NATIONALISM

Nationalism came to dominate political and cultural life in Europe during the nineteenth century, and throughout the world in the twentieth, but defining it with any precision is far harder than recognizing its importance. The best definition is probably the least helpful: nationalism is an ideology that prioritizes the needs of the nation, making all other concerns—social justice, universal religious teachings, partisan politics, personal ambitions—subordinate to the national interest. But that just begs the question: What, exactly, is a nation? Is it defined by language, ancestry, religion, cultural affinity, geographical location, political allegiance, or some combination of all these factors? Once a nation is identified, what does it mean to pursue its interests? Does a nation have to possess an independent state? Must people of other nations be purged from that state? These questions, which have shaped the history of nationalism in Europe, have proven to be as persistent as they are irresolvable.

the origins of nationalism

The word nation is based on the Latin natio, which referred in ancient times to a collection of people united by common ancestry. Prior to the eighteenth century, however, the term had little ideological importance. Political allegiance in medieval and early modern Europe rarely corresponded to linguistic or cultural communities, and it was perfectly normal for a variety of communities to coexist within the same town, region, or state. One's sense of "self " was neither more nor less fragmented than it is today—people would think of themselves as worshiping within this-or-that religious tradition, speaking this-or-that language, living under this-or-that monarch, having this-or-that ancestry, but no one would presume that one and only one of these categories could define a person, or that all of them should somehow come together to create a unified sense of collective belonging. The difference between premodern and modern Europe was not necessarily a change in the way people perceived themselves, but the increasingly widespread sense that the irreducible complexity of cultural diversity was a problem—one that could be and should be solved. In the worldview of the nationalist, humanity got divided into sharply defined groups and everyone inside each group was said to share an identity, in the sense of being (on some basic level) identical. The emergence of nationalism entailed the quest for (and eventual enforcement of) a homogeneity that never did and never could exist.

The ideology of nationalism does not have a clear intellectual lineage or recognized set of canonical texts—it is not even an "ideology," in the strict sense of the word, but rather a set of general attitudes about culture, community, and politics. These attitudes began to come together in the late eighteenth century, when a wide range of intellectuals (mainly in Europe, but also in the Americas) began toying with the ramifications of the idea that humanity is grouped into mutually exclusive cultural blocs, and that these blocs are coherent and cohesive enough to act as collective historical agents. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) was one of the first European philosophers to argue that language determines the way people think. Instead of a single pattern of reasoning common to all humans, Herder posited the existence of linguistically determined modes of understanding that made communication across cultures extra-ordinarily difficult. This diversity was to be celebrated and protected, Herder argued, because each linguistic culture offered a distinctive contribution to humanity as a whole—he was, in other words, quite distant from any form of German chauvinism or xenophobia. But even as he praised the plurality of cultures, Herder implied a certain uniformity within each collectivity based on his assumption that the most fundamental thoughts of the people in a community were structured by the language they shared with their neighbors. It is therefore no surprise that Herder's ideas would be cited throughout the nineteenth century by nationalists who were far less cosmopolitan than he was.

Though he differed from Herder in many ways, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) made a similar move in the political realm, advancing the idea of an undifferentiated "general will," a sort of collective personality that took precedence over the individual personalities within it. Whereas Herder's community was defined by language, Rousseau's was marked by adherence to a "social contract" that defined subgroups within an otherwise undifferentiated humanity. Many historians of nationalism have drawn a sharp contrast between Herder and Rousseau, suggesting that the former represented a culturally defined nationalism, whereas the latter advocated a nation based on citizenship and republican liberty. Without denying the profound differences between these two thinkers, it is important to note that they were linked by a shared assumption that large-scale communities were the primary agents in history and in politics, and that those communities were bound together in ways that compelled individuals to embrace mutually exclusive identities. In this sense they were both among the first Europeans to cultivate a nationalist mode of thinking.

As intellectuals such as Herder and Rousseau were debating new ways to think about communities and politics, two developments at the end of the eighteenth century brought the concept of the nation to center stage for millions of Europeans: the French Revolution (1789) and the Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, and 1795). The Revolution turned theories about the "general will" into a vital public issue, as the new French regime claimed to derive its authority from, and speak on behalf of, "the people." When the Revolution was threatened from abroad, a mass mobilization (the levée en masse) created a genuine citizen's army for the first time in European history, as hundreds of thousands of troops demonstrated their willingness to die for the nation (at least as long as the nation was coterminous with the Revolution). At almost the same time, the total destruction of the Polish Republic, previously one of the largest (albeit also one of the weakest) states in Europe, created the first significant political movement in Europe to juxtapose a call for "national liberation" with the highly charged rhetoric of the revolutionary era.

Over the course of the coming century Poles would be joined by groups advocating the national causes of Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Irish, Italians, and Germans—indeed, virtually every corner of Europe (and eventually the entire world) was touched in some way by some kind of national movement. These causes differed in many ways—some stressed independence, others unification, still others merely demanded recognition and respect for their languages and cultures. For all their differences, though, all these national movements spread the view that the world was divided into national communities, that every individual possessed one (and only one) national identity, and that these nations were the fundamental building blocks of history and politics.

national idealism

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was already a prominent philosopher when he gave a series of lectures in 1807 and 1808 titled "Addresses to the German Nation." Like Herder, he believed that national communities were defined by language, and that those speaking different languages thought in different ways. Fichte, however, drew some specific political conclusions from these observations. At a time when most of Europe was occupied by the forces of Napoleon I, Fichte argued that all Germans should both resist foreign rule and unite within a single national state. Even more important, however, was the philosopher's justification for this political agenda: Fichte imagined a grand scheme of historical progress according to which each nation, acting through a state, contributed to the overall advancement of humanity. Each nation represented a unique principle, a specific piece of the larger puzzle that was human advancement, and the pursuit of independence and unification was the means by which this ideal would be realized.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was widely assumed that nationalism was a revolutionary force, tied to slogans about "liberty," "freedom," "justice," and even "democracy." At a time when Europe's ruling elites were for the most part nonnational or supranational, the claim that people of a common culture should belong to a common state was inherently disruptive. The Italian movement for national unification was almost inevitably opposed to the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, which had an interest in sustaining the Papal States; the German national movement threatened the autonomy and authority of dozens of monarchs; the Greek independence movement challenged the Ottoman Empire; and the Polish national movement was an ever-present danger to Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. But the revolutionary reputation of mid-nineteenth-century nationalism was based on more than just this alignment of political interests. The ideology of nationalism was itself, at the time, fundamentally radical. For all the talk of language and culture, few nationalist activists in the 1830s or 1840s would go so far as to define a nation purely according to ethnographic features. Language was important, but it was not exclusively determinative. More fundamental was the "national idea" or the "national soul": an ill-defined "spiritual" communion that linked people together, imbued them with a historical mission, and positioned them within a grand scheme of historical progress. Nationalism was tied up inextricably with the romanticism and idealism that shaped European culture at the time, and this generated a sort of internationalist nationalism—an eagerness to see each national cause as part of a much broader struggle. Thus Lord Byron (1788–1824) would die while taking part in the Greek war for independence, Poles would go into battle during a rebellion in 1830 with flags emblazoned with the slogan "For Your Freedom and Ours," and the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) would found the People's International League in Britain in 1847. The flip side of the idealistic and progressive views of these early national movements was their limited social base. They could focus on the "national spirit" rather than ethnography or linguistics, because for the most part they were engaged in conspiracies rather than mass politics. Sometimes those conspiracies led to violent clashes involving thousands of people, but until at least the 1840s it was easy for national activists to place "the people" on an idealized pedestal.

A turning point in this regard were the revolutions of 1848, for it was in that year that nationalist activists from all over Europe first confronted a problem they had been carefully dodging to that point: What happens if the national liberation of one group conflicts with the national liberation of another? How can liberty remain a meaningful term in a nationalist framework if it cannot be universally applied, and attained equally for all? Tragically, in 1848 it became evident that the Hungarian movement's aspirations were irreconcilable with the goals of many Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, and Romanians; Czech nationalists could not achieve what they wanted without challenging the dreams of many Germans from Bohemia; any program of German unification inevitably came up against Polish hopes to restore independence; and those Polish ambitions, in turn, would have made it impossible for the Ukrainian movement to reach its objectives. None of these programs had to clash as long as everyone was talking about the "national spirit" and the ideals of freedom supposedly embodied in national liberation movements. But during the revolutions of 1848 the first stirrings of mass politics brought ethnolinguistic complexity to the forefront as never before. The Pan-Slav Congress held in Prague that year collapsed in the face of bickering among the various delegates; Germans and Poles fought over the fate of the Pozna? region; and the Habsburg monarchy was able to use Croats, Romanians, Slovaks, and Serbs against rebellious Hungarians. The experiences of 1848 dealt national idealism a blow from which it never fully recovered.

national egoism

In a poignant testimony to the changing shape of nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, Mazzini refused to participate in the political life of the newly created Italian state, even though he had fought for that cause his entire life. Italy had been built using the tools of power politics, and its government and social system failed to break from the institutions and norms of the past. It was, in other words, just another European state, and to a national idealist like Mazzini that was intolerable. A similar pattern was seen in Germany a few years later, when unification came not at the hands of revolutionaries, but under the leadership of the archconservative, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). Perhaps no one exemplified the new approach to nationalism better than Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), a political theorist who believed that nations were bound by no universal moral restraints in their quest for independent statehood, and that the ensuing states were similarly entitled to use whatever means were necessary in pursuit of their expansionist goals. Nationalists such as Treitschke believed that nations were locked together in a struggle for survival, in which the winners would be those with the most discipline, unity, strength, and collective determination. The national interest had nothing to do with broad goals of peace, justice, or liberty—instead, the only concern for each nationalist was the welfare of his or her own nation. In this context, nationalism dovetailed with imperialism, helping to provide a justification for aggression both within Europe and in the colonial world.

Accompanying these developments in political theory came a wave of nationalization campaigns: programs (usually state-sponsored) to establish ethnolinguistic homogeneity where none had existed before. Eastern Europe provided some of the best-known examples: Hungary attempted to suppress the use of the Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, and Croatian languages; Germany tried to forcibly assimilate Poles; and the tsars attempted to spread the use of Russian to parts of the empire where it had not previously been widely spoken. While these campaigns were the most obvious, no less egregious were the much more successful programs to make France linguistically homogeneous (which it was not in the mid-nineteenth century), or to create a single Italian language for the new Italian

state. Late-nineteenth-century nationalists all over Europe came to recognize that the imagined cultural unity spoken of so glowingly earlier in the century did not, in fact, exist. Peasants in particular were notorious for their lack of "national consciousness," but the problem (for nationalists do tend to perceive cultural diversity as a problem) was not limited to isolated rural areas. In nearly all the towns of central and eastern Europe different communities lived side by side, and bilingualism was common. In these settings, national activists had to exert a great deal of energy to polarize the cultural and political atmosphere, and force people to pick the group to which they wished to belong.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, were marked by concerted efforts on the part of both state officials and opposition activists to "nationalize" the masses. They succeeded for a number of reasons, not least of which was the way in which competing national groups generated a climate of struggle in which each side agreed on one basic point: victory for one would mean defeat for the other. The collective hatreds that exploded during World War I and the tenuous system of "nation-states" created in Europe afterward demonstrated how successful the previous decades of "nation-building" had been. Later in the twentieth century the rhetoric of nationalism would be appropriated by anticolonial movements all over the world, appearing in a wide variety of iterations and transposing itself onto a diverse array of political conflicts. Observers have repeatedly prophesied the end of the age of nationalism, but the post–Cold War era has provided many new examples of the continued potency of national thinking, both in Europe and throughout the world.

theories of nationalism

The scholarship on nationalism stood for decades in the shadow of two towering mid-twentieth-century authors: Carlton J. H. Hayes and Hans Kohn. They introduced two basic themes that persisted for many years. First, both scholars drew a distinction between a good nationalism marked by civic inclusion and a benign love of one's country, and a bad nationalism marked by aggression, cultural chauvinism, and racism. This dichotomy reproduced itself over the years in both chronological and typological schemes, even among those who claimed to eschew explicit moral assessments. Kohn himself literally mapped out these two types of nationalism, locating the good nationalism in "the West" (which for him meant France, Britain, and the United States), and the bad nationalism in "the East" (which started in Germany in his presentation). A strict spatial embodiment of nationalism's Janus face has been repeatedly debunked: the rhetoric of civil inclusion in "the West" has often been used to conceal cultural exclusion, and there are plenty of examples of "Eastern" republicanism. Nonetheless, the basic dichotomy, cast in less stark terms, persists to this day.

The second enduring element introduced by Hayes and Kohn was the way they plotted nationalism's history over time. Kohn traced the evolution of "the idea of nationalism" from the ancient Israelites to the Enlightenment, but characterized this long history as a prelude to the birth of "modern nationalism" around the time of the French Revolution. Hayes offered a slightly different narrative, but the general scheme was similar: in both cases, the emergence of national thinking was an integral part of modernity. For Hayes, Kohn, and countless historians of nationalism to follow, the nation has appeared as the primary means of organizing collectivities in the modern world, supplanting earlier forms of community and polity (first in Europe, then throughout the world).

The first historians of nationalism told this story within the genre of intellectual history, focusing on the ideologues of national and nationalist thought. Eventually this approach was challenged by social scientists who tried to explain modern nationalism by linking it to broad forces of social change. Nationalism was taken out of the realm of ideas and grounded in seemingly more concrete social dynamics (industrialization, urbanization, and the corresponding transformations of political consciousness). This approach dominated the scholarship on nationalism from the 1960s to the 1980s. Perhaps the most important moment for the historiography of nationalism came in 1983. In an extraordinary congruence of scholarly energy, three seminal texts appeared in that year: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism, and Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition. The English-language translation of Miroslav Hroch's Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe appeared two years later, and together these four books reframed the scholarly discussion of nationalism for years to come. Gellner and Hroch spelled out theories explaining the mechanisms by which the social changes of modernization could generate new forms of self-awareness and a new politics of nationalism; Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Ranger, without actually challenging these sociological arguments, began focusing on the ways in which nationalists constructed the very nations they claimed to serve. Anderson's famous title purported to depict nations (all large-scale communities, for that matter) as "imagined," and Hobsbawm and Ranger characterized tradition as something "invented." These two loaded words alone were enough to spark debates about the degree to which nations were (or were not) grounded in enduring social formations. Anthony D. Smith, for example, responded by insisting that a nation could emerge only if an ethnic community was already in place. But as is so often the case with academic debates, the heat of the polemical exchanges obscured the broad consensus that linked most scholars of nationalism in the 1980s. Smith never questioned that modernization provided the solvents that converted ethnic groups into nations, and Anderson, Hobsbawm, and the others never really claimed that nations were as ephemeral as such terms as invented and imagined might imply. In fact, the class of 1983 grounded the process of "invention" firmly within inexorable social forces, making their nations as "real" as any social formation could possibly be. The nations described in these books are indeed created, but the agent of creation is History (with a very teleological capital H). They are imagined and invented only in the sense that they are rooted in a mutable historical narrative rather than an immutable natural order. Even though few serious scholars of the early twenty-first century would claim that national identity is hardwired into the human psyche, it becomes no less "real" for being historicized.

If the novelty of that batch of scholarship has been somewhat overstated, the more profound changes that came in the 1990s may have been underappreciated. Historians are still coming to terms with the much-discussed "cultural turn" that swept the discipline at that time. One unambiguously positive result has been to expand the scholarly field of vision to include aspects of the past that once escaped attention. The study of popular culture in particular has blossomed, with fascinating implications for historical understanding of national thinking. If nothing else, the focus on "culture" (indeed, the very attempt to define that elusive term) has helped to transcend the old, increasingly sterile tensions between intellectual and social history. But perhaps most profoundly, the "cultural turn" has transformed the study of nationalism by inspiring scholars to give renewed attention to the way historical narratives themselves contribute to the construction and maintenance of nations. The historiographical tradition that has been developed to understand (mainly European) nationalism has itself served the agenda of nationalism, both by naturalizing national communities and by obscuring a whole range of alternative forms of subjectivity, many of which are every bit as important in the "modern" world as national belonging. In the view of nationalists (and most of the scholars who studied them), "History" was necessarily marching forward into a world in which the nation-state was the natural, inevitable, and ultimately desirable means of structuring society and expressing popular will. Other forms of subjectivity—whether tribal or familial on the microcosmic scale, or imperial or religious on the macrocosmic scale—were relegated to subordinate positions, or scheduled for elimination altogether. A myriad of alternative ways of structuring society were silenced as being unnational, and thus unnatural, and a political framework developed under specific conditions in Europe was described as a universal historical destiny.

Nations were always said to be "emerging," "awakening," "becoming," "resurrecting," "growing," and even "dying." They are nearly always portrayed as historically dynamic, and nearly always tied to some scheme of historical progress. It is by critically focusing on nationalist historiography that one truly penetrates to the core of what it means to "be national." Adjectives such as "Italian" or "American" or "German" or "Irish" are never just sociological descriptions: they are understood to exist within a specific understanding of historical progress. Only by questioning that understanding, by revealing it as an ideological and cultural construction, can one fully perceive how national thought works. Scholars are starting to get beyond the assumption that with time the ideology of nationalism must necessarily move in a certain direction, and that theorists of the nation must cope in predictable ways with predictable historical developments. In fact, the study of nationalism has moved away from the macrotheorizing of sociologists and political scientists, and since the mid-1990s the historian's attention to context and contingency has returned to the forefront. Few scholars today attempt to spin grand "theories of nationalism" that claim to predict the rise and eventual fall of national thinking; instead, today's most exciting scholarship tends to employ a tighter focus on the ways specific individuals and communities use national categories to advance their own specific goals and understand their own specific circumstances.

See alsoBismarck, Otto von; Conservatism; Endecja; Franco-Prussian War; French Revolution; Leipzig, Battle of; Levée en Masse; Liberalism; Mazzini, Giuseppe; Napoleon; Republicanism; Risorgimento (Italian Unification); Socialism.

bibliography

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Brian Porter