Nationalism
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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW The idea of nationalism was born during the French Revolution. Previously, countries had been thought of as ‘realms’, ‘principalities’ or ‘kingdoms’. The inhabitants of a country were ‘subjects’, their political identity being formed by an allegiance to a ruler or ruling dynasty, rather than any sense of national identity or patriotism. However, the revolutionaries in France who rose up against Louis XVI in 1789 did so in the name of the people, and understood the people to be the ‘French nation’. Their ideas were influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see p. 133) and the new doctrine of popular self-government. Nationalism was therefore a revolutionary and democratic creed, reflecting the idea that ‘subjects of the crown’ should become ‘citizens of France’. The nation should be its own master, or, as the French rationalist scholar Ernest Renan (1823–92) put it, the nation is a ‘daily plebiscite’. However, such ideas were not the exclusive property of the French. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792– 1815), much of continental Europe was invaded by France, giving rise to both resentment against France and a desire for independence . In Italy and Germany, long divided into a collection of states, the experience of conquest helped to forge, for the first time, a consciousness of national unity, expressed in a new language of nationalism, inherited from France. Nationalist ideas also spread to Latin America in the early nineteenth
century, where Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), ‘the Liberator’, led revolutions against Spanish rule in what was then New Grenada, now the countries of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, as well as in Peru and Bolivia. In many respects, nationalism developed into the most successful and compelling of political creeds, helping to shape and reshape history in many parts of the world for over two hundred years. The rising tide of nationalism re-drew the map of Europe in the nineteenth century as the autocratic and multinational empires of Turkey, Austria and Russia started to crumble in the face of liberal and nationalist pressure. In 1848, nationalist uprisings broke out in the Italian states, among the Czechs and the Hungarians, and in Germany, where the desire for national unity was expressed in the creation of the short-lived Frankfurt parliament. The nineteenth century was a period of nation building. Italy, once dismissed by the Austrian Chancellor Metternich as a ‘mere geographical expression’, became a united state in 1861, the process of unification being completed with the acquisition of Rome in 1870. Germany, formerly a collection of 39 states, was unified in 1871, following the Franco-Prussian War.
Nation: A collection of people bound together by shared values and traditions, a common language, religion and history, and usually occupying the same geographical area (see p. 131). Independence: The process through which a nation is liberated from foreign rule, usually involving the establishment of sovereign statehood. Unification: The process through which a collection of separate political entities, usually sharing cultural characteristics, are integrated into a single state.
KEY CONCEPT PATRIOTISM
organization. Patriotism provides the affective basis for that belief, and thus underpins all forms of nationalism. It is difficult to conceive of a national group demanding, say, political independence without possessing at least a measure of patriotic loyalty or national consciousness. However, not all patriots are nationalists. Not all of those who identify with, or even love, their nation, see it as a means through which political demands can be articulated.
Patriotism (from the Latin patria , meaning ‘fatherland’) is a sentiment, a psychological attachment to one’s nation, literally a ‘love of one’s country’. The terms nationalism and patriotism are often confused. Nationalism has a doctrinal character and embodies the belief that the nation is in some way the central principle of political
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