The Undivided Past (11 page)

Beyond any doubt, some degree of collective
national identity had periodically existed here and there across medieval and early modern Europe.
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But these national solidarities and antagonisms were often complicated by alternative claims upon people’s loyalties and identities.
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The universal church under the pontificates of
Gregory VII or
Innocent III, and the universal monarchy of such
Holy Roman emperors as
Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and
Frederick Barbarossa, forcefully countered the competing claims of nascent nationhood, while the presence of the church in every town and village and in the fabric of individual lives surpassed the pull of any
secular power or national attachment.
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And even if they did not engender a strong collective sense of religious identity, they may have occluded the development of an alternative secular solidarity. By the early modern period, these universalist claims had in practice (though not in theory) been given up, but the continued presence of the Holy Roman emperor in Germany and the pope in Italy were powerful restraints on the development of any strong sense of national identity in those parts of Europe. Moreover, while different versions and variants of the Christian
religion may on occasion have helped to unify some nations and give them a sense of providential greatness and global destiny, as in the case of
Catholic Spain under
Philip II or
Protestant Britain under the Hanoverians,
Christianity also divided and undermined other nations from within, as in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, or in the
Habsburg lands of
Hungary and Bohemia during the first half of the seventeenth.
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In medieval and early modern Europe, then, religious identities and national identities were elaborately and intricately interconnected, and while they were sometimes mutually reinforcing, they could also militate against each other. Moreover, and as the example of the
Holy Roman Empire suggests, secular power was not so much national as dynastic in its geographical grounding and articulation. At one extreme, the greatest sovereigns held their many lands as personal fiefdoms, in extended and elaborate territorial agglomerations. The emperor Charles V was the classic exemplar of such a “composite monarchy,” holding dominions
in what would become Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as acquiring rapidly expanding possessions in the Americas, each with its own
laws,
languages, cultures, and traditions. The same was later true of the kings of Spain, the emperors of Russia and Austria, and even the king of
Great Britain, none of whom were sovereigns of a single or unitary nation.
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In the “composite states” over which these monarchs ruled, and which had often been cobbled together by the accidents of succession or the imperatives of arranged marriages, or had been expanded thanks to victory in war, regional loyalties (and animosities) were stronger than national solidarities, as in the continuing division of ostensibly united Spain between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.
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At the other end of the
territorial scale, in Italy and Germany there were many great cities and minor principalities that retained their independence down to the nineteenth century, as in Florence and Milan, or in Hamburg and Cologne.
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At the beginning of the sixteenth century, five hundred such “
political units” existed in Europe, and two hundred years later there were still enough of them to suggest that across much of the continent national identity was never more than feebly and unevenly developed.
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And while many of these “units” clashed across the centuries, they usually did so because of the dynastic rivalries and conflicting ambitions among their ruling houses rather than because of antagonistic national feelings. The
Hundred Years War may have been between “
France” and “England,” but the mainspring of these “national” confrontations was the royal claim made by the English monarch to the French throne. Most of the conflicts during the first half of the sixteenth century, especially those between
King Francis I of France and the emperor
Charles V, were fought to assert or to defend personal rights of property and succession.
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Even by the eighteenth century, “national” confrontations were still in practice between monarchs, furthering their dynastic claims and ambitions, as in the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). These conflicts were essentially the kings’ wars, and the armed forces involved were regarded as part of the royal household rather than as the embodiment of the nation. This
in turn explains why lands and territories were so readily traded back and forth when peace treaties were negotiated, for they were primarily seen as bargaining counters and trophies, rather than as constituent and integral parts of a broader and more inclusive
national solidarity that must be maintained at all cost.
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Even the undoubted horrors of the
Thirty Years War only involved a relatively small proportion of the continental population in military service and fighting battles. Moreover, from medieval times to the mid-eighteenth century, most Europeans were preoccupied either with the unrelenting imperative of mere survival or, at a higher level, with “commerce, travel, and cultural and learned intercourse.” Thus understood, life was (as
Braudel had insisted in
The Mediterranean World
) either so localized and particular, or alternatively at such a remove, that the vague jurisdictions and often shifting boundaries of any nation rarely constrained or impinged on it.
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During the
Middle Ages (and for centuries thereafter), most people lived and died in or near the locality of their birth, and acquired little if any notion of a distant if ultimate “national” authority. At the same time, Italian and German Hanseatic merchants established far-flung
trading networks in the Mediterranean and the Baltic; most of them inhabited city-states, they were happy to trade wherever markets could be found; and they were essentially
cosmopolitan in their outlook and activities. Thus the medieval West was united by trade as well as by
religion, both undermining and transcending any claims to territorially grounded nationhood, and this continued across much of the continent for most of the early modern period.
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In the same way, the majority of people across most of Europe spoke local and regional dialects rather than a “national” language. Yet whether in universities or in monasteries, the intellectual life of the continent was being conducted largely in the lingua franca of Latin, while the social and diplomatic life that took place in royal courts or castles or in country houses was routinely carried on in French.
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Likewise, while vernacular architecture may have differed from place to place and region to region, the Gothic, the classical, and the baroque styles transcended political boundaries, whether local or national, and much the same was true in music,
painting, and literature.
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Even monarchs and princes fighting one another for dynastic advantage and territorial gain also shared a sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan, continental cousinhood of royalty, beyond particular identities or national interests. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, Britain,
France, the
Netherlands,
Portugal, and
Spain had each acquired extensive transoceanic dominions, and for those who settled or worked overseas, the focus of their abiding metropolitan loyalty was the composite monarchy and the person of the sovereign, or an extended version of a “greater”
nation encompassing the whole empire.
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So while national identities and antagonisms did develop in medieval and early
modern Europe, they were nothing like as solid or as significant as they would later become.

The last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth witnessed a marked intensification of such national feelings and identities, as exemplified by the creation of the United States of America, by the renaming of the
French Estates-General as the “National Assembly” in June 1789, and by the overthrow of Spanish
imperial dominion in Latin America by the early 1820s.
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The United States defined itself against the British nation (and the British king); Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France did the same; and the Latin American republics defined themselves against the Spanish nation (and the Spanish king). Thus did the “age of revolutions” usher in the “age of nationalism” (the word itself was first coined in the 1790s), an epoch of nation-building and the nation-state, as new countries were created in North and South America, as “old” nations consolidated (France, Spain,
Russia) or evolved and emerged as new versions of themselves (England-Britain and Austria-Hungary), as two new nations were “belatedly”
unified (
Italy and
Germany), and as the Balkan nations won their independence from the
Ottoman Empire (
Greece,
Albania,
Bulgaria,
Romania). With the exception of Spain and the Latin American republics, all these countries would be caught up in the
First World War, when for
the first time millions volunteered to fight out of a shared sense of national loyalty and identity, as wars of whole populations superseded the traditionally limited conflicts of armies, and when to die in battle for their country became the highest calling:
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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The Harvard historian
Charles Maier identifies the heyday of the nation-state as beginning during the 1860s; it arose out of the notion of “territoriality,” by which he means the control of “
bordered
political space,” which created the essential framework for exploiting material resources, for wielding temporal power, and for nurturing common notions of national consciousness.
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This, he argues, was not just a European but a global development, taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the
Civil War, in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in
Germany with
unification and in
Italy with the
Risorgimento, in the
Austrian and Hungarian halves of the
Habsburg Empire, and also in countries such as
Canada,
Mexico,
Australia, and Argentina. All across the globe, Maier contends, national societies were forged and reforged during the second half of the nineteenth century, often in a sudden and violent stroke. The result was the strengthening of central government at the expense of local or regional authority; the continued mobilization of internally and externally quartered military capacity; the official co-opting of new leaders of finance and industry, science and the professions into a ruling cartel alongside the still powerful, but no longer supreme, members of the landed elite; and the development of an infrastructure based on the technologies of coal and iron as applied to long-distance transport of goods and people and on the mass production of finished products assembled by a large and increasingly unionized
labor force.
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Hence the creation of the modern nation, as a coincidence and convergence of geographical specificity and
human solidarity.
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One indication of this convergence was an unprecedented concern with delineating borders and securing boundaries: as
Lord Curzon put it in 1907, in words more portentous than he could then have known, “frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which are suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations.”
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A second indication was that the lands within
carefully defined and policed
national borders were increasingly “pervaded” with prefectures and post offices, newspapers and telegraph networks, and, eventually, electrical power, all of which served political authority as well as everyday life. There was thus no area inside its frontiers that was beyond the state’s control, and this resulted in a correspondingly enhanced consciousness of national territoriality. Of particular importance were the railroads, not only in tying nations together, as in the United States,
Canada, Russia, and
Australia, but also in connecting national capitals more closely with the provinces that were integrated into the “national domain,” as in
Germany,
France,
Spain, and Britain; and where the railways led, the personnel and bureaucracy of an increasingly intrusive state soon followed. Here were the acts and facts of that unprecedented process of “nation-building” to which
Walter Bagehot, the journalist, com
mentator, and editor of
The Economist
, rightly drew attention.
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From this perspective, the nation as a unit of collective loyalty overwhelmed and subsumed all other shared forms of human identity, as regional, linguistic,
ethnic, class, and
religious solidarities were subordinated to what has been called the “nationalization of the masses.” Accordingly, the years from 1870 to 1914 have been described as witnessing the transformation not only of peasants into Frenchmen (or into Germans, or Italians, or Spaniards, or
Russians), but also of workers, the middle classes, and even
aristocracies and monarchies into national loyalists, too.
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There were many mechanisms and processes by which this national assimilation was accomplished: the growth in universal, state-sponsored
education; the gradual expansion of the
franchise to include unpropertied men and even, in some cases, women; the rise of mass political parties and charismatic political leaders such as
Gladstone,
Cavour, and
Lincoln; the provision of state welfare programs beginning in
Bismarck’s Germany; the imposition by many nations of protective tariffs from the 1870s onward; the militarization of society, whereby the armed forces were no longer part of the royal household but had become the embodiment of the nation; and the invention or reinvention of a whole host of pageants, ceremonials, and festivals, centered on an hereditary or an elected head of state and providing the spectacular focus
for an enhanced
national consciousness and loyalty. As a result, monarchs such as the German and
Russian emperors not only belonged to a pan-national, cosmopolitan, continental caste, but increasingly became the embodiment of particular nationalities.
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