National independence movements in Europe have always had a strong hold on Americans. Mazzini, Garibaldi and Kossuth were heroes in this country as well as in their own. This sentiment reached its height during the Wilsonian era, and influenced our foreign policy; it remains strong today. Yet the face and character of European nationalism have drastically changed, and the end is not yet. Today the slogan “national independence” remains, but most of what it offers under the guise of this old and honorable cause has, with the march of history, suffered a sea-change into something quite different and dubious.
Though nationalities have always existed as “ethnographic material,” modern “classical” nationalism dates back no further than the second half of the 18th century, as Hans Kohn has pointed out. Thus it cannot be called a “natural phenomenon.” Essentially, it is a child of the French Revolution. Then, for the first time, every member of a country became part and parcel of a national body by the fact of having been born within its boundaries—and through such group identification the nation-state came into being. From France, the nation-state concept spread elsewhere, but only fairly recently as history is reckoned. Even as late as the 19th century “it was said of a Croat landowner that he would sooner have regarded his horse than his peasant as a member of the Croat nation.”
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Traditional Democratic Nationalism
Nationalism and democracy rose together, and for a long time seemed to be so inextricably linked as to be almost identical. It is no accident that such 19th-century anti-democrats as Jakob Burckhardt and Lord Acton also attacked nationalism. Both ideals were the expression of the newly acquired strength of oppressed nations and classes that had hitherto been passive objects of the historical process, but who now desired to shape their own fate.
The discovery of the inherent dignity and rights of the individual went hand in hand with the birth of the spirit of national independence. Thus Mazzini’s “Young Europe” confederation of movements for national liberation called itself an association of “men believing in a future of liberty, equality and fraternity for all mankind.” And it was quite natural for Thomas G. Masaryk, the last inheritor of this tendency, to apply Kant’s concept of individual morality to nations: “No man shall use another man as an instrument for his own ends; no nation shall use another nation as an instrument for its own aims.”
It is obvious that the new nationalism whose manifestations we now behold in many European countries shows a quite different temper. The traditional marriage of national sovereignty and the Rights of Man has suffered a divorce. The voice of Masaryk is replaced by that of Eduard Benes: “Nothing less than the transfer of two to two-and-a-half million Germans, and about four hundred thousand Hungarians, can assure to the nation a reasonably secure future.”
What has happened? What new spirit now invests these old shrines?
The nationalism of the past largely reflected, as has been indicated, the newly found awareness of their own strength by peoples and classes formerly historically submerged. The new nationalism reflects a growing consciousness on the part of these same peoples and classes of their essential powerlessness. It no longer expresses the “reasonable” desires of an ambitious bourgeoisie, but the subservient status of the unfree subjects of a more or less authoritarian society (which in turn is often nothing more than the protectorate of a great power).
The old nationalism led to national unification and independence. These, in the 19th century, provided the political and economic conditions under which Europe could develop its productive forces. Today’s nationalism is a response precisely to the disappearance of the material basis for the continued existence of independent national states in Europe. In an age of super-national power blocs and economic and technological developments that transcend national boundaries, a purely national economy can no longer support the nation. National independence in the old sense has lost its foundation, and has become a mere illusion, a pretense and fiction.
Millions of human beings all over Europe are today uprooted and insecure. Nationalism has become a sort of screen to shield them from the effects of their loneliness. No longer does it inspire an effort to sink roots in the soil of a revived or newly discovered national culture. Today nationalism has by some paradox become culturally indifferent or destructive.
As Karl Mannheim has pointed out, when the vast rationalized mechanism of economic and social life breaks down in a modern state, the individual can no longer repair it with the aid of his own diagnoses and insights. His powerlessness as an individual reduces him to a state of terrified helplessness. At a time when none of the old values seems secure and millions have been stripped, not only of their belongings, but also of their most essential humanity, this frustration causes men to cling to the only thing that they still appear to own: their group identification, their nationality. The loss of individual personality, the prestige which the isolated human being can no longer secure in his own name or by personal effort, he compensates for by sinking himself in a collective personality to which he belongs by virtue of the accident of birth, i.e.—by race. Nationalism in this form is hardly more than a kind of social neurosis—as Caroline Playne has suggested.
Today’s nationalist is not the proud and creative man of the bourgeois revolution, confident of his virility and destiny. He is man naked and defenseless in the face of the recurrence of war, plunder and oppression, desperately clinging to his mystic participation in the life of his ethnic group. And it is his very loneliness and sense of impotence that makes him so jealously exclusive in the claims of his nationality.
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The New Nationalism
The old nationalism could afford to compromise and accommodate. It could reconcile itself to the multi-national state and entertain the possibility of harmonious collaboration between different nationalities within one administrative unit. True, Masaryk thought that “the discrepancies between state and ethnographic frontiers cause the wars and unrests in Europe” and that “nations are the natural organs of mankind.” But he stressed that “in a democracy the representation of [national] minorities is a necessity; in any case, it is the duty of the [national] majority, which according to democratic principles impresses on the state its character, to gain the minority for a political collaborator.” And elsewhere: “Even if the new Europe cannot be remodeled on a strictly nationalist basis, the national rights of the minorities must be assured. We have always claimed equal, not superior, rights. Though we advocate the principle of nationality, we wish to retain our minorities.”
The new neurotic nationalism is different. It is exclusive, always sniffing for the alien, the foreigner, seeking always to make him a scapegoat. Masaryk was doubtful whether the territorial transfer of large national minorities so often proposed by the Pan-Germans could be carried out without compulsion and injustice. His “heir,” Benes, claims that a Czech national state will be able to exist only after the expulsion of a few million so-called racially incompatible elements. And he denies minority rights to Jews among others.
During the late 18th century and the 19th century, nationalism was progressive. National independence was a means of freeing society from the bonds of feudalism, and of the feudal lord, so that it could deal with the new problems with which history faced it. Nationalism was part of the ideology of democratic revolution held by the bourgeoisie. Nationalism today is the substitute for revolution; its role is to prevent society from coping effectively with the economic necessities of a changed world.
Alienated from its original association with democratic and liberal ideas, nationalism now takes on more and more of a totalitarian coloration. Thus, in the more important nations of Europe, nationalism has been gradually transformed into imperialism and chauvinism. As the 19th century drew to its close, it became the imperialism of a Cecil Rhodes, the White Man’s Burden, the Herrenvolk, the mission civilisatrice de la grande France. These, together with Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, dissolved democratic nationalism, which increasingly became the vehicle of the drive to power and of the imperial mission. (Hannah Arendt’s article, “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism” in the Review of Politics for October 1945 illuminates this connection.)
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Reactionary Mission
We Need only recall how the rise to independent statehood of the smaller nationalities of Southeastern Europe, following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, failed to be accompanied by a freeing of new cultural forces and a flowering of national cultures such as had marked national liberations of the past. It was marked rather by the oppression of minorities and by anti-liberal policies. The new states rapidly developed into police regimes of the worst kind, Czechoslovakia being the only exception.
As time went on the liberal, humanitarian principles of Mazzini, Kossuth and Garibaldi were transformed into principles of zoological race purity. The individual became a mere abstraction. Today what has come to count is the national body, in which individuals are only cells. The cells have the sole duty of ordering and conducting themselves in such a way as to make the life of the national group secure. And what is important is no longer the personal worth of a man, but his birth certificate. His destiny is determined completely by which side of the border he happened to have been born on.
Latter-day European nationalism, created in part by the very same factors that spawned Fascism and Nazism, has been forced to take over many of their features. As we read of the mass-expulsions all over Europe for the purpose of establishing ethnically pure nations, we remember Goebbels: “Even though we may be defeated on the battlefield, our ideas cannot but live on among our enemies.”
At the moment Lord Acton, an uncompromising foe of the nationalism of his own day, appears a prophet: “The great adversary of the rights of nationality is the modem theory of nationality. By making the state and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduced practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to any equality with the ruling nation which would be a contradiction of the principles of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or put in a condition of dependency.”
The hold on their subjects of those who rule the nation of Europe is tenuous. The traditional ruling classes, with their organic relation to society and to the historical development of their countries, have been replaced. In their stead, we have for the most part a new élite composed of an amalgamation of the old ruling personnel and new elements rising from the most diverse social strata. For these latter, the best way, indeed the sole way of assuring themselves acceptance is by stressing national characteristics, national loyalties, and national prestige as rising above and canceling all else. So long as the parvenu rulers seem to advance the national cause, they can hope that their right to rule will go unquestioned. Unable to solve the fundamental economic and political problems, they divert frustration and resentment into chauvinist channels. If they can supply neither butter nor guns, they can at least stage parades and proclaim martial ideologies. If they cannot provide higher returns from the cultivation of land, they at least can hand out the land of an evicted “alien” minority.
However, national communities are today so deeply split by class conflict that this alone does not suffice. The maintenance of cohesion is in the end only possible by the appeal to national passions of the most violent and totalitarian kind—and by foreign expansion.
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Autarchy
In The past the national unit corresponded more or less to a functioning economic unit. The scale of production was then commensurate with national limitations. Furthermore, relatively free trade between nations permitted the development of a world market and the international division of labor. But after World War I, this situation changed basically. On the one hand, more and more new barriers were erected against international trade, so that the integrated world economy was replaced by a multiplicity of national economies, each concerned only with making itself as free as possible of outside influences, each endeavoring to establish the maximum of autonomy and autarchy. On the other hand, however, technological and industrial progress made it necessary to organize production on an ever larger scale, as E. H. Carr points out in his recent book, Nationalism and After. Modern large-scale industry can produce cheaply and efficiently only if it has access to large markets. An automobile factory designed for the needs of a small nation must produce at a much higher cost than a factory that can count on millions of prospective customers. Thus economic nationalism means a low standard of living enforced by high production costs—even discounting the vast expenditures on armaments and such, made to satisfy the desire for national “grandeur” and to provide vicarious enjoyment associated with symbols of national power. Autarchy is a wasteful absurdity.
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Anachronism
In Addition to the economic anomaly constituted by the national state, there exists a political anomaly. The national state can no longer command the power necessary to defend the national independence that is its principle of life, and without which it becomes meaningless.
In Europe today this situation takes the form of a vicious circle. On the one hand, there is the understandable and justifiable fear of those liberated from Nazi occupation that they may become dominated by their liberators. In the words of a leading French Socialist, André Philip: “We must beware of becoming the slaves of a powerful enemy or of a protecting friend.” Accordingly, the nations of Europe feel that they must at all costs restore their economic and political power in order to stand on their own feet in international competition. Thus, the new nationalism in Europe is in part a defensive reflex against encroachments on their sovereignty by the victors Britain, America and Russia.
On the other hand, present European national states, even with their power restored, can no longer defend themselves against the great imperial powers. Their scale and strength in organization, militarily and otherwise, are no longer adequate to self-protection—are in fact liabilities.
The illusory happiness the small nations find in their anachronistic nationalism only puts them all the more at the mercy of the great powers, only makes their subjugation that much easier. The new nationalism rests on illusions more dangerous to those who expound it than to anyone else.
Here again the situation is fundamentally different from that of the last century. Metternich’s Holy Alliance saw in the spirit of nationalism the most dangerous enemy of its own principle of dynastic and feudal legitimacy. The new Holy Trinity of Britain, Russia and the United States, on the contrary, feels secure only when the opposition is channeled within the spirit of the new nationalism.
The aristocratic rationalist of the 18th century may not have believed in God for himself, but he thought that “religion was good for the people.” Similarly, those who now control the destinies of the world no longer think in narrow nationalist terms, but in the wider ones of global domination. Precisely because of this, national conflicts over details of boundary lines, over strategic mountain passes, over the ownership of seaports by the European states are welcome news to the great powers. Competitive struggles between small nations, who, like neurotics, overcompensate for their weakness by bombast and threats, are the best guarantee of the power of those who are really strong. Divide and rule is still imperialism’s best method.
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The New Feudalism
During the period of resistance against Nazi oppression, it appeared as if the common fight against a common enemy had created a new feeling of fraternity among the peoples of Europe. The great, progressive dream was federation.
Many a clandestine paper carried articles such as the one in the French Résistance, which appeared in February 1943: “It would be a great misfortune if the odious exploitation of a just idea by the Nazi regime should make us forget the necessity of a great federation of the peoples of Europe. This is a political, moral and economic necessity. Compartmented into small states, with their obsolete customs barriers, the Europe of yesterday had to die of asphyxiation. . . . Maintain the states within the frontiers that answer the aspirations of their citizens, but at the same time see to it that the frontiers do not hinder the circulation of men, ideas, goods—that is the program of the truly European revolution.”
Whether this feeling of fraternity had popular roots or whether it was mainly an expression of the intellectual awareness of a few leaders, the bitter disappointment and frustration that set in shortly after liberation, in the wake of the Great Powers’ plans for Europe, prevented—at least temporarily—the further spreading of European solidarity. Just as continued hunger after liberation has made for a loosening of the bonds of human brotherhood between the individuals within each nation, thus bringing about a general atomization of society—so it has also made for a severance of the bonds between the different nations of Europe. Their bitter need has not made them draw closer together; rather each has retreated into its own shell. Not only have nations shut themselves off from the outside, but within nations themselves the different regions have begun to shut themselves off from each other; thus in certain parts of Austria and Italy, for example, the economy tends to revert to pre-capitalist, feudal patterns.
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Federation the Only Hope
And yet, in spite of this, the peoples of Europe may be more receptive today to proposals for continental federation than they were before the war. So impotent is the new nationalism to solve any of the problems of Europe that it seems unlikely that it will accord in any long-range way with the sentiment of the majority. Increasingly it will reveal itself as the instrument of the interests of those who rule and exploit the people and have access to the organs of propaganda.
Not only the common oppression, but also the experience of a continental economy—even if only in a perverted form under the Nazis—has prepared the ground for the perspectives of federalization. It should not be forgotten that, as Franz Borkenau has said, “Hitler’s successes are basically rooted not in his extreme nationalism, but on the contrary in his shrewd judgment of the decay of nationalism among his neighbors.”
True, in their present desperate state, the peoples of Europe may have fallen prey for a moment to nationalist mania: trapped in a world they never made and no longer understand, they react with all the despairing and purposeless violence of a hunted animal. But at the same time, it is undeniable that traditional nationalist feeling, as expressed in patriotism, has declined profoundly. In no European country, not even Germany, did one witness during the past war anything like the spontaneous outbursts of national feeling that marked the beginning of World War I. Negatively at least, this was a demonstration that the people sensed that the national state had become obsolete as an instrument of human welfare and progress. When they did rise to resist the invader it was to make their own life more endurable, and not because they had any interest in rescuing the nation as such.
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Unite or Perish
European nationalism today opposes itself to the main currents of progress—which are away from isolation and toward internationalism. Nationalism today delays the only solution still open for dismembered and lacerated Europe: integration and federalization. Arnold Toynbee defined the spirit of nationality as “a spirit which makes people feel and act and think about a part of any given society as though it were the whole of that society.” It may not yet be possible to instill in modern man the awareness of the wholeness of human society in general that lies at the basis of Toynbee’s view—but it may be possible at least to make Europeans aware of the wholeness of Europe. If the nationalist spirit is not overcome, that Continent will perish.
Cultural pluralism—the right of each people to its own culture—is perfectly compatible with unification on the economic and political plane, and it is absurd to pretend that those who favor such unification call for the standardization of European culture. On the contrary, a diversified European culture is no longer possible except through political and economic integration. “Balkanization” will mean not only material, but cultural poverty. The only political, economic or cultural hope of the peoples of Europe lies in an over-all community that goes beyond the separate nation.
