Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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John Breuilly
Cultural division became a problem with democratisation. There was
a demand to enforce English or French culture at a popular level. The
Restoration regime of post-1815 France did not relax this policy, even if
national culture was seen in Catholic and hierarchical rather than secular and
democratic terms (Lyons 2006). John Stuart Mill argued that the assimilation
of small, backward, peripheral cultures (Bretons, Welsh) to the dominant
culture was necessary to create the public consensus needed in a liberal
democracy. Mill’s arguments were influential at the time and have been
much discussed recently.
12
Mill defines nationality so as to include a political demand:
A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among
themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others –
which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people,
desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by
themselves or a portion of themselves, exclusively. (Mill 1977b, p. 546)
This leads Mill to argue for the political separation of nationalities:
it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions, that the boundaries of govern-
ments should coincide with those of nationalities. (Mill 1977b, p. 548)
However, Mill qualifies this proposition, for example in relation to geo-
graphical distributions of national populations. Lord Acton attacked Mill’s
argument, demanding the continued distinction between culture (nation-
ality) and politics (independence) (Acton 1907b).
My concern is not with the presumption that a polity requires one
national culture under conditions of representative democracy, but with
Mill’s related argument about civilisation. Mill thought that if a civilised
minority ruled a less civilised majority, one could not have democracy, a
position he took with regard to British rule in India.
13
Where civilised
nations lived side-by-side, there should usually be political separation. Mill
supported political autonomy for French Canadians on this ground (Varoux-
akis 2002,p.18). However, where a civilised majority ruled a backward
minority Mill’s prescription was not political separation but cultural assim-
ilation. As his most notorious passage on the subject put the matter:
and told us more about differences at the level of popular culture rather than that of elite culture or
politics. For more recent studies of such issues see Ford 1993 and Lehning 1995.
12 The principal text is Mill 1977b, in particular Chapter XVI, ‘Of Nationality, as Connected with
Representative Government’. Varouxakis 2002 provides a reliable analysis. For recent normative
arguments which draw on Mill see Miller 1995.
13 He knew India well, both his father and himself having worked for the East India Company.
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On the principle of nationality
Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French
Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly refined and
cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms
to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection,
and the dignity and prestige of French power – than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-
savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation
or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the
Welshman or the Scottish Highlander, as members of the British nation. (Mill 1977b,
p. 549)
We must not project contemporary understandings on to this passage. Mill
was not arguing that all Breton or Welsh customs (‘ways of life’) be swept
aside. This passage long precedes the age of mass culture and interventionist
states with an extensive realm of ‘public’ culture and a restricted private
culture. Never theless, this was a time when moves towards compulsory
schooling in Britain raised questions about the language of instruction,
indeed even how ‘proper’ English was to be spoken. More important is the
impact of such thinking in Central and Eastern Europe.
Mill’s view derives from established contrasts between the civilised and
the backward but acquired new urgency with democratisation. In Central
Europe ‘nationality’ as political concept was connected to high culture.
To b e a ‘ P o l e ’ i n 1600 was to be a privileged member of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth. So Mill’s arguments could be taken up by
privileged groups in the political conflicts that became acute in 1848.For
liberal audiences of Mill’s persuasion, it was important that advocates of
national causes – Greek, German, Polish, Hungarian, Italian – establish not
merely that their nation existed but that it was civilised.
This acquired additional force in Central Europe with arguments about
history. Hegel had taken the idea of progress and made it into world process.
He notoriously asserted that Africa ‘had no history’. Hegel has been roundly
criticised but it was a pioneering effort to construct world history, envisaging
a key nation at the centre of that history in each epoch.
14
Such ideas were applied to mid-century Europe with the distinction
between ‘historical’ and ‘non-historical’ nations. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels used the distinction to justify support for or opposition to conflict-
ing national claims (Cummins 1980; Nimni 1991; Rosdolsky 1986). It has
14 ‘Passing judgement on it [Hegel’s ‘dialectic of national minds’] today requires little effort, but it is
all too easy to forget that, in spite of its metaphysical arbitrariness, this represented the first attempt
to master intellectually the apparent chaos of historical events and to comprehend human history as
a developmental process that made sense and followed its own laws’ (Rosdolsky 1986,p.130). For an
English translation see Hegel 1975a.
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John Breuilly
been argued that these were pragmatic judgements about which national
movements would promote or obstruct progress towards socialism, as well
as expressing their fear that tsarism would exploit Slav sentiments to effect
counter-revolution. However, Engels at least also argued that Slavs (except-
ing Poles) were ruined fragments of an earlier culture who must assimilate
into non-Slav nations. Engels portrayed Habsburg history as centralising
and progressive. He supported the rule of the dominant nationalities of the
Habsburg Empire and their assimilation of ‘non-historic’ peoples.
15
By different routes Mill and Engels discriminated between nationalities
(civilised, historical) which should form states and those (backward, unhis-
torical) which should not. One finds similar conclusions, asserted rather
than argued, in Mazzini. His ‘Young Europe’ programme, when mapped
on to Europe, produces something similar to Hegelian projections by Engels
on to ‘historical’ peoples.
16
Applying the discourse
This discourse of historic nationality was central to the claims made on
behalf of Germans, Italians, Magyars and Poles. Central throughout was
a preoccupation, even an obsession, with modernity understood from a
liberal perspective. Yet it was necessary to avoid simple emulation of French
and British variations of modernity: modernity had to be given a national
twist and this was achieved with the principle of historic nationality (for
recent surveys not otherwise cited: see Denes 2006; Wingfield 2003).
There were important differences. In Poland there was a long-standing
aristocratic conception of Polish nationality. A Polish state had existed until
1795 and there was a direct connection between that state and advocates
of its restoration in the nineteenth century. Democratising the principle of
nationality confronted not only the challenge of dismantling an aristocratic
order but also of accommodating the many non-Polish speakers. The scale
of the problem became clear in Galicia in 1846 when peasants turned against
the gentry nationalist uprising and sided with the Habsburg monarchy. This
revealed that the dynasties had available a populist option to use against elite
nationalism (Gill 1974;Snyder2003).
15 I base much of this on Rosdolsky 1986, a pioneering Marxist critique of Marx and, especially, Engels.
16 In 1852 Mazzini suggested how some fifty national units in Europe could be reduced to thirteen
or fourteen larger federal groupings. In a letter of 1857 he put flesh on this idea, including a great
Danubian confederation. See Smith 1994,pp.155–6. My thanks to Oliver Zimmer for drawing my
attention to this reference.
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On the principle of nationality
In Hungary there was an aristocratic Magyar culture, autonomy under
a foreign dynasty and a significant proportion of non-Magyar speakers
within the subordinate population. Unlike the Poles, however, there was a
core area of Hungary with a Magyar speaking peasantry which provided a
base for revolution in 1848–9, once peasant emancipation was proclaimed.
Earlier independence lay further back in time than for Poland and there
was more to be done in the way of constructing Magyar high culture.
Hungarian nationalists had the advantage that their political demands were
addressed to one dynast and not, like the Poles, to three, and there was
room for compromise on internal autonomy. The Habsburgs ruled as Kings
of Hungary, not Emperors. During 1848–9 the revolutionaries, on the basis
of concessions made at an early stage by the ruler (the April Laws) insisted
that they were not rebelling against their king (Deak 1979).
Magyars shared with Poles the problem that popular appeal to nationality
on the basis of a shared culture and language could backfire where the
rural masses were of distinct ethnicity and language or pressed for more
radical land reform than elite nationalists were willing to concede. After
the dualist constitution of 1867 gave internal autonomy to the Kingdom of
Hungary, the official fiction of ‘one and indivisible nation’ was bound to
trigger counter-nationalist responses.
In Italy even into the mid-nineteenth century men like Cavour preferred
speaking French to Italian. Not only was Italy politically splintered but
much rulership was ‘foreign’: Habsburgs in the north, Popes in the centre,
Bourbons in the south. A few territorial states and local domination could
claim to be Italian. Italy was highly localised and there was no common
culture or a mutually comprehensible language. It was necessary to cultivate
deliberately a high culture.
17
Mazzini ignored the problem. Italy, he asserted,
had the unique advantage of being unified by ‘sublime and indisputable
boundaries’ and a common language (Mazzini 1907,pp.53–4).
German states were ruled by German princes and elites. German high
culture had been effectively constructed. By the mid-nineteenth century
this culture was entrenched in the curricula of Gymnasien and universities.
There was a loose German political and legal system. There were dialects but
they were German dialects. German nationalists were well-placed to argue
that there was a distinct nationality and simple removal of fragmentation
17 On the diversity of Italy see Woolf 1979. For a sceptical view of the ‘national’ basis of Risorgimento
claims see Laven 2006.
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could create a national state. However, lack of alien rule deprived German
nationalists of a foreign enemy while vested state interests and conflict
between Austria and Prussia blocked moves to unification (Breuilly 1996;
Vick 2002).
In different ways the notion of a historic nation constituted by domination
and high culture could be claimed for these four nations. A shared liberal-
radical vision of a national Europe in the mid-nineteenth century assumed
the unification of Italy and Germany and the restoration of Poland and
Hungary. The victims would be the petty states of the Italian and German
lands and the Habsburg and Romanov empires. If monarchies like Piedmont
and Prussia pursued this vision, however, they would have to surrender some
prerogatives although it was also difficult for liberal opinion to envisage any
political form other than monarchy. When Greece, Belgium, Serbia and
Romania acquired political independence, a monarchical form was adopted,
usually importing a king from a cadet branch of an established royal family.
This demonstrates the conservative assumptions within which the notion
of historic nationality operated.
There was one further potential victim of this historic-liberal principle of
nationality: the ‘non-historic’ nationalities. A different principle of nation-
ality was being constructed here and 1848 would accelerate and crystallise
its development.
5 Nation as ethnicity
Terms such as ‘non-historic’ or ‘historyless’ were regarded by spokesmen
for such nations as derogatory. Nowadays other terms are used, such as non-
dominant ethnic community (Hroch 1996: 80). Indeed, the terms imply a
nationalist assumption about the connection between identity and history.
Naturally, therefore, nationalists who took up the cause of non-historic
nationalities focused on constructing a national history.
Older notions of domination and high culture were not framed in terms
of ‘complete’ groups but in terms of a hierarchical social order with those
at the top culturally distinct from those at the bottom. If social hierarchy
was sharp and cultural differences clear, as was increasingly the case as
one moved from west to east in Europe, it was difficult for elite culture
to generate popular appeal or for subordinate culture to present claims to
domination. Social mobility was accompanied by cultural shift. A successful
Czech-speaking immigrant into Prague learnt German and ensured his
children assimilated into dominant German culture (Cohen 1981).
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On the principle of nationality
There are many reasons why and how such assimilation declined. A
dynamic economy generated more upward social mobility than the tradi-
tional order could handle and the new men – farmers, merchants, manu-
facturers – asserted a group identity instead. Peasant emancipation was a
cause of such mobility and undermined social hierarchy. Gellner developed
a theory of industrialisation and unequal development to explain the emer-
gence of such nationalist movements. Hroch has connected the impulse to
formulate small nation principles to the growth of market towns in commer-
cialising agricultural and manufacturing districts of Central Europe. Berend
has stressed the role of economic backwardness and a combined resentment
of and desire to emulate the ‘West’ (Berend 2003, especially chs. 2 and 3;
Deutsch 1966; Gellner 2006;Hroch1985).
The cultivation of national rather than civilisational arguments by dom-
inant groups stimulated a like response from spokesmen for subordinate
groups. Magyars had rejected the Josephine notion of using German as the
official language and had carried on with Latin but by the 1830s were push-
ing for its replacement by Magyar. That stimulated Croatians to demand
the use of Croatian in their assemblies (Okey 2000,pp.121–5). With each
downward step language came to be increasingly regarded as attached to
group identity and interest rather than to utility of communication and
administration (Lyons 2006,pp.76–97).
Romanticism stimulated an interest in vernacular languages and tradi-
tions, a shift of focus from elite to folk culture, and provided a model for
a small vanguard intelligentsia. If French or German intellectuals made so
much of discovering, or even fabricating, medieval epics as indicative of the
depth of the national past, why should not Scottish or Czech intellectuals
do the same, especially if it impressed British or German public opinion?
18
The growing importance of such intellectuals can be linked directly to
new socio-economic interests, such as journalists catering for a demand for
a vernacular press from nouveau riche figures who had not become fluent
in the elite language. Lajos Kossuth (1802–94) came to politics through
18 Thus the epic poems allegedly by Ossian which James Macpherson published in the late eighteenth
century and about which Goethe, amongst others, enthused, or the Czech ‘Lay of Visegrad’ which
Josef Linda announced in 1816 (Lyons 2006,pp.80–1). The Gothic revival in art and literature in late
eighteenth-century Britain drew upon Macpherson’s forgery and the Nibelungslieder and other such
work for inspiration, something ably documented in a recent (2005) exhibition ‘Gothic Nightmares:
Fuseli, Black and the Romantic Imagination’ held at the Tate Britain. However, one should note
that if there really was some kind of oral tradition which, to gain recognition in the elite intellectual
world which subscribed to the principle of nationality, had to present this tradition in a written
vernacular, there could be a hazy distinction between ‘forgery’ and ‘genuine’.
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John Breuilly
journalism. Other intellectual nationalists came from existing institutions
of which the most important were churches which catered for subordinate
groups such as the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Greek Orthodox
and Uniate churches amongst Slavic peoples in Central Europe. Sometimes
they served regional elite interests against a centralising dynasty. The Czech
nationalist historian, Franti
ˆ
sek Palack
´
y(1798–1876) began his career writing
on Bohemian-Moravian history under noble patronage.
Such intellectual vanguards challenged notions of dominant or historical
culture which denied to their national culture historic roots or equality of
esteem. There was great variation in the cultural and historical resources
available for pressing this challenge. Much intellectual effort went into
creating more resources as well as interpreting those already available. There
were three main emphases: vernacular culture, religion and political rule
(for the role of such intellectual groups see Kennedy and Suny 1999).
Subordinate cultures usually had poorly developed written vernaculars.
This inhibited standardisation around one dialect. The written and ritual
church language (Latin, Church Slavonic) was usually separate from every-
day language.
19
Secular written communication in law courts and estate
assemblies was conducted in the language of the dominant culture. There
was much bi- or multilingualism as well as patois forms which defied
‘national’ classification, such as the mixing of Czech and German (King
2002). Switches in language use were tied to social situations. In non-
literate societies this made it impossible to identify distinct languages as
opposed to linguistic codes. The notion of ‘a language’ – a key tenet of
nationalist thought – was difficult to grasp.
20
The claim to equal recognition entailed the construction of a written
form of the language of the subordinate culture. A written vernacular makes
it possible to imagine language as a distinct and bounded entity possessed by
a nation. The nation might even be defined as the imagined readership of
a standardised written vernacular (Anderson 1991). Usually there was some
earlier written form on which to draw (e.g. medieval Czech) but frequently
substantial modification was required. Much work went into script (e.g.
19 These points do not apply to enclaves of Protestant belief in east-central Europe where direct
access to the written word of God was a central article of faith. They apply rather to churches in
which mystery and ritual mediated through an order of priests was central, that is, the Catholic and
Orthodox churches.
20 For an introduction to the complexities of this subject see Fishman 1973. Extracts are conveniently
reprintedinS.J.Woolf1996,pp.155–70. The peculiarity of the assumption that each human
being possesses one essential language is well brought out in Billig 1995,ch.2, ‘Nations and
Languages’.
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On the principle of nationality
Roman or Cyrillic), orthog raphy and pronunciation, which dialect form
to take as the norm, grammar, dictionary compilations, purging of loan
words, coining of new words. There were battles to promote the language
in schools and through poems, plays, novels and newspaper articles. Conflicts
over the language of schools, law courts or provincial assemblies related to
material interests, such as the job prospects of teachers or lawyers. Such
interests only came into play once the movement for vernacular language
use had got under way. Why one language succeeded and another failed
was a complex matter (Berend 2003,ch.2).
Religious differences mapped on to cultural and social distinctions. Impe-
rial expansion in east-central Europe established differences between dom-
inant and subordinate religions. In the Ottoman Empire Muslims ruled
Christian populations. In the Habsburg Empire, Catholics ruled other
Christians. Russian expansion meant domination of Russian Orthodoxy
over other confessions. With the waning of the religious conflicts after the
seventeenth century there was a shift away from conversion or expulsion to
a hierarchy from privileged, established churches to tolerated, subordinate
ones.
These churches provided an institutional basis and a small counter-elite
around which subordinate cultures could construct a principle of nationality.
In late eighteenth-century Transylvania Uniate and Orthodox clergy agreed
on Romanian national claims (Hitchins 1969, 1977). The Uniate Church
favoured a ‘Roman’ view of Romanian history, tracing its origins back
to Trajan’s conquest of Dacia and drawing a sharp distinction between
Romanians, their Magyar and German rulers and Slav populations.
There was a marked difference between how these ideas were elaborated
in the Ottoman Empire and the Christian empires of the Habsburgs and
the Romanovs. The religious distinction was starker in the Ottoman
Empire – between two opposed monotheistic religions – whereas else-
where the divisions were confessional ones within Christianity. However,
the Ottoman Empire allowed more autonomy to Greek Orthodoxy (and to
Judaism) than the Habsburg Empire did to non-Catholic and the Romanov
Empire to non-Orthodox confessions.
In the Habsburg and Romanov empires there was a close connection
between class structure and confessional difference. (The same point applies
to Ireland where populist nationalism combined with the religion of the sub-
ordinate group.) This was not the case in the Ottoman Empire where polit-
ical rule was based on a bureaucratic-military system that largely left local
communities alone if they provided tax revenue and obedience. Muslims
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were favoured but the millet system provided autonomy to religious com-
munities. Such autonomy increased as the rule of the centre weakened in
the nineteenth century (see for example Mazower, 2004).
The hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox church played a leading role in
the running of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. This militated against
elaborating a national principle because ‘Greek’ referred to a broad reli-
gious identity. Nationality was linked to religion on the basis of semi-
autonomous institutions within Greek Orthodoxy, such as the Serbian
and Bulgarian Exarchates. Greek nationalism could be framed in Hellenic
terms, congenial to classically educated Western Europeans, but also as
Greek Orthodoxy. Neither had much to do with the peninsula later called
Greece.
These variations indicate difficulties encountered by nationalists seek-
ing to mesh religious and nationality principles.
21
There were cross-cutting
identities (Protestant Irish nationalists, Greek Orthodox Ottoman admin-
istrators). There were pressures from lay communities that did not accept
the ‘national’ church (such as neo-Protestant converts in Orthodox territo-
ries) or the ‘sacralised’ nation. There was the supra-national perspective of
church elites; the papacy rejected Italian nationalism and could not easily
side with German or Polish Catholics. There was tension between differ-
ent elites. The clergy and the secular elites based on commerce, schools
and media institutions regarded each other with suspicion, drawing their
authority from different sources. Nevertheless, at moments of crisis coali-
tions could be formed and at a popular level religious identity was the core
of national identity. The fusion of religion and nationality was most likely
if an imperial government acted on behalf of a privileged church against a
subordinate culture that was religiously and socially distinct.
This raises the issue of rule. ‘Historic’ nations had political privileges:
whether a recent state (Poland), control of the local state (Germans,
Magyars) or class domination in the locality (Italy). Subordinate cultural
groups did not have such privileges. However, some claimed a past when
they did. Czech, Lithuanian and Serbian nationalists claimed medieval poli-
ties as their own and depicted the early modern period as one of defeat and
decline which the nation must reverse. Some built on institutions, often
21 Stefan Berger has observed to me that from 1850 it does appear that the national paradigm dominates
historical narratives, ‘trumping’ religion, class or race. However, what dominates historical writing
does not necessarily work at the level of popular, political mobilisation.
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On the principle of nationality
granted by an imperial regime to weaken the regionally privileged elite,
as was the case of Croatia in relation to Hungary. Other groups had less
in the way of a definite history or institution to which their names and
marks could be attached and were forced into speculative claims about the
far-distant past, such as the Romanian myths about links to the Roman
Empire. Slav nationalists had even less. In Lithuania by 1914 an empirical
case had barely been made, let alone any movement formed.
22
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the construction of many
national histories, weaving together claims about language, culture, religion
and statehood to produce remarkably similar accounts for their allegedly
unique nations. The empirical claim that there was a nationality was linked
to the normative claim that this nationality was worthy of recognition and
loyalty. One feature of these claims was to use history, culture and other
markers to turn what was often a class or some other sectional group into
a ‘whole’ group which could be imagined as self-sufficient and complete.
Monika Baar has identified the strategies of five scholars writing the his-
tory of distinct nations. Two of these were historians of ‘historical nations’:
the Polish historian Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) and the Hungarian his-
torian Mih
´
aly Horv
´
ath (1804–78), though Baar’s analysis demonstrates the
same intellectual strategies as those deployed by the historians of the three
subordinate groups. These are Simonas Daukantas (Lithuanian, 1793–1864),
Franti
ˇ
sek Palack
´
y (Czech) and Mihail Kog
˘
alniceanu (Romanian, 1818–91).
Influenced by Scottish Enlightenment and French Restoration romantic
historical writing,
23
these men aimed to write:
a complete history of their own nation from its origins until recent times from a
new perspective, one which encompassed the ‘democratization’ of every aspect of
historiography: its subject, stage, medium and audience. (Baar 2010,p.47)
Nation replaced dynasty as principal subject, even if the history written
was about the work of dynasty. The history was written in the ‘national’
language, which often involved abandoning an acquired academic language
22 Snyder 2003 works comparatively and considers ‘failures’ (e.g. Belarus) as well as ‘successes’. One
could extend the approach and ask why, for example, to this very day it has not proved possible to
work up nationalist cases for the central Asian republics which achieved nominal independence with
the end of the Soviet Union.
23 Monika Baar has pointed out to me that these historians were not influenced by German historicism
but rather by late German Enlightenment writer s. Perhaps this indicates how difficult it is for a
generalising political ideology like nationalism really to root itself in a genuine historicist view which
regards each nation as quite unique.
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