Whether a Nation and… Whither if One?: The Politics of Selection and Interpretation of the Past

558 Рецензии/Reviews не только британским) помыслить контуры возможных концептуа- лизаций. В академическом отноше- нии, по словам самого автора, описание региона “во всей … сложности его исторического раз- вития, природного разнообразия и пространственной взаимос- вязанности достойно усилий и, собственно, является как раз той задачей, с которой только гео- графы и могут совладать. К тому же, обращение к региональной географии может дать основания для проверки более глобальных выводов социальной теории, давая им эмпирическое обосно- вание” (С. xvii). Россия осталась, география изменилась. Изменялась она и в прошлом, и нынешние изменения не последние. Д. Шоу доказы- вает, что не стоит переписывать каждый раз сызнова “историю с географией”. Emilian KAVALSKI Whether a Nation and… Whither if One? The Politics of Selection and Interpretation of the Past Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations : The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002); xii+2000 p. Index. ISBN: 0-69109054 -8 (cloth). Introduction The end of the Cold War has indicated not only to the material and ideational disparity between the former enemies, but has also set off resurgence in ethnic segmentation. It has been suggested that the tensions between “the West” and “the East” kept the lid on ethnic divisions not only within the immediate realms of the two superpowers, but also in the world at large. Once the conditions that maintained the order of deterrence disappeared, the supposed primordial aspirations re-emerged from the dust of ideological oblivion and groups whose names seemed condemned to the pages of history textbooks resurfaced in a full-blooded and often bloody fashion. “How and why ethnicity becomes a political tool?” is the topic of Patrick J. Geary’s book. 559 Ab Imperio, 1/2003 His, however, is quite an unusual account and is, perhaps, one of the most refreshing recent inquiries into the issues of national identity and nationalism. The Myth of Nations is comparable in its conceptual framework and explanation to such seminal works as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London, 1983), Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983) and Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986). Geary, however, distinguishes himself from other scholars by his approach. Unlike many, who take a distinct sociological, political, historical, psychological or a mixed psycho-socio-historico-political perspective, the methodology of his investigation is a peculiar brand of medieval scholarship interlaced with a profoundly humanist anxiety and consideration for the dilemmas plaguing the post-1989 world. This handling of the subject makes The Myth of Nations an extremely stimulating and valuable repository for comprehensive, and, at the same time, perceptive exploration into the long-winded and complicated avenues of national discourses. Geary puts forth an argument, which is fairly straightforward and, at the same time, well grounded in relevant data: Rather than interpret the past from the vantage point of the present, he delves into the hoary times of yore to decipher how identity was perceived by the people living then. Geary’s justification for such an approach is quite unequivocally and lucidly spelled out: “Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism .As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness . Cleaning up the waste is the most daunting challenge facing historians today” (p. 15). For the purposes of clarity, the six chapters of Geary’s rigorous account and deft dismantling of nationalist myths could be distinguished into three broad themes: (i) mythologies of nationalism – where the lucid prose of the author and his succinct argumentation engages different modes of group-organization; (ii) imagining the past – Geary’s most ingenious and resourceful contribution to understanding the theories of nation-formation through his unflinching reconsideration of national origins via critical evaluation of primary sources; and (iii) the politics of language – an outline of the pattern in which political agendas permeate the processes of national construction by reducing the individual complexities of many centuries of development to a single, 560 Рецензии/Reviews standardized set of identifiers. It is in this way that Geary’s book puts forward the suggestion that ultimately the formation of European peoples has to be seen as an ongoing process that began in antiquity and continues in the present. He discards as historical nonsense the idea that national character is fixed for all time in a distant and bucolic past. Instead, the actuality, as The Myth of Nations attests, was one, where the underscoring complexity of the daily environment of ancient societies is comparable to the one surrounding societies today. Mythologies of Nationalism The premise of The Myth of Nations is that the...