Chapter 3 - Nationalism and Universalism: 1815–1848

Summary

If the eighteenth century was dominated by a French Enlightenment idea of Europe, following the French Revolution and then the Napoleon Wars, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a German Romantic idea of Europe, dominated by strains of cultural nationalism. On the one hand, German Romantics such as Novalis looked back nostalgically to medieval Christendom for the model of a united Europe; on the other hand, thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Schlegel brothers dreamed of a Europe dominated by German culture. The roots of the shift from universalism to nationalism lay in the work of writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who challenged French Enlightenment universalism with an insistence upon cultural differences. While Herder also challenged the prevailing Eurocentrism and Euro-universalism, the post-Napoleonic era saw both a growing nationalism across Europe and an intensifying European imperialism that would culminate in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explores the complex relation between the idea of Europe and that of nationalism in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the ways in which the ostensibly antithetical ideas of the universal and the national were integrated into the idea of Europe.