Rise of Nationalism in 19th Century (Nation State)

Rise of Nationalism in the 19th Century

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The rise of nationalism in the 19th century is a cornerstone theme of UPSC History Optional (World History), examining how nationalism emerged as a modern ideology in Europe, fused with the modern state to produce the nation-state, and shaped the political map of Europe through unification movements, imperial rivalry, and the eventual collapse of multi-national empires. This article traces the theoretical roots of nationalism, its growth in stages, its relationship with democracy and class, and its distinctive trajectories in Western and Eastern Europe.

Origins of Modern Nationalism

• Nationalism, in the modern sense, is a phenomenon that emerged in 18th-century Western Europe and then spread during the 19th and 20th centuries to other parts of the world.
• Historians broadly hold that modern nationalism emerged with the growth of industrial capitalism or print capitalism, and was subsequently sustained by a variety of factors — notions of community based on language, ethnicity, or religion, or by rivalry and competition among states and “imagined communities.”
• Nationalism aligned with the modern state to give rise to the nation-state.
  • In certain cases, the modern state itself fostered a spirit of nationalism to provide the people within its boundaries with a viable nationalist ideology.
  • Together, nationalism and the modern state produced popular mobilisations that further strengthened the state and helped in the formation of nation-states.

The Idea of Nationalism and the Nation-State

• The modern concept of the nation emerged during the Age of Revolution — the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789).
  • In America, political discourse did not emphasise the unitary aspect of nationalism; Americans were more concerned with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the proper relationship between the American union and the states, and the development of a liberal capitalist society.
  • By contrast, in France, the nation was conceived as “one and indivisible,” with the idea of the nation inextricably linked to mass participation, citizenship, and the collective sovereignty of the people.
• The French insistence on linguistic uniformity after the Revolution was strong, even though the Revolution itself recorded how few people actually spoke French at the time.
  • In the revolutionary French concept of the nation, the willingness of non-French speakers within France to speak French was one of the conditions for full French citizenship.
• In the case of Italy, the only basis for unification and nationalism was the Italian language, even though, in 1860, when Italian unification was achieved, only 2.5% of the population used Italian for everyday purposes.
  • Mazzini, the leader of Young Italy and prophet of Italian nationalism, believed that the popular sovereignty of the nation must be indivisible, and that proposals for a federal Italy were mere mechanisms for preserving the longevity of local ruling classes.
  • Mazzini believed the Italian people had to be “formed” to overcome Italy’s divisions, holding a mystical faith in the sanctity and unity of the popular will.
  • He argued that writers must “explore the needs of the peoples,” so that Italian literature could inspire and revive the nation — literature, in his view, could precede and help shape political development.

Stages in the Growth of Nationalism

• The growth of nationalism can be broadly divided into two phases.
  • The first phase occurs before the late 18th century, when certain preliminary notions of national unity existed. Its chronology varies from country to country, but these ideas of geographical or cultural unity were only precursors to modern nationalism.
  • The second phase takes shape only in the wake of the French Revolution, except perhaps in the cases of Britain and France, where nation-building had already been underway since the 16th and 17th centuries respectively.

Nationalism Before 1789: Proto-Nationalism

• In the historical literature, the emergence of the modern nation and nationalism is placed in the late 18th century; nationalism acquires a more democratic character only in the era of mass politics of the late 19th century.
• Several 19th-century observers believed elements of nationalism had emerged in the medieval period — a sense of ethnic, linguistic, or national identity — which can be termed a form of patriotism or proto-nationalism.
  • The 19th-century French historian and politician Guizot believed that the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337–1453), provoked by the English king’s claim to the French throne, brought together the nobility, burghers, and peasantry in a common desire to defeat the invading foreigner.
  • Though modern historians regard this as a period of crisis marked by war, plague, and famine, it nonetheless created a sense of patriotism, and the subsequent growth of monarchy brought about the creation of a unified French state.
• While some historians have emphasised that France was a geographical reality independent of the centralising monarchy’s role, this geographical determinism is not very convincing, since there were, in fact, no real natural frontiers for France — the French state was, in this sense, an accidental creation of history.
• The struggle of free peasants in rural communities and large towns against feudal tutelage, from the 13th century onwards, helped in the emergence of Swiss national consciousness.
  • Though four different nationalities created a modern Swiss state in 1648, a distinct Swiss national consciousness only emerged by 1848, after the victory of the liberals and the drafting of a new federal constitution.

Modern Nationalism: The 19th Century

• The 19th century is regarded as the “century of nationalism” — a period in which the idea of the nation and nation-state, based on the models of Britain and France, was generalised and perceived as a universal principle for modern societies.
  • Friedrich List, in 1885, stated that “a large population and an extensive territory endowed with manifold national resources, are essential requirements of the normal nationality,” arguing that a nation restricted in population and territory, especially one with a separate language, could only possess “crippled literature” and “crippled institutions” for promoting art and science, since a small state could never bring the various branches of production to perfection within its own territory.
• In practice, the principle of nationality applied, during the liberal period, only to nationalities of a certain size — a tacit assumption known as the “threshold principle” of nationality, broadly endorsed by the liberal bourgeoisie from about 1830 to 1880.
  • This threshold principle was shared by John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, and Mazzini, and explains why Mazzini, despite being the apostle of nationalism, did not support the cause of Irish independence.
  • The principle of national self-determination in the period of Mill and Mazzini was therefore substantially different from that of the American President Woodrow Wilson in the 20th century.
  • Mazzini’s map of Europe, drawn up in 1857 based on nations, included only about a dozen states and federations; by contrast, the Europe refashioned after World War II on the basis of the right to national self-determination comprised 26 nation-states, and in the post-war period, some 42 regionalist movements were identified in Western Europe alone.
• The major shift in attitudes towards nationality and nationalism came in the late 19th century, with the growth of mass political movements in the era of democratic politics.
  • After 1880, the debate over the “national question” became important, driven by the need to mobilise voters for different political parties and gain adherents for new ideologies, whether among socialists or minor linguistic and national groupings.
  • In this later stage of mass politics, the state played an active role. Colonel Piłsudski, the liberator of Poland, observed: “It is the state which makes the nation and not the nation the state.”
  • Whatever view one takes of the relationship between nation and state, it was ultimately electoral democracy that undermined the older liberal theory of the nation.

How Nationalism and the Modern State Created the Nation-State

• Nationalism as an ideal began to grow in the 19th century, rooted in the ideas of the French Revolution and in the consequences of Napoleonic military victories and the political realignments they produced.
• Several factors helped spread the gospel of nationalism across Europe:
  • the simplification of the political map of Europe through the reduction in the number of states within the German Empire;
  • the quickening of Spanish nationalism during the military campaigns of the Peninsular War; and
  • the rise of Italian and German nationalism, inspired by the French armies, the Napoleonic role in nation-state building, and the contagion of revolutionary and democratic ideas.
• Nationalism appealed particularly to the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie, who spearheaded the movements for Italian and German unification.
  • Mass politics in the late 19th century gave an additional impetus to nationalism, especially in Eastern Europe, a region relatively backward compared to the more industrialised parts of Western Europe.

Absolutism and the Modern State

• The absolutist states, particularly in Western Europe, played an important role in the gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism.
  • The dynastic rulers of the 16th and 17th centuries were responsible for creating centralised states with substantial standing armies, claiming rights to taxation and a monopoly over the legitimate use of force within their boundaries.
• The emergence of strong, centralised states was itself the product of wars among the absolutist rulers; the growth of state taxation was linked to the costs of waging such wars, and the prime objective of mercantilist policies was to enhance the economic — and thereby military — power of each state relative to its rivals.
  • The wars of the 16th and 17th centuries accelerated “all the fundamental state-making processes.” In the resulting economic and military competition, most of the roughly 500 political entities that once existed in Europe perished, though the political unification of Italy and Germany became possible only with the emergence of nationalist ideology in the 19th century.
• The European state-making process minimised cultural variation within states and maximised variation among states.
  • This internal minimisation was accomplished through the centralisation of state power and the development of a concept of sovereignty that was absolute and indivisible.
  • Centralising monarchs sought to overcome obstacles to exercising sovereign rights posed by local and regional assemblies, or by the aristocracy, clergy, or bourgeoisie; ultimately, it was the “revolutions from below” in Holland, England, and France that removed these barriers to the modern state.
  • It was only the bourgeois revolutions of the Age of Revolutions that finally led to the rise of the modern capitalist state.

Modern States and the System of States

• The system of states that emerged from the 16th and 17th centuries onward can be studied in terms of the uneven development of capitalism across Europe during the 19th century.
  • Industrialisation in Britain during the late 18th century led to the gradual expansion of industries across Europe over the course of the 19th century, but late-industrialising countries faced distinct disadvantages in competing with those that had already established a lead.
• In countries such as Germany and Russia, which industrialised later than Britain, the role of the state was much greater.
  • To compensate for a late start, the state actively created favourable conditions for rapid industrialisation, including systems of tariff protection and the aiding of industrial cartelisation.
  • Germany saw a greater concentration of capital and a much stronger nexus between banks and industrial firms than existed in Britain.
  • The doctrine of free trade and liberal capitalism, as propounded by Britain, was challenged by the German economist Friedrich List, who sought to allow the German economy to develop behind protectionist walls in order to catch up with Britain.
• German businessmen and industrialists favoured political unification because their class interests were tied to the creation of a national market for German entrepreneurs.
  • In the perception of the German bourgeoisie, a German national state was a necessary precondition for economic development.
  • The economic challenge posed by England had an impact on German nationalism no less enduring than the political challenge thrown down by Napoleonic France; regardless of the distinctions between Germans on economic and political ideals, a German national state was generally regarded as essential for economic progress.
  • The German nation-state was ultimately created by a “revolution from above,” following the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870–71, led by Bismarck and the Prussian Army.
• In Italy, the idea of nationalism was first associated with the literary Italian of Dante and the youthful idealism of Mazzini’s Young Italy, before being linked to the economic ideology of the bourgeoisie.
  • During the 1840s, a programme for economic unification was propagated by journalists and intellectuals, linked to the interests of the nascent Italian bourgeoisie and to the growing success of the German customs union, the Zollverein.
  • Austrian opposition to the integration of the Italian railway system — specifically, the linking of the Piedmontese and Lombard railways — fuelled the growth of economic nationalism in Italy.
  • There was, however, no unified agenda among Italian industrialists championing railway building, a customs union, a common currency, and the creation of a national market. The Piedmontese were viewed as rivals by Milanese industrialists, who in fact favoured integration with the larger German market, since Italian industrialists were often too weak to profit from wider markets and had genuine reasons to fear increased competition.
  • Even commercial interests were not always in favour of economic unification. It was, in fact, landlords and market-oriented farmers who favoured unification most consistently — figures like Cavour, Minghetti in Bologna, and Ricasoli in Tuscany, all improving landlords and moderate liberals, played leading roles in Italian national unification.
  • The relative weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie gave greater prominence to the role of landlords and urban professionals in the movement toward economic unification.

Nations and Nation-States

• Modern states, nations, and nationalism are all territorial in the sense that they claim or are based on specific geographical areas.
  • In the 19th century, the idea spread that the state and the nation should “coincide geographically in the nation-state.”
  • The modern state is often called the “territorial state,” since it has a clearly demarcated territory over which it claims sovereign rights over all its citizens.
• Nationalism is a territorial ideology that is internally unifying and externally divisive.
  • As an ideology, it discourages conflicts based on social class or status within a nation while enhancing the differences between different peoples and nations.
  • Nationalism links culturally and historically defined territorial communities, called nations, to political statehood, and may produce a demand for an independent state, the transformation of a pre-existing state, or merely an attempt to seek political legitimacy for state policy in the higher interests of the nation, i.e. the “national interest.”
• Three ways in which nationalism has shaped the modern state have been identified:
  • In older states like England and France, the rise of nationalism was linked to the development of more democratic relationships between the state and civil society.
  • Nationalism furthers the internal unification of culturally and economically diverse regions into a more homogeneous state territory.
  • Nationalism divides one political community or nation from another, and in many cases even determines the geographical boundaries of the nation.
• Nationalism can support both movements of unification and separation:
  • In Italy and Germany, nationalism and the state created a new nation-state.
  • In Scandinavia, nationalism produced the separation of Norway from Sweden.
  • In the case of Poland, there was both separation and unification, which together created the Polish nation-state.
• In the late 19th century, the doctrine of national self-determination became the basis for creating new nation-states based on language (including invented national languages), ethnicity, or common culture and tradition.
  • The nationalism of Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland emerged before the creation of these nation-states, which gained their freedom from the multi-national empires within which they had grown — carved respectively out of the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Britain.
  • As nationalism spread to Central and Eastern Europe — regions with little industrialisation and weak bourgeoisies — the role of the lower middle class and peasantry in shaping nationalism increased.
  • As industrialisation grew, alongside the rise of the working class, socialism, and inter-imperialist rivalries, nationalism came to be associated increasingly with conservative and right-wing ideologies, not merely with the republican ideas of the French Revolution.

Relationship between Democratic and Nationalist Mobilisation

Liberal Democracies and Nationalism

• The French Revolution, with its ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and the Rights of Man, served as a source of inspiration for all subsequent democratic and popular movements.
  • The Jacobins inspired radicals throughout 19th-century Europe, and the ideal-type of the “bourgeois revolution” was itself derived from the experience of the French Revolution.
• Although the democratisation of France took place gradually — with the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 forming part of this gradual process — the significance of the radicalism of the years 1792–95 cannot be denied.
  • Although the Napoleonic dictatorship represented a retreat from the ideals of the Revolution, his military exploits and conquests simplified the political map of Europe and spread the ideas of nationalism and democracy among the conquered peoples.
• The Congress of Vienna sought not only to contain France but, through the Metternich system, the conservative powers — Prussia, Austria, and Russia — sought to restrict the spread of both democratic and nationalist ideas.
  • The Concert of Europe actively tried to suppress liberal and nationalist movements that threatened the position of autocratic rulers; there were revolutions in Spain, Greece, and Italy in 1820, and a far more serious outbreak of revolutions affected France, Germany, Belgium, and Poland in 1830, with middle-class radicals, peasants, and workers producing a revolution that won independence for Belgium.
• Despite systematic efforts to suppress democracy in Europe, the spread of liberal ideas could not be held back indefinitely.
  • The Revolutions of 1848, which engulfed most of Europe, accelerated the movement towards democracy and nationalism — bringing Napoleon III to power in France, hastening the unification of Germany and Italy, and stirring national sentiment within the multi-national Austrian Empire.
• The process of democratisation in the first half of the 19th century was accelerated not only by revolutions but by gradual socio-economic change — the growth of industries and the emergence of new social classes, the bourgeoisie and workers.
  • It was also accompanied by the growth of the modern state and bureaucracy, which led to the development of official languages and public education, and by the growth of the press, which fostered both democratic and nationalist ideas as the number of publications and the size of the reading public steadily grew.
  • As public instruction and public employment expanded, state policy increasingly became a matter of public concern, and the size of the liberal middle class grew accordingly.
• In Britain, where there was no revolution during the 19th century inspired by the French Revolution, there was instead the growth of the Chartist movement and the widening of the franchise through the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867.
  • In Britain, the Industrial Revolution led not only to the development of capitalism, largely through private capitalist accumulation, but also gave civil society a decisive advantage in its relationship with the British state.
  • Nevertheless, the British ruling class and state represented a compromise between the rising bourgeoisie and the older aristocracy.

Factors Affecting National Mobilisation and Democratisation

• As the 19th century advanced, the idea of democracy grew in popularity, despite the reactionary role of the Concert of Europe and the Holy Alliance, associated with the growth of liberal capitalism in Britain and France.
  • It is customary to contrast the experience of these “first-wave” capitalisms of Britain and France with those of Germany and Italy, which were late industrialisers, or part of the “second wave.”
• As the economy developed new social classes, the emergence of the working class in particular posed new problems for the modernising states and the liberal bourgeoisie of the 19th century.
  • After the 1832 Reform Act in Britain, the struggles of the liberal middle class parted company with the struggles of the working classes.
  • The inclusion of the propertied middle classes within the framework of electoral democracy was typically achieved in several European states by the mid-19th century; it was the emergence of the labour and socialist movement in the late 19th century that subsequently affected the balance of social forces.

Nationality and Language

• The modernisation of states was accompanied by the development of a centralised administration and a large bureaucracy based on rational-legal principles — and this process, in turn, was accompanied by the development of a national language, one used for administration rather than merely local communication.
  • The choice of a dialect or language as the medium of official communication led to public or state support for its propagation, especially through the school system.
  • The growth of a professional middle class and of modern state bureaucracies was based on the growth of modern universities, law, and journalism.
• The expansion of the secondary school system, and the state’s choice of an official or national language for schools, became a source of great conflict among rival ethnic-linguistic groups within multi-ethnic states like Austria-Hungary and across Eastern Europe more generally.
  • In earlier periods, language had been less divisive, because literacy levels were very low, the elite-mass relationship was not based on regular interaction, and the state did not seek legitimisation on the basis of representative government.
  • In the 19th century, linguistic nationalism was linked to the growth of modern bureaucracy and the aspirations of a rising petty bourgeoisie seeking jobs and cultural influence.
• Language became an issue in international politics, as seen in the dispute between the Danes and Germans over Schleswig-Holstein, and between the Germans and French over the Rhine frontier during the 1840s.
  • Language grew increasingly important as a factor in nationality conflicts in the late 19th century; the modern state and its administrative innovations themselves sharpened a sense of linguistic identity among the population.
  • Statisticians and census data collectors, from the 1860s onwards, began seeking data on language. By asking the “language question,” censuses for the first time forced everyone to choose not only a nationality, but a linguistic nationality.

Nationalism, State, and Class

• In older states like Britain and France, a state-based patriotism itself encouraged a sense of nationalism during the course of the 19th century.
  • The processes that turned subjects into citizens helped encourage a sense of nationalism and patriotism in several states.
• Popular perceptions of natural-cultural differences, and political and national characteristics, contributed to both nationalism and national chauvinism in the late 19th century — in countries regardless of whether they were liberal capitalist states like Britain or second-wave, late-industrialising states like Germany.
  • The patriotism of the working classes in Europe did not deny the chasm between classes, but nonetheless affirmed their loyalty to the nation-state.
  • The most significant illustration of this was the manner in which the working-class and socialist parties of the Second International, having repeatedly passed resolutions condemning the idea of an imperialist war and emphasising the international character of the socialist struggle, very quickly identified with their own nations and national interests once World War I broke out.
  • Despite being opposed to the ruling classes and imperialist cliques of their respective societies, workers and socialist parties patriotically marched into the Great War (1914–18).
  • Lenin could scarcely believe it when he read that the German Social Democrats — then the largest socialist party in Europe, controlling about one-third of the vote in Germany — had voted for war credits no sooner than war was declared. The Socialists and Marxists had, evidently, underestimated the power of nationalism and the patriotism of the working classes.

Nationalism, Empire, and Imperial Rivalry

• The gradual extension of the franchise, and the efforts of liberal states like Britain, modernising states like Germany, or survival strategies of autocracies like Tsarist Russia to gain legitimacy and popular support, all produced a form of state-sponsored patriotism.
• National pride and identification were also encouraged by overseas expansion — the material and psychological rewards that imperial possessions brought to countries like Britain, France, and even Holland and Spain.
  • In Britain, a sense of national identification was fostered by pride in a worldwide empire — celebrated through Britain’s industrial achievements at the Industrial Exhibition of 1851 and its sense of imperial greatness at the Imperial Durbar in India in 1877.
  • Scottish nationalism did develop in the 18th and 19th centuries after the Union of 1707, but economic development deepened diversity of region and social class within Scotland; Scottish workers, Highland crofters, and hard-pressed tenants were frequently at odds with Scottish landlords, and Scottish nationalism remained a weak and ineffective force, further weakened by the great role the Scots played in both acquiring and managing the Empire.
• State policies designed to build greater legitimacy and support, alongside spontaneous and state-sponsored enthusiasm for imperial exploits and colonial profits, encouraged a broader sense of national pride.
  • Some of this patriotism was reflected in jingoistic responses in Britain to the Boer War, fought against the settlers of South Africa between 1898 and 1902.
• In the late 19th century, as imperialist rivalries among European powers increased, it became possible to deflect attention from domestic economic difficulties or class conflicts.
  • Though the partition of Africa was accomplished without direct war between the European powers, the struggle for overseas markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, and territorial expansion encouraged identification with the nation-state among broad sections of the population.
  • A military adventure or successful commercial achievement overseas invariably helped rally support for 19th-century states, whether countries with vast overseas empires like Britain or those with more limited overseas influence like Germany.
• Part of 19th-century nationalism was linked to the economic and military rivalry between Britain and Germany, the naval-building competition between the two powers, and the general desire of the more right-wing governments in Germany and Italy to catch up with Britain and France, who had industrialised early and acquired vast colonial possessions.
  • The aggressive nationalism of conservative regimes in late-industrialising countries like Germany helped rally support for these regimes and encouraged nationalist sentiment across Europe.
  • The speech by the German Emperor William II at Tangiers, Morocco, in 1905, induced widespread fear in France, amplified by the large number of French newspapers.
  • French anxiety over Germany’s hostility, combined with memories of France’s defeat at Sedan in the Franco-German War (1870), helped create a sense of national unity capable of transcending domestic conflicts in times of acute crisis.
• The period from 1890 to 1914 is often called the era of “armed peace,” shaped by rival military and diplomatic alliances competing for industrial and military supremacy, and for colonial possessions and profits.
  • The memorialisation of major events in national calendars — through school texts and nationalist newspapers — and the press and public’s reactions to diplomatic and military rivalry, encouraged both spontaneous and state-sponsored support for the nation-state in 19th-century Europe.

Ethnic-Linguistic Basis of Nationalism in the Late 19th Century

• By the late 19th century, the processes of modernisation and homogenisation had produced a strong sense of nationalism within the older states, and within those large states that had already achieved unification.
  • The idea of unitary nationalism often produced a counter-nationalism among groups — ethnic or linguistic — who felt oppressed or excluded by this process of nationalist homogenisation.
• Nationalism in the period 1880–1914 was no longer constrained by the earlier “threshold principle” that had limited demands for nation-states; any body of people claiming to be a “nation” could now claim the right to national self-determination.
  • In these “non-state” forms of nationalism, the ethnic-linguistic criterion for defining nationality became a decisive consideration.
• The historian Hroch identified three stages in the emergence of national movements: between the 1780s and 1840s, it was only a body of agitators who created the national idea; in the second phase, pioneers and publicists of the national idea occupied centre-stage; and it was only in the third stage that mass support for nationalism emerged, in the late 19th-century European nationalist movements.
• Communities became increasingly ready to make claims of nationhood and self-determination due to the pace of change, economic distress, and large-scale migrations of peoples in this period — traditional groups felt threatened by the pace of modernisation.
  • Educated middle strata with modest incomes — journalists, schoolteachers, and petty officials — were the torchbearers of linguistic nationalism. Migration itself produced friction and conflict between groups unused to coexisting with one another.
  • It was this nationalist petty bourgeoisie that played a major role in the emergence of the new ethnic-linguistic nationalism, as well as the chauvinist and right-wing movements that emerged within the older nation-states.
  • The oppressed nationalities of Eastern Europe eventually became independent states, based on Woodrow Wilson’s support for the principle of national self-determination.

Nationalist Movements and Democracy

• The idea of the nation and nationalism has historically been identified with the people, popular sovereignty, and democratic rights.
  • Although the French Revolution was an important influence on national movements throughout the 19th century, an illiberal or right-wing shift in the nature of nationalist politics became apparent towards the century’s end.
  • This rightward shift occurred even as the level of mass participation, based on regular elections, continued to increase — the growth in nationalism’s right-wing orientation stemmed largely from a fear of popular participation in politics, especially by the working class and left-wing or socialist parties.
• The liberal intelligentsia and middle class, who had championed a republican or liberal nationalism in the first half of the 19th century, made a compromise with conservative landowners and dynastic states after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848.
  • It was the liberals who compromised first, to achieve national unification, and subsequently to cope with the political challenge posed by the working classes and socialist parties; ideologies of race and empire came to buttress this more conservative version of nationalism.
  • The Revolutions of 1848 revealed the weakness of the liberal bourgeoisie in Europe, compelling German liberals to accept a compromise with the Prussian state, and leading to the ascendancy of Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy.
• In Europe, the Revolutions of 1848 revealed three distinct trends:
  • the emergence of nationalist sentiment within the Habsburg Empire and Eastern Europe;
  • the emergence of working-class and socialist ideology throughout Europe; and
  • the differences within the liberal-democratic movement that separated the middle classes from the workers, peasants, and urban poor.
• The relationship between democratic, popular movements and nationalist, national movements has always been complex.
  • In late 18th-century Britain, while the common people generally favoured a national mobilisation of resources and manpower in the struggle against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the ruling class and the British state were reluctant to unleash popular energies that might endanger their local dominance.
  • The ideals of the French Revolution did not command universal respect, and the armies of revolutionary — especially Napoleonic — France were plagued by desertions.
• Although Mazzini espoused democratic ideals and proposed a people’s war of national liberation, Italian liberals were unable to enthuse the masses and remained confined largely to the towns.
  • Though Mazzini drew his notion of a “people’s war” from the Spanish War of 1808–13, he failed to learn from it the major role played by the clergy in winning peasants over to the cause of Spanish nationalism.
  • Carlo Pisacane, a Neapolitan who had played a major role in the defence of the Roman Republic and who believed Italian leadership had lagged behind popular initiative, and that Garibaldi had failed to produce a true revolutionary army, was himself killed by local peasants in 1857, along with his own small revolutionary force.
  • In Italy, the relationship between the national movement for political unification and popular participation was so weak that Massimo d’Azeglio famously observed: “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.”

Italian Nationalism and Popular Mobilisation

• In Italy, mass and peasant participation in the national movement remained limited, owing to the conservatism of the rulers of the various Italian states, the reluctance of landlords to grant concessions to peasants, the inability of the intelligentsia and revolutionaries to bridge the gap between town and country, and the fear of radical change that affected Italy’s dominant elite in the 19th century.
  • Coppa has argued that the 1848 war against Austria was, on the Italian side, essentially an “ideological war.” In that year, Garibaldi’s volunteers and Milanese revolutionaries fought alongside troops from Piedmont, the Papal States, Tuscany, and Naples, though the participation of these states’ rulers was born more out of fear of revolution or public opinion than genuine nationalist conviction.
  • The failure of the Republics in Venice and Rome offers further evidence of the failure of Mazzinian ideals of “people’s war.”
• In the period 1859–61, Cavour’s motives were “patriotic rather than nationalist,” since his objective was to secure a dominant position for Piedmont rather than an ideological commitment to Italian unification as such.
  • The successful “southern initiative” of Garibaldi produced a revolution in Sicily; after his victory in Naples, he willingly accepted an auxiliary role in the unification process assigned to him by Cavour, having accepted the need to work with the monarchy.
  • Italy was thus unified through a combination of force and popular consent, as manifested in plebiscites — though the centralised form of government of the new Italian state ultimately alienated opinion in both Naples and Sicily.
• Only a tiny minority, 2.5% of the population, spoke Italian at the time of unification, and over 100,000 troops had to be deployed to establish control over the turbulent south soon afterwards.
  • Cavour instructed his agents in Central Italy to conduct plebiscites demonstrating that the people endorsed their assemblies’ decisions to unite with Piedmont — but the fact that Napoleon III of France and Cavour conspired to ensure the plebiscites in the Romagna and the Duchies favoured Piedmont, and those in Nice and Savoy favoured France, revealed the insufficiency of genuine mass participation in the process.
• The divisions between the industrialised north, the less-developed central region, and the neglected south of Italy actually intensified after unification.
  • Italian unification, achieved more through military success and international diplomacy than through people’s war or mass struggle, rested on the lowest possible mobilisation of the masses required to achieve independence and unification.
  • Even after the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, national politics remained dominated by parties with narrow social bases and limited contact with the Italian masses; the extension of the franchise, spread of public education, and growth of industries and towns proceeded more slowly than in France and Germany.
  • The process of Italian unification is thus best described as a form of “passive revolution,” in which the Italian elite mobilised the masses only to the extent necessary to achieve national unification and independence from Austria.
• With the growth of industries, workers’ organisations, and socialism, Italy’s conservative politicians, landowners, and lower middle class in particular felt increasingly threatened.
  • Italy’s slow and inadequate economic development, and the weak growth of civil society and democratic values, meant that the crisis after World War I created the conditions for the rise of fascism and Mussolini’s eventual victory — despite Italy having played a comparatively minor role in the war and having joined late.
  • Italian democracy developed slowly even after unification, and Italian nationalism never succeeded in fully winning over the Italians of the south.

Development of Nationalism in Eastern Europe

• Historians identify three phases in the development of national movements among the small states of Eastern Europe:
  • Phase A, emphasising culture, literature, and folklore;
  • Phase B, in which pioneers of the national idea and its publicists occupied centre stage; and
  • Phase C, in which national movements finally acquired mass support on any significant scale.

Cultural Nationalism: Phases A and B

• The European Romantic perception of the natural and “untainted” peasantry, and a serious scholarly study of folklore by the late 18th century, provided the basis for many national movements in Eastern Europe by the late 19th century.
  • The cultural and linguistic revival movements in Europe between the 1780s and 1840s were largely the handiwork of scholars and ruling elites anxious to preserve and develop the national traditions of some forgotten people or peasantry — and were sometimes even the product of foreign scholars and elites.
  • While many East European languages developed or constructed their literary forms between the late 18th and 19th centuries, literary Hungarian had already emerged in the 16th century.
  • There was a conscious effort to unite the southern Slavs: although Serbo-Croat developed as one common literary language, Catholic Croats used Roman characters, while Orthodox Serbs used Cyrillic.
• In Eastern — especially south-eastern — Europe, ethnic and linguistic diversity was greater than in the rest of the continent, and awareness of distinct linguistic-cultural identity generally emerged later.
  • The Magyars, however, had a distinct sense of themselves as an ethnic group with their own language as early as the 13th century.
  • Not only the Magyars but also the Czechs and Poles had developed a distinct identity based on ethnicity or language, though their concept of the “nation” did not, at this stage, include the peasantry or common people.

Czech Nationalism

• The emergence of a common Czech national feeling is attributable to the native clergy’s fear of competition for senior posts from immigrant German clerics.
  • The Czechs did not possess their own independent state during the 18th and 19th centuries; as a result, the nobility spoke German, Spanish, or French, and the townsmen spoke German, leaving only the peasantry and urban poor to speak Czech.
  • The development of capitalism, and the migration of Czech workers into towns, created the social basis for modern Czech nationalism.
• The revival of Czech language and literature was taken up by the intelligentsia in the late 18th century — sons of clerks, handicraftsmen, and servants who had received a university education.
  • By the 1780s, Czech language and theatre were patronised even by craftsmen and workers, with the rising Czech intelligentsia aiming to “acquire equal rights for the modern Czech nation with that of the German nation in the Czech Lands.”
  • Over the first half of the 19th century, the Czech intelligentsia, drawn mainly from small-town craftsmen’s families, promoted Czech as the language of instruction in schools, using newspapers, theatres, and public discussion to advance the Czech cause, linking it with broader Slav solidarity.
• The Czechs, constituting about 70% of the population of Bohemia and Moravia in the mid-19th century, had almost no political rights, while the Germans enjoyed full political rights.
  • Public discussions and Czech debates over conditions in Russia and Germany led the intelligentsia to favour equality with the Germans within the Czech lands, under the broader Austrian framework.
  • In Austria, it would be possible to live alongside other Slavs — Poles, Serbs, Slovaks, Croats — offering both safety in numbers and a better chance for the Czechs to secure their rights than under a more authoritarian Tsarist autocracy or a more homogenising German Empire.
  • These considerations shaped the political concept of Austro-Slavism, which emerged in the 1840s, aiming to transform the Austrian absolutist state into “a federal state of nations enjoying equal rights.”

Hungarian Nationalism

• In Hungary, national awakening among the Magyars took place around the same time as among other ethnic groups, in the late 18th century.
  • National movements typically passed through two phases — a cultural phase, in which a national language was created from among numerous dialects and a historical consciousness emerged, and a political phase, in which demands for local autonomy and the use of the national language in administration eventually led to the creation of a nation-state.
• Hungary contained diverse ethnic groups.
  • The Ottoman occupation of central Hungary, from 1541 until the end of the 17th century, affected the region’s ethnic balance, as did the subsequent Habsburg policy of settling German colonists in southern Hungary.
  • Only the Magyars and Croats had produced a significant feudal elite in Hungary, together with a legal-political life expressed through the Diets.

Spread of the National Idea and Nationalism

• Proto-national feeling existed among the Serbs, who kept alive the memory of the old Serb kingdom destroyed by the Turks; a form of patriotism was preserved by the Serbian Church, which had canonised the Serb kings.
  • It was only after the growth of cultural nationalism, rooted in a sense of shared language, culture, and history, that nationalism as an idea came to influence the smaller nationalities of Eastern Europe.

Czechoslovakia

• Czech politicians of the late 19th century produced no grand political schemes and had to settle for small concessions, since economic and cultural advances in the Czech Lands left the bourgeoisie with insufficient reason to actively support Czech nationalism.
  • It was World War I that triggered nationalism in the Czech Lands, as elsewhere in Europe: wartime difficulties produced unrest in the towns, desertions on the battlefield from 1915 onwards, and, in 1917, Czech writers published a manifesto supporting a future democratic Europe of free nations.
  • Tomáš Masaryk had pleaded for the independence of small European nations as early as October 1915, and the rapid political changes of World War I eventually led to the realisation of these aspirations; the demand for an independent Czechoslovak state was formally made in 1915.
• Czech and Slovak military units joined the enemies of Austria-Hungary during World War I, establishing their claims to recognition by the victorious Entente powers.
  • After a thousand years, the Czech Lands were finally reunited with Slovakia — the result of Czech nationalism, the effects of World War I on the great dynastic empires, and President Wilson’s support for national self-determination.

Hungary

• In Hungary, the creation of the Dual Monarchy appeased the Hungarians but aroused national sentiment among the other nationalities within its borders.
  • Hungarian statesmen sought to assimilate the non-Magyar population through the imposition of Hungarian as the state language.
  • Between 1890 and 1914, as a result of modernisation and industrialisation, more than a million people were successfully assimilated by the Magyars; Budapest, which in the mid-19th century had a German-speaking, non-Magyar population, had become a Hungarian-speaking city by the early 20th century.
  • Emigration to the United States was actually encouraged by the government to reduce the non-Magyar population, such as Slovaks and Serbs. By the early 20th century, a new and more active political elite had emerged among the Romanians and Slovaks.
• The break-up of the Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary led to the creation of new nation-states — Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia.
  • Owing to the difficulty of demarcating precise national frontiers, which plagued the post-war settlement, over three million Magyars became minorities in the newly independent states neighbouring a truncated Hungary.
  • This was a “great reversal of roles,” making the once-dominant Magyars a minority in new states — the Treaty of Trianon (1920) forced roughly one in three Magyars to live outside Hungary’s new borders.
  • Hungarian ruling elites, having lost large estates, banks, and factories, used the discontent produced by the reduction of Hungary to a third of its former size to mobilise opposition to the “unjust” Treaty of Trianon.
  • Conservative elites, exploiting this discontent, eventually carried Hungary into the camp of fascist Germany and Italy during World War II.

Poland

• In Poland, the nobility, by the 18th century, had developed a sense of Polish identity based on the acceptance of the Polish language and culture, though language itself was not yet, at this stage, a basis for wider national consciousness — religious differences within the Polish population played a more significant role in this period.
  • Peasants did not possess a developed national consciousness at this stage, though they did participate in the struggle for Polish independence in the late 18th century.
• It was during the 19th century that the abolition of serfdom and enfranchisement took place, at different points in time, under the auspices of the three great powers — Prussia, Austria, and Russia — that had partitioned Poland among themselves in the 18th century.
  • National consciousness was accelerated by the granting of civil and democratic rights to burghers, and later to Jews; by movements and parties demanding agricultural reform; and by the gradual elimination of legal inequalities between classes.
• The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of a distinct Belorussian and Ukrainian national consciousness, based on a language and literature that resisted domination by Polish language and literature.
  • These linguistic differences were closely linked to social differences: Polish was the language of the nobility and intelligentsia, while Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian, regarded as peasant languages, were considered inferior by comparison.
• While Polish national consciousness had itself developed as a response to oppressive German nationalism, following the creation of an independent Poland in 1918, Polish nationalism in turn became oppressive towards its own minority groups.
  • The Polish Republic, which came into being in 1920, was a product of the revolutionary changes sweeping central and eastern Europe, stirring the national consciousness of several groups. In the new Polish state, over one-third of the population was non-Polish: Ukrainians constituted 16%, Jews 10%, and Belorussians 6% of the population in 1931.
  • It was during the inter-war years that national consciousness developed further among the Ukrainians and Belorussians, even as processes of assimilation continued to operate simultaneously.
• The growth of fascism in the 1930s intensified national antagonisms throughout Europe, helping to undermine the Versailles settlement, which had itself been based on the principle of national self-determination at the end of World War I.
• The development of national movements and nationalism in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period, the course of World War II, and the final post-war settlements devised at Tehran, Potsdam, and Yalta by the victorious Allies, together shaped the post-World War II map of nation-states in Eastern Europe, and the broader political map of Europe as a whole.