10.7 — Nationalism, 1848, and the Unification of Italy and Germany

In 1861, when Italy was unified, the politician Massimo d'Azeglio is supposed to have said: we have made Italy, now we must make Italians.

At unification, something on the order of 2 to 10 percent of the peninsula's population spoke standard Italian — the Tuscan dialect that became the national language. Everyone else spoke Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian, Piedmontese, Lombard and dozens of others, several of them mutually unintelligible. The first king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, conducted business in Piedmontese and French.

A nation is not a fact that a state expresses. It is frequently a thing that a state has to manufacture afterwards. That is the argument this chapter makes, and it is the most useful idea in it.

What nationalism actually is

The claim: that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that a nation is defined by shared language, culture, history and territory, that each nation is entitled to its own state, and that loyalty to the nation outranks loyalty to region, class, dynasty or religion.

Every part of that is recent. Before roughly 1800, most people's primary loyalties were local, religious or dynastic. A peasant in Brittany in 1750 was a subject of the French king, a Catholic and a Breton, in that order, and did not speak French.

The theorists of nationalism largely agree that it is modern and constructed, and differ on why.

Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" is the most useful formulation. A nation is imagined because you will never meet more than a fraction of its members and yet feel a bond with them. He connects it directly to print capitalism (Chapter 8.2): once books and newspapers are printed in a vernacular, the readers of that language become aware of themselves as a public, reading the same things on the same day.

Ernest Gellner's argument is economic. Industrial society needs a mobile workforce that can be trained, retrained and moved, which requires a standard language and mass schooling, which requires a state that provides it — and that state defines a nation. Agrarian societies do not need this and do not produce it.

Eric Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition" documents how national symbols presented as ancient are frequently recent. The Scottish clan tartan system was largely codified in the nineteenth century. Most national anthems, flags and ceremonies date from the same period.

And the practical evidence for construction is language policy. France in 1789 had a large minority who did not speak French; a century of compulsory schooling, conscription and administrative uniformity produced a French-speaking population. The same process happened in Italy, Germany and, in a different way, in every state in this Part.

1848

In one year, revolutions broke out in France, the German and Italian states, the Austrian Empire, Hungary, Denmark, Poland and elsewhere. It is the closest thing to a simultaneous European revolution that has ever occurred.

The causes were stacked.

Hunger. The potato blight of 1845–49 — which killed around a million people in Ireland and drove a million more to emigrate — also hit continental Europe, and grain harvests failed in 1846. Food prices spiked.

Unemployment, from an industrial downturn.

Political exclusion. Middle-class demands for constitutions, parliaments and press freedom, blocked by the Vienna settlement's system (Chapter 10.4).

And national demands — Italians and Germans for unification, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and others for autonomy from the Austrian Empire.

What happened: monarchs fled or conceded, constitutions were promised, the Frankfurt Parliament assembled to design a united Germany, and Hungary declared independence.

And within eighteen months almost all of it had been reversed.

Why it failed, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental.

The coalitions broke on class. Middle-class liberals wanted constitutions and property rights; workers wanted employment and the vote. When Paris workers rose again in June 1848, the liberal government suppressed them with several thousand deaths — and after that the propertied classes across Europe preferred order to reform.

The national demands conflicted with each other. A united Germany on linguistic lines and a Hungarian state and a Czech state could not all have the same territory. The Frankfurt Parliament spent months arguing over whether to include Austria's German-speaking lands, and offered the crown to the Prussian king, who refused to accept a crown from an assembly rather than from fellow princes.

And the armies stayed loyal. Austria's forces, and Russian troops sent to help in Hungary, put the revolutions down.

What survived. Serfdom was abolished in the Austrian Empire and not restored. The French Second Republic introduced universal male suffrage — and then elected Louis-Napoleon, who made himself emperor within four years. And the lesson drawn by nationalists was decisive: unification by liberal assembly had failed, so it would have to be done by a state with an army.

Italy

Three approaches competed and one won.

Mazzini's — a democratic republic created by popular insurrection, promoted through his organisation Young Italy. It inspired a generation and never succeeded militarily.

The papal option — a federation under the Pope — which ended when Pius IX refused to fight Catholic Austria.

And Cavour's — unification under the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, achieved by diplomacy and by borrowing a great power's army.

Cavour's method is worth describing because it is a model of realist statecraft.

He sent Piedmontese troops to the Crimean War in 1855, in which Piedmont had no interest whatever, in order to obtain a seat at the peace conference and raise the Italian question.

He then made a secret agreement with Napoleon III of France, promising Nice and Savoy in exchange for French help against Austria, and provoked Austria into declaring war in 1859 so that France's defensive commitment would be triggered.

And Garibaldi supplied the popular element. In 1860 he landed in Sicily with about a thousand volunteers, the Redshirts, and took Sicily and then Naples against far larger Bourbon forces, largely because the population rose in support.

Then the crucial moment. Garibaldi, a republican, having conquered the south, handed it to the king of Piedmont — because he judged unification more important than the form of government. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861.

Venice followed in 1866 and Rome in 1870, when French troops protecting the Pope were withdrawn to fight Prussia.

And the aftermath was harder than the unification. The south was substantially conquered rather than joined, and a large insurgency there — called brigandage by the government — required years of military occupation and killed more people than the wars of unification. The economic gap between north and south opened then and has never closed.

Germany

Otto von Bismarck, appointed Minister-President of Prussia in 1862, told the parliament that the great questions of the day would not be settled by speeches and majority decisions — that had been the mistake of 1848 — but by iron and blood.

His method was three wars, each deliberately arranged.

Denmark, 1864, over the Schleswig-Holstein duchies, fought jointly with Austria — which set up the next war by giving Prussia and Austria a shared territory to quarrel over.

Austria, 1866. Prussia won in seven weeks, decisively, because of railways for mobilisation, the breech-loading needle gun which could be fired lying down and far faster than a muzzle-loader, and a general staff that had planned the campaign in advance. The peace was deliberately lenient — no territory taken from Austria proper — because Bismarck wanted Austria neutral in the next war, not vengeful.

France, 1870–71. Bismarck engineered it. The Ems Dispatch — a telegram reporting a conversation between the Prussian king and the French ambassador — was edited by Bismarck before release so that it read as a mutual insult. France declared war, which is what he required: the southern German states' treaties obliged them to join Prussia if it was attacked.

France was defeated in six weeks. The emperor was captured at Sedan; Paris was besieged and starved through the winter.

And the German Empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — in the palace of the French kings, deliberately. Chapter 11.4 shows the French choosing the same room in 1919.

The peace terms were harsh: Alsace and most of Lorraine annexed, and a large indemnity. Bismarck's own generals pressed for the annexation on military grounds and he had reservations, correctly anticipating that it would make France a permanent enemy.

What kind of state was created

This is the part with consequences.

The German Empire had universal male suffrage for the Reichstag — more democratic than Britain's franchise at the time — and the Reichstag had limited power. The Chancellor was responsible to the Kaiser, not to parliament. The army answered to the Kaiser directly and its budget was voted in multi-year blocks.

So Germany was industrially the most advanced country in Europe by 1900, with the best universities, the best chemical and electrical industries, and the first modern welfare state — Bismarck introduced health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884 and old-age pensions in 1889, explicitly to undercut the socialists. And its political system gave a hereditary monarch and a general staff control of foreign and military policy with no parliamentary check.

Chapter 11.2 is what that combination produced.

The two faces of nationalism

The chapter has to close on this because both are real.

Nationalism as liberation. It broke up multi-ethnic empires in which subject peoples had no voice; it produced Italian and German unity, Greek, Serbian, Polish and Irish independence; and it is the principle every anti-colonial movement used, including India's (Chapter 6.20).

Nationalism as exclusion. A nation defined by ethnicity, language and blood has to define who is outside it. The nineteenth-century construction of national identity ran alongside the systematisation of racial theory (Chapter 8.9), the intensification of antisemitism — the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890s is the standing case — and the justification of empire on the ground that some nations were fit to rule others (Chapter 11.1).

And the two are not separable, which is the uncomfortable finding. The same doctrine that says a people is entitled to govern itself says that a people is a unit defined by descent, and Chapter 11.9 shows where that leads when a state acts on it fully.

Chapter 13.1 makes the practical distinction between civic nationalism — membership defined by citizenship and shared institutions — and ethnic nationalism — membership defined by ancestry — and notes that the first is more inclusive, harder to build, and that most real states contain both.

Where this shows up in your life

Almost every country on the world map is a nation-state, and the form is about two hundred years old.

India's founders faced this chapter's question directly. A country with fifteen major languages, every world religion and enormous regional variation could not define itself ethnically without destroying itself. The Constitution defines Indian citizenship civically, and the linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956 accommodated linguistic identity within a single federal nation rather than against it (Chapter 6.25). Whether that settlement holds is an active argument in Indian politics.

And Pakistan is the counter-experiment. A state defined by a single religious identity lost its eastern half in 1971 to a movement organised around language (Chapter 6.26).

What the next page covers

The largest political conflict of the nineteenth century was fought over slavery, and it killed more Americans than every other American war combined. Chapter 10.8 covers abolition and the American Civil War — how the British abolition movement actually won, why the American question could not be compromised, what the war was actually about according to the people who started it, what Reconstruction achieved and how it was destroyed, and why the century that followed looked the way it did.