Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775

Nationalism in Europe & America

Nationalism in Europe & America

Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775

LLOYD KRAMER

University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2011 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Arno Pro by IBT. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kramer, Lloyd S.

Nationalism in Europe and America : politics, cultures, and identities

since 1775 / Lloyd Kramer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3484-8 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8078-7200-0

(pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Nationalism—United States—History.

2. Nationalism—Europe—History. 3. Political culture—

United States—History. 4. Political culture—Europe—History.

5. Group identity—United States—History. 6. Group identity

—Europe—History. I. Title.

E169.1.K685 2011

305.800973—dc22

2010052564

cloth 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

paper 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

For Kyle Pomeroy Kramer and Renee Pomeroy Kramer

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Nationalism and Modern World History

ONE The Cultural Meaning of Nationalism

TWO Politics, Revolutions, and National Sovereignty

THREE Land, Language, and Writing

FOUR Religion, Sacrifice, and National Life

FIVE Gender, Family, and Race

SIX The Cultural Construction of Nationalism in Early America

SEVEN Nationalism and Nation-States in the Modern World, 1870–1945

EIGHT Nationalism and Nation-States after 1945

Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the History of Nationalism

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations & Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

Unknown artist, The Execution of Captain Hale 9

François Georgin, Napoleon at Arcis-Sur-Aube 22

Isidore Pils, Rouget de Lisle Singing La Marseillaise 27

Jacques Réattu, The Triumph of Liberty 33

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence 36

Unknown artist, The Triumph of the French Republic under the Auspices of Liberty 43

Le Coeur, after Swebach, Oath of the Federation of 14 July 1790 47

Unknown artist, Britannia Blowing up the Corsican Bottle Conjurer 50

Fiayn and Chaponnier, after Lembert, Crossing the Bridge at Arcole 67

Unknown artist, Fichte Addressing the German Nation 72

Unknown artist, Teaching: Quinet, Villemain, Guizot, Cousin, Michelet, and Renan 78

Unknown artist, French-Polish Committee Flags 91

Victor Adam, Procession of Napoleon’s Funeral Cortege 95

Pinçon, after Horace Vernet, Grenadier on Elba Island 98

The New Marianne, illustration in Le Petit Journal 105

Philipp Veit, Germania 109

Clark and Dubourgh, after I. A. Atkinson, Russian Loyalty and Heroism 114

Unknown artist, Washington Giving the Laws to America 132

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware 141

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, photographer, Incidents of the War: A Harvest of Death. Gettysburg, July 1863 145

Unknown photographer, Off to War, 1914 155

Destroy This Mad Brute, American war poster designed by H. R. Hopps 157

Unknown photographer, French Remembrance Ceremony 162

The National Socialist Party Ensures the People’s Community, German Nazi poster designed by Ahrle 166

William Vandivert, photographer, Residents Cleaning Bombed-Out Buildings in Berlin 169

Mansell, photographer, Gandhi Leading the Salt March to Protest British Policies in India 176

Unknown photographer, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl at Verdun 187

Steve Hockstein, photographer, Barack Obama Announces Strategy for Afghanistan 195

MAPS

The Napoleonic Empire in Europe, 1810 53

Europe after the Congress of Vienna, 1815 55

Territorial Expansion of the United States from the 1780s to the 1850s 128

Europe in 1914 152

Europe after the First World War 159

Decolonization and the Emergence of New Nations, 1945–1975 181

Acknowledgments

This book is a much-revised version of a work that originally appeared in 1998. Twayne Publishers produced that book as part of a series entitled Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History (edited by Michael Roth). The earlier edition carried a different title and included only six chapters; the final two chapters of this book are therefore completely new. All other chapters, as well as the introduction and conclusion, have been significantly revised and updated. The bibliography and notes have also been extensively revised to include new scholarship that has emerged over the last fifteen years. There are new maps and numerous new images, and the title has been changed to reflect more accurately the book’s expanded contents. I would like to thank Charles Scribner’s Sons for releasing all obligations from the former edition.

I would also like to acknowledge the assistance and support of others who helped to make this book possible. Thoughtful, critical-minded students have pushed me to rethink the evolving history of nationalism as we have discussed transnational historical questions in various classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). I particularly remember the emotionally charged discussions in a UNC undergraduate course on nationalism during the fall semester of 2001—a time in which contemporary events gave students a new sense of personal engagement with the historical meaning of nationalism in the United States. Unexpected, complex events provoke each generation to bring new perspectives and questions to the study of the past, which helps to explain why the teaching of history is really a process of lifelong learning.

I have benefited greatly from the astute comments of faculty colleagues in UNC’s History Department, in the Triangle Area Intellectual History Seminar, and in the Triangle Area French Studies Seminar. The seminars meet regularly at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, and they provide exceptional opportunities for exchanging ideas and responding to new research. Regular participants in these various seminars—including Don Reid, Jay Smith, Jim Winders, Steven Vincent, Linda Orr, Bill Reddy, Keith Luria, Mary Sheriff, Dan Sherman, Anoush Terjanian, Melissa Bullard, Malachai Hacohen, Anthony LaVopa, Martin Miller, and others too numerous to name—have enriched my understanding of modern history in more ways than I can acknowledge here. I am grateful to all of these colleagues and friends for their encouragement and insights.

I thank Chuck Grench, Jay Mazzocchi, and their talented colleagues at UNC Press who have helped to produce this book. I have also relied on numerous librarians and archivists for assistance in collecting illustrations for this volume (specific institutions are acknowledged in credits for the images); and I thank Bill Nelson for designing the maps. I began to plan a new version of this book when I was a fellow at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in 2002–3. I gained a great deal from the conversations with other NHC fellows and from the extraordinary support of the center’s outstanding staff. I have also benefited more recently from the generous support of a Kenan Research Fellowship at UNC and a Chapman Family Fellowship at UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH), both of which made it possible for me to complete this book. The IAH is an active, creative center for interdisciplinary seminars and conferences that have often carried me into new intellectual territories and imaginative communities.

Finally, I thank my wife, Gwynne Pomeroy; my son, Kyle Kramer; and my daughter, Renee Kramer, for the diverse, enriching experiences that I share with each of these special people. I deeply value the knowledge and insights they bring to our unpredictable, ongoing conversations. This book is dedicated to Kyle and Renee, who live with curiosity and imagination amid the transnational cultures of the twenty-first century.

INTRODUCTION

Nationalism & Modern World History

Nationalism has decisively influenced world history for more than two centuries. Although it first developed its distinctive modern characteristics in late eighteenth-century America and Europe, it has spread rapidly across every part of the world, absorbing or intersecting with other ideologies such as romanticism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and ancient religions. Nationalist movements and ideologies have helped to reshape modern descriptions of human identity, and they have arguably contributed to more violent conflicts than any other political or ideological force in the contemporary world. Despite frequent predictions of nationalism’s impending decline, people everywhere continue to describe their personal lives and social communities in the context of national cultures. There are numerous definitions for the meaning of nationalism, and, as the following chapters will argue, there are multiple layers of nationalist cultures. In the most general terms, however, nationalism can be defined as the widely held belief that people living in particular geographical spaces share distinctive cultural and historical traditions and have the right to live in an independent political state.

This book examines the history of nationalism since the late eighteenth century, focusing on political and cultural themes that constantly reappear in modern nationalist thought. The overall argument therefore emphasizes similarities in the nationalisms of various societies and historical eras. Although the specific claims about national identities or histories differ in each society, the underlying structures of nationalist thought show remarkable continuities across time. All national identities, for example, emerge through repeated descriptions of national cultural differences, national geographical spaces, and the history of famous national events. There are also historical continuities in the inextricable nationalist connections between politics and culture, in the overlap of American and European nationalist themes, in the linkage of national rights with individual human rights, in the interplay of ethnic and civic identities, in the fusion of the personal with the national in modern families, and in the nationalist opposition to empires from the American Revolution to the anticolonial revolutions after 1945.

The following chapters stress that nationalism has had exceptional historical influence because it has always offered people the emotionally important sense of safely belonging to supportive social groups; this key theme of nationalist thought has been reiterated constantly in many different places around the modern world. Nationalism has entered deeply into the lives of modern people who believe that their personal well-being depends on the well-being of their national state and society. Nobody is born with an innate national identity, however, so the belief in a national selfhood must develop through specific cultural experiences. Children learn their national identities as they grow up in families and other institutions that convey a shared nationality. The history of nationalism therefore becomes also the history of cultural processes that teach people how they are connected to their nations. A collective national identity is linked to each personal identity, and the long lives of nations provide consolation or meaning for the short lives of its individual citizens.

The power of modern nationalist movements has attracted the wide-ranging scholarly attention of social scientists as well as the commentaries of journalists and official policy makers. The vast literature on nationalism can thus overwhelm anyone who sets out to study its history or understand its influence in the contemporary world. Much of this endless writing seeks to explain recent political and economic conflicts, but most accounts of contemporary issues provide little historical or theoretical perspective on the cultural traditions that shape modern nationalist identities. Meanwhile, other analysts in the popular scholarly field of cultural studies have produced an extensive theoretical literature on the cultural construction of modern identities. This innovative cultural approach to nationalism emphasizes the importance of languages and symbols in nationalist thought, but, as with the social scientists and journalists, the analysis usually focuses on contemporary issues or drifts into difficult theoretical jargon.

In contrast to most books on contemporary national identities and conflicts, my approach to nationalism focuses especially on the historical emergence of American and European nationalisms in the century after 1775. Although historians have long recognized the importance of this era for the development of nationalist ideas and institutions, the recent scholarly emphasis on the cultural history of collective memories and identities has opened new paths for the study of early nationalist thought. I therefore draw on the methods of cultural history to discuss specific nationalist ideas, writers, and political leaders who helped create the modern meaning of nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The first five chapters of this book examine the common political and cultural themes that have shaped most modern nationalisms—what might be called the deep continuities of nationalist thought. (Chapter 1 also includes sections that summarize various scholarly interpretations and debates about the history of nationalism.) The last three chapters look at some specific examples of how nationalist ideas entered into early American history and influenced the twentieth-century history of global wars, anticolonialism, and powerful national states. Neither the thematic sections nor the overview of modern events can provide comprehensive accounts of all nationalist ideas and conflicts; but each chapter offers a concise introduction to historical issues that still influence national identities, cultures, and conflicts in our own time. Anyone who seeks to understand the history of the modern world must eventually examine the historical development of nationalism because nationalist ideas and aspirations have helped to shape almost all modern cultures, economies, political systems, and wars. Although this book inevitably excludes certain aspects of nationalist thought and important regions of the world, it is designed to give readers a manageable, historical starting point for a wider or more detailed analysis of nationalism’s most enduring themes.

Despite the limits of my geographical and chronological framework, I argue that nationalisms in other places and eras tend to replicate, extend, or reshape themes that first emerged in American and European nationalisms. This tendency of all nationalisms to replicate similar cultural assumptions and practices suggests why, as noted earlier, this book emphasizes continuities that reappear in even the most diverse modern societies. All nationalist cultures have asserted a distinctive collective identity through accounts of national difference, and all have claimed to represent the political sovereignty of a specific people. Nationalists have always created narratives about a shared national history. They have also tried to link their views of the nation to religious traditions, gender identities, and the meanings of family, race, or land. The following chapters explore all of these themes, with particular reference to European and American examples. The history of nationalism suggests important similarities in the transatlantic history of politics and cultures, thereby challenging the once-popular belief in American exceptionalism. A thematic, Atlantic history of nationalism shows the overlapping arguments for national sovereignty and the shared, quasi-religious conceptions of national sacrifice. The early history of American nationalism encompasses almost all of the important cultural patterns of nationalist identities (including pervasive beliefs in a unique national mission), so the American example can tell us a great deal about modern nationalism’s emotional messages and political power. The responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provide a notable recent example of nationalism’s emotional significance in the United States; and the final chapter of this book suggests how America’s post-9/11 political culture returned to the most enduring components of a long-existing national identity.

America has also become one of the most self-consciously multicultural nations, and this theme provides yet another connection between the evolving nationalisms on both sides of the Atlantic. I have noted my interest in the continuities of nationalism, but there are also variations that show how nationalist thought never stays exactly the same. Twentieth-century nationalisms led to the catastrophic human costs of the two world wars and to the unexpected consequences of national self-determination. Nationalism’s history is always open-ended, however, which suggests why the European nation-states could evolve after 1945 into a new, collaborative European Union and the United Nations could provide a new framework for transnational cooperation among post-colonial societies. These examples point to the ways in which nationalism has begun to change in the contemporary world. The modern history of nationalism therefore raises analytical questions that this book invites you to ask about every theme and event it discusses: what has changed and what has stayed the same as nationalist ideas have evolved over the last two centuries?

It is much easier to recognize the nationalist beliefs of other cultures than to see the nationalism in one’s own society. We all absorb nationalist ideas through the activities and social networks of our daily lives, though we can rarely recognize the nationalism in these ideas unless they are placed in broader historical frameworks. The historical study of nationalism thus becomes important for a critical understanding of one’s own life as well as the lives of others around the world. In this respect, exploring the history of nationalism is like foreign travel because the distancing perspectives offer a new view of the nationalism in our own culture and the nationalist components of our own personal identities.

I have referred to numerous themes that reappear often in the following chapters. These themes can be concisely summarized here as the key points of the book’s overall argument: (1) modern nationalism emerged in the late eighteenth-century American and French Revolutions; (2) American and European nationalisms have far more similarities than differences; (3) civic (or political) and ethnic (or racial) nationalisms often overlap, so these analytical categories should not be viewed as sharp dichotomies; (4) nationalist thought shows remarkable continuities across time; (5) nationalists always make strong claims to defend specific geographical territories, specific historical memories, and the specific right to a sovereign political state; (6) all nationalisms require a constant cultural education that teaches people the meaning of their nationality; (7) nationalism connects with deep human emotions (much like religions), expresses strong emotional desires to belong to social groups, and gives emotional meaning to personal sacrifices and death; (8) modern categories of personal identity such as gender, family, and race are connected to collective national identities; (9) all nationalisms construct collective identities by stressing their differences from other nations and peoples; (10) nationalist ideas and aspirations have shaped or influenced all of the major wars of modern history; (11) newer forms of multicultural nationalism and transnational institutions have emerged in recent decades to challenge older, more exclusionary aspects of nationalist thought; and (12) despite these transnational tendencies (for example, the European Union), nationalism and nationalist thought retain enormous influence almost everywhere in the modern world.

Each theme in this twelve-point summary raises multiple questions and suggests wider issues in the continuing historical conversation that this book invites you to join. Although all of my themes are therefore debatable, I will argue that historical evidence supports the claims I have enumerated and that these themes explain why nationalism remains the most pervasive political and cultural ism in the modern world. Historical study provides one of the essential methods for understanding how nationalism gained this influence, and an analysis of the most powerful, enduring themes in contemporary national cultures shows how many of these nationalist ideas had already emerged in America and Europe by the early nineteenth century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Cultural Meaning of Nationalism

Nationalism became one of the most influential political and cultural forces in the modern world because it gives people deep emotional attachments to large human communities and provides powerful stories to explain the meaning of public and personal lives. Modern people encounter stories about their nations in almost every sphere of their political, social, and economic activities—from election campaigns and tax payments to professional training, military service, and family relationships. Children learn their nationality almost as soon as they learn to talk, and virtually everyone refers to national cultures when they describe personal or group identities: He is French, she is Russian, they are Japanese, we are Egyptians, I am American, and so on through every part of the world. Nationalism expresses the deep and apparently universal human desire to participate in and identify with social communities, but these identities have only acquired their distinctive nationalist meanings over the last two or three centuries. The history of nationalism thus leads everywhere to the history of modern politics, cultures, and personal identities.

Three stories from the early history of modern nations can introduce us to the cultural influence of nationalism. In September 1776 a twenty-one-year-old man named Nathan Hale was executed by the British army in New York on charges of spying for America’s new Continental army. Hale therefore became an early symbol of national sacrifice in the new American nationalism that was emerging in a war for political independence from Britain, and his famous last words—I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country—became a moral lesson for every subsequent American generation.

In April 1792 a soldier in the French army named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle sat down near the Rhine River in Strasbourg to write a song about France’s just-declared war with Prussia and Austria. Rouget de Lisle completed the song in a day, but its revolutionary call to arms became a permanent expression of French nationalism. La Marseillaise (as the song was soon called) resembles Hale’s last words in stressing the virtues of sacrifice, and it describes the nation’s cause as the highest duty for every citizen:

Let us go, children of the Fatherland

Our day of glory has arrived.

Against us stands tyranny

The bloody flag is raised;

the bloody flag is raised.

In the winter of 1807–8, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered a series of popular Addresses to the German Nation to large audiences in Berlin. Speaking shortly after the French army had taken control of the city, Fichte predicted that a new Germany would arise from this national humiliation. He conceded that the French dominated Europe in 1807, but he offered his audiences the philosophical assurance that decisive German actions would create a different future in which you will see the German name exalted . . . to the most illustrious among all the peoples, you will see in this nation the regenerator and restorer of the world.¹

The American spy, French soldier-songwriter, and German philosopher lived in different places, spoke different languages, and advocated different national causes, yet they all contributed the words and exemplary actions for new nationalisms. Representing three social roles that every nationalism requires (martyr, lyricist, prophet), each man stressed the danger of enemies, the need for sacrifice, and the national ideal as an essential component of human identity. Their stories were connected with the revolutions and wars that first produced and expressed the modern ideas of nations and nationalism, and their lives point to the overlapping personal and public identities that have made nationalism so pervasive and powerful in modern world history. More generally, the actions and cultural memories of Hale, Rouget de Lisle, and Fichte exemplify the cultural construction of nationalism—the ubiquitous historical process that is the subject of this book. Nationalism has evolved in very different places, political systems, and historical contexts, but all nationalists assume that each person’s life is inextricably connected to the history, culture, land, language, and traditions that (theoretically) form a coherent national society and state.

Unknown artist, The Execution of Captain Hale, photo engraving. The weeping woman and the two children suggest how Nathan Hale’s death was portrayed in history books as an exemplary sacrifice for the American nation and a patriotic model for later generations. (In Benson J. Lossing’s popular illustrated book, Lossing’s History of the United States 3:887 [New York, 1909])

Nationalism and Modernity

Although nationalist movements frequently claim to represent long-existing cultural or ethnic groups, most historians argue that modern nationalist ideas and political campaigns did not develop before the late eighteenth century. This historical argument therefore challenges the typical nationalist’s belief in the very old or even primordial existence of national identities. In contrast to the nationalists’ emphasis on an enduring national spirit or essence that reappears constantly in the nation’s history, most historians stress the influential cultural work of intellectuals and political activists who created the modern stories of national heroes, popular folklore, and shared traditions. To be sure, this historical approach to nationalism recognizes that people have always shared collective identities in their towns, families, religions, and geographical regions, but the nationalisms that spread in modern texts and state institutions promoted new personal identifications with much larger territories and more diverse populations.

Despite their general agreement on the historical influence and modernity of nationalist politics and ideas, historians frequently disagree about the premodern origins of national communities and identities. The resurgence of nationalist and ethnic violence in the 1990s contributed to new historical interest in the earliest emergence of nationalist thought, which some writers have traced back to ancient Israel or other ancient Mediterranean cultures.² Most historians, however, continue to describe nationalism as a distinctive form of modern thought and political culture. They assume that nationalism has grown out of and shaped specific social and political systems in modern cultures and has no essential origin in ancient or premodern societies. As the historian Hans Kohn noted in a classic study of the idea of nationalism, it is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness, which is constructed like other ideas through constantly evolving historical conflicts, social relations, and political movements.³ A more recent historian of nationalism, Liah Greenfeld, argues that nationalism is not simply the outcome of modernizing social and political institutions (for example, capitalism and nation-states); it is instead a key source of modernity. Historically, Greenfeld explains, the emergence of nationalism predated the development of every significant component of modernization. Although other historians differ from Greenfeld by exploring the constant interplay of modern and premodern ideas or by inverting her account to argue that modern social institutions actually produced nationalist ideologies, the linkage between nationalism and modernity has become a widely accepted truism of historical explanation.⁴

My own account of nationalism draws on recent historical and theoretical perspectives to argue that national identities are historically constructed and began to develop their modern forms in late eighteenth-century Europe and America. In contrast to many histories of Western nationalism, the following chapters show how the themes of European nationalism appeared also in the nationalism of the emerging United States, where the construction of a new national identity against an imperial European power can be compared to subsequent nationalisms in other regions of the world. Nationalism has always developed overlapping political and cultural ideas, all of which share the central assumption that the well-being and identity of individuals depend on their participation in a national culture. This assumption shapes the cultural claims of nationalism and provides a starting point for the historical analysis of nationalist thought. If social groups and individuals define their identities with the language of national cultures, then the historical construction of those cultures becomes crucial for understanding a whole range of historical issues—from politics and public conflicts to the interpretation of family life, gender roles, education, and death.

The intersection of collective and personal identities suggests why the cultural history of nationalism (the influence of language, history, religion, literature, and public symbols) goes beyond what social or military or economic history can explain about the emergence of nationalist institutions. Nationalism develops in the convergence of modern political and cultural narratives that construct the shared history of people living in a specific geographical space; these narratives then typically claim a fundamental human right for such populations to have an independent, sovereign state. National narratives also affirm unique, collective identities by stressing that each national population differs from the people and cultures in all other nations. Nationalism is therefore a more coherent system of beliefs than patriotism, which, in my view, expresses emotional identifications with particular places, communities, or governments but lacks the self-conscious cultural themes of nationalist movements and institutions. My interest in the cultural construction of nationalism, however, does not ignore or negate other explanations for the popularity and power of modern nationalisms; in fact, the cultural approach to the multiple layers and political power of nationalism should also recognize the insights of alternative interpretations, including the ethnic and economic themes of recent social theorists.

I noted earlier that the violence of contemporary ethnic conflicts has prompted some analysts to question the modernity of nationalisms and examine the premodern origins of modern national identities. The English sociologist Anthony D. Smith, for example, complains that contemporary fascination with the cultural invention of nations leads too many historians to ignore the ways in which national identities depend on long-developing "patterns of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that form the distinctive heritage of the nation. This distinctive heritage limits what intellectuals or politicians can actually claim for the cultural traditions of a nation, and cultural elites can never simply construct a new national culture. The modern language of nationalism must refer to realities or remembered experiences outside of writing, Smith argues, and these realities are evoked in the common myths and memories of ethnic groups and national populations who claim to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation.’"⁵

Smith therefore assumes that nationalism has deep roots, because the people in each specific ethnic or national community learn the stories of a shared past that are handed down from generation to generation in the form of subjective ‘ethnohistory,’ [which] sets limits to current aspirations and perceptions. Smith assumes that this ethnohistory or ethnosymbolic memory sets the parameters of national cultures and forces the would-be creators of a national identity to reconstruct the traditions, customs and institutions of the ethnic community or communities which form the basis of the nation.⁶ The concept of ethnic identity for Smith and others who build on his theories refers to cultural traditions