User:Javits2000/Fallmerayer is dead



''The following is intended as a contribution to the user-authored literature on Wikipedia and nationalism. For other examples of the same genre, see User:Dbachmann/Wikipedia and nationalism; User:NikoSilver/Nationality quiz.''

''Update 20 June 2007: in the meantime the entry on Fallmerayer has been almost completely rewritten. The basic argument of the essay may nevertheless retain some validity.''

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer has been dead for nearly 150 years. As it's a lovely spring day in Munich (München leuchtete, as the urban boosters never tire of reminding us), I rode the U-Bahn down to the Alter südlicher Friedhof just to make sure. There were no signs of an unholy resurrection.

News of Fallmerayer's death will not surprise most editors; in fact hardly anyone will know who he is. I had studied Byzantine history for years before I heard of him, and I can pinpoint the first place I ever read his name.

So who was he, and why does he matter? J.P.F., as we'll call him, was a politician and historian, born in the Austro-Hungrian Empire and active for most of his career in the Kingdom of Bavaria, who believed that the course of history was determined by race. He furthermore thought that the Slavs were in the ascendant, and was puzzled by the growing ties between the "Hellenic" inhabitants of the late Ottoman south Balkans and the prototypically "Slavic" Russian Empire. (N.B.: four pre-nationalist states in the last two sentences.) J.P.F. proposed to solve this problem by means of a historical argument, and determined to his own satisfaction that the "Greeks" had become, over the course of the middle ages, racially (although not culturally or linguistically) "Slavic."

Whether or not this is true is one question; rather more interesting is why anyone should care. J.P.F., as stated, cared because he subscribed to a racial theory of history: to which, it should be added, no respectable historian subscribes today. The unfortunate consequence, however, was that his opponents, the early Greek nationalists and the Philhellenes, adopted the same logic to prove him wrong. The ground for the Greek nation became -- and mind you, this only happened after J.P.F. had written -- the racial identity of the modern Greeks with the ancient Hellenes.

Even today, the Wikipedia article on J.P.F. devotes three paragraphs to "Gene Studies related to Fallmerayer's ethnic theories," which are understood to prove him wrong. (Compare this to Ptolemy, where Copernicus is mentioned once, and in passing, although one might have thought that the latter revolution in scientific thought was somewhat more significant.) In other words, if J.P.F. is to be disproved, it is still according to his own terms of debate; when in fact the far more responsible approach would be to point out that it is his premise (racial contingency of the actions of states) that has been discredited.

To some people, then, J.P.F. remains very much alive. A quick google search reveals a number of interesting documents from within Wikipedia itself. Besser gesagt: he remains alive only insofar as his theories are understood to have encroached on the racial identity of the Greek nation, an identity which he himself, ironically, was instrumental in founding. J.P.F. himself, as a man who lived at a particular time, in a particular cultural climate, is a subject of little interest.

This point becomes quite clear when one compares the Wiki entry on J.P.F. with the 1911 Brittanica article which lies at its core. The section on his life remains almost (entirely?) unchanged, and this despite a recent and impressive revival of interest in his career by scholars of 19th century intellectual history. On the other hand, once we get to the "legacy" section, a certain change has come about. 1911:

His contributions to the medieval history of Greece are of great value, and though his theory that the Greeks of the present day are of Albanian and Slav descent, with hardly a drop of true Greek blood in their veins, has not been accepted in its entirety by other investigators, it has served to modify the opinions of even his greatest opponents.

Wiki:

The value of his contributions to the medieval history of Greece is now diminished by association with his discredited thesis that the Greeks of the present day are predominantly of Albanian and Slav descent, which prejudiced his work throughout.

Note, again, that what is "discredited" is not the premise of J.P.F.'s theory, which is in fact assumed implicitly to be correct, but rather his conclusions.

Why does any of this matter to the subject of Wikipedia and nationalism? The point is actually quite simple: Wikipedia can either help to explain the origins and historical context of nationalist thought in late imperial Europe, or it can perpetuate its logic uncritically. A strange, disembodied J.P.F. is alive today on the fringes of the internet: on the websites of Makedonijan radicals, who cite him approvingly in their attempt to disprove the "Greekness of the Greeks," and on the websites of Greek neo-Nazis, who damn Nikos Dimou for saying a kind word about him. This sort of thing is only to be expected. On the other hand, Wikipedia has the potential to offer a resource that treats J.P.F. as truly dead, and considers him as a product of a very different era, both intellectually and geopolitically. Or, it can do what it does now: present "moderated" versions of the same rhetoric that appears on the fringe websites, enlisting or seeking to discredit the theories of the long-dead, divorced from their own historical contexts, in the pursuit of modern nationalist agendas.

In other words, if Wikipedia is truly to be "de-nationalized," a much more engaged process is necessary than is at present available (by which I mean the pursuit of neutral wording, or the resolution of conflicts between two bitterly divided parties over "controversial" articles). It requires the development of Wikipedia as a tool that presents nationalism as what it is: a product primarily of 19th-century intellectual history, that served an important role in the geo-political context of post-imperial Europe, but has outlived its usefulness, and exists today in a state of vicious ignorance of its own historical roots.

The problem is, of course, that nationalism, if at one time a useful theory of history and state-formation, was transformed during the course of the 20th century into a passion, and its passionate adherents far outnumber intellectual historians of modern Europe, both in the population at large and among the editors of Wikipedia. This is, in fact, the greatest danger of Wikipedia: by the very nature of the editorial process, passion tends to become the equivalent of truth, according to the principle that those who don't care, don't edit. Thus Wikipedia is postmodern in the worst sense of the word: it exemplifies the philosophy that holds all narratives to be equally valid, self-enclosed texts, without relation to an exterior world of "facts." Such a theory is fine if we're reading Kafka, but when we're dealing with the discourse of nationalism, which has a very real effect on the lives, and deaths, of millions, it can no longer be defended.

It is simply true that J.P.F. was wrong: that is, race does not determine history. However, the idea that race determines history, has determined over a century and a half of history. And insofar as Wikipedia continues to humor this idea, it perpetuates its logic, and J.P.F lives on.


 * --Javits2000, Gründonnerstag 2007, München.