Topic 7.2 Notes – Nationalism

What Nationalism Meant in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Nationalism said your nation should get your highest political loyalty and should have political institutions that express who “your people” are.

• A nation is a people who believe they share language, history, culture, religion, memories, or identity.
• A state is a government that rules a territory.
• A nation-state is a state that claims to represent one nation.
• Patriotism is loyalty to your country or state. It does not always mean the borders match one national group.

The core nationalist claim was simple. Political borders should match the nation more closely.

That mattered after 1815 because Europe’s map did not match national identities very well. This map gives you the basic problem nationalists wanted to solve. Germans and Italians were split among many states, and the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires ruled many peoples.

Europe after 1815

The French Revolution and Napoleon had already spread popular sovereignty, the idea that authority comes from the people or nation, and they also stirred resistance to foreign domination. The Congress of Vienna ignored national self-determination and restored dynastic rule, so nationalism became a challenge to the Vienna system.

One tension runs through this whole topic:

• Civic nationalism tied the nation to citizenship and political loyalty.
• Ethnic nationalism tied the nation to ancestry, language, religion, or “blood.”

How Nationalists Built Loyalty to the Nation

Nationalism did not just appear. People built it through culture, education, and symbols.

Major tools included:

• Romantic idealism that celebrated feeling, history, and the unique spirit of a people
• Language standardization so scattered populations could imagine themselves as one community
• Folklore and legends treated as proof of an ancient national spirit
• Heroes, flags, monuments, festivals, and schools that taught shared memory

Fichte

J. G. Fichte wrote Addresses to the German Nation during Napoleonic domination. He argued that shared language and education could create German unity even before a German state existed.

Grimm Brothers

The Grimm Brothers collected German folktales. In this context, fairy tales were political. They seemed to preserve the authentic voice of the German people.

Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1831. He tied nationalism to liberal republicanism and wanted a unified, independent Italian republic led by the people.

Pan-Slavists

Pan-Slavists stressed shared Slavic language and culture. Some wanted cultural cooperation, some autonomy, some political unity. That threatened Habsburg and Ottoman control.

How Nationalism Changed Politics and States

Early nationalism often worked with liberalism. Nationalists often wanted constitutions, representative government, civil equality, and an end to absolutism, dynastic privilege, and foreign rule.

Nationalism could move politics in two directions:

1. Unification of divided peoples, like Italians and Germans
2. Autonomy or independence for peoples inside empires

After 1848, conservative rulers learned to use nationalism themselves. This is nationalism from above.

• Napoleon III used plebiscites, public works, military prestige, and national glory to build support for authoritarian empire.
• Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, used diplomacy and war to make Piedmont lead Italian unification. He was far more practical and monarchist than Mazzini.
• Bismarck used diplomacy, war, and German nationalism to unify Germany under Prussian leadership.

In multinational empires, rulers tried compromise. The Ausgleich of 1867 created Austria-Hungary, a dual monarchy with separate Austrian and Hungarian governments under one Habsburg ruler. It calmed Hungarian demands but left Slavs and others unhappy.

How Nationalism Became Exclusionary

By the late nineteenth century, nationalism often hardened into chauvinism, an aggressive belief in national superiority, and racialism, the idea that nations were biological groups.

That changed the question from “Who are our citizens?” to “Who truly belongs?”

Many Jews in western and central Europe gained civil rights and became acculturated. They entered universities, professions, politics, journalism, and the arts. But anti-Semitism still grew.

Modern anti-Semitism treated Jewishness as racial and permanent. Even fully assimilated Jews could be labeled alien to the nation.

Key examples:

• Adolf Stoecker used anti-Semitic Christian Social politics in Germany.
• Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, showed that anti-Semitic mass politics could thrive in a modern city.
• The Dreyfus affair in France exposed the conflict between republican citizenship and exclusionary nationalism. Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason in 1894, and Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse…!” attacked the injustice.

Alfred Dreyfus’s public degradation, 1895

The image shows Dreyfus being publicly stripped of honor, which turned the case into a powerful symbol of how exclusionary nationalism could override justice.

Zionism grew out of that failure of assimilation. Theodor Herzl, in The Jewish State (1896), argued that Jews needed a homeland. The First Zionist Congress met at Basel in 1897.