Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality by Eric J. Hobsbawm

Author:Eric J. Hobsbawm
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Political Ideologies, Reference, Electronic books, General, Nationalism - History, Political Science, World, Nationalism, History
ISBN: 9780521439619
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-10-29T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The transformation of nationalism, 1870-1918

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'.2 It is representative, in particular, in five ways: in stressing linguistic and cultural community, which was a nineteenth-century innovation,3 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.

Yet while the quotation at first sight reads like something that might have been written by Mazzini himself, in fact it was written seventy years after the 183o revolutions, and by a Marxian socialist of Moravian origin in a book about the specific problems of the Habsburg empire. In short, while it might be confused with the `principle of nationality' which transformed the political map of Europe between 183o and the 1870s, in fact it belongs to a later, and different, phase of nationalist development in European history.

The nationalism of 188o-1914 differed in three major respects from the Mazzinian phase of nationalism. First, it abandoned the `threshold principle' which, as we have seen, was central to nationalism in the Liberal era. Henceforth any body of people considering themselves a `nation' claimed the right to selfdetermination which, in the last analysis, meant the right to a separate sovereign independent state for their territory. Second, and in consequence of this multiplication of potential `unhistorical' nations, ethnicity and language became the central, increasingly the decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood. Yet there was a third change which affected not so much the non-state national movements, which now became increasingly numerous and ambitious, but national sentiments within the established nation-states: a sharp shift to the political right of nation and flag, for which the term `nationalism' was actually invented in the last decade(s) of the nineteenth century. Renner's quotation represents the first two, but (coming from the left) very distinctly not the third of these changes.

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