IMPRESSION OF A BRIT Europe’s cases of mistaken identity History suggests that it may be easier to create an identity for others than to find one for oneself. This is an extension of the ‘Us and Them’ syndrome, where the ‘Them’ are dumped all together in a separate and communal basket. No doubt this goes back to unrecorded prehistory, but it’s unrecorded… Richard Hill T he Greeks called all foreigners barbaros, simply because they couldn’t decipher their babbling. Isocrates the Classical philosopher was magnanimous in his assertion that “we consider Greeks those who partake in our culture”. This sense of cultural superiority clearly helped the cultures concerned to lump all their neighbours into a single disparaging basket. In the early Middle Ages, people of the Islamic faith were indiscriminately called Saracens or Moors. And the Arabs at the time of the Crusades got their own back by calling all westerners Franks. From the viewpoint of ‘Westerners’, all people east of the Oder were for a long time just called Slavs (a word that mutated to ‘slave’, although some etymologists think it was the other way round). According to the historian Norman Davies, about the same time, the peoples of Spain defined the Catalans as Franks while, due to the previous existence of a Visigothic kingdom centred on Toulouse, the Catalans referred to the people of southern France as Goths. From the viewpoint of ‘Easterners’, all settlers who moved from the West to fill the vacuum left by the departing Turks were classed as Swabians, even though many of them hailed from elsewhere, notably Flanders. In the meantime, the Ottoman Turks responded by indiscriminately calling all inhabitants of the Balkans Greeks, while the West responded by referring to all the good folk manning the fortresses on the borderlands of Transylvania as Saxons, when many of them came from elsewhere, including Flanders and, to a lesser extent, the Moselle and Wallonia. Rather more mysteriously, throughout Europe, people ranged east of others living further to the west tend to use words beginning with ‘Wa’ or ‘We’ to describe their generally romanised neighbours. Examples include the Wallachians (Vlachs from the Slav root Volokh) in the Balkans, Welsch in German for anybody to the southwest, Walliser to describe the inhabitants of the south-western canton of Switzerland (the Valais, to most people) and Walloons in Belgium. Not, however, the Welsh who were anything but romanised. There is even a community in the French Vosges mountains speaking a Romance dialect and known as the Welche, i.e. ‘those who do not speak German’. Maybe all these cases of mistaken identity were, in reality, forgivable. Europe’s history before the emergence of the nation states was essentially one of migration and assimilation, so that fragile embryonic identities were easily absorbed and transformed into what came later. The process of creating a nation often meant running roughshod over individual identities and papering over the ethnic cracks. The inhabitants of Hungary – supposedly as ethnically distinct a body of people as the Finns or, almost, the Basques – are not just Magyars. According to a study undertaken jointly by a Budapest research institute and a German university, the country’s citizens include more than one Magyar strain, as well as Armenians, Ruthenians, Croats, Gypsies – and the Swabians again (a splinter group of this ubiquitous race settled in the southern part of the country). At least most Hungarian nationalists have some claim to a relatively distinct identity. Pity their poor neighbours, the Ukranians, who are still looking for such an identity, having been a subject nation to, first, the Lithuan ians, then the Poles and, last of all, the Soviets… No wonder they need a bit of encouragement from the West! ● BECI - Bruxelles métropole - avril 2015 41
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