Recent blogs by myself and others has me pondering the notion of nations and the forces that hold them together and tear them apart.  And this pondering inevitably leads to remembering Professor Peter Sugar.  I only took one class from him during my time at the University of Washington in pursuit of a degree in history.  Yet he had a profound impact on how I see the world and the relationship between that world and myself (and others). 

The class was simply titled "Nations and States" and we spent the quarter delving into the dynamics of nations and their relationship to states throughout human history.  By the time I completed the class, the world was indeed a different place and as a consequence who I was a different person.

Professor Sugar himself epitomized the way many people might imagine a history professor.  He was a very short man who spoke with a thick accent (he was born in Budapest, Hungary) and had thinning white hair styled in the Einstein manner, a condition largely due to having just recently pulled off his beret.

A former student, Gregory Morgan, wrote in a recent UW Alumni magazine that he still pictures Dr. Sugar "slinking across the Quad in his trench coat and signature beret." (Seattle Times obituary)

I remember one day sitting in his small office, the room filled to over-capacity with books and a single desk, thinking as he explained some particular historical phenomenon to me, motioning to some book on a shelf and referencing a passage in a particular chapter that not only had he read every single book in his office, but he could recall the content of every one of them.  Moreover, and more importantly, he was able to fuse and synthesize all that content - rather than static and autonomous, the events and people of the world were a singular flowing, inter-related phenomenon. I also sensed a deep humility from him, a humility which led him to believe that in spite of vast knowledge of the world, he basically was in the dark and there was so much more he needed to learn about this phenomenon known as humans and their societies that has unfolded over the centuries.

I actually knew very little about his personal life other than he grown up in the Balkan region into his adulthood.  He taught European and Ottoman history, but he drew upon his own personal knowledge when he spoke of that region of the world that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea.

Some things I didn't know (or if he mentioned them in passing, I had quickly forgotten):

Born to a prosperous family in Budapest, Dr. Sugar played on Hungary's national hockey team. He also served in the Hungarian cavalry in the late 1930s.

I have a hard time imaging the tiny Professor Sugar sitting upon a horse, let alone charging into battle on one, sword drawn.  Or checking a player on the opposing hockey team into the wall in pursuit of the allusive puck. 

Before the fall of Hungary to Nazi Germany, he moved to Istanbul, Turkey, where he worked with U.S. Army intelligence during World War II.

I have an easier time imagining a young Peter Sugar bent over stacks of documents in some drab room, an intense bureaucrat translating and interpreting for some U.S. personnel who couldn't make heads or tails of the cultures and peoples that swarmed around them.

Dr. Sugar emigrated to the U.S. in 1946 [eligible because of service to the US army]. After a brief business career, he earned a bachelor's degree in history at City College of New York in 1954. He earned a doctorate in history and near-Eastern studies at Princeton University in 1959.

He joined the UW history department as an assistant professor that year and stayed for three decades.

I crossed paths with the professor in the Nations and States class in 1987 (just before he retired in March 1989).  While he was obviously an elderly person, especially to someone in his mid-twenties, I had no idea he was 78 years old.  His mind as far as my mind remembers was as vibrant and dynamic as the world he studied.  Good hearty Hungarian stock.

A key point the soft spoken Dr. Sugar wanted to drive home from the beginning of the class was a common mistake made by western Europeans and North Americans was to confuse and merge their understanding of what a nation was and what a state was.  This is because for the most part our nations and states emerged and unfolded together.  This is especially true for the U.S.  There is no long history of a people who considered themselves Americans before there was an American political state.  Before the war, there were Virginians and New Yorkers, if they tied their identity to a political state besides England.  For some religion was their primary sense of a larger identity.

The other point he wanted to impart was that nationalism, as a movement in human history, was one the greatest dangers to peace and prosperity. Another mistake people growing up in America or western Europe make is to not to see a downside to nationalism.  Nationalism emerges in the consciousness primarily as patriotism, and as such it is seen and presented in school and the larger culture as a virtue.

One must remember Sugar is from Hungary, located in a region of the world that has probably experienced the greatest chaos as a result of developing and shifting nationalities and states.  By the time I was seated in the professor's class, Tito had been dead for seven years, and Yugoslavia - a multinational state if there ever was one - was breaking apart.  This provided the backdrop for the discussion of Eastern Europe.  A description of his book East European Nationalism, Politics and Religion gives an idea of what Dr. Sugar poured over us at one point in the class:

The multi-national region of Europe situated between the German-speaking lands and those of the former Soviet Union has witnessed many varied manifestations of nationalism over the last two centuries. Professor Sugar has been in the forefront of those seeking to understand and explain these Eastern European nationalisms....The first two essays deal with problems of ethnicity and its specific manifestations in the region; the next three present the growth of national antagonisms during the 19th century. The third, and longest, section then sets out to examine the interaction of fully developed nationalism in Eastern Europe with the various political movements and religious organizations that impacted upon these lands.

Of course simply covering the history of this region of the world was in and of itself an eye-opener simply because I, as so many others, was a product of dismal state of our educational system and its lack of commitment to history and social studies.  That it is from what I hear even worse today (driven by the lack of the topics' importance to successfully taking the various required state and college tests in the K-12 world) than when I was in school is one force compelling the less than hopeful vision of the future (thankfully there are forces compelling its hopeful counterpart).

But as he rolled through the intricacies and nuances, Professor Sugar altered my understanding of identity.  Until that class, the concept of identity for me had been primarily a psychological matter.  Of course, as a student of history I was aware of political identities and how these developed and interacted with other facets of a person's identity.  I also understood how the inter-relationship between the world/society and an individual influenced one another in a back and forth manner, alterations to one caused changes to other.

As so often is the case, a great teacher is not one who provides you an utterly new understanding or paradigm of the world, but rather takes what is already there, sometimes just below the surface as an inkling, and makes it integral and powerful within one's paradigm .  That understanding which Sugar pulled to my surface was the collective identity.

Collective identity is a term thrown about from time to time.  Often it becomes a term used to describe behavior of groups in way that is better phrased as "as if there was a collective identity."  In other words, if the author or authors using the term was pushed on the matter, they would claim that there was an actual consciousness that existed in a similar manner as the consciousness of the individuals involved.  These are people who would become discomforted if a historical discussion suddenly veered to Jung and the collective unconscious. 

I don't know Sugar's personal view on the matter.  He may have even disagree with the understanding that emerged from those lectures.  Those messy unintended consequences.

To elaborate on this understanding around identity, something said by his son Steven in remembering his father is helpful:

As Balkan crises grew, he was in increasing demand to speak at local and world conferences.

"The media didn't listen very well to what he had to say...He did not see the crisis as religious, as was often depicted, but as a historical and cultural conflict."

The conflict based on religion can be seen as a battle between one point of view and another.  It could be reduced to a single person on this side and a single person on that side.  There doesn't need to be any past conflict or interaction between the two prior to the conflict.  A religious conflict, in this sense, becomes nothing more, or is at least reduced to, a bar room fight.

As a historical and cultural conflict, on the other, stretches back in time, as like a dream, its residue carrying people forward into a conflict whose exact contours are as much a mystery and misty as those dreams.  The conflict is embedded in the very language(s) of the people, subtly or not so subtly in the jokes and idioms .  Children emerge into cultural and historical understandings (in which religion plays a role of course) before they are able to understand them, and the emotions and thoughts felt years later as adults arise from understandings and perceptions not consciously understood and perceived. 

It would be easy to slip into the notion of the March of History, where individuals dissolve into unfolding spectacle as mere specks, no more able to think or feel or dream (or hate) than a dust particle being tossed about by a breeze.  Fortunately I did not get caught up this ideal view of the world (as is easy for a twenty-something to do as one's worldview seems to be in constant upheaval).

A nation is more than an autonomous individual decision to identify with others with some commonality.  It involves a deep immersion into a larger consciousness, which is itself unfolding and morphing over time.  Both we the individuals and the nations with whom we belong contain a plethora of residues and fragments from the distant and not so distant past that operate in ways we will never fully fathom. It is in part what makes life (and things like politics) interesting and so damn frustrating.  

There is something in me that feels compelled to tie this to Christmas and the Holiday Season, but that would be take some time and many many more words.  So I will end it here with a thanks to Professor Sugar for his dedication and commitment to not only understanding the world and the people who traverse through it, but to passing on those insights and perceptions to others.