Urbana.org All Things New Blog - europe

Botched Revolutions

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve been boning up on my revolutionary history lately with a great account of the wildest European year of the nineteenth century: 1848.

There were attempted revolutions nearly everywhere in Europe, from France to Romania. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. It was the most important year in the abolition of serfdom.
And yet, most of the revolutions failed, with for the most part, after a “Springtime of Peoples” and riotous summers, the monarchs holding on to power and ultimately prevailing.

Author Peter Rapport does a really good job of holding the myriad simultaneous uprisings together in one unified narration. At first glance, the Parisian events have nothing to do with the Prussian war in Denmark, or the Neopolitan supression of Sicilian organized crime, or the Romanian peasant revolt against Hungarian landlords. But Rapport pulls it off.

Structuring the story in seasons—the Red Summer, the Counter-Revolutionary Autumn, etc.—Rapport can dart between hotspots in such a way that he can show commonalities across the continent, while returning to the same subplots and characters lets him go deeper in the particular places. It works.

Rapport expresses sadness that democracy by and large failed in 1848, a victim of popular (and justified) fears the revolutions would go too far (meaning Communist). Because although most of 1848’s revolutionaries were aware of simultaneous events around Europe, they were in the first instance local affairs. The common engine of revolution was consciousness-raising of local identities against distant and absolute rulers, with the exception of France—where a republic was replaced with a dictatorship.

It was this local consciousness, the Springtime of Peoples, that was certainly the most ominous development, as the communists at this point were bumbling idiots. But human flourishing was envisioned in ethnic terms, and the bloody wars and genocides of Europe’s awful 20th century are present here. Rapport never lets the spectre of genocide slip from view.

Baltic Mediterranean

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:01:00 -0600

The president of Estonia spoke recently at Turku University in Finland, on the issue of geography and identity. Drawing on the re-understanding of nationhood that has emerged in the last twenty years, which focuses on the social construction of nationhood—and, accordingly, its imaginary existence—Toomas Hendrik Ilves suggests the hardly controversial solution that “we should consider ourselves Europeans.”

Since European in this line of thinking is innocent as a lamb and incapable of hurting its neighbors around the world, he’s really saying “let us be citizens of the world.”

It’s been said endlessly, but Ilves adds a twist: regional geography. The Baltics, to which three countries he adds a fourth—that of his audience, Finland—have been subjects of various empires and foreign rulers for the last millennium, and have accordingly an important contribution to bring to the discussion of European identity: the Baltic Sea as a mare nostrum, as a European lake:

Today we can discern or imagine several competing or even co-existing concepts and theories regarding our region. The traditional view (if I can use that term for something with such a short history) distinguishes between the Nordic and Baltic countries, a distinction that itself is barely 70 years old. Another sees Balto-scandia as single space, as I would argue it was before the arrival of imperial rule from East and West. We have a northern dimension in the European Union and we will see under the Swedish presidency in the second half of this year a Baltic Sea Strategy that will recognize the Baltic Sea littoral as what it fundamentally and by and large is: an EU lake, a mare nostrum.

The very term mare nostrum ("our sea"), which describes the Roman view of the Mediterranean as a lake of Roman imperial dominion, shows how transitory our regional mental geography can be. Today, discussions of Northern Africa as a home of European civilisation would strike us as odd. Yet what would European civilisation be without St Augustine's De Civitate Dei? St Augustine was born and lived and did his seminal work in what today is Algeria. Yet today, in the European Union, we have something called the Barcelona Process, which is supposed to bring Northern Africa – the Southern Littoral of the Roman's mare nostrum – closer to the European Union. But also not too much closer, for today, the region is considered to be non-European. Yet St Augustine of Hippo lies at the core of what we consider Europe to be.

So, too, during the Cold War mental geography underwent a dramatic shift. In his classic essay from the early 1980s, "The Idea of Central Europe", Milan Kundera expressed his exasperation that in the post-war era, Vienna was considered a bastion and reigning capital of western civilisation, while Prague, the home of Franz Kafka and long-time home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two hundred kilometres to the West of Vienna, had quickly become a symbol of the grey and listless totalitarian East. Just as happened to Estonia, to Poland, to Hungary, countries once a part of European civilisation that found themselves in a matter of just a few years, thrust into an altogether different civilisation, as so brilliantly described by Nobel prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz in his book The Captive Mind.

Germany is Once Again an Emigrant Country

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:01:00 -0600

More Germans moved overseas last year than repatriated. This reports a Swiss newspaper.
In several 19th Century waves, hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homes for better lives in other countries, especially in North and South America and Australia and, after the German Imperial expansion into Africa, into today’s Tanzania.

It has been argued that part of the motive for obtaining colonies in the first place—never really part of German tradition—was a felt need to retain emigrants within the internal economy of the German empire.

From the vantage of today’s wealthy Germany, the economic engine of Europe, it’s hard to remember the brutal poverty in 19th century Germany, not entirely unlike that in today’s Africa. Germans were starving to death.

That’s why the very news of German emigration is eye-popping. The article doesn’t explain who these people are or why they’re moving. Without knowing better I’d guess a high number would be retirees moving to Italy or Spain, now part of Schengen’s borderless Europe. I’ve heard tell of German communities in Goa, India, serviced by German doctors and dentists.

Germans have a long-established culture of roaming and distance tourism; they gave us the word Wanderlust, after all. Still, it’s remarkable when a people loses interest in living at home.

From Nation-Building to Market-Building

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Writing in Mittelweg (in German), German Sociologist Theresa Wobbe takes a look at an important change in the process of European integration: gone are the days in which poorer members of the European Union and its predecessors were built into equal participants. The philosophy was that a continent of highly developed nations would serve everyone on the continent, so the rich countries taxed themselves for the purpose of building up the poor countries.

And it’s worked, most notably in countries on Europe’s geographical periphery, like Ireland, Latvia, and Portugal. Economically backward countries are now able to stand on their own two feet.

But a subtle change in values is emerging, Wobbe says; perhaps it’s a consequence of the success of the policies: we’re no longer talking about building a community of nations; we’re now talking about building a European society.

The difference is a lowering of national and regional identities in favor of creating a new sense of European –ness. The trick is that this is not merely nationalism at a higher scale: the purpose is to create a bigger internal market. That is, rather than building up (relatively poor) Slovakia so that the now (relatively) rich Slovakia may help everyone else prosper, we’re now talking about turning Slovaks into better consumers of the European market.

The key here is that the new, supranational scale of Europe/European Union no longer has as a goal a guarantee of continent-wide political access to a continent-wide citizenship; rather: it’s about continent-wide equality of economic opportunity.

If that’s the case, if Wobbe is right, what we’re seeing here is a new form of society-building, one in which identities and loyalties are entirely stripped of place—of geographical belonging. Slovaks aren’t wished to be the best Slovaks possible; rather Slovaks are wished to be just as economically productive as anyone else.

Mass Layoffs: more than an "American Problem"

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I was listening to an interview on the economy on a Swiss radio podcast and heard a comment that really smacked in the gut:

Swiss employment law makes layoffs easier than in EU nations; not surprisingly, layoffs are on the rise there. In this interview, the moderator asked for a definition of "mass layoffs", asking the interviewee, "is this more than an American problem"?

ugh.

The Poverty Hitler Hated

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Quite coincidentally, I’ve come upon two different social twists on Adolf Hitler’s legacy, each of which is quite fascinating in its own right, but amazing when taken together.

And it really is coincidence: Hitler’s Beneficiaries, by Götz Ali—which I’ll review tomorrow—came to me by accident. I’d ordered from the library another book by the same scholar, and the wrong one came, which I read anyway. And Children of a Vanished World, a collection of photographs by Roman Vishniac, was handed to me on vacation by my mother, who in turn (I believe) had found it on some giveaway table.

The former discusses the German poverty ended by Hitler (via the Nazi welfare state); the latter the Eastern European Jewish poverty he murdered.

Children of a Vanished World is a collection of several dozen photographs of Jewish children from Poland to the Ukraine, in the late 1930s. The pictures are accompanied by Yiddish playground songs and their English translations.

The Dove

The dove flew
Over all the world
And saw a lovely land
But the land was locked
And the key was broken
One, two, three
Out you go.

Roman Vishniac was brought into the region 1935 by a Jewish charity, who was already worried about the future of the communities with the saber-rattling coming from Germany. And it was just in time: the negatives had to be smuggled out of the country, and starting in 1939, Nazis overran Eastern Europe, and would later initiate a genocide of these communities—hence this Vanished World.

The history is not new to me. What really sticks in the throat here is the quiet, and somewhat self-contained poverty of these communities. These were hardly the international conspirator bogeymen obsessed over by the Nazis and today’s anti-Semites.

The haunting question, and one pages through this book is: which of these children survived?

Again, these were impoverished communities. It’s a recurring human tendency to try to eliminate poverty by getting rid of the poor (or at least getting them out of sight), and the whole story makes me rethink the holocaust. Why were rank-and-file Germans willing to participate in this mass-murder? In part, people have argued over and over again, because of the dehumanizing anti-Jewish propaganda bubbling out of Nazi headquarters, depicting Jews as rats and similar.

I am certain that’s part of the truth. But what about the fact that the Jews they encountered in Eastern Europe were hungry, with shabby clothes and broken teeth? It’s easier to be hard toward the homeless—we all know that. So—and this is the question I’m left with—was Jewish poverty a part of the holocaust motivation?

Photo: credit the International Center for Photography.

East Berliners vote to keep religion out of schools

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Berliners recently held a referendum on making religious education compulsory in public schools, as opposed to the “ethics” classes currently required.

The referendum failed. Berliners want to maintain their unique separation of church and school, shared in Germany only by one other state, Bremen.

That much is less notable to me, who attended mandatory religion classes in high school in Switzerland (and found the classes ecumenical to the point where they might as well be secular ethics—we talked mostly about pollution), than the demographics of the vote: it broke down neatly along lines of the old Berlin Wall.

Those from the old communist side voted overwhelmingly against religious instruction, while those living in the West leaned in favor. In the east, people had grown up taking socialist civics classes, and preferred against bringing the churches into the mix.

Does that mean the East Berliners want less religion? Probably not. As I’ve recently realized, the religious life in Communist East Germany was far from withering; there was, in fact, a vigorous church with youth movements, continually brushing up against the limits of state tolerance; East German Protestant churches, I’ve been told, were much more vital than those of other protestants in communist Europe.

The fascist was a spy

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

It’s as if Rodney King had been beaten by Black Panthers inside the LAPD: a change in the perpetrator’s identity changes everything about our understanding of the incident.

It was forty-two years ago today, on June second 1967, in West Berlin. Unarmed, unthreatening literature student Benno Ohnesorg was participating in his first protest (against the Iranian Shah’s visit), and was shot dead by a West Berlin cop named Karl-Heinz Kurras.

Kurras was found innocent in court, but the case galvanized student protest in West Germany. An entire generation, born post-war and raised in the shadows of the Iron Curtain, suddenly came to view their own government as fascist and bad.

Last week, forty years later, archivists going through the files of the East German secret police, discovered that Kurras was a spy.

While further research has failed to demonstrate that he was acting on orders, the symbolism of the story is incredibly troubling. Ohnesorg has been canonized (to the right: see this monument to him, image from Wikipedia) by the left as an innocent victim (that much is certain, in any case) of an irreparably brutal government.

In the short run, the late sixties and seventies, the murder was fuel for significant protest (including leftist terror) and wide-ranging soul-searching in the West, to the point that Germany went on the path to becoming the popularly left-leaning place it is today, with a gut-level distrust of Western powers.

Meanwhile, the story begs the question of memory: for those for whom Ohnesorg's death was a cornerstone to much of their values and moral decisions for forty-two years. Now what?

Listening to Neighbors in Europe and North America

Thu, 21 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Muslims in Europe are less happy, more likely to support their government, and more likely to have significant relations with people of other faiths—than their non-Muslim countrymen and –women.

This according to a new study released by Gallup, drawing on research previously done during their global survey of Muslims.

What’s really interesting to me, navel-gazing American that I am, is that when respondents from the United States and Canada were included for comparison, North Americans came off as far more likely than their European counterparts to agree that they’ve learned something from people of another faith in the last year.

That part made me proud, I must say. Over the 20-plus years I’ve been watching Europe, this may be the first time I’ve seen pollsters add a challenging question (that of learning from someone in the last year) to the usual, bland, tolerance questions, which always strike me as condescending.

Is there a bad to student mobility?

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:49:00 -0600

Upon the conclusion of Big Meetings for Big Bureaucrats in Leuven, Belgium last week, where the Bologna Process was to be pushed along, I was reading the GlobalHigherEd blog for a response.

The Bologna Process is, basically, the alignment of higher education standards in 46 mostly-European countries; the idea is to create a European interior market for university degrees. The subtext, always lingering, is the apparent global success of US-American universities, relative to European ones.

Writing in GlobalHigherEd, Peter Jones (University of Bristol, UK) comments on the lack of legitimacy to the student delegation at Leuven, claiming the European Students Union (ESU) to have a breathtaking "acquiescence with the Bologna scripts," as evidenced by a lack of criticism of the process.

The ESU would not be the first representative body to be taken up by bureaucratic and careerist agendas and seduced by proximity to forums of power and influence.

But to the meat here: Jones then offers some suggestions for rallying points for opposition to Bologna, wishing the ESU would voice these concerns. First pointing out that the ESU views mobility (meaning the ability to transfer between universities within the entire system) “as an unalloyed good”, he quotes from their position paper:

[Mobility’s] benefits for students, academics, institutions and society as a whole are undisputed. Xenophobia exists and becomes especially evident in the event of an economic crisis such as the one we are currently facing. Mobility will require openness and will contribute to a more tolerant European society…

Jones then proposes his main objection:

In fact of course mobility is a far more problematic issue than this. The ESU does recognise the dangers of the commodification of higher education, the promotion of brain drain and the creation of a higher education market but seems to see these as somehow side-effects rather than of the essence of the Bologna Process. The ESU both opposes making a market out of higher education and actively calls for the process which is contributing to it to be extended and implemented.

Never mind the disingenuousness of a researcher at a British University—beneficiaries of brain drain if there ever were any—Jones’ critique is deep and important. It’s basically the question of whether good local education might be squelched in the effort to be global.

Expanding further, this seems to be the same question of whether local or transnational is more capable of germinating vision.

Unser Kampf

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:09:00 -0600

News Flash: we follow in our parents’ footsteps, often even in the way we reject our parents.

I really want to read this book: Unser Kampf: 1968—Ein Irritierter Blick Zurück, by German historian Götz Aly, but I can’t access it, because I don’t want to fork over € 40 to buy it from Europe. But it seems to be a particularly juicy book of recent history, one that has triggered quite the brouhaha in Germany (link in German-sorry).

Unser Kampf means “our struggle” and refers to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“my struggle”). The title alone is the first punch: it’s hard for North Americans to understand the feelings such a title can arouse. Germany is a modern liberal democracy, yet one which has made exceptions to freedom of speech in matters of the Nazi past: Mein Kampf is banned; holocaust denial is illegal; the Neo-Nazi party is illegal, and so on.

A major public debate in recent decades has focused on situating the Nazi moment in German History. Put crudely, the question is: was Hitler the exception or the rule? With “our struggle”, (again, which I haven’t yet read), Aly seems to be pushing those buttons and more.

The book is about the “68 Generation,” or those young people involved in revolutionary (leftist) movements of 1968. Aly, as a young man, was a leading participant at the time. Forty years later, as a scholar of the Nazi period, he looks back to his own youth and concludes: we too had totalitarian tendencies.

As the 1968 protests were part political rebellion and part generational struggle between those born before and after World War 2, it is particularly belligerent of Aly to highlight the similarities between the camps. As one reviewer has put it, Aly is far from disinterested here; with many of his fellow 68ers, he’s writing through a bullhorn.

And, writing forty years later, this bullhorn says: the seduction of belonging to mass movements; the thrill of believing that the solution to most of the world’s problems may be at hand; the intoxicating feeling of being on the correct side of progress—all these are shared by both the 68er youth and their Nazi youth parents.

What does all this mean for North America? 1968 here was more fragmented. After Martin Luther King’s murder that spring, all hope for a revolutionary coalition between black and white youth withered away; plus the anti-Vietnam element here drew attention away from a leftist social transformation as envisioned by the Port Huron crowd.

But generational battles are always new, and full of mutual incriminations. It’s tempting to Monday-morning quarterback the mistakes of one’s parents’ youth. It’s a lot harder to admit we were wrong.

Many readers of this blog, I assume, are of student age. We too will one day have to swallow withering critique from our children. Some of it will be ignorant; some of it deserved. How will we face that moment? More importantly, how will we handle the bullhorn of our own youth, as we speak to our own parents?

Signs: Boundary-Free Europe

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Border-Crossings in Europe are becoming as easy as between provinces or states in North America—this at a time of passport controls between the US and Canada. Pictured here is entering the Netherlands from Germany.

My question: what are the long-term, culture-making consequences of borders like these? Does local identity take on more, or less meaning, as symbols of national sovereignty fade?

[photo credit: borderforum.org member Andreas]

Ayatollah Khomeini Wins!

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:37:00 -0600

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Salman Rushdie affair, which though formally over, is still alive, both for the condemned man himself, and for the European intellectual culture he represents.

Thierry Chervel of signandsight.com has written a retrospective in a German newspaper, now available in English.

The main problem, says Chervel, is that

In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality.

Set aside, for a moment, the highly debatable notion that free speech and equal rights are the exclusive domain of the Left (big L, which Chervel means those of the 1968 generation). What he's saying is significant: that the West no longer stands for anything, human rights included, aside from multiculturalism.

To review, for those too young to remember 1989:

Bombay-born Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, published a novel called The Satanic Verses, which he knew would be considered offensive against Islam.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (the same revolution depicted in the movie Persepolis), issued a fatwa, a judgment, against Rushdie, condemning him to death.

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.

Riots and book burnings ensued, not only in Iran, but in liberal Europe as well—largely by angered Muslim residents of those countries.

The secular West may have won the struggle, Chervel argues, but only in the short run. Yes, Rushdie survived. Yes, his book became a bestseller and is today widely available. And yes, the fatwa was put in the back shed after Khomeini’s death.

But, Chervel continues, today the West’s attitude toward Islam is marked by a multiculturalist spirit of taboo. That is, in the name of respect we submit to censorship—in advance of any real controversy.

“We” (left-leaning, secular cosmopolitan types) need only look at our great success in taming Christianity to realize the importance of pushing the envelope with Islam:

Playing with the symbols, discourse and constraints of Christianity has long been taken for granted in Western culture. But playing with the symbols of Islam has been out of bounds since the fatwa, ostensibly out of "respect."

What do you think?

It seems to me that Chervel has drawn a bizarre conclusion from the Rushdie affair: that blasphemy is a duty of enlightenment, and that self-restriction out of respect necessarily constitutes submission. In fact, we restrain ourselves all the time, even when we’re entirely among those who share our culture.

It is a rhetorical trick to suggest there is no alternative between, on the one hand, embracing religion-cloaked anti-female violence, and on the other, celebrating the humiliation of that same religion. It's a false choice Chervel--and others like him--present to us.

There is a muscular civility, modeled for us by Martin Luther King and his followers, that can combine unwavering and principled judgement with kindness.

Blasphemy may be a noble calling to the transatlantic cultural élites, but it is not at all clear to me that the blasphemous life is the liberated life. In fact, to develop an idea I first heard from Slavoj i ek: as with the senseless violence of countless urban riots, in which the property of friends and neighbors is destroyed, or with the pitiful tantrums of a two-year old, intentional offence, far from creating space for freedom, can actually be an expression of impotence and fear.

In the end, it seems to me, if Khomeini has won it is because he stands for something, while neither the multiculturalists, too timid to risk, and the Enlightenment vanguard, paranoid of restraint, stand for much of anything—they fail to define a world worth living for.

But: surely we don’t have to embrace death sentences for blasphemers. What is a better way?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member sumeja]

Not Far From History

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I remember when Ceaucescu fell.

I was in high school and quite attentive to the collapse of communist Eastern Europe. First Poland, over the summer, then several others in early autumn, before the highlight, East Germany—marked by dancing on the wall.

I was safely away in Switzerland, listening to it all on my short wave radio. The cold war’s end didn’t change my life. I was only a few hundred kilometers from history, though.

That’s the story of the delightful Romanian movie 12:08 East of Bucharest. Set on the anniversary of the dictator’s flight from his palace, but in a provincial city somewhere East of Bucharest, it is a funny day-in-the-life story of a small-town TV manager struggling to imagine a role for his city during the revolution.

It all revolves around one question: were we out protesting before 12:08, the moment when Ceausescu fled? Or did we merely celebrate in the streets, now that the danger was passed?

It’s a great question, and delivered in such dead-pan fashion—this is a really funny movie.

Here’s the trailer. I could only find the Romanian trailer and one subtitled in Spanish, so this’ll have to do:

Enlightened European Narcissism

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:01:00 -0600

Persepolis works hard to make the Islamic Revolution seem an exotic imposition upon secular Iran (image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

Yesterday I looked at Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous Persepolis graphic novels, which tell the story of a childhood during the Iranian revolution and beyond. The story has also been adapted to film, now out on DVD (check your local library). I've got the trailer embedded below. Don't worry: the DVD has an English-language setting.

I loved the books and the film both. The film is visually far better than the books, but preserves the books’ Spartan feel. The film, however, makes a subtle editorial decision, that significantly changes the feel of the story; that decision is described in the special features—in a question-answer session in which French co-director Vincent Paronnaud speaks.

In order to make Marjane Satrapi’s story more understandable, they worked hard to make Tehran and Iran seem more universal, and less exotic. They wanted Tehran to look like anywhere—like San Francisco, or Cincinnati—those are the two cities Paronnaud mentions—or nowhere. Tehran has no mosques, no bazaars, and no strange music. It has anyplace high-rises, anyplace traffic jams, and so on.

Vienna, on the other hand, is other-worldly and fantastic, with haunting cathedral bells, beer halls (Paronnaud inexplicably calls them “Bavarian”), bourgeois punk anarchists, and coffee-houses. Listen to the opening few seconds of the trailer, below: those are European church bells. Vienna, in other words, is made to be the abnormal place, next to which Satrapi’s Iranian childhood seems normal. The intent is to help “us” better relate to her disorientation in Austria. (See Jesus, You Know, a movie I reviewed recently, for Austrian Catholics at prayer).

All this tells us that the subject of this movie is not Marjane Satrapi, but the European viewer, for whom a city like Vienna—with its high-context urban textures, from church bells to classical music to beer halls and bourgeois anarchists—is under normal circumstances “normal”. Non-Europeans wouldn’t need the touch: Europe is already a strange place. This is reverse orientalism.

Furthermore, by sterilizing Tehran, they’ve made the Islamic revolution come off as a foreign imposition—something certainly un-Persian (hence the title Persepolis, the ancient—pre-Islamic—imperial capital). Islam and Islamic revolution are conflated, and alien to “real Iran,” which is a nominally Muslim, thoroughly modern place.

Sandra Mackey, in her book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, argues that an important sub-plot in Iranian history is the tension between ethnicity (Farsi, or Persian—an Indo-European ethnicity and language) and religion (Islam, a religion with a universal claim, but which originates in Semitic Arabia). Iran, after all, is one of two countries in the world named after the proto-Indo-Europeans, the Aryans.

Persepolis is a story, told by a non-devout Iranian expatriate/exile. It is now a movie intended for a European audience that, noisy multi-ethnic debates aside, is still quite uncritically unaware of its particularity.