Nationalisms

The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century

Montserrat Guibernau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a comprehensive and accessible account of the nature of nationalism, which has re-emerged as one of the fundamental forces shaping world society today.

1

Nationalism in Classical Social Theory

Heinrich von Treitschke

The state

Treitschke defines the state as ‘the people legally united as an independent power’. By the people he understands ‘a plural number of families permanently living together’.¹ In his view, the state is always above individuals and has the right to be omnipotent over them. The state is power. The power of the state is exerted in two major ways. First, the state is the ‘supreme moralizing and humanizing agency’. In Treitschke’s view, no moral law exists for the state. Rather, it is the state itself that establishes the law in its own domain and requires loyal obedience from individuals. The state has no commitments. There is no authority above it. He argues that every nation will have a special code of morality depending upon the particular needs of the state and the different features of its citizens. Hence the state is a moral community, one of several ideas which Treitschke derives from Aristotle.

Second, the state exerts its power through war. Treitschke defines the state as the only entity capable of maintaining a monopoly of violence when he writes, ‘the right of arms distinguishes the state from all other forms of corporate life.’² The state is founded upon the possession of territory.³ As we shall see, territory and violence are two crucial elements later incorporated by Weber into his own definition of the state. Treitschke argues that international treaties may indeed become more frequent, but a decisive tribunal of nations is impossible. The appeal to arms will be valid until the end of history and therein lies the sacredness of war,⁴ which he regards as one of the normal activities of nations: ‘The grandeur of history lies in the perpetual conflict of nations, and it is simply foolish to desire the suppression of their rivalry.’⁵ Treitschke predicts that wars will become fewer and shorter, but, in his view, it would be a fallacy to infer from this that they could ever cease.⁶ He neither envisages nor wishes a peaceful future for humanity. Thus, for him:

War is political science par excellence. Over and over again has it been proved that it is only in war a people becomes in very deed a people. It is only in the common performance of heroic deeds for the sake of the fatherland that a nation becomes truly and spiritually united.⁷

‘War is a sharp medicine for national disunion and waning patriotism,’⁸ he adds; ‘it is political idealism that demands war.’⁹ War fulfils three major functions: it settles quarrels which ‘must’ arise between independent states; it is a remedy against national disunion; and it is a means to create new states. Treitschke emphasizes that if a state loses its independence, it ceases to be a state. Consequently, the chief tasks of the state which derive directly from its power involve the administration of justice, the creation of a moral law, and war. To be able to exert its power, the state must have sufficient material resources for self-defence and absolute sovereignty.

The relation between the individual and the state is determined by the superiority Treitschke confers on the latter. Following Aristotle, he argues that the interests of the community are above those of the individual:

The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole; he must recognise what a nothing his life is in comparison with the general welfare¹⁰… The individual must sacrifice himself for a higher community of which he is a member; but the state is itself the highest in the external community of men.¹¹

Treitschke requires an absolute surrender of the individual to the state and does not contemplate the possibility of revolution or even disagreement: ‘the individual should feel himself a member of his state, and as such have courage to take its errors upon him.’¹² He goes on to say that ‘states do not arise out of the people’s sovereignty, but they are created against the will of the people; the state is the power of the stronger race which establishes itself.’¹³ The dimension of the individual is not limited to his or her membership of the state; Treitschke recognizes an ‘immortal and individual soul in every man’ but he restricts human freedom to ‘the right to think freely concerning God and divine things’. However, he declares that it is impractical for the state to tolerate different religions because ‘the unity of the state is impossible when its subjects are divided between radically different religions.’¹⁴

In the work of Treitschke, therefore, we find a generalized idea of the state as a supreme entity guided ‘not by emotions, but by calculating, clear experience of the world’.¹⁵ The state ‘protects and embraces the life of the people, regulating it externally in all directions’.¹⁶

On German unification

Treitschke’s position on German unification is mainly expounded in Bundesstaat und Einheitsstaat (1864). In his view the German empire is based upon the existence of a dominant state, Prussia, and he envisages the creation of a ‘Greater Germany’ under Prussian leadership. In order to achieve this, Prussia should conquer the smaller states and incorporate them. Treitschke’s Machiavellianism is evident since both he and Machiavelli agree that the interest of the nation must be set above the ordinary obligations of law and morality. Yet there is a difference between them; while Machiavelli sees no hope in any established dynasty and looks for a Prince ‘who will begin at the beginning’ (Cesare Borgia), Treitschke sees in the Hohenzollerns a monarchy which may shortly become strong enough to guide the process of German unification. Treitschke writes: ‘I realize that for Germany there is only one hope of salvation, namely, a united and indivisible monarchy… Prussia, then, has no choice. She must triumph with the help of the German people.’¹⁷

Treitschke analyses three different possibilities for German unification: Staatenbund, Bundesstaat and Einheitsstaat. The first refers to the foundation of a Confederation of German States for mutual defence, one that lacks central institutions and which would leave the sovereignty of single states untouched. The Bundesstaat would imply the creation of an institution analogous to that of the United States of America, with a central executive, legislature and judiciary. The central government would be superior to that of the integrant states and have an unflexible constitution. This second option was rejected by him, but was finally adopted in the constitution of the German empire.

Treitschke presented the Einheitsstaat as ‘the only valid alternative’, involving the annihilation of the governments of smaller German states and the establishment of a unitary state in the form of an expanded Prussia. In 1864 he wrote:

Every Prussian must feel it to be quite right that the best political institutions should be extended to the rest of Germany; and every reasonable non-Prussian must find cause for rejoicing that Prussia has brought the name of Germany into honour once again. The conditions are such that the will of the Empire can in the last instance be nothing else than the will of the Prussian state.¹⁸

Treitschke’s relevance stems from the fact that he was one of the most influential figures of his time and profoundly affected the views of both Weber and Durkheim. The ideas he defended throughout his work, and expounded in his renowned, crowded lectures, influenced two generations of German academics: those who witnessed the unification of Germany and those who envisaged the formation of the Weimar Republic. We shall now move on to consider Treitschke’s views on nationalism, which he discusses primarily under the rubric of patriotism.

On nationalism

For Treitschke, ‘genuine patriotism is the consciousness of co-operating with the body-politic, of being rooted in ancestral achievements and of transmitting them to descendants.’¹⁹ He appeals to a common historical past as one of the constituent features of patriotism. Consciousness and co-operation are key words in grasping his conception. ‘To be conscious of’ means ‘to be aware of’ and in the context of patriotism this means that individuals ‘know’ that they are, and ‘are conscious of’ being, members of a given community. It is not simply a matter of ‘living in’ a particular state; individuals should be ‘conscious of belonging to’ a particular group. Furthermore, patriotism requires active participation. Treitschke writes about the consciousness ‘of co-operating’. This is a basic concept within his framework since it establishes that individuals are not merely members of a community, but are involved in a process. They are stewards of that other constituent feature of patriotism he appeals to, their common past. This relationship between the individual and the state provides the basis for the quasi-religious assertions he makes in discussing national honour:

Here the high moral ideal of national honour is a factor handed down from one generation to another, enshrining something positively sacred, and compelling the individual to sacrifice himself to it. This ideal is above all price and cannot be reduced to pounds, shilling and pence.²⁰

Treitschke points to two powerful forces working in history: the tendency of every state to amalgamate its population, in speech and manners, into one single unity, and the impulse of every vigorous nationality to construct a state of its own.²¹ If we add to this the fact that, for him, nation and state should coincide, it is easy to understand why he thought that Prussia should be the ‘unifying agent’ which all the other states should join in order to create a Greater Germany. He adds: ‘only brave nations have a secure existence, a future, a development; cowardly nations go to the wall, and rightly so.’²²

Treitschke stresses that ‘the unity of the state should be based on nationality. The legal bond must at the same time be felt to be a natural bond of blood-relationship – either real or imaginary blood-relationship (for on this point nations labour under the most extraordinary delusions).’²³ In his view, patriotism is the consciousness of being rooted in ancestral achievements. However, he recognizes that ‘nationality is not a settled and permanent thing’.²⁴ When talking about nationalism and patriotism, he focuses primarily on sizeable, powerful nation-states. Treitschke argues that ‘the great state has the noble capacity … Only in great states can there be developed that genuine national pride which is the sign of the moral efficiency of a nation.’ Not only does he refer to the moral ‘grandeur’ of large states, he also attributes cultural supremacy to them: ‘All real masterpieces of poetry and art arose upon the soil of great nationalities’.²⁵ We should bear in mind that for Treitschke ‘Staat ist Macht’, and a larger state means a more powerful one. He discounts the fact that a large state is by no means necessarily ‘nobler’ than and ‘culturally superior’ to a smaller one. That larger states have the power to impose their own way of thinking, present themselves as ‘superior states’, and promote their art and culture is taken for granted. However, as a historian, Treitschke was aware of the rise and fall of states through different periods, and this led him to leave open the possibility of success for small nationalities: ‘The nations themselves are something living and growing. No one can say with absolute certainty when the small nationalities will decay internally and shrivel up, or when, on the other hand, they will exhibit an unexpected vital energy.’²⁶

The superiority of Western culture, in Treitschke’s view, derives from the fact that Western Europe ‘has larger compact ethnological masses, while the East is the classic soil for the fragments of nations’.²⁷ He describes the nineteenth century as a period in which ‘a man thinks of himself in the first place as a German or a Frenchman, or whatever his nationality may be, and only in the second place as a member of the whole human race’.²⁸ In Treitschke’s view, the explosion of nationalism during his lifetime was a ‘natural revulsion against the world-empire of Napoleon. The unhappy attempt to transform the multiplicity of European life into the arid uniformity of universal sovereignty has produced the exclusive sway of nationality as the dominant political idea. Cosmopolitanism has receded too far.’²⁹ He writes:

The idea of a World-state is odious; the ideal of one state containing all mankind is no ideal at all … the whole content of civilisation cannot be realised in a single state … All peoples, just like individual men, are one-sided, but in the very fullness of this one-sidedness the richness of the human race is seen. Every people has therefore the right to believe that certain powers of the divine reason display themselves in it at their highest.³⁰

To confirm this argument Treitschke notes that ‘every nation overestimates itself’, and more importantly that ‘without this feeling of itself, the nation would also lack the consciousness of being a community’.³¹ But what will be the future of nationalism in a world where, for the first time in history, it is possible to speak of a worldwide culture? A standard response to this sort of question is to seek to demonstrate that national particularities will disappear in favour of a more general and global culture. Treitschke approaches this issue in a different way, arguing that:

The notion that a universally-extended culture will finally displace national customs by customs for all mankind, and turn the world into a cosmopolitan primitive hash has become a common-place … If a nation has the power to preserve itself and its nationality through the merciless race-struggle of history, then every progress in civilisation will only develop more strikingly its deeper national peculiarities.³²

Power is a recurrent theme in Treitschke’s thought. But in practical terms, what exactly does it mean for the nation ‘to have the power to preserve itself? To what extent is it possible for a nation to preserve itself in a world where globalization processes are becoming more and more compelling? Does the assertion that ‘only’ powerful nations will be able to preserve their ‘national peculiarities’ mean that only a very few nations will ‘preserve themselves’, while the rest will be fully absorbed or at least ‘culturally assimilated’ by their more powerful companions? For now I shall leave these questions open, but I shall return to them in a later discussion of the link between nationalism and globalization.

Karl Marx

Nationalism and the bourgeoisie

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes the history of human society in terms of class struggle: ‘Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.’³³ The struggle of ‘oppressors and oppressed’ ends either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society – where, prior to socialism, the ‘oppressed’ become ‘oppressors’ – or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Contemporary society is divided into two great classes, directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. For Marx, social classes are t...