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OF THE NATIONAL ENTITY

Patriotic battle cries could be heard during the Low Countries’ revolt against the Spanish kingdom in the late sixteenth century and even more so in the early seventeenth century. During the English revolution of the mid-sixteenth century, the radical wing of the Levellers identified the homeland with the free community, which was fully mobilized against monarchic tyranny. And if at the outset of the American Revolution the rebels regarded Britain as their motherland, their attitude had changed by its conclusion, when a new conception of patriotism began to percolate among them. “The land of the free and the home of the brave”³⁵ was on its way, soon to make its mark on history.

One of the most important milestones in the new and promising career of the homeland in the modern era was undoubtedly the French Revolution, particularly its Republican phase. If until then the concept of homeland had served as a point of reference for the political and intellectual elite—state officials, ambassadors, scholars, poets, philosophers, and the like—it now strode confidently into the alleyways of the people. For example, “La Marseillaise,” composed by a junior officer from Alsace, became a popular refrain sung by the large revolutionary battalion that arrived in Marseille and was quickly learned by many more. “Franche-Comté, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived! Against us stands tyranny,” sang the volunteer fighters as they marched, trembling, to the battle of Valmy in September 1792 to fight the hired armies of the old world. And those who were not wounded by the salvo of cannon fire were even able to finish the words to the song: “Sacred love of the fatherland, support our avenging arms. Liberty, cherished liberty, fight with thy defenders!” For good reason, the song was later adopted as France’s national anthem.³⁶

      In the meantime, however, Napoleon’s conquests were arousing a new wave of patriotic demands outside France, in areas such as the future territories of Germany and Italy. One by one, the seeds of patriotism were planted, soon to transform old Europe into a spectacular garden of nations and, thus, of homelands.

      From the stormy 1790s in France to the popular uprisings that rocked the Arab world at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, almost all revolutionaries and rebels have pledged their love to liberty and, at the same time, declared their loyalty to homeland. The homeland would reemerge on a large scale in the European Spring of Nations of 1848 and would also unite the rebels of the Paris Commune of 1871. And although the Russian Revolution took pride in its internationalism, when put to the test during its war of survival against the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union revived patriotism as an effective ideological mechanism for mass mobilization. The two world wars of the twentieth century were brutal conflicts fought in the name of a guiding superideology that regarded the state as the entity responsible for protecting the homeland, or at least attempting to work for its benefit by expanding its borders. As we have seen, the acquisition of territory was regarded as a major aim of the nationalist struggles in the great campaigns for decolonization that swept the world from the 1940s to the 1970s. Both the socialists and the communists of the Third World were first and foremost patriots, and only later focused on distinctions of sociopolitical affiliation.

      The major question that still needs to be answered is how deep emotion toward a small and familiar physical place was translated into a conceptual composite, applied to vast territories that humans could never know firsthand in their entirety. Perhaps the answer lies in the slow yet decisive territorialization of politics in the age of nationalism.

      Despite their great historical importance, the patriots of the English revolution, the volunteers who sang the “Marseillaise” while marching into battle during the French Revolution, the rebels against Napoleonic occupation, and even the revolutionaries of 1848 in the capital cities of Europe still constituted minorities of the populations in which they conducted their activities—large minorities, but minorities nonetheless. And even if homeland had become a key concept in the restless capital cities, most people remained tillers of the soil, relatively untroubled by the qualities of the political leadership, which was already swaying to the cultural and linguistic tones of modernity.

      What beckoned them into the new homeland or, perhaps more accurately, what began to construct the concept of national territory in their consciousness was the legislation emanating from the political centers and applied throughout the territories. These laws exempted significant numbers of farmers from feudal obligations, taxes, and other burdens, and in some cases also provided decisive recognition of their ownership to the land they cultivated. The new land laws and agrarian reforms served as the primary means for the transformation of dynastic monarchies and large principalities into increasingly stable nation-states and, as a result, for the evolution of multidimensional homeland areas.

      The great urbanization that was responsible for much social change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for the detachment of the masses from their “small homelands,” constituted another important precondition for enabling many to come to terms, at least conceptually, with a large, unfamiliar national territory. Mobility gave rise to hitherto unknown variations of the need for social belonging, and this need was met by national identity, which offered the enticing promise of facilitating individual and collective adherence and rootedness within a larger geographic area.

      These and many other political, legal, and social processes were only the starting gun or, rather, the invitation. The invitees still had a long and exhausting road to travel before finding safe haven in their expansive imagined homelands.

It is important to remember that homelands did not produce nationalism, but rather the opposite: homelands emerged from nationalism. The homeland would prove to be one of the more surprising, and perhaps the most destructive, creations of the modern era. The establishment of nation-states imbued with new meaning the areas under their rule and the borders that delineated them. Through the construction of a deep sense of belonging to a national group, a cultural-political process created Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and, later, Algerians, Thais, and Vietnamese, from diverse mixtures of local cultures and languages. This process invariably produced an array of emotions related to a defined physical spaces. Landscape became a fundamental component of collective identity, forming the walls, so to speak, of the home in which the evolving nation was being invited to reside. Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul offers a persuasive analysis of this dynamic in his delineation of the evolution of the Siamese nation-state. The “geo-body” of the new nation, he contends, was one condition for its own formation, and it was first and foremost modern mapping that facilitated the creation of this territorial entity.³⁷ It is customary to refer to historians as the first authorized agents of a nation, but this appellation must also be bestowed on the geographers who undertook its mapping. While historiography helped the national state to discipline its primeval past, it was cartography that helped it actualize its imagination and its power over its territory.

The material, technological precondition for the expansion of territorial imagination was the slow development and spread of mass communications. Political and cultural factors completed the process by creating effective state vehicles for the formulation and dissemination of ideology. From the printing revolution of the fifteenth century—which grew increasingly sophisticated as it evolved into comprehensive and invasive multi-channel media—to the opening of schools and the advent of compulsory education during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between elite culture and popular culture changed completely, as did the relationship between the cultures of the urban centers and the rural periphery. If not for printing, the kingdoms’ maps and the geographers’ increasingly sophisticated diagrams of the physical world would have been seen by very few. If not for the provision of public education for all, only a small number of people would have known and been able to identify the borders of their own countries. Mapmaking and education became a natural, integrated complex that served to carve out a defined, familiar space. For this reason, maps that propagate and inculcate the borders of the homeland deep within the consciousness of every student still adorn the walls of today’s classrooms. Often beside

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