Tomasz Kamusella. Nationalism and National Languages
In the 20th century, the ethnolinguistically homogenous nationstate became the norm of legitimate statehood, especially in Central Europe. At the level of rhetoric, the Soviet Union was an exception to this trend, but it in 1991 was replaced by ethnolinguistic national polities. The idea of the normative isomorphism (tight spatial and symbolic overlapping) of language, nation, and state still obtains in Central Europe, as exemplified by the parallel breakups of Yugoslavia and its Serbo-Croatian language, so that each successor state (with the exception of Kosovo) has its own national language.The widespread normative insistence that languages should make nations and polities, and nation-states should make languages, is limited to Central Europe (including much of the post-Soviet space) and Southeast Asia, prevented outside Eurasia by the imposition of colonial languages. Interestingly, should the European Union persist in its official polyglotism, the normative thrust of ethnolinguistic nationalism in Central Europe may be blunted in the future.