Since the end of the Second World War, it’s been difficult to talk about nationalism in Europe as a force of progress. Nationalism, which seemed to reach its logical conclusion in violent fascism, has appeared anathema to liberalism, socialism, and other ideologies rooted in the Enlightenment. It’s been seen as the natural enemy of tolerance, multiculturalism, and internationalism. To many observers, it was nationalism’s atavistic return that explained the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. In 2016, many discerned it as the dark force behind Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps nationalism is the shadow side of our modern liberal democracies, our destructive collective id harking back to a tribal past.
This view would have puzzled important advocates of liberal progress and social justice in nineteenth-century Europe, among them the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and the Irish republican James Connolly. They believed that nations existed as collective actors in history and were the best basis for organizing human society and politics. Of course, the national idea had both inclusive and exclusive implications. It was inclusive in the sense that everyone—regardless of class, status, sex, or age—belonged to the nation. Many thus viewed nationalism as the natural corollary of democracy. But it was exclusive in the sense that a particular nation represented a bounded community to which not all of humanity could belong. Yet internationalism—the belief in the fraternity and equality of nations—presupposes the division of humanity into separate nations. Who belonged to these nations and who did not? Who was best suited or qualified to lead the nation? The wealthiest citizens or the best educated? The most connected to “national” folk traditions or the most capable of delivering national glory?
Or maybe the working classes. The idea that the working classes were the authentic core and natural leaders of European nations powered forward mass socialist movements at the beginning of the last century. This did not necessarily entail aggression toward other nations; often the contrary was true. But it did entail separate trajectories for those ostensibly working-class nations. How this would play out in practice became a vexed question. Some states, like the vast multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe, contained multiple nations; in many places, the national identity of “the people” was far from clear. Perhaps nowhere was the situation more complicated than in Habsburg Austria: a dynamic, literate, and industrializing society with no official nationalist ideology (the Austrian regime down to its collapse in 1918 was nationally agnostic or neutral), but with at least nine officially recognized national groups. In the Social Democratic movement, Czechs and Germans predominated. The movement thrived on the mobilization of Czech and German workers, who became convinced they were the true leaders of the Czech and German nations; it broke apart when they decided their paths toward a future socialist utopia lay apart, not together.
Here was an apparent paradox. Social Democracy dedicated itself to democratizing society. In Habsburg Austria, the campaign for universal male suffrage in parliamentary elections was the clearest expression of that. It culminated in 1905 with dramatic and unprecedented street demonstrations; electoral reform followed a year and a half later. But the expanding working classes that won it increasingly saw themselves in narrowly national terms. For instance, Czech socialist workers were the real Czech nation and needed to have their own movement separate from their German “comrades”. The future of socialism depended on it, in their view. Populist ethnic nationalism, then, was behind both Austrian Social Democracy’s meteoric rise and its ignominious collapse on the eve of the First World War. Workers’ nationalism was populist because it was premised on the notion that national virtue and authenticity lay not with elites, but with the laboring classes. It was ethnic because it identified the national collective not with the state, but with groups defined by allegedly inherited traits, language above all.
It’s true that the legal and political structures of imperial Austria since 1867 (the constitutional settlement that created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) made national separatism more likely at all levels of society. But nationalism appealed to Czech and German socialist workers at a deep cultural level. Stories of suffering, sacrifice, and redemption, drawn in part from Austrian Catholicism, had wide currency. Socialism appeared capable of redeeming and reversing proletarian suffering, which was both social due to capitalist exploitation, and national due to nefarious elites and to the interference of other nations. This proved to be an incredibly powerful idea.
Liberalism is in crisis now, and not for the first time. The rise of mass politics, including social democracy, accompanied the first major crisis of European liberalism toward the end of the nineteenth century. Today socialist parties are everywhere in retreat. Amid fears of what the current shakeup might bring, we ask whether populism is not inherently opposed to democracy. Few see progressive potential in nationalism. But it’s worth remembering that the political left in the early twentieth century harnessed nationalist and populist energies to expand political participation, not to restrict it.
What this legacy might mean for the present, whether it’s to be recalled or best ignored, is an open question.
Featured image credit: “Two signs” by Bradley Gordon. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
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