THE NATION, NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONAL PRINCIPLE

THE NATION, NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONAL PRINCIPLE

The ‘principle of nationality’—the belief that each nation had a right of self- determination and should find expression in its own distinct state—was the most subversive and arguably the most potent political idea of the nineteenth century. It inspired a succession of revolutions and wars; it broke up empires and overthrew dynasties; and it left the map of Europe and North and South America (and soon Asia and Africa too) changed beyond recognition between the 1770s and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Quite why nationalism should have become the force it did in this century is a subject of much debate among historians, sociologists and anthropologists. Some have pointed to the corrosive effects of economic modernization, with the break-up of old rural hierarchies and the need for fresh integrative structures and systems of communication; others have highlighted such factors as the development of ‘print capitalism’ and its role in producing emotionally charged ‘imagined communities’; still others have focused on the intellectual revolution occasioned by the Enlightenment, with the discrediting of traditional epistemologies, and the search by the educated classes for new secular cosmologies.

The genesis in the second half of the eighteenth century of ‘nationalism’—the idea that individuals derive their essential identity from a nation, whose interests they should seek to promote and defend—has more often been assumed than demonstrated, and in recent years a number of historians have rightly pointed to the existence of well-defined currents of nationalist thought in some of the older Western states, above all England, from the Middle Ages onwards. Wars, they have shown, were a particular catalyst to such thinking—in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as in the nineteenth and twentieth. Nor did the term ‘nation’ undergo any radical shift in meaning, as has frequently been suggested: writers such as Milton, Shakespeare and Bacon used the term in much the same way as it would be today. Even the desirability of some degree of congruence between nation and state appears to have been quite widely accepted. Machiavelli’s famous call in The Prince (1513) for Italians to liberate their land from ‘barbarians’ was echoed in more general terms by his French contemporary Claude Seyssel: ‘All nations and reasonable men,’ he wrote, ‘prefer to be governed by men of their own country and nation—who know their habits, laws and customs and share the same language and lifestyle as them—rather than by strangers.’

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 480 What gave nationalism particular potency from the later eighteenth century was the

emergence of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. This doctrine—most clearly enunciated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Du Contrat social—derived sustenance from extensive discussions among intellectuals of the Enlightenment about ‘national genius’ and ‘national character’, and the growing interest in historical study as a tool for the understanding of societies and furtherance of civil progress. Rousseau did not spell out exactly what it was that defined a ‘people’, but it was in ‘the people’ that sovereignty lay. Moreover, as he suggested in his Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne and Projet Corse states should seek to protect and nurture the particular character and customs of their people—through, for example, education and patriotic festivals—so as to foster patriotism (which he saw as crucial to the liberty of the ancient city states that he so admired). ‘A child, on opening its eyes,’ he wrote, ‘ought to see la patrie’; and everyone should be taught ‘love of their country, that is to say, love of liberty and the laws’.

The binomial of popular sovereignty and the nation found its first clear expression in the American Revolution of the 1770s; but it was with the French Revolution, and the ensuing cataclysm of the Napoleonic Wars, that nationalism erupted onto the stage as an active political principle, sweeping east and south across Europe, westwards into South America, and then later moving on into Asia and Africa. For the French revolutionaries the nation was represented by the Third Estate, and it was this Estate, ‘the people’, that should determine what the nation was and how it should be governed. This was liberal, but also profoundly subversive. In theory at least now, any group that identified with the new dispensation in Paris could elect to become part of the French nation: as happened in 1791 with the annexation of the papal enclave of Avignon to France following a popular plebiscite.

A far less liberal dimension to the new nationalism—and one that was to have devastating implications for much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history—was its aggressive rationalism. In part this was the result of Enlightenment universalism, which was at root humane and irenical. But the assertion that the French nation was ‘one and indivisible’, and the ensuing pursuit of legal, administrative and cultural standardization and uniformity, derived also from other more practical, less idealistic preoccupations: fears that the revolution might be subverted from within and from without. The often quite extraordinary initiatives to make ‘la patrie’ the object of mass veneration—the populist rhetoric, the theatrical ceremonies and festivals, the new appellations and symbols, the cult of the flag, the Marseillaise—served to mobilize a nation that by 1792 had more than a million men under arms and was about to embark on nearly a quarter of

a century of war.

The rationalism of the French Revolution, and the idea that nations could be constructed on universal principles, irrespective of history and traditions, was to receive a prompt challenge from several quarters. The most eloquent (and influential) riposte came from EDMUND BURKE, in England. Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) argued that nations were discrete, divinely ordained entities, whose distinctiveness was the felicitous product of slow, providentially guided, development. Change, if change were needed, should be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and should build on the accretions of the centuries. Burke’s views were to be echoed by a number of Continental European writers (notably such aristocratic French opponents of the

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revolution as BONALD and CHATEAUBRIAND), and were to provide the theoretical underpinning of the post-1815 Restoration order in Europe, with its conservative alliance of Throne and Altar, and uncompromising rejection of popular sovereignty and the principle of nationality. In the later nineteenth century they were to receive a radical and aggressive reworking in ‘integral nationalism’.

In Central Europe, the impact of the French Revolution, and the traumatic experience in particular of invasion by the Napoleonic armies, stimulated some very different thinking about the nation. While France and England had enjoyed several centuries of continuous existence as nation-states, and developed a fairly strong sense of national consciousness (albeit rudimentary still in many rural areas, especially in southern and western France), so making appeals to history or voluntarism appear quite logical, in those regions where there was no historical congruence between nation and state a more metaphysical and abstract basis for nationalism was needed. The principal source for this alternative version of nationalism—often referred to as ‘organic’ or ‘eastern’—was Germany.

In the years immediately before the French Revolution the German philosopher, critic and ardent collector of folk songs, Johann Gottfried von Herder, had elaborated a theory according to which humanity was characterized not by a universal rationality, but by difference. Nations, he argued, were the natural building blocks of mankind, and had a primordial, God-given existence. Each was endowed with a distinctive character, which over time had become etched deep into the soul of the common people. Through scholarly study, above all of language (the principal manifestation of a nation’s soul), he believed that it should be possible to uncover the primal ‘folk character’ of each nation and remove the alien and unnatural incrustations with which it had become overlaid. Herder was very much a man of the Enlightenment, and his instincts were humanitarian. He aspired to a multifarious world, tolerant of the diversity of nations. In the hands of a younger generation of German intellectuals, however, angry at the defeats inflicted on their fellow countrymen by Napoleon, his ideas on the nation assumed a more menacing character.

For these intellectuals—men such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Jahn and Johann Gottlieb Fichte—Herder’s idea of the nation as a natural, organic entity, existing over and above individuals, was grafted on to Kantian notions of autonomy, to produce a doctrine of nationalism in which will, struggle and self-determination were central tenets. For these post-Kantians freedom was no longer, as in the US, French or British models, something extraneous to the nation, which the state should seek to safeguard. Rather, freedom was a matter of self-realization, to be achieved through the total absorption of the individual in the collective life of the nation, outside of which, they argued, he had no meaning or purpose. In the case of suppressed nationalities—like that of Germany—this meant ‘awakening’ the national soul. As Fichte argued in his famous Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in the wake of the Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806, Germany would have to generate the same extraordinary collective spiritual energy as the French had shown, if it wanted to be free, and that could only come through a programme of education designed to fuse the will of the individual totally with that of the nation-state.

This German version of nationalism was to prove highly influential, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It helped to generate a huge scholarly industry of cultural, linguistic and historical research in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Across Europe, members of the educated classes gathered folk songs, unearthed and reconstructed (or in some cases, as with Romanian, effectively invented) submerged languages, collected sagas and myths, assembled vast tomes of historical documents, and made patriotic episodes from the past the subjects of novels and paintings. Though the practitioners of this research were often motivated more by academic and aesthetic concerns than political ones, these attempts to uncover the folkloric ‘soul’ of peoples provided the platform for many of the nationalist movements in the later nineteenth century, especially in Eastern Europe (but also in Ireland, to mention a ‘Western’ anomaly).

In the period between the Vienna settlement of 1815 and the revolutions of 1848–9, it was the ‘Western’ or liberal version of nationalism that was to be most in evidence in European politics. The re-establishment of absolutism, the rejection of the principles of 1789, and the alliance of Throne and Altar, ensured that the national resistance movements that had begun to appear in Italy, Germany, Holland and other parts of Europe under French occupation continued to exist and operate after 1815—typically through the medium of secret societies such as the Carbonari or GIUSEPPE MAZZINI’s Young Italy—and to link the pursuit of national self-determination to constitutionalism and a measure of secularization and democracy (though quite how much democracy proved a source of perennial contention among liberals). Revolution was the main instrument of change: Greece, Poland, Belgium and Italy all witnessed liberal national risings in this period. So too did South America, where in the 1820s, under the leadership of SIMON BOLIVAR and José de San Martin, Spanish imperial rule was brought to an end and independence secured.

In theory the liberal nationalism of these years was strongly humanitarian in its outlook. Self-determination, freedom from foreign rule, representative government and guarantees of personal liberty would, it was felt, usher in a new world order. As states became coterminous with nations, and the ancien régime elites were dislodged from power under the impact of the rising tide of democracy, so governments would come to rest on more stable foundations and the causes of international conflict disappear: for were not ‘the people’ instinctively more inclined to peace and the pursuit of material prosperity than bellicose kings and aristocrats? Free trade would help to cement this new order. And where disputes did arise, international arbitration, of the kind that JEREMY BENTHAM had advocated back in 1789 in his influential Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace, would prevail. Tennyson summed up the optimism of the age in his poem Locksley Hall (1842), when he envisioned a time when ‘the war-drum throbb’d no longer and the battle flags were furl’d/In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’.

In practice, though, the liberal nationalism of 1815–48 was far from being wholly irenic and tolerant. To begin with, the idea of self-determination was intertwined with a romanticist glorification of suffering and struggle—‘through blood and darkness to light’, as German liberals explained the red, black and gold of their tricolour. ‘Holy’ wars of liberation were accordingly necessary, desirable even, to give nations—in the words of a leading Italian follower of Mazzini—‘a baptism of blood’. Second, liberal nationalism was extremely vague about who or what exactly constituted a nation, and linguistic, territorial and historical claims were invoked or discounted in an almost arbitrary fashion according to the standpoint and interests of the observer. Thus English liberals (including

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JOHN STUART MILL) tended to dismiss Irish nationalism on the grounds that the ‘principle of nationality’ should further, not retard, the cause of human progress; and how could a small, economically backward, Catholic state be regarded as a step forward? German liberals in 1848 looked to scotch Polish claims for independence by invoking Fichtean voluntarism. As a prominent deputy of the left put it: ‘Mere existence does not entitle a people to political independence: only the force to assert itself as a state among the others.’

Nor, when they were examined closely, did the ideas of those liberal nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, who volunteered some theoretical justification for their beliefs, augur well for freedom and peace. In the absence of any widespread national sentiment in the peninsula, Mazzini based his conviction that Italy was a nation (and a great one at that) ultimately upon a religious intuition, namely that it had been ordained by God. This, more than any alleged oppression of the people, provided the moral basis for the struggle against the ‘foreigner’, just as after Italy’s unification in 1860 it was used by some of Mazzini’s intellectual heirs to support the government’s suppression of ‘anti-national’ internal dissent. No less perilous was Mazzini’s use of Herder’s idea of ‘mission’. In theory, Mazzini (like Herder) envisaged a harmonious world of free, self-confident nations, each contributing its unique qualities to the enrichment of humanity. In practice, though, it was hard for ‘mission’ to avoid a strong impulse towards competitiveness, even expansion.

Indeed, the dividing line between distinctiveness and assertions of superiority was a thin one, especially when past glories—real or imagined—were resurrected and used as a spur to national revival. Moreover, the scholarly passion for ‘national’ histories stirred up

a hornets’ nest of memories of wars, conquests and persecutions that contributed, especially in the later nineteenth century, to an atmosphere of growing international mistrust. The movement for German unification fed on deep strands of Francophobia, a belief that the French harboured inveterate, perhaps incorrigible, hegemonic ambitions, cultural and political, that would have to be defeated if Germany were ever to be truly herself. Similar sentiments could be found among the followers of Mazzini in Italy, while further east, in the Balkans, centuries of ethnic and religious conflict ensured that nationalism here was to be riddled with mistrust and hatred, and claims and counter- claims of superiority and inferiority. The hopes of Romantic nationalists like JULES MICHELET in the 1840s that by ‘being themselves’ the peoples of the world would come together ‘with open hearts’ were unrealistic.

It was in part an awareness of the dangers inherent in nationalism that led many liberals, especially in Britain, but also in France and the USA, to be sceptical about the application of the national principle in politics. Byron and DISRAELI—both of whom shared a Romantic identification with the underdog, and voiced strong sympathy for the struggles of oppressed peoples—were less typical than CARLYLE, COLERIDGE and LORD ACTON. In his well-known 1862 essay, Nationality, Lord Acton described the ‘theory of nationality’ as ‘a retrograde step in history’. He argued that a state that contained a diversity of peoples, and that guaranteed their rights and peaceful coexistence, was ‘one of the chief instruments of civilisation’. By contrast a state that sought to ‘neutralise, to absorb, or to expel’ other nations, risked destroying ‘its own vitality’. He concluded that the most perfect dispensations were multi-national ones, like the British and Austrian Empires.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 484 John Stuart Mill was also well aware of the dangers posed by nationalism. He had

been appalled at the bloody denouement of the revolutions of 1848–9, and at how:

in the backward parts of Europe…the sentiment of nationality so far outweighs the love of liberty, that the people are willing to abet their rulers in crushing the liberty and independence of any people not of their own race and language.

But he also conceded that the principle of nationality could be politically beneficial. In general, he argued, in the chapter on nationality in his Representative Government (1861), it was desirable for free government that a state and a nation should coincide: people liked to be represented by their own kind. But the national principle should certainly not be binding. There was a practicality threshold to be crossed: Hungary was ethnically too much of a hotchpotch to be unscrambled. More importantly there was a moral threshold to be considered. It was manifestly to the advantage of the Bretons and Basques to be part of the French nation, just as it was for the Welsh and Scots to be part of Britain. Secession would condemn them ‘to sulk on [their] own rocks, the half savage relic of past times, revolving in [their] own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world’.

Although there was an implicit economic dimension to Mill’s dismissal of smaller nationalities, in general liberals found it difficult to articulate a clear connection between nations and economies. This was mainly because the liberal anti-mercantilist orthodoxies envisaged no theoretical role for national governments: the main unit of wealth creation was the individual or the company. Indeed prior to the widespread adoption of protectionism in the 1870s and 1880s, the only important discussions of economic nationalism were in Germany. Here in 1840 FRIEDRICH LIST—who had been an influential advocate of the Zollverein—published his celebrated The National System of Political Economy, which argued that free trade was appropriate only to the most advanced economies, such as the British, and that if other countries were to catch up and compete, their governments needed to adopt national policies to foster their commercial, industrial and agricultural sectors.

Such ideas, however, found little support at a time when liberal Britain was widely regarded as the paragon of the successful state. But the devastating victories of less than liberal Prussia over France in 1870, and the ensuing emergence of realpolitik, weakened faith in the claims of classical liberalism. So, too, did the onset of industrial and agricultural recession. Social Darwinism also took its toll: if, as Darwin had shown, species flourished according to their capacity to adapt to circumstances, why should the same not be true of peoples, races or nations? And if states were to be successful, or simply survive, was it not incumbent upon governments to intervene—if need be at the expense of individual freedoms—and ensure that their societies were strong and that their citizens or subjects were educated and trained in a way that best enabled them to compete?

Already in the Far East in the 1850s, the arrival of Commodore Perry and his warships persuaded Japan to embark on a process of state-promoted modernization that would enable the country to catch up economically and militarily with the Western world. The reforms—focused on the person of the Emperor—had spectacular results, enabling Japan

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to take on and defeat both China (1894–5) and Russia (1905). Japan was the most remarkable instance of what has been described as ‘reform nationalism’ (in which Western models and practices were embraced in order to ‘defend’ existing traditions against foreign intrusion or rule), but varieties of it emerged in a number of Asian and African countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially within the Ottoman Empire.

However, the underlying impulses of ‘reform nationalism’—a perceived threat from outside, and the need to mobilize the people in order to meet it—also informed the extraordinary growth of nationalist rhetoric in most European countries in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Prussia had shown on the battlefields of Spicheren and Sedan what a disciplined and patriotic ‘nation in arms’ could achieve; and if, as was coming to

be widely accepted, war was the expression of deep biological urges, and not as many liberals had fondly believed, merely the sport of irresponsible kings and aristocrats, then states needed to ensure they were strong enough to deal with the predatory instincts of neighbours. That meant internal cohesion and unity, and the suppression of those groups (ethnic or racial) that were felt to threaten the organic purity and vitality of the national body.

The idea of ‘race’ (see ANTHROPOLOGY AND RACE) became increasingly entangled with nationalism in the later nineteenth century. The COMTE DE GOBINEAU, had launched this particularly insidious bandwagon with his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–5),which had argued for the superiority of a so- called white ‘Aryan’ race, and for the degenerative consequences of miscegenation. Though Gobineau’s ideas met with considerable opposition in his native France— RENAN, for example, in his famous Sorbonne lecture of 1882 pointed out that historians, anthropologists and philologists all used the term ‘race’ in very different ways, and that it was a far too crude a category to have any serious political validity—in the USA and Britain the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority attracted a number of influential apologists. In Germany, where the concept of the nation had from the outset been linked to concerns to recover and defend a primordial ‘volk character’, the idea of race struck a particular chord with sections of the insecure middle classes, and spawned from the 1880s increasingly xenophobic currents. Anti-Semitism, which until then had been to a large extent religio-cultural in character, now began to take on a strongly racial hue.

Racial ideas, and the growing concerns of states to promote national cohesion, were fuelled by the widespread socio-economic dislocation of the late nineteenth century, by the rise of revolutionary Marxist socialism, by persistent international rivalries (in Europe, and increasingly from the 1880s in Africa and Asia) and by the omnipresent shadow of war. Fear, and its reflex emotion of aggression, became central to the politics of many countries. As Hobsbawm has noted, the key term in the lexicon of the French right in the 1880s was not ‘family’, ‘order’ or ‘tradition’, but ‘menace’. Almost everywhere, minority ethnic groups found themselves the target of suspicion or persecution, above all in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where civic traditions were relatively weak and political instability pronounced. But in the West, too—in Britain, Spain and France—governments showed themselves increasingly intolerant of minority claims (Irish, Basque, Catalan, Breton, Provencal), and thereby often fuelled the very nationalism they had wanted to suppress.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 486 The militant, or as it is sometimes generically called, ‘integral’, nationalism of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had its spokesmen in many countries, but it was probably at its most strident in those countries such as Germany and Italy where strong feelings of internal and external ‘menace’ were combined with frustrations at unfulfilled national ambitions. Its most elaborate philosophical formulations occurred in France. Here, stung by the defeat of 1870, writers such as HIPPOLYTE TAINE and MAURICE BARRÈS identified the cause of their country’s misfortunes in the disjuncture arising from the imposition of doctrinaire liberalism on the ‘real’ French nation at the time of the revolution. Like Bonald and Chateaubriand nearly a century before, they saw this ‘real’ nation as the product of historical evolution, and thus as in essence still Catholic and monarchist; and in a manner reminiscent of the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, they regarded it as a spiritual community, with claims prior to the individual, which through race, environment and collective memories mystically informed and shaped the soul of the French people. According to Barrès’s disciple, CHARLES MAURRAS (the founder of Action Française who coined the phrase ‘integral nationalism’), only a Frenchman born and bred could ever fully appreciate the beauties of Racine’s line: ‘Dans l’orient désert quel dévint mon ennui.’

By 1914 militant nationalism, now generally associated with the political right, had pervaded most of Europe and parts of Asia, and was beginning to make inroads into Africa, too. For most on the left, this was a source of deep concern. While some socialists, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, were inclined to take a pragmatic view of the national principle and were willing to back independence movements in places such as Ireland and Poland in so far as they might hasten the demise of the old capitalist or feudal order, most shared the views of Marx and Engels that nationalism was at root an instrument of bourgeois hegemony that threatened international proletarian solidarity and encouraged exploitative imperialism. The surge of popular enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of the Great War proved profoundly disappointing to them. The nation had clearly become for many workers, as well as the middle classes, a fundamental locus of identity. Four years of slaughter did little to change this, and the twentieth century, like the nineteenth, was to remain heavily in thrall to the idea of the nation and national self-determination.