The Transformation of the World (89 page)

Pointing the historical discussion in a different direction, Wolfgang Reinhard claims, in agreement with such theorists as John Breuilly or Eric Hobsbawm: “The nation was the dependent variable of historical development, but state power was its independent variable.”
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In this view, the nation-state—which Reinhard, too, first locates in the nineteenth century
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—is not the almost inevitable result of the formation of mass consciousness and identity “from below” but rather the outcome of a will to concentrate political power “from above.”
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A nation-state is thus not the state casing of a given nation; it is a project of state apparatuses and power elites, as well as of revolutionary or anticolonial
counter-
elites. The nation-state usually attaches itself to an existing sense of nationhood and instrumentalizes it for a
policy
of nation building, whose aims are to create a viable economic space, an effective player in international politics, and sometimes also a homogeneous culture with its own symbols and values.
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So, there are not only nations looking for a nation-state of their own, but also nation-states looking for the perfect nation with which to align themselves. As Reinhard convincingly observes, most states that are today designated as nation-states are in reality multinational states, with sizable minorities organized at least at the prepolitical level of social space.
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These minorities differ from one another mainly according to whether their political leaders mount a separatist challenge to the wider state (until very recently Basques or Tamils, for instance), or whether they are content with partial autonomy (Scots, Catalans, or French Canadians). The “national groups” or (in a premodern sense of the word) “nationalities” of the great empires were such minorities. Some of the multiethnicity of
all
empires was preserved in the young nation-states of the nineteenth century, even if they constantly tried to conceal this behind discourses of homogeneity.

Where then are the nation-states that are the supposed hallmark of the nineteenth century? A glance at maps of the world shows empires, rather,
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and in 1900 no one predicted the coming end of the imperial age. After the First World War, which irrevocably destroyed three empires (Ottoman, Hohenzollern, and Habsburg), the imperial era lingered on. The Western European colonial empires, as well as the US colony in the Philippines, reached the zenith of their significance for the metropolitan economies and mentalities only in 1920s and 1930s. The new Soviet regime managed within a few years to reconstitute the Caucasian and Central Asian
cordon
of the late Tsarist Empire. Japan, Italy, and—very briefly—Nazi Germany built new empires that imitated and caricatured the old. The imperial age came to an end only with the great wave of decolonization between the Suez crisis of 1956 and the end of the Algerian war in 1962.

Although the nineteenth century was not an “age of nation-states,” two things are nevertheless true of it.
First
, it was the era in which
nationalism
emerged as a way of thinking and a political mythology, finding expression in doctrines and programs, and mobilizing sentiments with a capacity to arouse the masses. From the outset nationalism had had a strongly anti-imperial component. It was the experience of French “foreign rule” under Napoleon that first radicalized nationalism in Germany, and everywhere else—in the Tsarist Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and Ireland—resistance stirred in the name of new national conceptions. By no means was it always associated with the goal of an independent state, however. Often the initial aim was only to protect the nation from physical attack or discrimination, to achieve stronger representation of national interests within the imperial polity, or to widen the scope for the national language and other forms of cultural expression. The early, “primary resistance” to colonial conquest in Asia and Africa also seldom set its sights on an independent national state. “Secondary resistance” followed only in the twentieth century, when new elites familiar with the West warmed to the nation-state model and recognized the mobilizing power of a rhetoric of national emancipation.

Nevertheless, however hazy it remained in the nineteenth century, the idea of the nation-state as a framework for political leaderships to form and develop became ever more attractive in Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and other parts of Europe, as well as in a handful of extra-European contexts, such as the Egyptian Urabi movement of 1881–82 (so called after its main leader, it opposed an extremely pro-Western government with the slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians!”) and the early stirrings of Vietnamese anticolonialism from 1907 on.
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Second
, the nineteenth century was an age of nation-state
formation
. Despite many a spectacular founding act, this was invariably a lengthy process—and it is not always easy to indicate when national statehood was actually accomplished, when the “external” and “internal” building of the nation-state was sufficiently matured. The internal aspect is the more difficult to judge. One must decide when a certain territorial polity, usually undergoing evolutionary change, attained a degree of structural integration and homogeneous thinking that made it qualitatively different from the princedom, empire, old-style city republic, or colony that had preceded it. Even for the French nation-state, the usual model in this respect, it is no simple matter to say when such a point was reached. Already with the Revolution of 1789 and its national rhetoric and legislature? With Napoleon's centralizing reforms? Or with the transformation of “peasants into Frenchmen”—a decades-long process that its foremost historian sees getting under way as late as the 1870s?
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If it is so difficult to give an answer for France, what can be said of more complex cases?

Less problematic is the question of when a polity became capable of international action and acquired the
external
form of a nation-state. Under the systems and conventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a country
counted
as a nation-state only if the great majority of the international community recognized it as an independent player. This Western concept of sovereignty is not a sufficient criterion—otherwise the external point of view would be absolute, and an entity such as Bavaria would have been a nation-state in 1850. But external recognition is a necessary condition: there is no nation-state that does not have its own army and diplomatic corps and that is not accepted as a signatory to international agreements. In the nineteenth century, the number of international players was smaller than the number of polities with some certifiable success in social and cultural nation building. Although around the year 1900 Russian-controlled Poland, Habsburg Hungary, and Ireland within the United Kingdom exhibited many features of nation building, it cannot be said that they were nation-states. They attained that status only after the end of the First World War—in a flurry of national emancipation outpacing all that the “century of the nation-state” had offered. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the reverse: many states outwardly recognized as independent remained unstable quasi-states without institutional or cultural coherence.

In the nineteenth century nation-states came into being in one of three ways: (1) through the revolutionary breakaway of a colony; (2) through hegemonic unification; or (3) through evolution toward autonomy.
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To these corresponded three distinct forms of nationalism: anticolonial nationalism, unification nationalism, and separatist nationalism.
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Revolutionary Independence

Most new states that entered the scene during the nineteenth century came into being in its first quarter, at the end of an Atlantic cycle of revolution.
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This first wave of decolonization was part of a chain reaction that had begun in the 1760s with the roughly simultaneous (though causally unrelated) interventions by London and Madrid in their American colonies.
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The reaction of the North Americans was prompt, that of the Spanish Americans a little delayed. When open revolt broke out in 1810 from the River Plate to Mexico, the wider context was different: not only was there the example of the United States, but the Spanish monarchy had collapsed in 1808 following Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (itself a sequel to the military expansionism that had marked the French Revolution almost from the beginning). The influence of 1789 made itself felt earlier and more directly on the island of Hispaniola, where an uprising of mulatto middle strata (
gens de couleur
) and black slaves got under way in 1792. Out of this genuine anticolonial and social revolution came the second republic in the Americas: Haiti.
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It was recognized by France in 1825, and thereafter gradually by most other countries. On the mainland, a wave of revolutions gave birth to the independent polities that are still there today: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico. But the larger entities envisaged by Simon Bolívar failed to materialize.
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Later breakaways saw the emergence of Ecuador (1830), Honduras (1838), and Guatemala
(1839). Thus, after the interlude of a Mexican empire in 1822–24, a whole new archipelago of republics claimed and won external sovereignty, even if successes in internal nation building were often a long time in coming.

Developments were less revolutionary in Brazil, where Creole elites did not break with an unpopular imperial center. In 1807 the Portuguese dynasty managed to flee the French to its most important colony, and after the fall of Napoleon, the regent Dom João (later John VI) decided to remain in Brazil, raising it to the level of a kingdom and ruling it from 1816 as the King of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve. After his return to Europe, his son stayed on as prince regent and in 1822 had himself crowned as Emperor Pedro I of a Brazil now peacefully separated from the mother country. Only in 1889 did the most populous country of Latin America declare itself a republic.

In Europe, the only new state with origins in an empire was Greece. Here indigenous forces active both inside the country and in exile came together with vociferous philhellene movements in Britain and Germany to detach Hellas from the Ottoman Empire in 1827, eventually assisted by a naval intervention on the part of Britain, Russia, and France. For the time being, the borders encompassed only the south of present-day Greece plus the Aegean islands. If the period of Ottoman rule going back to the fifteenth century is baldly defined as “colonial,” then liberated Greece was a postcolonial entity; it was the result, however, not of a wholly autonomous revolution but of a process supported by the Great Powers and lacking a broad social base. Greece then remained more dependent on the Great Powers than did the new states of Latin America. It won recognition, becoming a reality under international law, only in the London Protocol of February 1830. But the outer casing did not yet correspond to a social and cultural content: “A Greek state now existed, but a Greek nation still had to be made.”
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Also in 1830–31 the Belgian state—traditionally the Southern Netherlands—came into being. Unlike the Greeks, the citizens of Brussels and its surrounding area could not complain of centuries of foreign rule. Their main grievance was what they saw as the autocratic policy of the Dutch king William I since the post-Napoleonic unification of the kingdom in 1815. But the conflict lacked an ideological dimension, such as the struggle of free Europeans against Oriental despotism that had won the Greeks so much publicity and support. More than Greece, Belgium was the progeny of a revolution. Amid the turmoil unleashed in many parts of Europe by the French revolution of July 1830, disturbances broke out in Brussels in August, during a performance of Auber's
La Muette de Portici
at the opera house. Uprisings ensued in other cities, and the Dutch sent in troops. Complete separation from the Netherlands, which in a few weeks became the goal of the fast-radicalizing movement, was here achieved without foreign military intervention, although the tsar and the king of Prussia had threatened to come to the aid of William, and for a time the related international crisis escalated dangerously. Like Greece, however, Belgium had its independence
guaranteed by a great power treaty, in which Britain once again played the role of principal midwife.
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In 1804, much farther from the limelight in the pashalik of Belgrade—a border province of the Ottoman Empire, with a population of roughly 370,000—the Christians of Serbian origin rose up against the local Ottoman janissaries, who, barely under Istanbul control, had been exercising a reign of terror.
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In 1830, after a long conflict, the sultan recognized the Principality of Serbia, nominally continuing as part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1867—at more or less the same time as similar developments in Canada—the Serbs reached a point where they no longer had to fear interference in their internal affairs by their remote suzerain; the last Turkish troops were withdrawn.
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Finally, in 1878 the great-powers meeting at the Congress of Berlin recognized Serbia as an independent state in international law, as they also did Montenegro and Romania (long torn this way and that between Russian and Ottoman protection). Bulgaria profited from the Sultan's major defeat in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, but it remained a tribute-paying principality of the Porte and achieved international recognition as a state with its own “tsar” only during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908–9 in the Ottoman Empire.
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Can it be said that all these new political structures were nation-states in an
internal
sense? There is reason to doubt it. After a hundred years of existence as a state, Haiti had to show for itself “a questionable past and a deplorable present”; neither its political institution building nor its social-economic development had made much progress.
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In mainland South and Central America, the first half century after independence was not one of calm consolidation; most countries achieved political stability only in that crucial decade of the 1870s, which all over the world saw a centralization and reorganization of state power. Greece was at first subject to Bavarian tutelage; the Great Powers seconded Prince Otto, a son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, to reign as monarch. The country then experienced its first coups d'état (1843, 1862, 1909), and only after 1910, under the Liberal prime minister Eliftherios Venizelos, did it develop more stable institutions.
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Even Belgium was no model nation-state. Its dominant nationalism, taking a clear distance from the Netherlands, rooted French in the constitution as the only official language, but from the 1840s it came under challenge from an ethnolinguistic Flemish nationalism. For this self-styled “Flemish movement,” the issues were equal rights within the Belgian state and a cross-border unity with Dutch language and culture.
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