CHAPTER FIVE

BEYOND : TRANSFORMATIONS OF POLITICAL

Toward Integral Nationalism

The period separating List and Witte, the two great figures of , was also one of a fundamental transformation of political nationalism and liberalism. Changes were continent-wide, although the half century before 1914 is still believed to have been the zenith of the lib- eral order, which is perhaps something of an exaggeration. The political and economic consequences the Long Depression of 1873–1896 brought about, for example, in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian were profound indeed (Rosenberg 1943). Also, liberal ideas constituted an important argument in the battles for modernization of societies, econo- mies and the newly established sovereign states fought for by the elites of Central Europe and Latin America. For obvious reasons, in Central Europe the second task took a definitely different form. According to the Italian philosopher and historian, and witness to the crisis of liberal nationalism, transformation symbolically manifested itself as a clash of the “Cavourian ideal with the Bismarckian:” “If the Italian Risorgimiento had been the masterpiece of the European liberal spirit, [the] rebirth of Germany was the masterpiece of political art in union with the military virtues” (Croce 1933: 265, 253). In a less literary style Kohn (1955: 50) pointed to the transformation of “liberal humanitarianism” into an “aggressive exclusivism” and “exaltation” of government, whereas Mommsen (1990: 217) wrote about nations assuming “distinctive authori- tarian features.” This basic change was however neither the only nor the first one. The “Cavourian ideal” had already exemplified an earlier transformation: the adjustment of the ideas of individualistic liberalism to collectivist identities and policies strengthened by the and the Napoleonic wars. Social changes accompanying the economic revolution, too, were conducive to such transformation. In List’s time classical liberal- ism was entering a new era. Individual freedoms were increasingly often associated, not without opposition, with first and foremost nationalism, 148 chapter five but also increasingly with democracy and ‘communism’; in short, with the problem of the ties accentuating group identities. Together with Mazzini, Kossuth, Polish Romantics, but also with the workers’ ‘coalitions’ that were just taking their first steps, the ideas of the author of The Social Contract were coming back with redoubled intensity. He made people realize that “[h]e who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions [speaks in fact] of transforming each individual … into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being” (Rousseau 1923: 35). What would that “greater whole” be? The answers that were given to this question diverged far from the ideal of the individualistic and civic nation expressed in the British and American experience. The political and social consequences of industrialization had delivered a “devastating blow” to liberal principles: “The need for community feeling, rootedness and security turned out to be stronger … than the sumptuous need for freedom of thought, conscience and action” (Jedlicki 1993: 38). Classical liberalism was facing an already visibly different form of nationalism. The latter pushed to the fore a symbiotic relationship between ethnic criteria and the state, even where the concept of an open civic community seemed to prevail (Smith 1998: 127). Habermas’s thesis (1992: 4) that “only briefly did the democratic national state forge a close link between ‘ethnos’ and ‘demos’. Citizenship was never conceptually tied to ” should be treated solely as a mere expression of hope. In the period of the first globalization real tendencies were differ- ent. Acton was well aware of this. When confronted with the theories of “equality, communism, and nationality,” although he did not accept any of them, he was definitely more disdainful of the last one. He treated it as usurpation which eliminated the natural autonomy of the state and of the nation, the autonomy perfectly embodied in the British experience. Mill’s approach to national aspirations was as a matter of fact similar: because they could not be checked they therefore required assimilation in the wider context of liberal values. It still was an argument, not a mortal duel, even though the chance of preventing a divorce looked bleak. Individual freedom and the parlia­ mentary system, openness in public life and the free press, that is the foundations of classical liberalism, were confronted with values and loyalties of another order, which assumed a new form of unity. Already bringing liberalism and mass-based democracy to a compromise was a dif- ficult and time consuming process, while conflict between them “never disappeared” (Bobbio 1998: 54).