Len Scales, Oliver Zimmer, eds. Power and the Nation in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xi + 389 pp. $39.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-60830-5; $84.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84580-9.
Reviewed by Jonathan Sperber (Department of History, University of Missouri, Columbia)
Published on H-German (January, 2006)
On the--Ostensible--Antiquity of Nations
It has been my experience that undergraduates in modern European and modern German history classes have an intuitive understanding of nations as timeless, or very ancient entities, and of nationalism as a natural human emotion. There is a fair amount of effort involved in clearing up these misconceptions (at least what I have thought of as misconceptions), by pointing out the constructed and artificial nature of such supposedly self-evident national characteristics as common language, common culture and common descent, highlighting powerful alternative sources of political identity, including religious and dynastic loyalties, and showing how nationalist ideas started with a relatively small group of intellectuals in the late eighteenth century and spread, in very uneven fashion, into the broader population over the course of the post-1780 "long" nineteenth century. I never regarded this explanation as involving anything that was intellectually particularly contentious, but just as bringing to students the consensus among historians and sociologists about the nature of nations and nationalism.
After reading the book under consideration, I can see that I was incorrect--perhaps not so much about the origin and nature of nations and nationalism, as about the scholarly consensus concerning them. As this collection of essays makes clear, there exists a substantial group of scholars--particularly medievalist historians, but also some early modernists and sociologists--who take very seriously the idea of the antiquity of nations. They understand the nations of post-1780 nationalism as having centuries- or even millennia-old roots and maintain that nationalist sentiments and political loyalties were a major feature of the pre-modern world. The Scales and Zimmer book contains the proceedings of a conference that brought together adherents of the antiquity of nations with proponents of the "modernist" view of nationalism. The resulting confrontations conveyed a lot of information, but when all was said and done, I was not particularly convinced that what I describe to my students as the standard picture of the development of nations and nationalism needs all that much in the way of revision.
This is not because opposing views are not well represented in the book. Quite the opposite, they are, and in drastic fashion. Anthony Smith, for instance, in his essay, "Were There Nations in Antiquity?" claims the Old Testament kingdom of Judah and fourth-century A.D. Armenia as nation-states. The late Patrick Wormald, in a self-consciously provocative essay, "Germanic Power Structures: The Early English Experience," does not just describe Anglo-Saxon England as a nation-state whose existence runs in unbroken continuity down to the present day, but regards nationalism as the oldest form of human group identity and political loyalty, embedded in the deep structures of Indo-European languages, and at work in northern Europe since Neolithic times, the driving force among other things, behind the construction of Stonehenge. He does note at one point the reader may conclude "that Oxford's school of Anglo-Saxon studies has taken leave of its marbles" (p. 116), a useful observation to have in considering his argument.
Proponents of this antiquity of nations differ among themselves about the nature of the nations they are describing. Besides Wormald, who sees nationalism as part of human nature, or at least Germanic human nature, Anthony Smith regards nationalism as developing from ethnies, pre- or non-political communities of common language and culture, while the distinguished medievalist Susan Reynolds, in her essay, "The Idea of the Nation as Political Community," understands medieval nations primarily as dynastic creations, or as political communities roughly co-extensive with the boundaries of a monarch's rule. Common, though, to all of these essays is an aggressive comparison with the modern world. Perhaps one should say, more precisely, an aggressive non-comparison, since the authors make statements not backed up by much in the way of evidence, such as Reynolds's remark about political participation: "In earlier times, most people may not have felt very involved much of the time, but nor do they now" (p. 61).
After reading such arguments, it is a pleasure to turn to the essay of John Breuilly, "Changes in the Political Use of the Nation: Continuity or Discontinuity?" In an excellent and systematic investigation of the nature of nations and nationalism from the early medieval to the modern world, Breuilly carefully and systematically distinguishes use of the idea of the nation in different eras. Among the questions he poses toward this end are: did the nation refer to the entire population or just to a small elite group, such as the nobility or a priestly caste? Was the nation a central reference point in political thought or a marginal one? Were appeals to the nation a constant feature of political life, or just an infrequent and occasional one? Was the nation a contested term, used by adherents of different political views as a form of political mobilization? His thorough discussion of these points reveals the very different nature of nations and nationalism in the pre-modern and post-1789 political worlds. Breuilly does suggest that the early modern era could be seen as something of a transitional period, in which the politicization of Old Testament ideas of a people chosen by God marked a transition from medieval toward more modern forms of political loyalties. Even there, he notes distinctions. As Breuilly points out, using John Foxe's famous Book of Martyrs as proof for sixteenth-century English nationalism is a bit problematic, since Foxe's Protestant martyrs came from Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as from England. In sum, Breuilly's essay, precisely through its investigation of earlier versions of nations and nationalism, very convincingly reasserts their distinct nature in the modern world.
A number of the essays written by the modernists in the book underscore Breuilly's arguments. Robert Frost's survey of Polish nationalism shows the very considerable differences between the nature of Polish identity in the old regime Polish Commonwealth--restricted to the nobility (admittedly an unusually large group, by European standards), articulated most strongly by nobles living in Lithuania and Ukraine and calling themselves Lithuanians or Ukrainians--and the ethnically exclusive, linguistically demanding and often biologically based versions of modern Polish nationalism, frequently claiming a rather different territory than that of pre-1772 Poland. Geoffrey Hosking's very interesting essay on national identity in Russia argues for a Russian Sonderweg, suggesting that the processes of bureaucratization and state-building, which encouraged the spread of national identities and nationalist loyalties in other European countries worked against them in both the Tsar's empire and the USSR.
Readers of H-German might want to know in particular if the clash of perspectives on the origins of nations and nationalism offers useful material for the study of central European history. The book contains two essays on developments in Germany. Co-editor Len Scales's piece, "Late Medieval Germany: An Under-Stated Nation?" starts from the oft-observed point that medieval Germany did not develop into a nation-state, as did other European countries. Scales suggests that historians have paired this institutional under-development with an intellectual one, arguing that a sense of nationalism remained under-developed in Germany as well. By contrast, he argues, ideas of a German nation, and of the Holy Roman Empire as this nation's state, were well articulated in late medieval Germany, precisely because the Holy Roman Empire was not developing into a centralized nation-state.
One might well wonder if describing political developments in late medieval France and England--or Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark to name some other examples--as leading to a nation-state, instead of, say, to a centralized monarchy, is prejudging the issue. Scales contends that ideas of German nationhood circulated in fifteenth-century "local or group-specific communities of sociability and shared culture," no less "public" than those of early-nineteenth-century nationalism (p. 182). While expressed in more modest terms than some of the other authors, this seems like an example of their non-comparative comparison, as can be seen if we employ John Breuilly's criteria. Consider the 100,000 volunteers for the Prussian army in the Wars of Liberation, the 600 women's associations formed all over Central Europe to nurse wounded soldiers of these wars, the 30,000 participants in the 1832 Hambach Festival and even the several thousand members of the Gymnastics Associations c. 1820, or the participants in the 1817 Wartburg Festival. Were the "spaces--at great courts, within networks of acquaintance, patronage and common interest, in the towns, and, by the fifteenth century, the universities" that Scales suggests as sites of a late medieval nationalist public sphere comparable to these (p. 182)?
Abigail Green's essay, "Political Institutions and Nationhood in Germany, 1750-1914," considers connections between loyalty to the Holy Roman Empire and nineteenth-century German nationalism. Her essay covers familiar territory, not least for readers of her excellent book, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2001). She shows the many different varieties of political loyalties and identities circulating in central Europe between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and warns against seeing the inevitability of Bismarck's small-German nation-state. This is all to the good, but the very diversity of possible political forms elucidated by Green militates against the strength of continuities in German national identity between the old regime and the era of the Reichsgründung. After reading the essay, it is hard to avoid the impression that the strongest adherents to a continuity with the old regime Reichspatriotismus were the biggest losers of the political struggles around national identity in the nineteenth century. Green's modest conclusion, "Yet there is evidence that the nationalists of the Kaiserreich did not forget older traditions of Germanness," is the very most that can be said in favor of a continuity of nationalism from the old regime to the First World War (p. 327).
In the end, the aggressive opposition expressed by a number of authors in this book to the idea of nations and nationalism as characteristic features of the political landscape of the modern European world only served to reinforce the proposition they were opposing. Naturally, the distinction between continuity and rupture in historical studies is always a relative one, and there was no magic line drawn between 1780 and 1789, separating the earlier years from the later ones. There may have been individual instances of something that looks fairly similar to modern nationalism in earlier times, or transitional forms of political loyalty in the early modern era, but, applying John Breuilly's criteria, we can see both the distinctive nature and the powerful political position of nationalism in the post- as opposed to the pre-French Revolution European world. Questions about this development certainly remain, such as how nationalism came to exert its influence. The main explanations used by authors in this book, Ernst Gellner's insistence on industrialization and urbanization, or Benedict Anderson's evocation of an "imaginary community," of the nation created by the rise of the periodical press, do not seem entirely convincing to me. One might also wonder just how the political loyalties of nationalism have played in the non-European world over the last two centuries (a point evoked very briefly by Anthony Smith in his essay, but then not explored), but raising such questions only underscores the powerful and unique position of the nation and of the political loyalties of nationalism in modern Europe.
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Citation:
Jonathan Sperber. Review of Scales, Len; Zimmer, Oliver, eds., Power and the Nation in European History.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11360
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