VI.

Origins and Development

There seems to be considerable agreement about the dating of nationalism's emergence. Yet no ideology, let alone religion, emerges full-blown, like Athena from Zeus' head.

Elie Kedourie proposed 1807, the date of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, as nationalism's birth-date; Eric Hobsbawm appeared to favour the later date of 1830, while admitting earlier manifestations; John Breuilly also seems to think in terms of the early 19th century, while conceding an influential role to Herder; whereas Hans Kohn looked back to the Partitions of Poland in the 1770s. If nationalism is regarded as a secular political movement, then its first full-scale expression can be found during the course of the French Revolution, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. There are also important and influential precedents in 17th century Holland and England, though their vibrant nationalisms were couched in fervent religious language and imagery, as have been many latterday “religious nationalisms”, notably in the Islamic world.

On the other side, medievalists like Adrian Hastings argue that defensive nationalisms can be found as far back as the Anglo-Saxons or even the ancient Israelites. He seems to have in mind more “national sentiment” than nationalist ideologies or movements; a theory of nationalism, he claims, is unimportant compared to the power of the mass sentiments of the nation. This may only serve to confuse the issue. We may concede the antiquity of “national sentiment”, but still argue that nationalism, the ideological movement, is both relatively modern and important in its own right, because the theory provides many ethnic communities and nations with a legitimation, guide, and blueprint for their political aspirations.

Later, with Rousseau and Herder, we begin to enter a new world of a widespread concern for authenticity, a return to roots, a preoccupation with unity and identity, as well as a desire for autonomy, which we find only sporadically in earlier centuries. Notwithstanding, there are a few suggestive pre-modern cases which seem to exhibit an organized ideological movement for autonomy, unity, and identity of a “nation”—among the Maccabees and Zealots of ancient Judea, the ancient Greeks in Persae (“The Persians”) and other dramas by Aeschylus, the Armenians in the pages of Elishe and Xorenatsi, perhaps the Scots of the Declaration of Arbroath and the Swiss after the Oath of the Rutli. If so, the idea did not catch on until much later. The turning point appears to come in the 15th and 16th centuries, when a conjunction of factors—the rise of the modern state, competition between nascent bourgeoisies, the rise of vernacular print, humanism and the revival of Greco-Roman political models, and the return to Old Testament theology of ethnic election and sacred territory, spread both national sentiment and national ideals of unity, autonomy, and identity among a wider literate class in Western Europe. Here too we can locate the origins of the characteristic ideas of “national character”, “authenticity”, and “national genius”, which were taken up over a century and a half later by Rousseau and Herder and their followers.

It is undoubtedly the case that many European nationalisms emerged at the beginning of the 19th century—in Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Greece and Serbia—stirred in part by the example and conquests of Napoleon. From this point on, we can trace both emancipatory and unificatory themes, together or in succession. This formulation seems nearer the mark than conventional historical accounts which trace a first period of mass-democratic, “liberal” nationalism to the abortive Revolutions of 1848, followed after 1870 by exclusive small-nation ethno-linguistic nationalisms, which reached their apogee in World War I and World War II—and which for some like Eric Hobsbawm have returned in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union. In fact, divisive ethno-linguistic movements could be found as far back as the Serbian, Greek, and Irish uprisings, while several of the post-War anti-colonial nationalisms have been unifying and emancipatory.

A useful distinction can indeed be made between “ethnic” and “territorial” nationalisms, with the latter facing often major problems of integration, as in Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, India, Burma, and Indonesia, and the former veering between the poles of exclusiveness and absorption by larger neighbours. Similarly, we can usefully follow Hans Kohn and distinguish two ideological variants of nationalism in this period: the one more voluntarist, “civic”, and rationalist, the other more organic, “ethnic”, and authoritarian. Of course, in particular cases, it is always a matter of degree, and nationalisms may well move between these poles in different periods and circumstances. Nevertheless there is an important distinction to be made, analytically, between a nationalism that requires an individual to belong to a specific nation, but leaves to him or her the choice of nation, and a nationalism that prescribes the individual's nation from birth.

The later 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a proliferation of nationalisms of all kinds—conservative, religious, social democratic, communist, and fascist. The relationship between fascism, and especially Nazism, and nationalism has been problematic. For some they represent the logical culmination and denouement of nationalism; for others they are radically different, even opposed, the result of new factors like racism and the violence of World War I. In some cases, like the fascism of Mussolini, the link with expansionist integral nationalism is clear. In Romania, too, the affinity between and transition from a populist and romantic nationalism to the fascist movement of Corneliu Codreanu was plainly visible. In the Nazi case, the picture is more complex: the Nazis displaced the conservative Nationalist party of Alfred Hugenberg, while their themes of “agrarian settlement” in the East derived from Volkisch (or populist) nationalism. These themes were accompanied by a brutal imperialism and the idea of a racial hierarchy that was quite contrary to Herder’s original belief in cultural nationalism and to the whole idea of a world of vertical nations.

The relationship between communism and nationalism has been equally complex. Both reveal profound similarities in the structure of their ideologies; both are profoundly historicist, with revolution hastening overall evolution, with a special place reserved for the historical elect (the proletariat, the nation), and with the “movement” as the main instrument of historical progress and emancipation. Yet, “national communism”, from China and Vietnam to Romania and Yugoslavia, proved to be the undoing of the Comintern. The idea that communism had to be adapted to the situation and traditions of each nation (an idea traceable to Marx) revealed the staying power of nationalism and paved the way for the demise of international communism.