4 - The transformation of nationalism 1870–1918

Summary

Once a certain degree of European development has been reached, the linguistic and cultural communities of peoples, having silently matured throughout the centuries, emerge from the world of passive existence as peoples (passiver Volkheit). They become conscious of themselves as a force with a historical destiny. They demand control over the state, as the highest available instrument of power, and strive for their political self-determination. The birthday of the political idea of the nation and the birth-year of this new consciousness, is 1789, the year of the French Revolution.

Two hundred years after the French Revolution no serious historian and, it is hoped, no one who has read up to this point in the present book, will regard statements like the one quoted above as other than exercises in programmatic mythology. Yet the quotation seems a representative statement of that ‘principle of nationality’ which convulsed the international politics of Europe after 1830, creating a number of new states which corresponded, so far as practicable, with one half of Mazzini's call ‘Every nation a state’, though less so with the other half, ‘only one state for the entire nation’. It is representative, in particular, in five ways: in stressing linguistic and cultural community, which was a nineteenth-century innovation, in stressing the nationalism that aspired to form or capture states rather than the ‘nations’ of already existing states, in its historicism and sense of historic mission, in claiming the paternity of 1789, and not least in its terminological ambiguity and rhetoric.