How many reach the point of seeing their own skeleton in the mirror?

We ended our article on how the French became French by asking in whose name those who practice racism in the name of Frenchness actually practice it. Racism in the name of Frenchness is, above all, an empty claim, because the historical data, the ethnological history of France, shows that there is no longer any possibility of identifying any physical characteristic that could be called characteristic of the French. Even so, there is a Frenchness, and this identity is in fact one that was historically formed, worked up and refined by the state through the nation-state project. To whatever extent racism carried out in the name of this identity can be racism at all.

The theses of famous historians and sociologists such as Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson and Giddens, to the effect that nations are created by the state, have disturbed from the outset those nationalists who attribute a kind of metaphysical origin, a sanctity, to the concept of the nation. In the magnificent question of İsmet Özel: "How many, how many people are there, in this whole wide world, who go so far as to see their own skeleton in the mirror?" This question is in fact a poetic call to confront all our taboos, the shared delusions that shut us up in a cocoon. Every call to wake from a deep sleep is, of course, uncomfortable at first.

A nationalist sociologist friend whom I value greatly, reacting to my last article, wrote that the theses of Gellner and Hobsbawm have been refuted by writers such as Smith, Armstrong and Nairn, and that the real galat-ı meşhur, the widely repeated error, is the thesis that states give birth to nations. Nobody is refuting anybody. Of course no state creates a nation entirely out of nothing. But no one can write a story of nationalism while ignoring the obvious function that states and armed organizations (Giddens) performed in the twentieth century in bringing one among the many identities a person has, with which he is somehow connected (ethnic, religious, territorial and so on), to the fore and creating a nation on that basis. How, and at whose call, in what definition and on what basis, do we become "we"?

My dear friend, the sociologist Levent Ünsaldı, publisher of the book in which E. Weber describes the coercive role played by the state in creating a French identity out of an extremely diverse and complex peasant society, has also made very valuable contributions to what I wrote in my article. I leave the rest of my article to Ünsaldı, who spent many years in France and served there as a faculty member:

"Dear professor, in your article you refer to E. Weber's "Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France" (Heretik Yayınları, Turkish translation by Çağdaş Sümer, Ankara, 2017), which takes the events in France as its lens on the problem of nation formation. Even its title alone is striking, because in the development literature the concept of "modernization" is mostly used for peripheral countries, whereas in the analysis of core countries the concept of development is preferred. This points, beyond an ordinary terminological preference, to an extraordinarily important semantic divergence. For example, when you say Turkish modernization, you refer to a dynamic whose agent is identifiable (the state), which gains momentum from top to bottom, and which has been carried out sometimes by coercion and sometimes in spite of certain social segments. The notion of development or progress, by contrast, implicitly carries within it the idea that social dynamics flourish on their own and without any need for outside intervention (above all the intervention of the state).

In the same way, in another, different but related piece of writing, every emphasis on the state-dependent character of Turkish capitalism or of the bourgeoisie contains the presupposition that in its "normal" course and elsewhere (in Western Europe and North America) this is not so (or should not be so), that is, that the capitalist dynamic and the development of the bourgeoisie owe very little to the state under ordinary conditions. For all these reasons, E. Weber's study is extraordinarily central, because it demolishes the binary classification schemes and categories of perception used in analyses of us (the core countries) and them (the countries of the periphery).

If nation formation is a construction, says Weber, then in Western Europe too it came about through the articulation of certain agents and dynamics and related class interests in a way that cannot be described as a natural and smooth flow. Two hundred years ago the French peasant was, first of all, a Breton (Brittany), a Norman (Normandy), a Basque (Basque Country), a Picard (Northern France), a Corsican. The language he used was "patois," which today has been reduced to the status of a dialect but which, for its defenders, possesses the full richness and competence of a language in its own right.

In the social sciences, thinking relationally is essential. If any patois has been "demoted" today to the status of a local language/dialect, this is not because things had to be so by their nature, but because over the centuries French, the old French (vieux français) that until the 18th century was spoken only in Paris and its surrounding regions, renewed itself and established its dominance across all of France. A note: the language of social science is mostly passive and does not clearly designate the agent ("has established"). So here too we need to look at who, how and with what interests turned French into the dominant and "natural" language of the nation being constructed.

E. Weber's study gives detailed answers to these questions, backed by extraordinary archival work. Let us touch on them briefly: following capitalist development (and the interests of the burgeoning bourgeoisie), the national market came to coincide with national borders and a common "official" language imposed itself as the most important element of nation-building; French as an administrative language seeped into the local through courts, prefectures, municipalities, the army, the means of communication and correspondence and, of course, as the most important component, the school, and in a sense swept away local belonging, language and cosmos, or, to put it in the mildest terms, defined them in its own eyes as secondary, archaic, bygone elements with feeble roots.

In all this development E. Weber sees not the traces of a historical process following its own dynamic, but the will of the rulers who mobilized the state apparatus within a very clear project. It is clear that before, or simultaneously with, bringing "civilization" to various regions in Africa or South Asia, the French rulers felt compelled to bring civilization to the regions of the metropole as well (in everyday and administrative language, the metropole denotes France on the European mainland). In the eyes of these circles and of the state apparatus, at least in the period in question, there is not much difference between a Senegalese and a Ch'ti from Picardie (from Northern France). Both arouse the same feeling of disgust in the French ruler: savagery, ignorance, criminality, ignorance of proper conduct.

The ignorance of proper conduct here should be taken, as in N. Elias's book "The Civilizing Process," as being unaware of the rules of manners, refinement and etiquette that define being civilized. Likewise, the removal of violence from everyday life, to which Elias gives lengthy space in his works, can find a quite strong echo, through a cross-reading, in E. Weber's book. For the peasant who gets angry easily, who "sees red," who is prone to violence, is also a headache for the French administration; this is an inseparable part of his savage nature.

Therefore it can be seen that nation-building, if we proceed this time along the line drawn by the other Weber, Max Weber, proceeded simultaneously with the state's seizure of the monopoly of physical force. The fear of the gendarme (peur du gendarme), whose traces can still be seen in the French countryside, undoubtedly dates from this period. Likewise, the idea of "pacification" [bringing under control], which formed the framework of the French administration's repressive policies in the colonies, is not very far removed from the internal colonization practices applied in the metropole. The difference, undoubtedly, is that in the metropole these practices somehow resulted in a national construction, whereas in the colonies they triggered the opposite dynamic.

As an explanatory framework here, it can be argued that the capitalist dynamic in the colonies and the transfer of surplus value, that is, exploitation, was directly and very clearly superimposed on ethnic and religious/sectarian lines/divisions."