7.2 Nationalism

Early 19th-century nationalism drew on Romanticism's love of folk culture. The German writer Johann Gottfried Herder had argued that each people has its own spirit expressed in its language and songs, and the Brothers Grimm collected German folk tales partly for that reason. Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), delivered under Napoleon's occupation, called on Germans to see themselves as one people with a special mission. Liberal nationalists linked national freedom to constitutions and rights. The Italian Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy (1831) to create a united, democratic Italian republic, and believed free nations would live together in peace.

After 1850 nationalism became more conservative and more aggressive. Conservative statesmen such as Napoleon III, Cavour and Bismarck learned to harness popular national feeling to build new states or make existing ones stronger. Chauvinism, a boastful belief in one's own nation's superiority, was used to justify expansion at other nations' expense. Some nationalists began to define the nation by race and blood instead of shared culture or citizenship, and to see other nations as enemies in a struggle for survival, an idea strengthened by Social Darwinism (7.4).

Several forces turned ordinary people into conscious members of a nation. Public schools taught a standard national language and patriotic history. Conscription put young men from different regions into the same army. Railroads and cheap newspapers connected regions. National holidays, anthems, flags and monuments gave people shared symbols. By 1900, many peasants who had once identified mainly with their village thought of themselves as French, German or Italian.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, was elected president of France in 1848, seized power in 1851 and became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. He combined authoritarian rule with universal male suffrage and plebiscites, rebuilt Paris (6.9), promoted railways and banks, and pursued national glory abroad in the Crimea, Italy and Mexico. His regime collapsed after defeat by Prussia in 1870.

The Austrian Empire faced the opposite problem: nationalism threatened to break it apart. After losing to Prussia in 1866, Emperor Franz Joseph made the Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich) with the Hungarians. It created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary: two states with separate parliaments and governments, sharing one monarch, one army, foreign policy and the finances for those. Germans dominated the Austrian half and Magyars (Hungarians) the Hungarian half, but Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and others still lacked equal power. Their frustration, and Serbia's appeal to South Slavs, became a direct cause of World War I.

In the Ottoman lands and Russia, Pan-Slavism, the idea that Slavic peoples should unite under Russian leadership, encouraged Balkan nationalism, while Russia's own Russification policy forced the Russian language and Orthodox religion on Poles, Finns and others.

Jews in western Europe had won legal equality in the 1800s, and many joined the professions. Older religious hostility now mixed with new racial theories, and politicians found that blaming Jews for economic troubles won votes. In Berlin, the court preacher Adolf Stoecker's Christian Social Party (founded 1878) mixed social reform with attacks on Jews, and in Vienna, Karl Lueger, leader of Austria's Christian Social Party, became mayor in 1897 after campaigns that used anti-Semitic appeals. In Russia, waves of violent attacks called pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, pushing many Jews to emigrate.

In France, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was convicted of spying for Germany in 1894 and sent to Devil's Island. Evidence soon pointed to another officer, Major Esterhazy, but the army covered it up. The novelist Émile Zola's open letter “J'accuse…!” (1898) accused the army of injustice. The affair split France between the army, Church and nationalist right on one side and republicans and the left on the other. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and fully cleared in 1906, and the bitterness helped lead to the 1905 law separating church and state.

Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist from Vienna who covered the Dreyfus affair, concluded that assimilation would not protect Jews from anti-Semitism. In The Jewish State (1896) he argued that Jews needed a homeland of their own, and in 1897 he organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Zionism was itself a form of nationalism, a response to exclusion by other nationalisms. It later shaped the history of Palestine and the founding of Israel in 1948.