A Genealogy of Nationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Global Relay Race It Set Off | A Brief History of Things

In this model of nationalism, new political elites created it through deliberate policy.

Attach an "-ism" to anything and there is a very good chance people will start talking past one another. Nationalism is no exception.

At one end of the spectrum sit the constructivists, who hold that nations and states are "constructed" by political forces and acts of imagination rather than grown like living organisms. The camp is not itself unified; it splits into roughly three schools.

The first is led by the anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner, who argued that nationalism is closely bound up with urbanization and industrialization. In Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Gellner noted, and in Asia and Africa after the 1930s, it was the people packed into new urban centers who were most likely to describe themselves as a single nation and to demand a state of their own. It was the scramble among Hungarians, Serbs and Italians in 19th-century Vienna, and their competition for jobs and resources, that hardened the distinctions between these "races" and pushed them to demand national autonomy.

Gellner's theory is, in effect, a modernization theory of nationalism. On this view nationalism traveled with modernization from the West to the East, then to the South, and finally reached Africa in the 20th century — the "last continent," the one capitalism and urbanization reached in the end.

But Gellner's theory has an obvious bug: plenty of vigorous nationalist movements appeared in societies with very little industry. For those cases, Hobsbawm's explanation is the stronger one. Nationalism, Hobsbawm argued, is a product of the state itself, entirely the work of power. In other words, nationalism arrives after the state, not before it. Latin American nationalism took shape after the independent states were founded in the 1820s and 1830s, not earlier. Belgian nationalism was cultivated by the government after the Kingdom of Belgium emerged from a patchwork of linguistically mixed territories in northern Europe.

In this model of nationalism, new political elites created it through deliberate policy. The state pushed mass education, defined citizenship and the taxes that came with it, and at the same time created an "Other" — shutting some of its people out and locking them up. The urgency behind manufacturing nationalism was sharpened by the needs of capitalism, the rise of socialism, working-class radicalism and the fear of unrest. Governments in this period began taking regular censuses and used passports to control migration. All these policies, by design or not, worked to heighten national feeling and left people no choice but to pick a nation-state.

But that theory raises a problem of its own. In places that developed neither capitalism nor industrial urbanism, and never built a strong state, people still felt nationalism keenly. How to explain that? Enter Benedict Anderson, whose account of how nationalism comes into being is steeped in social anthropology. It stresses imagination and a sense of sharing, rather than shifts in power and resources, in the invention of nationalism. The nation is an "imagined community" created by "print capitalism": books and newspapers spread across the world and stamped a sense of belonging on the minds of elites, and later on ordinary readers.

It explains a great deal. Yet in the largely agrarian societies of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, most nationalist movements appeared before modern industrial urbanization and print capitalism had spread widely. In those societies, urbanization rarely passed 10 percent before the end of the 19th century, and male literacy may have run to a few percentage points. Even in Europe, in fact, print capitalism may have done less for nationalism than Anderson imagined. By one account, in 1848, the year revolutionary feeling ran highest in Europe, the leading Romanian nationalist newspaper sold just 250 subscriptions.

Perhaps that is the fate of every -ism: no theory can cover all the facts, least of all a theory pitched at one end of the spectrum. In some cases the nationalism at the other end — the "old-style patriotism" kind — explains a good deal too. Late-19th-century thinkers and "patriots" held that nationalism had long existed in societies that were relatively homogeneous in language and religion, and that modern nation-states therefore grew mostly out of earlier societies with a shared language and culture. Most cultural nationalists still think so today.

For the latecomers to nation-building, this "patriotic nationalism" explains a good deal as well. Efforts to build nationalism and nation-states sometimes worked and sometimes failed. Ruling groups in parts of Asia and Africa could gather a more energetic nationalism at the end of the 19th century because that nationalism was rooted in a sense of common purpose that already existed, visible in a shared language and old regional ties, and often reinforced by relatively long-lived centralized states and a tradition of effective government.

Late-19th-century nationalism was also more than a top-down affair, and more than something states or their elites shaped. People from poor and lower-class groups went looking for borders they could call their own country's. Sometimes migrants beyond those borders did much to stir the wish for a unified national territory: Irish migrants to the United States and Australia, and Chinese migrants to Hawaii and Southeast Asia, each played an important part in the rise of Irish and Chinese nationalism.

In the middle of the spectrum lies the theory that nationalism was born of war. Perhaps because it can have things both ways, this "war nationalism" seems able to run from old-style patriotic nationalism all the way to the urbanization, state and print-capitalism versions, and to connect European and non-European nationalism through war.

On this view, nationalism was the product of the wars, rebellions and international conflicts of the 19th century. The state, urbanization and print capitalism all played a part in that process, but war is where nationalism began — even if nationalism later became, more and more, a cause of war itself.

For those who trace nationalism to war, the two linked world crises of 1780–1815 and 1848–1865 did much to produce the first national identities.

Take the first crisis. British identity took shape during the long wars with France, and above all during the world crisis of 1780–1820. Napoleon's campaigns across Europe spurred German, Italian and Russian national identity. In the same way, French and Russian invasions made Ottomans, Egyptians and other North Africans sharply aware of their own weakness, and determined to remake their societies.

The second crisis, from 1848 to 1865, then drove nation-building worldwide. Rapid social change and the rebuilding of the Union produced a more full-blooded American national feeling. Before 1860 the United States had always had an ideal of patriotic devotion, but it was the Civil War, and the country's growing involvement in international affairs afterward, that bred a stronger American nationalism. In Europe, the appearance of two new nation-states, Germany and Italy, and the humiliation of two others, France and Austria, upset the continent's balance of diplomatic and military competition and fed a fresh surge of national feeling.

The mid-century wars across Eurasia convinced elites in the late Tokugawa shogunate that Japan had to make itself strong. In India, the Great Rebellion of 1857 and fresh British encroachment forced merchants and professionals on the coast to rethink their place in the empire. Then Japan's unification, Britain's aggressive rule in South Asia and Europe's push into the Middle East produced new nationalist movements among elites and merchants in Asia and Africa — which in turn produced new, open demands on colonial governments for self-rule.

This worldwide backlash of local nationalism against colonialism, together with the contest of nationalisms inside Europe, made European empire-building faster in the late 19th century. The new phase of imperial expansion came at the same moment as the full emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Americas and Japan, and the rise of national movements outside Europe.

Imperialism and nationalism then began another round of interaction, and nationalism another leg of the relay. In Eastern Europe, after the Balkan war of 1878, pan-Slavism — egged on by a Russia that had recovered its confidence — began cutting the European parts of the Ottoman Empire into small, combative Christian states. When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, it met opposition from a coalition of army officers, Muslim clerics and landowners, the sign of a new national identity in a southern territory the Ottomans had once ruled. In Asia, the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, and the sharp criticism that coastal and overseas Chinese aimed at the Manchu Qing government in the 1890s, both showed how badly the new Asian elites wanted nation-states of "their own."

Those who trace nationalism to war also allow that a stronger and wider sense of nation was not only the product of surging global warfare; it reflected new chances for exchange between regions and for adapting ideas. In the 1820s the Indian reformer Ram Mohan Roy could read commentary on post-Napoleonic revolutions in Europe in the English-language papers of Calcutta, and write essays on national self-determination. Before 1914, Ho Chi Minh read accounts of the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States, in his French schoolbooks.

Nor did ideas and models of nationalism and nation-building travel only from the West outward. By the 1880s Japan's own hybrid modernity had become a powerful example for other Asian and African nationalists to copy.

Recommended reading: The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914

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