National Awakening

Patria est communis omnium parens
Cicero

This was the final of three papers I had to write for a Euro-History Class. I'm not too concerned about anyone stealing quotes or ideas because I doubt there's a high volume of college/high school students visiting this page needing to write a paper that answers the specific questions this paper seeks to answer.

While it may be difficult to quantify in total the legacies of the French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, there can be no doubt that the rise of the nation-state becomes characteristic in Europe after Napoleon’s ultimate fall in 1815. The backbone to the formation of European nation-states may well lie in the unity between people who consist of a nation. Abbé Sieyes makes a profound statement in his What Is The Third Estate? which equates those who are not of noble birth as the essence of a nation. This is a remarkable statement which makes distinctions between the old regimes, who rule over many groupings of people who may not be ethnically similar to each other or their rulers, from what will be an era of “national awakening”.

The creation of satellite states and the general belligerence of Napoleon with lands outside of France-proper certainly stoked the flames of self-awareness, both in France and her enemies, particularly in German lands. Both the growth in socialist theories which gave classes of people a sense of identity as well as the maladroit uprisings of 1848 helped ossify the spirit of self-awareness that was becoming more palpable in European societies. However, it is arguments for nationalism which drive the intellectual motors for the creation of nation-states during the 19th century.

Giuseppe Mazzini argued that the old orders were fading or gone: “Europe no longer possesses unity of faith, of mission, or of aim. Such unity is a necessity in the world. Here, then, is the secret of the crisis. It is the duty of every one to examine and analyse [sic] calmly and carefully the probable elements of this new unity.” (On Nationality, 1852). For Mazzini, the new unity was obvious: people shared with each other their common languages, their common history, their common traditions:

“…they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and express their idea; to contribute their stone also to the great pyramid of history.”

Mazzini believed that the people who shared common blood, those who constitute a true “nation”, have a duty to organize themselves and rule themselves. “The map of Europe has to be remade” he declared. The revolutions of 1848 had failed, not because they were wrong, but rather that those seeking to preserve the old ways had not realized that their stubbornness had failed to provide the people with the proper vitality that those who are governed sought: “It was not for a material interest that the people of Vienna fought in 1848; in weakening the empire they could only lose power.” When considering the statement “…those who persist in perpetuating, by violence or by Jesuitical compromise, the external observance of the old unity, only perpetuate the crisis, and render its issue more violent.”, it could not be denied that so long as the old order denied the people the chance to organize and rule themselves, that the revolutions of 1848 would become routine.

This is important, because Mazzini believes that unnecessary violence is a result of the old order fighting the reality that they no longer bind society. In fact, it would be national awakening that would be the basis for both peace and order:

The nationality . . . founded upon the following principle:- Whichever people, by its superiority of strength, and by its geographical position, can do us an injury, is our natural enemy; whichever cannot do us an injury, but can by the amount of its force and by its position injure our enemy, is our natural ally, -is the princely nationality of aristocracies or royal races. The nationality of the peoples has not these dangers; it can only be founded by a common effort and a common movement; sympathy and alliance will be its result.

If Mazzini believes that violence is the natural condition where order is lost, then Otto von Bismarck believes violence is what will unite the German people into a nation-state. Hardly one to dismiss German-blooded aristocracy, Bismarck believes that the German people are united by their rivalry with other nations, principally France:

We assume the title [a unified German imperium] in the hope that the German people will be granted the ability to enjoy the reward of its ardent and self-sacrificing wars in lasting peace, within boundaries which afford the fatherland a security against renewed French aggression which has been lost for centuries. (Imperial Proclamation, 1/18/1871, italics added for stress)

It is in the interests of the German nation—those who speak German and share German history—to defend themselves from non-Germans. Certainly a united Germany stood a better chance in combating the hated French nation than a German confederation of states. It was in this Franco-Germanic rivalry that German unity was possible.

And so between Mazzini and Bismarck, the framework of what constitutes national awakening are clear. Unified by ethnicity, people naturally had greater vitality and were more safely ruled when ruled by their own nation, not by the threats or simple power and influence of other peoples who live far away and have little in common interests or knowledge for those who are governed.

If the security and vitality of an ethnicity lie in realizing its natural and national identity for Mazzini and Bismarck, then for Benito Mussolini, it is forcibly playing a role in history that will define nations as either victors or the oppressed. For Mussolini, history is defined by those who follow and those who lead. Democratic liberal governments are a failure because they run against what he presumes is natural:

“…Fascism [Mussolini’s ideology] denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....” (What Is Fascism, 1932)

In Mussolini’s fascism, Italy can find a new national awakening by seizing power. First done untactfully within the Italian political sphere, fascism provides a historically unique opportunity for Italy to play in world events simply by creating them. The most dramatic example is the confrontation in Ethiopia, starting in 1935, where broken treaties and condemnation by world powers were only vindicated by Italy’s inability for complete conquest. However, the episode proved that a nation bent on dominating others would not so easily be checked by paperwork and speeches.

The principles of force over reason, that history is made up of both leaders and followers, and that the true aspirations of a nation are endangered by foreign blood is brought to greater depths with National Socialists of Germany and Adolph Hitler. In a speech before a Munich court on March 27, 1924, Hitler proclaimed: “The declared enemy of Germany is France. Just as England needs the balkanization of Europe, so France needs the balkanization of Germany in order to gain hegemony in Europe.” While Mussolini would argue that Italy should seize power because it could, Hitler would argue that there is a racial, as well as national, struggle for survival:

“…World history teaches us that no people became great through economics: it was economics that brought them to their ruin. A people died when its race was disintegrated. Germany, too, did not become great through economics. A people that in its own life [volkisch] has lost honor becomes politically defenseless, and then becomes enslaved also in the economic sphere. Internationalization today means only Judaization. We in Germany have come to this: that a sixty-million people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers.” (9/18/22, speech in Munich)

By the time Hitler’s call for national awakening, it was clear that nationalist tendencies had evolved into a worldview in which brutality was not only acceptable but embraced. Mussolini would declare as much:

“It [fascism] thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.” (What is Fascism)

The nationalism of the 1920s and 30s would thus see the nation and its chief ethnicity no longer as something that had to be governed by those born on the land and who share the histories of that land, but rather as a struggle with other nations and peoples.

Where nationalism emerged from the wake of the Napoleonic Wars as a means to throw off the yoke of foreign crowns and rulers, it ended as a dangerous and intoxicating ideal for which fascism found its strength. It would be difficult to imagine a world where fascism would exist without an ideology which highlights the differences between people and supposing that struggle is the necessary and historically lasting fact for which these ethnicities should awaken towards.

Written by myself, MJK. Posted on this website 5/20/2003.

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