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Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present

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Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present NATIONALISM IN EUROPE, 1815 TO THE PRESENT Nationalism has become so integral a part of life in Europe today that it is virtually impossible not to identify oneself with a nation state, and yet nationalism is historically a modern phenomenon. This reader helps the student to gain an understanding of this important subject by offering: • a substantial and wide-ranging introduction • key texts, including John Stuart Mill and Otto Bauer • a selection of texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which emphasize how the understanding of nationalism has changed over time • a comparative European emphasis • pieces previously not published in English • a number of lengthy texts to offer students the possibility of studying in depth As well as providing the central building blocks for informed theoretical discussion, Stuart Woolf also tackles controversial issues such as the difference between the development of nationalism in western and central-eastern Europe and the relationship between nation state and national identity. Stuart Woolf is Research Professor of History at the University of Essex. His previous publications include Napoleon’s Integration of Europe (1991) and his edited collection, Fascism in Europe (1981). NATIONALISM IN EUROPE, 1815 TO THE PRESENT A reader Edited by Stuart Woolf London and New York First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1996 Stuart Woolf, selection and editorial material © 1996 Routledge, translated material All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-43285-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-74109-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-12563-4 (Print Edition) 0-415-12564-2 (pbk) CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Stuart Woolf 2 NATIONALITY (1861) 40 J.S.Mill 3 WHAT IS A NATION? (1882) 48 Ernest Renan 4 THE NATION (1906) 61 Otto Bauer 5 NATION, NATIONALITY, INTERNATIONALISM (1920–1) 85 Marcel Mauss 6 NATIONAL STATES AND NATIONAL MINORITIES (1934) 102 C.A.Macartney 7 THE IDEA OF NATION (1961) 124 Federico Chabod 8 REFLECTIONS ON NATIONALISM (1985) 137 John Breuilly 9 LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM (1973) 155 Joshua Fishman 10 URBAN SPACE AND MONUMENTS IN THE ‘NATIONALIZATION OF THE MASSES’: THE ITALIAN CASE (1979) 171 Bruno Tobia v CONTENTS 11 WHEN WAS WALES? (1979) 192 G.A.Williams Index 205 vi 1 INTRODUCTION* Stuart Woolf Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911)1 I against my brother I and my brother against our cousin I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbours, All of us against the foreigner Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1988)2 Nationalism has become so integral a part of life in Europe today that it is virtually impossible not to identify oneself with a nation state: we think of ourselves as Italians, French or English; we have been prepared to fight wars to affirm the independence or rights of our nation against what we regard as the threats of other states or, tragically, other ‘ethnically’ different peoples, such as Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, Armenians or Azers. To belong to a nation state has become so natural that, on the one hand, almost any people capable of articulating its identity as a nation and its sense of persecution by the existing state demands the right to independence and a territory, while on the other hand nation states build political and legal barriers to exclude all but their own citizens. The passport—in origin a passe-partout issued to protect the traveller— has now become an obligatory document of legal existence, symbol of this dependence of the individual on the nation state, so inconceivable is the concept of ‘statelessness’. Three different elements have become inextricably superimposed in our understanding of the nation state: the nation, as a collective identity; the state as an expression of political independence; and the 1 STUART WOOLF territory as a geographical area with frontiers demarcating the necessary coincidence between nation and state. Yet nationalism, in its identification of a people with the territorial nation state, is a historically modern phenomenon, generally accepted as dating from the French Revolution. ‘Patriotism’, in the sense of a readiness to sacrifice oneself for one’s community (king, country…), has a far older lineage, from the Roman patria to medieval kingdoms (Kantorowicz, 1984), but it was an expression of individual loyalty (or, at most, the self- identification of a group, such as the Polish szlachta, with the ‘nation’), not the collective action of a people. ‘National characteristics’ (also used by nationalists in support of the continuity of the distinctive identity of peoples) form part of a well- established and distinguished literary rhetoric, dating back to the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare and Montaigne employed the expression as a commonplace means of categorizing the differences between the new-found strength and identity of the early modern dynastic states. Far more recent, and part of the nationalist self- image, is the claim that national patriotism is a primordial instinct, like the family, inherently superior to other loyalties, and that the ‘nation’ is a ‘natural’ unit that has always existed, albeit for long in a passive and dormant state. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NATIONALISM From the earliest expressions of modern nationalism, historians, antiquarians and savants played a significant part in articulating a sense of national identity through their researches aimed at discovering (or inventing) the distant origins and ancient glories of their people. History, language, folklore, territory, culture or religion could all be used to demonstrate the past traditions of a nation, symbolic evidence of its historic continuity and hence its authenticity. But far more important in the diffusion of the ideological affirmation of the ‘naturalness’ and inevitability of the nation state was the role of academic historians. Clearly by the 1840s, but almost uninterruptedly from the later nineteenth century until the second world war, such historians (for example, Heinrich von Treitschke) intepreted the history of their country in a teleological manner, as culminating inevitably in the nation state, whether monarchical or republican. The ‘destiny’ of the nation not only 2 INTRODUCTION explained its past, but often justified the state’s imperialist ambitions. For in reality, in these interpretations the state embodied and incorporated the nation. Hegel’s dictum—‘nations may have had a long history before they finally reach their destination—that of forming themselves into states’ (Gellner, 1983, p. 48)—became the interpretative canon not just of German historians, starting with Ranke (for whom the state had moral, almost theological connotations), but throughout Europe, culminating in the heyday of positivist historiography. It formed part of the process of deliberate ‘nation-building’, which spread through Europe in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the political elites sought to strengthen the ties of their peoples to the old and newly formed nation states. It would be erroneous and unjust to accuse these historians of deliberately distorting their national past (although there were those, like the Englishman John Seeley or the Italian Gioacchino Volpe, who were too easily attracted to the political power respectively of imperialism and fascism). Rather, the very triumph of the nation state confirmed and consolidated nationalist historiography in all countries. The assumption that a ‘national spirit’ could be followed like a red thread through the centuries, laid down with academic authority to a lay audience by Ernest Lavisse in France, J.R.Green in England, Pietro Silva in Italy, became, through endless simplification and repetition in school and family, uncritical dogma. Historians thus contributed, at the best, to the pride and collective ideals intrinsic to a sense of national sentiment; but also, at the worst, to the aggressive political projects of extremist rightwing regimes, such as those that dominated the 1930s (Kennedy, 1974; Lanaro, 1993). The first world war, resulting in the disappearance of the multinational empires of eastern and central Europe and the affirmation of the principle of ‘self-determination’, strongly influenced historical interpretations. For self-determination, however imperfectly applied and whatever the problems of ethnic minorities that it brought to the forefront (P.Smith et al., 1991), appeared to confirm the legitimacy of nationalist claims about the existence of the nation as a primordial factor, a demiurge outside history. Hans Kohn, the most productive historian of nationalism of the interwar period, could still write after the second world war, at the end of a long and distinguished career: ‘What remains constant in nationalism through all its changes is the demand
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