Joep Leerssen won the Spinoza Prize in 2008, also known as the 'Dutch Nobel Prize'. He received the prize for his innovative contributions to European Studies, cultural nationalism and 'imagology', the study of national stereotypes. Four years later, Kennislink is curious:what has he done with the prize and has his research already yielded new insights?
The Dutch are sober, the Germans are profound and humorless and the French are proud and frivolous. They are stereotypes about national characters that – true or not – are deeply ingrained. The field that investigates these stereotypes, and in particular the way in which they are given shape in literature, is called imagology.
Anyone who subsequently wishes to propagate such a stereotypical image, for example what it means to be Dutch, in a political way, is called a nationalist. The influence that these kinds of national stereotypes have on expressions of cultural and political nationalism is what Joep Leerssen (1954), professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam, is concerned with.
His research into imagery and national stereotypes has led to a new perspective on the history of nationalism in Europe. It is precisely because the peoples of Europe have such a long tradition of characterizing each other that, according to Leerssen, a typically European form of political nationalism arose in the nineteenth century. He discovered that whether you are talking about Flemish, Finnish or Basque nationalism, they all have characteristics that nationalism in South America or Asia does not have.
Leerssen wanted to do further research on how this came about, what role European literature plays in this and what that says about nationalism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. His Spinoza Prize, an amount of 2.5 million euros that can be freely spent on research, has helped him a great deal. “What appeared to me as a remarkable phenomenon four years ago can now be easily explained, he says in his office at the Faculty of European Studies in Amsterdam.”
Where are you now with your research, more than four years after the Spinoza Prize was awarded?
“Quite far. With the money I have set up a large European project to bring scientists from all over Europe who are working on this in contact with each other. Quite a bit of research has already been done on nationalism in individual countries – by, for example, Slovaks, Basques or Estonians – but they usually publish in their own language. That is difficult for a comparative study.”
“The Netherlands has traditionally been internationally oriented as a meeting place for scientists, so I decided to bring all those people here. We all did workshops together, and that's how they got to know each other. Back and forth they could see from each other how much all their individual nationalisms have common traits. In this way I have created a network of expertise. They are now also starting to invite each other and organize workshops, so that works fine.”
What will be the next step?
“I want to create a kind of digital encyclopedia from that network of experts. In it we will map all kinds of phenomena from the nineteenth century, which are often seen as the cultural background noise of social life and are studied separately in different countries in the political and cultural history, as one European phenomenon. That project is well underway.”
And have you already discovered something about nationalism in Europe that you didn't know four years ago?
"Yes, of course. It is striking that in the nineteenth century nationalist movements emerged more or less simultaneously in countries that differ greatly from one another. Highly modernized areas such as Scotland and Wallonia will have to deal with it. And it also starts in very backward areas, such as Bulgaria or Russia, where serfdom still prevails.”
“The big question is, of course, how you can explain this simultaneity. My idea has always been to see nationalism not from a social or political point of view, but as something that spreads like a virus from circulating literature and cultural communication. I try to prove that by following the 'paper trail' to map; printed matter spreading throughout Europe, but also contacts between people involved.”
“Of course there are a lot of them, but I managed to bring them together into a core network of about five to seven hundred people. They were closely involved. In such a network, ideas can spread very quickly, like an epidemic virus. The nascent nationalism was something like that. It was sort of an informal think tank. I mapped out how that process went.”
Then those people in that think tank knew about each other what they were doing; did they really want to unleash some kind of nationalist revolution?
“It was a slowly growing network of people who became interested in each other's ideas. Very gradually an awareness arose that they were many and then all kinds of initiatives arose:magazines, congresses. All sorts of people spontaneously joined in. All kinds of discoveries were made, for example that European languages had much more similarities with Sanskrit than with Hebrew. Or that all kinds of unknown medieval manuscripts were found when the libraries were reorganized in the Napoleonic era.”
“As a result, the awareness arose within that network of undertaking a 'new science'. They also began to think about the political consequences of their academic interests, although the members of this network were certainly not revolutionaries, rather study room scholars.”
Who exactly are the central people in that network?
“There are only about ten central nodes. Sometimes they are famous people like Walter Scott, an early 19th century Scottish writer of historical novels. But there are also names that play a lot more in the background. For example, there was an illustrious Slovenian librarian in Vienna by the name of Jernej Kopitar, who brought many people in Europe together.”
“From that relatively small network of people it can be explained, for example, why Albania is now an independent country, while Friesland or Provence is not. There were constantly all kinds of different ideas about how states should be founded.”
“Some thought on a large scale, for example they wanted the Netherlands and Flanders to be one country. Others are much smaller in scale and want different language rules for Flemish than for Dutch. That competed with each other. Some ideas eventually led to state formation, and others lingered in regionalism.”
“The study of culture and nation-building in Europe in the nineteenth century is very complex. I see it as a kind of Rubik's cube:it is a puzzle that revolves around several dimensions:between culture and politics, between countries and between cultural media.”
“If you know how certain ideas cross from country to country, or for example from novels to opera, from paintings to statues, you can see how to put that cube together. I think I'm slowly starting to map out that very complex system.”
But what do all those forms of nationalism in Europe have in common?
“That they see language and culture as the DNA of the nation. They all feel that nations differ from each other in a natural way, a bit like poodles and sheepdogs differ. It was extremely important whether you speak a real language or a 'farmer's dialect'. Lithuanians gained enormous prestige because their language was considered important by nineteenth-century science; the Lapps spoke a strange peasant dialect in the eyes of that same science.”
“So people start thinking in terms of language areas, and want to make the borders of states coincide with them. This created problems in border areas. Where is the border between Dutch and Flemish, or are they both dialects of German? Where exactly is the border between German and Danish? Are Macedonian and Bulgarian, Croatian and Serbian one or two different languages? Wars have been fought over that.”
That overarching European idea of nationalism has therefore mainly led to differences and conflicts. Is there actually something to say about how Europeans thought about their similarities?
"Secure. The possibility of curbing war has always been considered in Europe. Something changed in the nineteenth century. Then people no longer wanted to avoid war between states, but the ideal emerged that each nation should have its own little country. Then there will be no more reason to go to war and Europe will become one big family of birds content in their own nests. Then there could also be a kind of United States of Europe.”
“That idea emerged in the 1840s and is also one of the reasons why many people hoped that World War I would be 'the war that ends all wars'. That war would tear the great multi-ethnic empires apart, and after that, new nation-states could move forward on the basis of harmony. In concrete terms, you can see that in the founding of the League of Nations, directly in 1918.”
“So an idea about Europe does arise, but that is rather a reaction to the nationalism of the individual countries. The European Union therefore does not want to be a nation state, and rightly so in my view. The idea of one cultural Europe, which you do hear today, and which means a difference with, for example, the world of Islam, is something very artificial.”
“Hitler was one of the first to say he wanted to fight for Europe, and against the Jewish-Bolshevik danger. You see that such historical ideas about a 'fortress Europe' to be protected from the barbarian outside world are often located in a somewhat stale corner of the political spectrum.”
Has the mapping of the network of important persons and these conclusions now completed your objective with the Spinoza Prize?
“Actually yes. I think we really have something new to say about the sources of the European nation states to which we have become so accustomed. I can now say with conviction:that's where it comes from. Now I have to publicize the results and enter into a dialogue with scientists who study nationalism worldwide, in the former European colonies in Asia, America and Africa.”
“The London School of Economics, for example, who conducts leading research in the field of political nationalism, is very interested in its cultural roots. Cultural processes are not reflections of political nationalism, they have played their own guiding role.”