COMMON HISTORICAL R.OOTS
563
that it is their thousand-year-old dream to finally achieve statehood. Thus
they are resentful. Then there are those that are independent, but whose
state has other national minorities within it which don't identify with
the majority nation. This ideology of the national state also subscribes
to
the subcriterion that it must be homogeneous.
La
fwciorl
homogene
is a
nightmare, a successful illusion originally created in France to make the
French the ruling nation in France. At the time of the Revolution,
maybe thirty-five percent of the population of France spoke French. The
illusion created a possible means of homogenization by which a success–
ful , developing bourgeoisie and a strongly centralized bureaucracy could
be achieved.
In Eastern-Central Europe, where there is , rather than a tradition of
statehood, a very powerful map of ethnic reality, that was not the case.
Thus there are, for instance, cases that have become jokes: Mr. Konrad,
who lives, let's say, in Uzgorod, is asked, "What is your country?" "Oh,"
he says, "I was born in Hungary, in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Later on I lived in Czechoslovakia, and I was a patriot for
Czechoslovakia . Then in '39, I had to be a good Hungarian patriot.
From '45 on, I had to be a good Soviet patriot. Now I have to be a
good Ukrainian patriot." Too many "belongings" make people a little
crazy, because they need some sort of sustained, collective social identity.
They need to know who they are. In the minds of the old and mature
and therefore advanced nations, sllch as France and England, to say "who
I am" is much easier, not only because there is a given national definition
which does not need so many emphases and ideologies, but also because
social identity is much clearer and more traditionally entrenched. In the
democratic, capitalist societies, for instance, it is understood what is
meant by a "middle-class person."
In the post-Communist societies, the social position of a family is so
disturbed and has been so disrupted that there is little possibility of
continuing family traditions, of the chance to be proud of the
grandfathers and the fathers at the same time. As a result, there is a kind
of confusion and uncertainty about the social, national, collective,
religious ego. This ego is looking for something more solid. But since
the entire socialist camp and the brotherhood of the socialists have gone
over and disappeared, what remains is a kind of more or less moderate,
nationalist anti-Communism. And we shouldn't forget that the most
offensive nationalist anti-Communism was the Third Reich and the
Fascist alliance. It is not easy to avoid such reminiscing, even in the new
countries of the former Soviet Union. Perhaps the contemporary collab–
orators will not have as moral an image as their predecessors did. On the
other hand, these new nations don't know where they belong. COME–
CON has disappeared. The Warsaw Pact has disappeared. In their illu-
