Searching for the perfect nation: the itinerary of Hans Kohn (1891–1971)

Abstract

. The ‘Hans Kohn Dichotomy’, i.e. the distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘Non‐Western’ nationalism, remains one of the most persistent paradigms in the study of nationalism. This article deals briefly with the terms of Kohn's Dichotomy and with the discussion about it. The main purpose of the article, however, is to problematise the dichotomy in terms of Kohn's personal itinerary which took him from Prague to Russia, and from Britain and Palestine to the United States. Kohn came late to the view that there were two types of nationalism. He adopted this position in the wake of a series of political and personal disappointments, and in response to dramatic historical challenges. In the final analysis, Kohn's Dichotomy was a rhetorical construct, designed to make sense of a world in conflict and to allow Kohn and others, then and later, to come to terms with the hopes and fears raised by nationalism.

The history of the dichotomy of civic Western and ethnic Eastern nationalism

“…Moreover … for Nazis of the early 1930s … American race laws sometimes looked too racist.' 5 Scholars have, however, shown how Kohn's life story affected the design of his dichotomy (Liebich, 2006), and how it made him grateful to the USA, the country that welcomed him, and blind to its racism (Jaskułowski, 2010, pp. 296-297;Kuzio, 2002, pp.…”

National identity and the “Kohn dichotomy”

“…The source of Kohn's dichotomous typology has been attributed to his own life experience in Central Europe in the early twentieth century, where, during his early years in Prague, he had a front-seat view of the contest between competing models of identity (Liebich 2006). Kohri's youthful political activism and his early involvement with Zionism encouraged his work on Jewish intellectual history; his 1924 pamphlet on "the political idea of Judaism" was substantially incorporated in his much broader classic study of nationalism 20 years later (Pianko 2010, 297-300).…”

‘New Europe’: Between Cosmopolitan Dreams and Nationalist Nightmares

“…Any attempt to order geographically the quality of nationalisms in Europe is fallacious. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the limitations of civic/ethnic and western/eastern dichotomies in studies of nationalism (Tamir, 1993; Nielsen, 1997; Schnapper, 1996; Liebich, 2006). As I have argued elsewhere (Auer, 2000), reductionist dualisms between two kinds of nationalism are particularly unhelpful in relation to the countries of central and eastern Europe.…”