"The Course Of True Nationalism Never Did Run Smooth" - excerpt from book: Nations and Nationalism

The Ruritanian language, or rather the dialects which could be held to compose it, was not really spoken by anyone other than these peasants. The aristocracy and officialdom spoke the language of the Megalomanian court, which happened to belong to a language group different from the one of which the Ruritanian dialects were an offshoot.

In the past the Ruritanian peasants had many griefs, movingly and beautifully recorded in their lament-songs (painstakingly collected by village headmasters late in the nineteenth century, and made well known to the international musical public by the compositions of the great Ruritanian national composer L.).

The pitiful oppression of the Ruritanian peasantry provoked in the eighteenth century, the guerilla resistance led by the famous social bandit K., whose deeds are said to still persist in the local folk memory, not to mention several novels and two films, one of them produced by the national artist Z., under highest auspices, soon after the promulgation of the Popular Socialist Republic of Ruritania.

Honesty compels one to admit that the social bandit was captured by his own compatriots, and that the tribunal which condemned him to a painful death had as its president another compatriot. Furthermore, shortly after Ruritania first attained independence, a circular passed between its Ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Education, considering whether it might now be more politic to celebrate the village defense units which had opposed the social bandit and his gangs, rather than the said social bandit himself, in the interest of not encouraging opposition to the police.

A careful analysis of the folk songs so painstakingly collected in the nineteenth century, and now incorporated into the repertoire of the Ruritanian youth, camping, and sports movement, does not disclose much evidence of any serious discontent on the part of the peasantry with their linguistic and cultural situation, however grieved they were by other, more earthly matters.

On the contrary, such awareness as there is of linguistic pluralism within the lyrics of the songs is ironic, jocular, and good-humoured, and consists in part of bilingual puns, sometimes in questionable taste… Anyway, to return to my main theme: though the songs do often raise complaints about the condition of the peasantry, they do not raise the issue of cultural nationalism. That was yet to come, and presumably post-dates the composition of the said songs.

In the nineteenth century, a population explosion occurred at the same time as certain other areas of the Empire of Megalomania - but not Ruriania - rapidly industrialized. The Ruritanian peasants were drawn to seek work in the industrially more developed areas, and some secured it, on the dreadful terms prevailing at the time.

As backward rustics speaking an obscure and seldom written or taught language, they had a particularly rough deal in the towns to whose slums they had moved. At the same time, some Ruritanian lads destined for the church, and educated in both the court and the liturgical languages, became influenced by the new liberal ideas in the course of secondary schooling, and shifted to secular training at the university, ending not as priests, but as journalists, teachers, and professors. They received encouragement from a few foreign, non-Ruritanian ethnographers, musicologists and historians who had come to explore Ruritanian. The continuing labour migration, increasingly widespread elementary education and conscription provided these Ruritanian awakeners with a growing audience.

Of course, it was perfectly possible for the Ruritanians, if they wished to do so (and many did), to assimilate into the dominant language of Megalomania. No genetically transmitted trait, no deep religious custom, differentiated an educated Ruritanian from a similar Megalomanian. In fact many did assimilate, often without bothering to change their names…

The point is, that after a rather harsh and painful start in the first generation, the life chances of the offspring of the Ruritanian labour migrant were not unduly bad, and probably at least as good (given his willingness to work hard) as those of his non-Ruritanian Megalomanian fellow-citizens. So these offspring shared in the eventual growing prosperity and general embourgeoisement of the region. Hence, as far as individual life chances went, there was perhaps no need for a virulent Ruritanian nationalism.

Nonetheless, something of the kind did occur. It would, I think be quite wrong to attribute conscious calculation to the participants in the movement. Subjectively, one must suppose that they had the motives and feelings which are so vigorously expressed in the literature of the national revival. They deplored the squalor and neglect of their home valleys, while yet also seeing the rustic virtues still to be found in them; they deplored the discrimination to which their co-nationals were subject, and the alienation from their native culture to which they were doomed in the proletarian suburbs of the industrial towns.