The Undivided Past (12 page)

The result of these developments was that people were more than ever, as
G. M. Trevelyan put it, “thinking in nationalities,” and to this unprecedented mode of thinking (and feeling)
historians contributed substantially, with best-selling books that appealed to the new mass reading public. Hence the rise to prominence of
Macaulay and
J. R. Green (and Trevelyan) in Britain,
Michelet and
Guizot in
France,
Parkman and
Bancroft in the United States, and
Ranke and
Mommsen in Germany: each wrote narrative history tracing the rise of his respective nation and insisting on its exceptionalism and providential blessing and thus its superiority to the rivals against whom it had often made war, its military triumph having set the seal on its national consciousness and its distinct, long-lived unity as one people.
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Such writers provided the carefully selected collective memory that became an essential prop to this new and widely shared sense of national identity, and this creation of a common national past in print was accompanied by the proliferation and cultivation of national images, myths, anniversaries, monuments, and heroes, from the German chieftain Arminius to England’s
King Alfred to
Joan of Arc of France to America’s
George Washington.
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The nations thus created were widely regarded as the final stage of human history and as the ultimate form of human identity, and the phrase “
secular religion” has been used to describe the veneration they seemed to inspire in the decades that culminated in the
First World War—a
religion and an identity that to many seemed far more appealing than the traditional sacred alternative, and also significantly more widespread and intense than any national feeling that had gone before.
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For while national sentiments and identities had existed in medieval and early modern times, especially on the part of monarchs, aristocrats, warriors, writers, and priests, they were rarely if ever shared by the population as a whole. As the historian of France
David Bell has observed, in words more generally applicable, “neither…
Richelieu nor
Mazarin envisioned taking entire populations…
and forging them all, in their millions, into a single nation, transforming everything from
language to manners to the most intimate ideas.” They did not “imagine programmes of national education…, or massive political action to reduce regional differences, or laws demarcating national citizens from foreigners.”
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Yet despite its undeniable plausibility, this argument cannot be pushed too far, for just as there were significant limits to national identities during medieval and early modern times, the same was true during this later period, even as such solidarities were more developed and encompassing than before.

To begin with, the idea that the belligerents of 1914 were unified, homogeneous nations does not survive detailed examination. Consider, for example, the matter of common language, often regarded as essential to any shared sense of national identity. It certainly did not exist in the nation created by the
Risorgimento. “We have made
Italy,”
Massimo d’Azeglio observed at the time, “now we have to make Italians.” With less than 5 percent of the population using Italian for everyday purposes, they had a long way to go. In France, almost half the schoolchildren engaged with French as a
foreign
language, speaking another tongue at home: dialect and patois were widespread, and in departments bordering other nations, it was often Flemish, Catalan, or German that was spoken.
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A similar picture could be found in Germany, where in the east many spoke Polish as their first language, whereas in Alsace and Lorraine many spoke French; and in
Russia, educated people conversed in French, while workers and peasants used a wide variety of Slavic languages and dialects. In
Austria-
Hungary, the array of different tongues was even more varied, including German, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, and Greek, and many of the Habsburg emperor’s subjects were multilingual, speaking one language at school or at work and another at home. Insofar as a common tongue could be considered an essential criterion, none of the major powers that went to war in 1914 qualified as a “nation.” Apart from
Portugal or Sweden, there were few linguistically homogeneous European countries.
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The reach of the late-nineteenth-century European state, and its capacity to exhort solidarity among its population, has often been exaggerated, for many people in these ostensibly unitary
nation-states felt excluded from the allegedly shared practices and customs of
national life.
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Universal male suffrage was limited to
France and Switzerland, and in Britain only 60 percent of adult males possessed the
vote in 1914, while all women were
disenfranchised, which meant less than one-third of the population played any part in the process of electing the government that ruled over them: so much for those “common rights and duties” that have been described as an essential attribute of nationhood and national identity.
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Moreover, the unity of some of these “nations” was far from consensual. In the United Kingdom, there were growing demands during the late nineteenth century for independence for
Scotland, Wales, and (especially)
Ireland. There were similar rejections of the notion of a unified Spanish nation by the Basques and the Catalans, and of a unified Russian nation by (among others) the Finns, Armenians, Georgians, and Lithuanians. Although they owed allegiance to the same
Habsburg monarch,
Austria and
Hungary were in many ways separate nations, and elsewhere in that empire there was growing nationalist agitation on the part of the Czechs, Ruthenians, and Croats. In reality, most countries in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe were polyglot and multiethnic—veritable stews of competing identities that constantly undermined the calls for national solidarity.
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Indeed, many of the so-called European nations that existed on the eve of the First
World War still bore a significant resemblance to the composite states and multiple monarchies of the early modern period from which they had only partially evolved. The United Kingdom was a nominally unitary polity, but Scotland and Ireland retained their respective
religions and educational systems, and British sovereigns crossing the border dividing England and Scotland were obliged to change their faith from
Anglican to Presbyterian. The German Reich was at one level a federation of distinct princely states, with their separate royalties and legislatures, and it was further divided by religion, with the north generally
Protestant and the south generally
Catholic. But in addition, an unwieldy (and dysfunctional)
imperial constitution, imposed in 1870, provided that the ruling Hohenzollern family were not only kings of
Prussia but also emperors of Germany, thereby creating with this
greater Reich conflicting loyalties even
among its crowned heads. As for the
Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the
Ottoman sultans, their dominions were so vast and varied that it was only the person of the sovereign that held them together. Indeed, as the full titles of their rulers suggest, Germany,
Austria-Hungary,
Russia, and the Ottoman realms were not single-identity nations at all: they were land-based empires where many nationalities coexisted, with varying degrees of amity and success.
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Farther afield, this description was equally valid in the case of
China, another monstrosity of
territorial agglomeration encompassing many languages, ethnicities, and religions. The same was true of the United States, which had created an empire by conquering and settling a continent, and which was becoming an increasingly diverse “melting pot,” as black
slaves were freed in the aftermath of the
Civil War, and as
immigrants poured in by the millions from southern, central, and eastern Europe in the decades before 1914. Moreover, nineteenth-century empires were not only land-based but also maritime, which further modified and undermined any clear-cut national identities. The French regarded their imperium as an integral part of their nation, be it in
Indochina, Saharan or equatorial Africa, or the
Caribbean, but such possessions increased the diversity and diminished the identity of
de Gaulle’s or
Braudel’s “
France” a hundredfold. The
British Empire spawned four great dominions, but those who settled in them could not decide whether they were British, or Canadians, or
Australians, or
New Zealanders, or
South Africans.
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Indeed, the very existence and expansion of so many imperial agglomerations encouraged some politicians to suppose that the nation was becoming obsolete: as
Joseph Chamberlain put it in 1904, “the day of small nations has passed away; the day of empires has come.”
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The idea of the fatherland may have been sold persuasively enough to compel millions to volunteer ten years later, but in reality the First
World War was a global conflict among empires that both transcended and subverted the particular claims of national identities.
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Empire was not the only force militating against national coherence and identity in the nineteenth century; indeed, some of the very innovations and developments that served the purposes
of national integration and territorial consolidation also produced powerful countervailing effects. Consider the railways. To be sure, they helped tie nations together, but as such they were not only instruments of peace but also agents of belligerence. The First
World War was famously described by the historian
A. J. P. Taylor as a “war by timetable”: it was the trains that transported the men and carried the matériel to the battlefronts; the Germans surrendered to the French in 1918 in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne outside Paris; and the French capitulated to the Germans in the same piece of rolling stock twenty-two years later. Railways were also the agents of a new internationalism and
cosmopolitanism, crossing and transcending national borders and moving people and goods between countries and across continents on a scale and with a frequency that had never been seen before. It was the railway that enabled
Thomas Cook to take
British tourists around Europe in their hundreds of thousands. It was the Orient Express that linked Paris directly with Constantinople. Even Queen
Victoria took to the rails, often visiting the capitals, spas, and resorts of the continent under the preposterously implausible incognito of the Countess of Balmoral.
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Like most late-nineteenth-century European royalty, Victoria became a uniquely venerated symbol of national identity and
imperial greatness; but like them again, she was also very much aware of herself as a member of the continental royal cousinhood.
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They might now be national icons and imperial cynosures, but European royalty still intermarried, and continued to regard itself as a pan-continental caste, with interests and connections that transcended national boundaries. Queen Victoria herself was almost entirely of German ancestry, and her husband was a minor German prince; she married off her own children internationally rather than domestically, including her eldest daughter to the crown prince of
Prussia. By the end of her reign there was scarcely a royal house in Europe unconnected with the British
monarchy, the ties with Germany and
Russia being especially close.
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This transnational perspective was also shared by many European
aristocrats: they were brought up to speak French as the
language of diplomacy and high society; they were equally at ease in London
or Paris or Rome or Vienna or St. Petersburg; and many of them shared a love for
Italy or
Greece engendered by a youthful grand tour. No less
cosmopolitan were plutocratic dynasties like the Rothschilds, with their finance houses in
Austria, Germany, Italy,
France, and Britain, all closely linked by different branches of the family, giving their critics to believe their first loyalty was more likely to be to their fortune and their dynasty than to any mere nation-state.
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Transnational character and internationalist attitudes were not limited to the uppermost parts of society.
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An essential element of the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology was a commitment to free trade, peace, and global amity that transcended the parochial limitations of any particular nation. The
Great Exhibition of 1851 may have been the symbol of Britain’s
economic preeminence, but it was also a celebration of common humanity, internationalism, and harmony.
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Sons of European manufacturers and merchants traveled the world in search of markets, and this global diaspora embraced Catalans, Basques, Germans, Danes, Chinese, Parsees, Jews, Armenians, Portuguese, Greeks, Dutch, North Americans, Scots, and English. The outcome was a cosmopolitan
trading community, in which nationality was often very blurred. Nor was it confined to the distant reaches of the globe: there was a German-speaking community in Manchester and also in Liverpool, where one merchant,
Alfred Horn, remembered how in the course of his education at St. Edward’s College he had rubbed shoulders with young men from Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Brazil, and Spain. “I believe,” he recalled, “the old idea in mixing the young
Britisher with his brothers of every climate was to make him cosmopolitan, and naturally enough we soon learned each other’s language.”
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A generation earlier,
Marx and Engels had made the same point in
The Communist Manifesto:
“The
bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,” and the result was a new world order characterized by the “universal interdependence of nations.”
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In different ways, then, nineteenth-century inter
nationalism and
imperialism both limited and undermined the nation-state
and the particular national identities constructed on the basis of such territorial delineations, and it became increasingly difficult for national boundaries to impede the flow of anything during what has rightly been called an age of globalization prior to our own.
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Consider in this regard the North Atlantic world where people, goods, capital, production techniques, and ideas all “slipped across national borders” with what has been described as “the fluidity of quicksilver.” In the case of people, this initially meant
immigration by Irish
Catholics to the United States in the aftermath of the Potato Famine in the 1840s, followed by southern and eastern Europeans, who crossed the Atlantic in record time thanks to the advent of the steamship and the liner. Many of these millions who settled in the United States retained close family connections with their country of origin, often sending money, sometimes visiting back home, and welcoming distant relatives to join them. The result was the creation of elaborate and long-lasting transatlantic kinship networks extending far beyond the confines of any European nation, and this in turn meant the newly arrived immigrants themselves rarely assimilated as fully into the United States as the common notion of the melting pot would imply.
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