the heraldic-dogmatic, the nineteenth-century beginnings of the modern movement which almost seemed to argue that if the coat of arms was correct, the free nation would materialise behind it, and the juristic-dogmatic, the argument that the nation had automatically regained its freedom of action because the Greenshields Case of 1709 had violated the terms of the Treaty of Union, or by various opimistic constructions put on the United Nations’ Charter.
But what about the thought, neither pragmatic nor dogmatic, that the attainment of national independence has a moral end: a condition in which people are not afraid and do not steal? This is not a dimension much discussed in Scotland. Statements that ‘it is time to end the begging-bowl mentality’, or ‘let us get away from the cult of failure’, or even ‘it is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees’, while often valid in themselves, do not really fill this gap.
I want to say a few things today about the moral content of nationalism in central and eastern Europe: specifically, in the histories of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Both nations – when I say Czechoslovakia, by the way, I am really talking about the Czechs rather than the Slovaks – assumed that the struggle for self-government and independence had a significance which was not merely political or material. But they identified this moral meaning in strikingly different ways: the Poles seeing in their fight a universal and almost mystical purpose, defined in terms of religion or in terms of the historical designs of providence, the Czechs striving to embody in the independence of their nation a number of more conventional moral values, of which the most important was Truth.
It should not be hard, especially in this nation, to see whereabouts in history the linking of morality with national struggle began. It begins in the Bible, in the story of the Children of Israel. This people considered their search for a land, their sufferings, their exiles as chapters in their long obedience to God, who had prepared a special – sometimes terrible – destiny for them. The Jews were also the first to understand the significance of memory for a nation; the Commandments had to be remembered in order to be obeyed and nothing, not even the worst punishments along Israel’s journey, must be forgotten. To remember was their Eleventh Commandment. The Polish poet Czeslaw Mitosz, in his Nobel Prize speech in 1980, said: ‘It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds. At least we are so taught by the Bible, a book of the tribulations of Israel. That book for a long time enabled European nations to preserve a sense of continuity – a word not to be mistaken for the fashionable term, historicity’.
This recognition of the importance of the story of Israel has always come easily to Poles. Let me quote from another writer, Kazimierz Brandys. In his ‘Warsaw Diary’ for 1981, he wrote: ‘Precisely 24 years ago … a Soviet writer by the name of Alexander Chakovsky asked me what the Poles’ real concern was in October 1956. He used the term “petty bourgeois revolt”. I answered that the concern was for moral law. “Well, that’s a provincial point of view” the literary representative of a great metropolis said, laughing indulgently. “Judaea was a province too” I said, “a little province that gave the world the Old and New Testaments”. Chakovsky grimaced.’
The plight of Poland which bred modern Polish nationalism was unique. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Poland had existed as a state for some eight hundred years. For 400 of them, it had been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, formed out of a union between the Polish kingdom and the Lithuanian Grand Duchy which had some resemblance to the Anglo-Scottish Union. It was a large, fairly stable state with a monarch limited by parliament and, in the later period, elected by the noble estate. Compared to the narrow despotisms of Prussia and Russia which arose on either side, Poland was remarkably tolerant and democratic.
But at the end of the eighteenth century, Poland fell into weakness and was partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria, finally vanishing from the map in 1795. It did not reappear until 1918. During that century and a quarter, the Germans and Russians, especially, used every kind of terror to eradicate the Polish language, the culture and the Catholic religion, as well as to crush with terrible bloodshed a series of vain national uprisings.
From the very beginning of the partitions, Poles saw their fate not merely as unjust but as a great act of international wickedness. Greed, lies and violence had prevailed over truth and virtue. Just before Poland completely disappeared, the Polish ambassador in St Petersburg wrote to warn his king that the Russian Empress Catherine II intended to destroy Poland by moral subversion as well as bayonets. Tor Your Majesty ought to know that Her Imperial Majesty has conceived a secret stratagem not to allow into positions of power in Poland people who are at the same time wise and honest.’
As the years passed, Polish feelings about their cause began to be expressed in language which was mystical as w
ell as political. The strongest and most gripping of these Romantic metaphors was the idea of Poland as the collective Christ. Especially after the failure of the November Rising in 1831, religious Poles asked themselves – much as the Jews asked themselves in the Old Testament – why God was inflicting this punishment on his own flock. Listen to the answer of Poland’s most loved poet, Adam Mickiewicz, writing in 1832: ‘Poland said: whosoever will come to me shall be free and equal, for I am freedom. But the Kings when they heard it were frightened in their hearts, and they crucified the Polish nation and laid it in its grave … But … the Polish nation did not die. Its body lieth in the grave but its spirit has descended into the abyss, that is, into the inner lives of all people who suffer slavery in their own countries. On the Third Day, the soul shall again return to the body, and the nation shall arise, and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery’.
Poland as the Messiah: crucified for the nations of the world, then to rise from the tomb to redeem them by its sacrifice. These ideas did not stay with a coterie of intellectual exiles. They spread throughout Poland, and became one of the most significant ways in which ordinary people understood their own nation.
The historian Joachim Lelewel was an agnostic and a liberal. Yet he invented a theory of Polish history in which he presented Poland as liberty’s ‘ambassador to humanity’; the darkess of the Polish partitions was only the prelude to the dawn of universal liberty for the whole human race. This was, if you like, Mickiewicz without God.
A great deal has remained from this clump of ideas known as ‘Messianism’. The most striking, because it is an approach of the Catholic Church in Poland which is very obviously shared by Pope John Paul II, is the notion that God created Man in three concentric but equally sacred circles: the individual, the family and the nation. The earthly tyrant who raises his hand to destroy an ancient nation is violating God’s law as surely as if he were destroying the rights and the moral independence of a single man or woman. In this way the nation also becomes divine, an integral part of God’s creation of Man. This is why the present Pope bends down to kiss the soil whenever he arrives in a foreign country.
No idea ever lifted the national cause as high as Polish Messianism did. But, on the other hand, not all Poles were mystics and Romantics. Life had to go on. After another failed rising in 1863, a mood of resignation set in. People asked whether the insurrectionary tradition had not been more destructive than sustaining.
Instead, the case was made for sober hard work to build up the economy, improve agricultural methods, spread basic and technical education. This stream of thought, known as Positivism or as Organic Work, ought to be very familiar to us, for this has been the dominant attitude of many intelligent Scots, including those retiring people in St Andrew’s House, for generations. In that spirit, the Polish thinker Smolenski at the end of the last century told the Poles to stop thinking about the loss of State independence as the main event in Poland’s experience. The State had gone, but the nation survived. Smolenski wrote: ‘The organism we call the State is not the centre of all aspects of life, and its history is not the quintessence of the past. In addition to creating their own State, the Polish nation left a legacy to civilisation which survived the Fall, and this is the main theme of history’.
In the end, these two currents, Romantic and practical, came together, without losing their moral charge along the way. They were both present in the ideals of Solidarity, which was at once a worker’s revolution, a national movement to restore the reality of independence to Poland’s internal life, and a crusade against corrupted values. This is a paragraph from the Solidarity programme, agreed at the union’s first and last congress in 1981: ‘What we had in mind (in establishing the union) was not only bread, butter and sausage but also justice, democracy, truth, legality, human dignity, freedom of convictions and the repair of the Republic. All elementary values had been too mistreated to believe that anything could improve without their rebirth. Thus the economic protest had to be simultaneously a social protest, and the social protest had to be simultaneously a moral protest’.
The Czech case was very different. The Poles were utterly confident of their nationhood, of their right to statehood, and that Heaven was on their side. The Czechs were not certain of any of these things by the late nineteenth century. They had lost their independence in 1621, nearly a century before the Scots and 174 years before the Poles. Their ruling class had been slaughtered and replaced by Germans; their proud Hussite Protestantism, not unlike the faith of the Covenanters, with its motto ‘Truth Will Prevail’, had been crushed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. When their national revival began in the nineteenth century, the Czechs never imagined they could win by force of arms. As their historian Palacky said then, it would have to be by the force of the spirit. But they did not think of this spirit as if they were the children of Israel; there was nothing inevitable about their victory. In fact the Czechs have always lived with the fear that ‘Czechness’ – the language and even the national identity – is really quite fragile, something which could actually vanish from Europe altogether. Today, the novelist Milan Kundera, who fears that the whole Czech experiment in nationality may be doomed – Finis Bohemiae – can be compared to a prophetic Gaelic writer and thinker like Sorley MacLean. As they work, they have always with them the thought that in a hundred years time, nobody will be able to read their writing without a dictionary.
So, to reassure themselves about the strength of their spirit, the Czech nationalists took some short cuts. In the early nineteenth century it was thought that an authentic nation must be able to show an epic, Homeric remote past.
Vaclav Hanka, the librarian of the new National Museum in Prague, announced in 1817 that he had found an eleventh-century manuscript, a great poem about ancient Czech civilisation in the time of the Princess Libuse. Then came another, the ‘Song of Vysehrad’, and then ‘The Love Song of King Wenceslas’. They showed that the Czechs had lived in a highly organised and cultured state while the Germans were still rolling about in the mud and eating acorns. Unfortunately, they were all fakes. Hanka had written them himself. The man who finally declared their falsity was Thomas Masaryk. He drew on himself a torrent of patriotic abuse. But he stuck to his guns: the Truth must Prevail, and a national pride founded on lies was worthless to him.
Today, we should be more tolerant than Masaryk. We talk easily about the forging of a nation, but forgery has played a very real part in the foundation or revival of many nations. In Scotland, we should know that better than most. Ossian was a forgery, but the emotions about nation and history roused by James Macpherson’s pastiche of genuine Gaelic myth cycles was real enough. Finland’s national epic, the ‘Kalevala’, emerged rather later, but doesn’t bear close inspection either.
Welsh heroic poems of antiquity which inspired a generation of Welsh patriots and Jacobin revolutionaries in the early nineteenth century were written by Iolo Morganwg in the back room of the King Lud pub, off Fleet Street in London. And don’t imagine this is dead. In the late 1970s, the Soviet press announced the discovery of the Vlesova Kniga, an ancient chronicle of Russian civilisation spanning the era from the ninth century BC to the ninth century AD, describing how the ancient historical motherland of the Russians stretched across the Eurasian steppes as far as the Amur river. All as phoney as a Guinness word of honour – cooked up by an émigré Russian in the 1950s – but it wasn’t safe in the Soviet Union to demolish its authenticity until this year.
I am sure that all of us here would agree with Masaryk that national pride grown in a pot of fraud is just a weed. But these forgeries have another meaning. In this hall, you have been working to create a new nation-state, not to revive what is gone, and the new Scotland will not be the ancient Scotland. The Irish Declaration of Independence begins: ‘In the Name of God and of the dead generations …’ Do not let the dead bind the living, for all the love and respect you have for them. That has been an Irish problem, and it remains the s
ickness of the English, so lost in contemplation of ‘heritage’ and pageant spectacle that they have no sight of their own national condition.
To use the word ‘we’ in Scotland is to refer to ‘us now’: to we who exist now and not then. Nationalism is innovation, using selected fragments of the past to build a new house. That is only forgery if we pretend that the new house is the old one.
Thomas Masaryk thought that nationalism was a way to a greater, wider humanity, because justice for one’s own nation could not be built on injustice to another. Morality abroad: and at home. It was the truth that must prevail, as Jan Hus had said, and prevail without the help of the sword. Masaryk said: ‘Unless we have some internal argument for equality springing from our souls, then only Marx will be able to oppose capitalist violence with communist violence’.
Some now feel that Masaryk did not know the facts of international life. His Czechoslovakia worked hard, sang well, practised fairness but in the end – at Munich – was betrayed and destroyed by bigger states caring nothing for morality. But in another sense he did not fail. Masaryk made a two-way link between decency and the nation. He argued that nationalism could never become unscrupulous without losing its creative nature, while those who sought to restore decency and honesty could only do so by increasing the independence of their own communities.
‘Truth Will Prevail’ – ‘Don’t be afraid – and don’t steal’.
Games with Shadows Page 7