Minorities

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MINORITIES

ethnonationalism and the nation-state
ethnicity, immigration, and national minorities
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In approaching the history of ethnicity in nineteenth-century Europe, one must immediately consider it in the context of two other social concepts, nation and race. All three gained significance during this period from a central fact of European life: the rise of state units based on citizenship and internally united not just by a single ruler but by language, history, and culture. This shift from multinational empire to homogeneous nation-state would dominate much of nineteenth-century life, culminating in the 1919 Paris peace settlement. It produced the modern idea of the nation as a sovereign entity that aligned political and cultural boundaries to emphasize the unity of the people who composed it. At the same time, European concepts of race became more sharply defined and more prominent. While the Enlightenment had pioneered the classification of different peoples according to physical characteristics, during the nineteenth century the idea of human races as unchanging and completely separate gained popularity, spurred on by new theories in anthropology and the physical sciences. By the end of the century, concepts of nation and race had merged to an important extent, so that references to "the British race" or "German race" had become common in educated European discourse.

Between two such massive conceptual frameworks, what was the place of ethnicity in nineteenth-century Europe? Unlike nation and race, the term ethnicity did not appear widely, owing more to twentieth-century American social science. And yet ideas of ethnicity played a significant role in the development of modern European society and culture. Let us start with definitions. Ethnicity refers to a sense of commonality between individuals based on several factors, including at times language, history, biology, a common territory, family ties, and rituals. Scholars have generally differentiated between ethnicity and race, the latter based on major hereditary physical differences, and between ethnicity and religion, although both religion and race can play a role in defining ethnic identifications. Ethnic groups, like other social units, define themselves by both inclusions and exclusions. They can be very small or very large, as large as (or larger than) nation-states. As late-twentieth-century scholarship has made clear, ethnic groups (like nations and races) arise from historical conjuncture and evolve over time. Essentialist ideas of ethnicity are not literally true, but rather represent strategies of self-definition on the part of ethnic groups.

In nineteenth-century Europe ethnicity became, more than ever before, a function of the nation-state. The creation of the modern nation-state to a large extent centered on the struggle for ethnonational homogeneity, or what some call ethnic nationalism. States strove to enforce a common language and history over their entire territory, bringing together the political and cultural boundaries of the nation. Paradoxically, nations that achieved this goal ceased to regard their dominant cultures as ethnic, but rather as national and hegemonic. The elevation of certain dialects to the status of national languages, underscored by the rise of mass education in the nineteenth century, is perhaps the clearest example of this. This process did not destroy ethnicity, however, but rather made it more and more synonymous with cultural difference, relegating it to the margins of the nation-state. Therefore, the rise of ethnic nationalism was complemented by the rise of ethnic minorities, peoples whose cultures lay at variance with the increasingly homogeneous culture of the nation. Peoples, like the Irish, the Gypsies, the Jews, and most of the peoples of eastern Europe, who had existed as subject nations in multinational empires, became increasingly viewed not as separate entities but as foreign bodies within the nation-state. This was especially true of groups that, through either migration or involuntary displacement, had left their traditional homelands for a diasporic mode of existence.

This entry will consider the history of both ethnic nationalism and ethnic minorities in Europe during the nineteenth century. It will outline the ways in which the rise of state power and the increasing importance of both political and cultural unification in the formation of ethnic groups and nations transformed European society in the era between 1789 and 1914. It will argue that ethnicity in nineteenth-century Europe arose both at the behest of the nation-state and in reaction to (sometimes against) it. Throughout European society, from the elites to the peasantry, ethnicity gradually became a key component of collective and individual identity. The fact that ethnic customs and cultures were often portrayed as traditional and unchanging should not be taken at face value, but rather as an indication of the powerful shock of the new in a rapidly changing continent.

ethnonationalism and the nation-state

The rise of national cultures in the nineteenth century gave a new significance to ideas of ethnicity. The elevation of certain ethnic or regional traditions at the expense of others both underscored the importance of cultural traditions and challenged minority ethnic groups and the legitimacy of ethnic difference as a whole. As with so many other aspects of the history of modern Europe, there is perhaps no better place to start than the French Revolution. Not only in France but throughout Europe the Revolution fostered the idea of national cultures, even while it in theory rejected them in favor of an internationalist liberalism. Whereas in France itself the heritage of the Revolution became a powerful aspect of national identity, in other countries, notably Germany, the resistance to revolutionary occupation and ideology proved decisive in the constitution of ethnonationalism.

France

In France the French Revolution fostered two paradoxical (even contradictory) ideas of the nation and national unity. The most prominent was the universalist tradition, the belief that the core of national identity resided in the ideological principals of liberty and citizenship enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). To be French (as opposed to a member of the internationalist aristocracy) meant to subscribe to these principles and, if need be, to dedicate one's life to championing them. Frenchness resided in the acceptance of core beliefs, not in one's ancestry nor culture. It therefore followed that anyone who accepted these beliefs could become French. This universalist ideal, historically grounded in the experience of the Revolution, defined the nation around citizenship and equality before the law, and has remained a key component of what it means to be French down to the present. At the same time, the Revolution also spurred the creation of a specific national identity based on language and culture. For example, during its most radical phase the Revolution elevated Parisian French to the status of the national language, suppressing Alsatian German, Provençal, and other languages as counterrevolutionary. In this way languages became dialects, reducing ancient regional cultures to subnational ethnic minorities. The revolution thus produced a specifically French universalism, a phrase that accurately expresses its contradictory vision of the nation. All men could share in the benefits of Enlightenment and liberty, but in order to do so fully they must in effect become French. Napoleon I's conquest of Europe thus represented both the extension of liberty to the peoples of the Continent, and the aggrandizement of the French nation.

The paradox of revolutionary nationalism survived both the Bourbon and Orleanist restorations to become the dominant approach to national identity in nineteenth-century France. In many respects, the political aspect of French identity seemed most important, both because nationalists throughout Europe and beyond hailed the French Revolution as the great symbol of liberty, and because until the late nineteenth century conservative and reactionary forces tended to oppose both liberalism and nationalism. No one expressed this idea of French and modern nationalism better than the historian Joseph-Ernest Renan in his 1882 Sorbonne lecture "What Is a Nation?" Rejecting the idea of a racial basis to national identity (an idea that was in fact growing more powerful in Europe) Renan portrayed the modern nation as a political and historical construct, a deliberate creation of citizens rather than a natural entity. And yet, while Renan emphasized the importance of politics and ideology in constituting a nation, he also acknowledged the significance of culture. "A community of interest is assuredly a powerful bond between men. Do interests, however, suffice to make a nation? I do not think so. Community of interest brings about trade agreements, but nationality has a sentimental side to it; it is both soul and body at once; a Zollverein is not a patrie" (p. 18). As the legacy of the Revolution itself became not just one of principles but also one of historical triumphs and collective memories, so did the idea of national universalism become the cornerstone of French identity.

The prime mover in this process during the nineteenth century was the French state. The triumph of republicanism, first in 1848 and then more definitively after 1870, made the principles of 1789 the leitmotiv of national politics. At the same time the Third Republic in particular completed the Revolution's mission of transforming France into an internally unified nation of citizens equal before the law. The expansion of state power also took the form of the homogenization of regional traditions into a synthetic national culture. In his celebrated study Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, Eugen Weber has outlined the ways in which the French state integrated the provinces into its own vision of the nation. A variety of institutions paved the way for the conquest of rural France, frequently viewed by Parisians at the beginning of the century as a land of savages. The establishment of a state railway network centered around Paris both enabled people to travel around the country more easily and helped create national economic markets. The establishment of mandatory national military service brought together young men from different regions, training them in the defense of a common motherland. Most important, the republic created a system of obligatory primary education that not only taught an awareness of France's history, geography, and common culture (complete with national flags and maps in classrooms) but also created the mass literacy necessary for an appreciation of French identity. Finally, the republic's renewal of France's overseas empire, especially under Prime Minister Jules Ferry in the 1880s, also fostered an ethnic sense of national identity. Although in theory the principles of the Revolution applied wherever the French flag flew, in reality France's civilizing mission reinforced the idea that only those who adopted French culture, not just French politics, could be full-fledged citizens. The practices of republican empire distinguished the French from their colonies on the basis not only of ethnicity but of race as well, since in large part greater France was an empire of nonwhite colonial subjects dominated by white citizens in the metropole.

Germany

If in France the state drove the creation of an ethnically unified nation, in Germany almost the reverse occurred in the nineteenth century. In contrast to France, in Germany the existence of a distinct national culture preceded the 1871 final unification of the German state by several decades. After 1871 the imperial government did pursue policies to unify the German population ethnically, in a manner comparable to France's Third Republic. Yet not until well into the twentieth century did Germany achieve a similar level of cultural unification in the context of the nation-state. For Germany, the French Revolution (in particular the Napoleonic occupation) also played a key role in fostering a sense of German national identity, although in a very different way from France. Napoleon's rationalization of German state structures, in particular his reduction in the number of German states from over three hundred to less than fifty, began to create a more regionally and even nationally based sense of German identity. Perhaps more important was the resistance movement against the French that the Germans created. Many young German intellectuals had originally embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and supported the victories of the revolutionary armies against aristocratic Europe. Napoleon's occupation, however, revealed the extent to which the universalism of the Revolution had degenerated into the imperialism of the French state. In doing so, it helped spawn a nationalist revolt, of German particularism against French universalism. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) called on all Germans, by which he meant all those who spoke the German language, to rise up in the struggle for a free Germany. The playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's William Tell (1804) transformed a Swiss legend into an allegory of national resistance. The guerrilla wars of liberation against France not only helped create a sense of common German identity against the invader, but also became over time a central myth of national glory.

The wars of liberation came at a time when Germans had begun to elaborate a new sense of cultural nationalism. By the late eighteenth century German intellectuals had begun writing in German and seeing hoch Deutsch (High German) in particular as key to the nation's culture. This also represented a reaction against the Enlightenment and the intellectual predominance of French. This concern with language gradually developed into an interest in folklore and mythology, as researchers began to investigate local traditions and customs to understand what was unique about the German character. In 1812 the brothers Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859) published the first volume of their famous Grimm's Fairy Tales, which not only became a classic of children's literature but also sought to revive a forgotten part of the nation's heritage. Such concerns with national culture both arose out of and fostered the idea that each nation had a particular character, even "soul." Starting in the 1780s, the Protestant pastor Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that the essence of Germanness was the Volksgeist, or culture and spirit of the common people. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the burgeoning Romantic movement gave added weight to the idea of national consciousness and culture. In particular, Romanticism emphasized the crucial role of history in shaping national identity, arguing that each nation had its own specific history. The idea of the nation as organic rather than contractual would become a powerful aspect of mystical nationalism in Germany, distinguishing it in the eyes of many from the more classical national idea of France.

Yet while German Romanticism may have championed the national soul, it did not create the German nation-state. Ultimately the idea of unifying Germany along the lines of liberal nationalism failed, signaled by the collapse of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849. Instead national unification came from above, in the shape of the authoritarian Prussian state. This state-driven idea of nationhood, championed above all by Otto von Bismarck (German chancellor, 1871–1890), regarded Germany primarily as a political creation, subject to the kaiser, rather than as an expression of cultural nationalism. In fact large numbers of ethnic Germans, including the populations of Austria and the Sudetenland, were excluded from membership in the Second Empire. However, though it did not exercise state power, the ethnocultural image of Germany remained a powerful force to be reckoned with in the life of the new nation-state.

Some have overemphasized the contrast between French and German notions of nationhood, seeing it as a conflict between "civilization" and "culture." In both countries, and throughout most of Europe in the nineteenth century, political and cultural ideas of national identity coexisted. Nonetheless, in general German nationalism gave its ethnic and cultural component greater weight, at least in theory, than did that of the French. By the early twentieth century the definition of citizenship based on jus soli, or birthplace, in France, versus jus sanguinis, or blood, in Germany, would highlight these different approaches to national identity. In different ways, the cases of France and Germany demonstrated the pressure toward the ethnicization of European ideas of the nation-state during the nineteenth century.

ethnicity, immigration, and national minorities

The idea of ethnic minorities developed in tandem with the ethnic nation state in nineteenth-century Europe. The rise of dominant national cultures reduced those communities that did not share (or refused to embrace) those cultures to the status of minority groups. Moreover, the rise of ethnonationalism gave a new character to migration, especially that across national boundaries. The extent to which immigrants adopted dominant national cultures became an important index of the unity of nation-states, while the immigrants themselves had to contend not only with the difficulties of displacement, but also new pressures to assimilate. Therefore, in studying the history of ethnicity in Europe between the French Revolution and World War I, one must consider both insiders and outsiders, ethnic nations and ethnic minorities. The rest of this entry will focus on two particular groups: Irish immigrants in Britain, and Jews in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. While at first glance one of Europe's most unified nations would seem to differ markedly from the rambling multinational empire of the Habsburgs, these two ethnic minorities in fact had much in common. In both cases large numbers of people migrated from imperial hinterlands to metropolitan centers, balancing between assimilation into the minority culture and the establishment of distinctive ethnic minority traditions. And in both cases, ethnicity interacted with class, gender, and especially religion in shaping the immigrants' experiences in their new homelands. As culturally unified nation-states became more normative in nineteenth-century Europe, these and other immigrant minorities gradually came to symbolize the very meaning of ethnicity.

The Irish in Britain and the Jews of Austria-Hungary were of course only two of the many ethnic groups in nineteenth-century Europe. Most minority groups came from elsewhere in Europe; however, the nineteenth century also witnessed the growth of small non-European communities. The presence of peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean on European soil reflected the growth of European colonial empires and existed before the French Revolution. Eighteenth-century Paris had a small but visible black community, for example. But the dramatic imperial ventures of Britain, France, and other European powers in the late nineteenth century sharply increased the nonwhite population of Europe, a trend that would only accelerate during the twentieth century.

This phenomenon appeared most noticeably in Britain, the heart of the world's greatest empire. While precise statistics are rare, it seems that by 1900 Britain was home to several thousand "blacks," or people of color. London alone had nearly 4,000 by the 1870s. Colonial migrants to Britain generally fell into one of two groups: members of the elite in search of education and immigrant workers in search of jobs. Mohandas Gandhi studied law in London during the 1880s and by 1910, 700 Indian students were enrolled in British universities. In 1913 colonial students founded the African Students Association. At the same time large numbers of colonial immigrants worked in British ports as sailors and long-shoremen. By the end of the nineteenth century, London and Liverpool were home to a few hundred Chinese immigrants; although a tiny population, they nonetheless became targets of racist fears of cheap labor.

Irish in Britain

The impact of colonial migrants paled in comparison with the huge Irish immigration into nineteenth-century Britain. Many have termed Ireland Britain's first colony, and the Irish presence in Britain goes back to the medieval beginnings of English imperial domination. The nineteenth century brought a massive increase in travel across the Irish Sea, however, thanks to the cataclysm of the Irish famine. This disaster, which killed a million Irish and forced the flight of many more, is best known for having brought a huge new immigrant population to the United States. Many Irish refugees from hunger traveled to Britain as well, either to await transport to North America, or else to settle there permanently. For example, 300,000 Irish arrived in Liverpool alone during 1847, and while 130,000 subsequently left, the rest stayed. Irish immigration constituted the greatest migration to Britain since the Norman Conquest, so that by the 1860s the Irish-born population of the island numbered over 800,000 people, by far the largest immigrant group in the country.

Forging an Irish community overseas did not happen automatically. The Irish population in Britain was not only large but also diverse. Not all of it settled there permanently: earlier patterns of seasonal migration continued, although now dwarfed by the postfamine exodus. Large numbers of Irishwomen migrated, more than traditionally the case for nineteenth-century European migrants, and significant numbers of middle-class and of Protestant Irish came to Britain as well. However, the Irish population in Britain was dominated by poor people from the countryside, for whom migration to Britain constituted not just displacement but also their first experience with urban industrial life. Once arrived in Britain, the Irish generally set up autonomous communities, Irish urban villages in the heart of British cities. The majority of Irish inhabitants of London, Manchester, and Liverpool lived in predominantly Irish streets and neighborhoods. This segregation facilitated the establishment of ethnic community networks. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain's Irish had developed a wide range of community associations, ranging from music societies to political clubs to celebrations of Saint Patrick's Day. No organization played a greater role in creating Irish community life than the Catholic Church. Irish immigrants effectively took over Catholicism in Britain, transforming it from a small elite organization to a mass-based one. The church not only performed missionary work among the Irish poor, but also established schools, boys' and girls' clubs, and a variety of other social organizations.

The development of Irish community life in nineteenth-century Britain constituted not only an attempt to preserve Irish culture, but also a defensive reaction against British hostility and prejudice. Anti-Irish bigotry in Britain has a history as long as the Irish presence there, but it reached its most virulent levels in the nineteenth century. British hostility to the Irish had numerous roots, including anti-Catholicism, a colonial sense of superiority to a subject people, and a tendency to blame Irish workers, some of the poorest people in Britain, for their own misery. Stereotypes of "Paddy" as lazy, dirty, stupid, violent, and criminal abounded, often drawing on racist images of blacks and other nonwhite groups. Enmity often led to violence, as Irish communities faced attacks by British mobs during the 1850s and 1860s in particular. Community solidarity and ethnic cultural assertion was one response to British antagonism. At the same time, however, Irish immigrants did gradually assimilate into British society, winning a greater level of acceptance by 1914 and the advent of Home Rule in 1922. This generally did not mean a loss of Irish identity, but rather a sense of hybridity, of being both British and Irish at the same time. Over the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, the Irish evolved from foreign immigrants to an ethnic group in Britain.

Jews in Austria

Like the Irish in Britain, the Jews in Austria went from being immigrants to creating distinctive communities in the nineteenth century. Not only did migration mean for them going from imperial borderlands to urban centers, it also entailed leaving the traditional Jewish ghetto and assimilating into mainstream European society. Both groups were variously described in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religion, and race, and both ultimately experienced a certain amount of assimilation while at the same time creating well-defined community cultures. However, a crucial difference between them was the contrast between Britain and Austria (Austria-Hungary after 1867). Austria was a multinational empire, not a state, and its central institutions made no claims to representing the culture of all the empire's subjects. Yet it was also an empire increasingly battered by the forces of ethnonationalism, as the nations that composed it demanded more and more cultural and political autonomy. For the Jews of Austria-Hungary, especially those living in urban centers like Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, the tension between waning imperial control and waxing ethnonationalism shaped their ability to choose either assimilation or ethnic separatism in the nineteenth century.

Jewish migration into Austria's urban centers took place in the broader context of nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation. The revolution of 1848, in which Austrian Jews participated heavily, made them citizens of the empire and lifted residential restrictions on them, freeing them to travel. Over the next few decades hundreds of thousands migrated from the hinterlands, especially Galicia, Bukovina, Bohemia, and Moravia, to the cities. By the end of the century Vienna had a Jewish population of 175,000, Prague 13,000, and Budapest 200,000. They came drawn by not only greater economic opportunities but also the lure of German culture, the means by which many eastern European Jews had come into contact with Enlightenment modernity. Many assimilated successfully into Austro-German culture, to the extent that they often abandoned Yiddish for German and looked down on their more recently arrived brethren from Galicia. Yet although a few became so Austrian as to convert to Christianity, most retained a strong sense of Jewish identity, forging a new sense of themselves as modernized Austrian Jews. This included the creation of numerous community institutions, such as synagogues, community and charitable societies, and political organizations. In Vienna, for example, most Jews lived in Jewish neighborhoods, attended mostly Jewish schools, and married other Jews. Although the Habsburg imperial administration formally considered the Jews of Austria a religion, in actual fact they functioned as both a religious and an ethnic community.

As with the Irish in Britain, prejudice from the dominant society reinforced Austrian Jews' own sense of separateness. Unlike Britain, however, Austria was a multinational empire, not a nation-state, one in which the imperial forces strove to keep in check the nationalist desires of Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and other groups. The nationalist revolutions of 1848 that emancipated Austria's Jews had also produced major popular anti-Semitic movements, and anti-Semitism continued to exist as a potent political force during the nineteenth century. The reaction of the Jewish community to this situation took different forms. It is perhaps no accident that modern Zionism arose in Austria, as some Jews responded to the assertiveness of other peoples in the empire by arguing that they, too, constituted a subject nation. In fact, one strand of Austrian Jewish nationalism advocated the creation of a Jewish state in central Europe, not Palestine. The majority of Austria's Jews rejected both Zionism and popular nationalism, preferring to view themselves as Austrians of Jewish faith and heritage. They clung to the institutions of the Habsburg Empire, seeing in it a political force that, by resisting the pressure of potentially anti-Semitic popular nationalism, could assure a place for them. Only in a state where no one culture dominated completely could the Jews feel truly at home. They therefore asserted the idea of themselves as an ethnic group in a multinational empire, engaging in ultimately futile resistance against the nationalist forces that would soon tear the empire apart.

For both insiders and outsiders, therefore, ethnicity represented an increasingly important component of both individual and national identity in Europe between the French Revolution and World War I. The idea of ethnic community was most important in relationship to nations and nationalism: ethnonationalism reinforced the power of the nation-state, whereas ethnic minority communities called its unity into question. Like nationalism and race, nineteenth-century ethnicity paradoxically championed "ancient" traditions with mass literacy, state intervention, and other aspects of modernity. Ethnicity represented a kind of intermediate level of community between the family and the nation. As life in Europe became more and more complex, ethnic groups both provided a sense of familiarity in an alien world and exemplified the extent to which the traditional worlds they so often celebrated had vanished.