AT HISTORY’S CROSSROAD: THE MAKING OF THE ARMENIAN NATION
Christopher J. Walker, The Weekly Standard
The Weekly Standard
November 27, 2006 Monday
The Armenians
>>From Kings and Priests To
Merchants and Commissars
by Razmik Panossian
Columbia, 442 pp., $40
In Xenophon’s Anabasis–"The March Up-Country"–there is a description
of the Armenian people. We learn of the clans and their chiefs. We
are also introduced to the popular custom of drinking beer through
a straw. Xenophon was writing in 401 B.C.
Today you can take a plane to Yerevan, capital of the Republic of
Armenia, not so far from the region that Xenophon was describing,
and you will meet the descendants of those whose lives were drawn
by the ancient writer. You’ll learn that Armenians have lived
there continuously, rising to establish great dynasties, falling
to subsistence, exile, or mass death, before becoming post-Soviet
citizens. In this fascinating and important book, Razmik Panossian
traces the connections across the centuries from the experience of
the past to the reality of the present. He delineates the course of
the roots that have fed the stems, leaves, and flowers visible today.
Modern Armenia is a child of World War I. When the great empires
of Europe and Asia collapsed in 1917-18, having hammered each other
prostrate in warfare, a host of nation-states took their place. One
of these was Armenia, which emerged as sovereign in May 1918–more
than a year after Czar Nicholas II’s abdication had set in train the
process towards the state’s independence.
In a sense, though, Armenia’s independence had been maturing for
centuries, and that course is charted here. We learn how the new
nation took shape: the processes of development, differentiation,
learning, understanding, and self-knowledge that stirred the spirit
of the people. Armenia, like other national cultures that developed
into states, had been clogged for centuries by the dark weeds and
oppressive mud of other people’s empires, before it found a current
with which to swim to the clear surface.
Until World War I, Armenia was divided between the empires of Turkey
and Russia. Its crises with its empires came relatively late. The
people were regimented and treated with disdain by their rulers,
but there was no emergency until the late 19th century. By this time
the population was on the way to emancipation and self-knowledge,
and had outgrown the restrictive bureaucracies that governed them. A
desire to loosen the bonds of empire was a natural corollary.
As Panossian informs us, a Catholic Armenian order of monks based in
Venice, known as the Mechitarists, was instrumental in pushing forward
much of the process of emancipation. From the early 18th century,
members of this order acted in a startlingly modern and critical
fashion, ably separating Catholic concerns from matters connected
with Armenian history and education. They retrieved the history
and language of the Armenians, collecting texts, sifting facts,
and building up a clear picture of the nation.
The people in the homeland were fortunate here, for the order was
quite possibly acting heretically. Compare the situation with Catholic
Hapsburg influence on the Czech nation. Compare the situation with
that of the Czechs, whose language and identity were being abolished
by agents of God and Emperor. The Jesuit Antonin Konias boasted
of burning 60,000 books in the Czech language, including the Czech
Bible. (The true figure is closer to 30,000–still huge.) Henceforth,
Latin, and then a bastardized form of German, were imposed on the
Czechs. Lands were confiscated and leading families were compelled
to leave. The peasantry, denied their reformed faith and resenting
the imposition of Catholicism, largely relapsed into paganism. Only
later, through the agency of antiquarians and historians of language,
did they start to relearn their own language and rediscover their true
identity–not as Jesuit-driven Hapsburgers, but as the Czech nation.
The perils that the Czechs had endured under the Hapsburgs attended
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1894-96, then those in Russia in
1903-05, and most seriously in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-16, when the
Armenian population from the Aegean coast to the Russian border was
driven out or exterminated in a totality and cruelty so vast as to
make the charge of genocide a valid one. (Anyone who questions the
reality of the Armenian genocide should read U.S. consul Leslie Davis’s
dispatches from Kharput.) Is there a thread running through empires,
which tends to make them, sooner or later, attack or destroy their
own subject peoples?
Razmik Panossian writes at length on the origin and nature of
nationalism, though one regrets his omission of the views of Hans Kohn,
an able and enlightened writer on the topic. Panossian discusses the
difference between the constructivists (who believed that national
identity is a construct) and the primordialists (who believe it was
always there, waiting to be discovered). From the facts he presents,
and from his use of the word "retrieve" in the context of Armenian
national identity, it would seem that he prefers a qualified version
of the primordialists–which certainly makes most sense in the light
of historical facts.
The process of becoming a modern and aware member of a national
group–a nation in the modern sense–seems best summed up in T. S.
Eliot’s words: To recover what has been lost / And found and lost
again and again. Intense theories about the construction of nationality
appear rather less smart and modern when one recalls that the Armenian
writer Grigor Tatevatsi, writing almost exactly 600 years ago,
declared that "a nation is divided from another nation by region, by
language, and by canon law." His text was reprinted in Constantinople
in 1729. Maybe some of the disputes about modern nationalism amount
to little more than a barrowful of medieval scholasticism.
In the light of the facts of rule by empires, any general study of
the topic should consist less in theorizing about the development of
national identity than in exploring the dynamics within empires that
lead them to oppress and crush national communities. In other words,
we should study the empires more than the subject nationalities,
since the problem lies with them. The question to answer is: Why are
empires such a uniquely bad way of organizing human society? Why,
in their collectivity and tendency towards monopoly, do they end up
looking like the Soviet Union of about 1974?
It is odd that some new version of empire is championed as the way
forward today by thinkers such as Philip Bobbitt and Robert Cooper.
And it is hard to see how nations like Armenia might fit into such
a scheme, divided as the country was until 1918 between two empires,
each, to a greater or lesser extent, destructive. Poland was not better
off divided among three empires than as a unitary state. There was a
farcical situation in New Caledonia, the Pacific territory over which,
in colonial times, Britain and France perpetually quarreled.
This led to the requirement that the native people speak French one
day, and English the next.
Examples spring to mind from the Baltic countries. In Lithuania,
in 1861, the czarist governor Muraviev had said he looked forward
to a time 40 years hence when there would be no trace of Lithuania
or Lithuanians. The czarist authorities actually dynamited Catholic
churches in Lithuania. The Lithuanian language was forbidden. Anyone
caught even coming out of church with a Lithuanian prayer book was
punished. In Estonia and Latvia, the native people sought freedom
from both Germans and Russians, but the Russian paternalistic fanatic
Pobiedonostsev, a modern Grand Inquisitor representing the power
of extreme orthodoxy, declared that no czar possessed the power to
diminish his own authority!
What these few examples show is that nationalism–local pride–is often
little more than a common-sense response to the actions of empires:
an expression of ordinary local folk against an Orwellian nightmare of
giganticism; a struggle to retain a human face, an identity grounded
in town or neighborhood, when confronted by a governmental monster
grinding towards political monopoly. We saw this in the last months of
the Soviet empire (with Lithuania again in the forefront), and we have
been witnessing it in the steady maintenance of Tibetan nationalism
against the bullying nastiness of the Chinese empire. The British
in Ireland also edged into imperial terrorism, by acts of collective
punishment and, from 1831, by compelling children to speak English,
forcing a cruel contraption into the mouths of kids unable or unwilling
to do so.
Panossian’s book is a warning against the return of empires, and a
plea for localism. Few people in the world have endured more from
the lack of localism, and from the intrusion of grandiose, secretive
political conglomerates, than the Armenians. They, and other small
nations, look for a world order, perhaps untidy, of many voices.
Their history is an argument against big government. We are
reminded that the Armenian people have always worked hard, and been
self-supporting, and that from that work ethic has come a devotion
to their heritage.
Even the merchants, active across the world in late medieval and early
modern times, favored patriotic activities, building churches and
keeping in mind the historical, ecclesiastical, and cultural legacy of
their people, especially their unique alphabet. Financial success only
denationalized some of those in the Ottoman capital. The record of the
generous and patriotic Armenian capitalist extends to the present day.
Panossian’s study of the background to modern Armenia has a further
value. He informs us of the activities of the Indian Armenians,
who pioneered Armenian journalism in the 1770s and contributed a
major history of the homeland; this was when the monks in Venice
were working hardest. Their enterprise had been made possible by
the privileged position that Armenian merchants had been granted in
Iran in 1604. Local educational establishments were also set up in
the Caucasus. Enterprising and patriotic Armenians established an
academy in Moscow in 1815.
All these activities predated the arrival of American missionaries, and
Panossian proves the falsity of a malign theory about the Armenians,
proposed by Elie Kedourie and repeated by Maurice Cowling, that by
accepting modernization from U.S. missionaries (who first arrived in
1829), the Armenians prepared for their own disasters. The introduction
of Western values into an Eastern society, so the theory goes, created
an impossible marriage, and the Eastern society was driven to murder.
The Ottoman campaigns of extreme violence of 1894-06 and of 1915-16
were, in effect, a lengthy Armenian suicide. (Armenians in the Russian
empire lie outside this curious metaphysic.) Besides being constructed
around a spineless concept of political responsibility, the theory
ignores the point that development came from many more directions,
and at an earlier date, than just from American missionaries. Change
was more nuanced, and the Turks themselves had been moving towards some
modernization: scientific education, printing, and so forth. The ruling
elite was not terminally reactionary. So this theory is disproved by
historical facts, and cannot stand up by reason of its scant regard
for basic knowledge.
Two points need more extensive treatment than what Panossian offers
us. The presence of the Kurds in historic Armenia requires explanation:
Kurdish tribes, as Sunni Muslims, were introduced into western Armenia
by the Turkish sultan, following his victory over the Persians at the
Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Their purpose was to guard the frontier
against the Shiite nation. This mandate lapsed with a treaty in 1639,
but the Armenians were thereafter compelled to share their land with
a privileged ethnicity, which was re-privileged in 1891 when the
sultan, sensing a spirit of Kurdish revolt, nipped it in the bud by
creating loyal Kurdish regiments, turning their threats towards the
Armenians. A brilliant and cynical imperial ruse.
The book could also benefit from a stronger awareness of the
international political situation. Though the Armenian nation has
never been large, the homeland is located on a pivotal part of the
earth’s surface, which has led to an excessive interest in Armenia by
outside powers that do not share the usual Armenian characteristics
of culture and self-limitation.
There is, perhaps, a third point: that the author himself shows some
of the partisanship that has divided the worldwide Armenian community
for almost 90 years. His fondness for the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation, which has shown genuine and dedicated service and activity,
leads him to downplay the legacy of the scholarly and cautious Ramkavar
party: less noisy, more conservative, but with a deep understanding
of Armenia’s history, culture, and options.
A word about this book’s physical appearance. Columbia University
Press has done a fine job in producing a volume that, besides making
public a valuable text, is easily usable and attractive. The design
of the book and its evocative jacket owe something to Shaker art,
and something to the English Arts and Crafts movement–a classic of
book-making, an item for anyone who values fine books.
Christopher J. Walker is the author, most recently, of Oliver Baldwin:
A Life of Dissent.
