1. The Problem

We all know the standard picture. Collectivist, exclusivist and irrationalist national ideologies remain, we are told, in a blatant contrast with liberal ideas: rationalist, individualist and universalist. This standard view is slowly changing nowadays and the theoretical possibility of “liberal nationalism” (I refer to the title of an excellent book of Jael Tamir) is more and more widely acknowledged. All the same, historians tend to see nationalism as inimical to liberalism. Perhaps this pertains to Eastern and Central Europe more than to the Western part of the Continent, as in the West a civic nationalism is said to have developed, whereas in the East intolerant “cultural” (i.e. based on national culture as a background of common identity) nationalism is supposed to prevail.^[1]
I would like to show that through the 19th century, national and liberal ideas were much more closely connected than it is usually supposed.
Moreover, I would like to argue that the mistaken view of national-liberal enmity proceeds, in a high degree, from a confusion of the two different types of national ideologies: one that stemmed from Enlightenment and Romantic roots, and another that developed at the turn of the 20th century.
All too often “nationalism” is perceived as a single, if multi-faceted, widespread phenomenon that dominated European society and politics in the 19th century and most of the 20th century. Most historians (let us risk an unauthorised generalisation) trace the illiberal potential of some modern national ideals back to the 19th century, if not to earlier times. I hope to make this attitude a bit less convincing.

2. East-Central European Liberalism: a Specificity of a Regional Model

I shall not waste time on defining nationalism, liberalism or East-Central Europe.^[2] Usually after reading a text the reader roughly feels what the author meant by terms he used. This way of defining by context seems to me much more sensible than elegant, but rarely helpful, definitions a priori.
Let us begin with an obvious statement: before 1848 liberal and national ideals were considered allies, not rivals. Was that only because they shared a common enemy – the “Vienna system”, or was there a deeper affinity? The latter, I believe, is the case.
Once we take a superficial glimpse on the liberal ideas in East-Central Europe through the 19th century, we may discern a few manifest features. People, groups and ideas who considered themselves, or were considered by others, as liberal, were, first of all, centralist and etatist. Contrary to the superficial view that equals liberalism with laissez-faire economy, it seems obvious that even in the classical Western liberalism “state” was at least as important category as “liberty”; in economically backward regions this feature was even more important. Experience of backwardness, more and more pressing on the consciousness of the elites, demanded active economic and social politics in order to overcome the distance between our region and the idealised West. Much was to be done in every field of human activity in order to make it possible for the “invisible hand” of the market to direct the fates of society and economy.
The tradition of enlightened absolutism, of Joseph II and of Frederick the Great, was invoked by the liberals as their own. They preached the ideals of individual liberty with somewhat less ardour than their Western counterparts; the main enemy was not the omnipotent state. This place was reserved for the remnants of the feudal system: the powerful estates, especially the nobility, the Church and urban corporations such as guilds. All these were instances of “particularism” and “exclusivity”, threatening both the individual freedom and the centralised bureaucratic state. The state, aiming at introduction of equality before the law, appeared in this perspective as liberator of individuals from the feudal bondage. There was no place for conflict.
At the same time liberalism, in the East as in the West, retained the universalism of the Enlightenment. Believing in the salutary effects of competition and rivalry, at the same time on a deeper level, it believed in the universal harmony that grows spontaneously from the competing particular interests. In the liberal Weltanschauung all individual gains in the long run help to perfect the whole – or they are not real gains. The liberals never could allow themselves to abandon the universalist phraseology, as the appeal to universal values formed one of their basic justifying strategies.
These two features – centralism and universalism – formed the premise of the liberal attitudes to the national idea.

3. Universalism of National Ideas in the 19th Century

Now it is perfectly obvious that the same two features formed the core of various national ideologies throughout the majority of the 19th century. Nationalist universalism (if we may be permitted this oxymoron) stemmed from romantic, rather than enlightened, roots; in Herderian tradition, it equally valued the growth of every nation, in each of them seeing the manifestation of God's omnipotence.
Karol Libelt, well-known Polish romantic philosopher, wrote in 1841 an essay on German literature in which German national revival was described as “a great apotheosis of a nation. High over earthly life and every day problems a nation rises to heaven with a shining face of its spirit, with its clean robe white as snow. [...] An observer, astonished and full of reverence, looks into this miracle as the Apostles did at the Mount of Tabor”^[3]. For Libelt, in a true Romantic spirit, revival of every nation was equally precious and admirable.
Some years earlier Adam Mickiewicz developed a historiosophical scheme in which Polish history was built into history of universal strivings towards liberty. Poland’s sufferings, taught Mickiewicz, have higher moral value, as they are not a particular matter of the Poles, but they are indispensable for the victory of liberty on earth. “The nation shall rise from the dead and shall free all nations of Europe from slavery. [...] And as with Christ’s Resurrection from the dead all bloody sacrifices have ceased, thus, after the resurrection of the Polish nation, shall all warfare among Christians come to an end”^[4]
In 1848 in his famous letter to Frankfurt, František Palacký declared: “With all my burning love towards my nation, still I praise good of humanity and of learning higher than national good”.^[5]
A little later the Romanian democratic leader Nicolae Balcescu drew consequences from the collapse of the revolution: all the Romanian uprisings lost because they were “inspired more by the spirit of vengeance than by the love of liberty”, whereas “liberty triumphs without performing vengeance, or there is no liberty any more but only vengeance. Nowhere and never has as yet the liberty been grounded by the suppression of justice and by the government of terror. [...]The problem to be solved in Transilvania was not and is not how the Rumanians, Hungarians, Saxons and Seklers should act in order to remain alone in the land and to expel all the other peoples, but it should be solved by proclaiming a generally binding law or equality for all the individuals and groups.”^[6]
The above quotations, chosen at random and without any claim to representativity, surely cannot prove anything. Counter-quotations, often from the same authors, could be found easily, and declarations like the above can be (and were) interpreted in various ways. The great Hungarian political philosopher, Baron Jozsef Eötvös, wryly observed in a well-known passage that nations claim justice and equality so long as they are suppressed and practice intolerance and oppression immediately after they are given equal rights.^[7] Many historians stress that the lofty ideals of the leading intellectuals, even if treated seriously, did not reach the educated public (not to say about masses) who took from Mickiewicz, Palacký and others only what suited the most rude chauvinist stereotypes.^[8]
However, granted all that, are not these quotations worth some reflection? After all, they were not uttered by some third-rate figures but by people considered important spokesmen of the national cultures of the nations in question. Most certainly these (and analogous) opinions were not casual but arose from a mature and full-fledged intellectual system.
This is as clear in the Polish as in the Czech case. Due to the efforts of numerous historians we now possess a detailed knowledge of the Polish national ideology in the period of Romanticism. It seems obvious that in the value system of the leading personalities of the Polish Romanticism the highest place was not occupied by the Polish national idea but by universal values such as freedom, humanity or moral perfection. Polish Romantic messianism very clearly, as can be seen from the above quotation, treated the Polish national idea precisely as a messiah – a messenger, or herald, of other ideas, higher and more important than the national one (in case of the Mickiewicz's book from which the above quotation was taken it was universal freedom). ^[9]
The Czech national idea, different as it was from the Polish one, also displayed elements of national messianism, as well as a clear primacy of universalist over national ideas. Palacký's scheme of Czech history saw the Hussite period as the great messianist epoch when the Czech nation realised for the first time the ideals of freedom and tolerance that are only now, in the 19th century, slowly and imperfectly approached by the West of Europe (incidentally, an analogous scheme for Polish history was developed in the same time by Joachim Lelewel). This glorious past gives the Czechs of today a special task: to stand up to their glorious traditions as fighters of God who committed the Czech nation with the task of spreading liberty on earth.^[10]
These ideas, combining the (protestant) Christianity with political liberalism, were present in Palacký's great historical work and were revived, restated and re-stressed with a new vigour by Thomas Masaryk, two generations later. The campaign against the patriotic forgeries of the allegedly medieval manuscripts revealed its ethical context in Masaryk's opinion that the Czech national movement should rest on firm moral foundations and that no excuse should tempt the Czech patriots to depart from truth while seeking national gain.
This was certainly the old idea of Palacký, who believed to have found his idea of truth in the Hussite epoch (misunderstanding it totally, but this is another matter). The ethical context of the Czech national revival was exposed with a dramatic force by a young literary critic, Hubert Gordon Schauer, who asked openly (1886): what right do we have to be Czechs; what gives us right to educate our children as Czechs rather than as Germans, thus closing them the door to a great European culture? Schauer's answer was that only a contribution to the human development in general can give the Czechs a necessary moral justification. “Without the consciousness of a moral calling there is no nation”.^[11]
Masaryk's book Česká Otázka (1895) gave a name to that problem which from that day on right up to the present day, is known as “the Czech question”. Masaryk himself, who knew both Herder and Mickiewicz, developed the idea of Czech national mission that consisted in spreading the humanitarian ideal in the world. This mission justifies the existence of the Czech nation, and, eventually, the independent Czech state. “No state formation without philosophic justification” – thus Masaryk's ideology was summarised by Ernest Gellner, in a sympathetic if slightly ironical essay.^[12]
While examining the mutual relation of national and universalist ideas, we cannot miss one more feature of national movements in the region. This feature, so obvious to everyone closely concerned with East-Central European 19th century, has somehow escaped the theoreticians of nationalism. I have in mind the fact that in our region the idea of nation-state was practically non-existent, at least before the 1890s.
Poland and Hungary seem to be exceptions. Polish Romantic poets and other intellectuals used to write about the independence of Poland and the independence of the Polish nation as equivalents. Their ideology, however, was to a high degree based on the historical rights of the Polish nation (and not on the natural rights of nations as such) and – what is more – the Romantic Polish nation could be multiethnic and multilingual. As regards the Hungarian case, the element of historical rights was even stronger than in the Polish instance. The Hungarian state after 1867, in spite of the increasingly pressing politics of Magyarisation, never renounced the idea of a political (as opposed to ethnically defined) Hungarian nation. Therefore, I do not think that either the Polish or Hungarian cases disprove my argument here.
There seems to exist a unwritten alliance of oppressors and oppressed – or rather of historians and publicists descending from the oppressed and oppressors of the former ages. It is clearly in the interest of both to stress the radicalism of the national ideology of small nationalities. From the perspective of the newly established nation-states of the 20th century, any suggestion that a venerable hero of any “national awakening” could have aimed at anything less than independent statehood must have been felt as blasphemy. On the other hand, the descendants of former masters felt it necessary to stress the radicalism of their former subjects in order to justify ex post the harsh measures taken against the national aspirations of the minority.
If, as usually is the case, no clear declaration can be found in the writings of a national patriarch regarding the desirability of a separate statehood, a simple device is evoked: censorship, it is said, prevented the national activists from speaking aloud their desires. They therefore had to speak in parables and allusions, to use “language of Aesop” in order to escape repressions. This reasoning certainly carries its weight, and censorship surely seriously deformed the intellectual life of the period and region we are interested in.^[13] However, censorship is not a constant, and given the average pace of political change in the 19th century, anybody in that epoch would, provided that he lived through an ordinary span of human life, sooner or later find opportunity to express his political ideas, if only he really wanted to. The possibility of emigration or publishing abroad anonymously was always open. The regime of Prince Paskevych in Russian Poland between 1830 and the Crimean War was surely at least as strict as that of Metternich in Austria, but it did not prevent the Polish intellectuals from proclaiming, both in exile and in conspiracy, Polish claims to independence.
The “censorship argument” is sometimes supplemented by another. Sometimes, it is argued, the national leaders restrained their demands on tactical grounds even when a temporary liberalisation seemed to permit them to speak their minds openly (as in 1848 in the Habsburg Monarchy). This argument, I believe, is even less tenable than the former one. If somebody never spoke his mind, either because of censorship or on tactical grounds, what rights do we (I mean we historians) have to presuppose the existence of an unstated demand? There seems to be a vicious circle here: Influenced by the strength of 20th century nationalisms we attribute the desire for the nation-state to the 19th century leaders, and then use the example of these leaders in order to prove the force of the nationalisms. Besides, assuming the existence of the tacit demand for independence under the surface of the loyal declarations, why not use the same method in the opposite direction when interpreting the new radical nationalisms in the early 20th century: why not claim that all the nationalist phraseology were only a façon de parler, a lip-service to a new fashion which did not really influenced the political life (I do not claim that it was so, I only show that the method can work in two opposite directions).
There is some irony here as well: the greatest defenders of, say, a Palacky, who try to credit him with the idea of independent Czech (or, depending on a historian's political convictions, Czechoslovak, or perhaps Czecho-Slovak) state fail to notice that they willy-nilly burden their idol with a charge of lying, implying the falsity of his public utterances. Risking charge of naivete, I would rather to take declarations of the leaders of national awakening at the face value. They were, most of them, sincerely convinced of the ethical value of their nation-building mission; they mythicised the history of their nations, so if we believe that they lied, they most likely lied in a manner extolling rather than diminishing future national glory.
I would even risk claiming more: throughout most of the 19th century, the idea of the independent nation-state was impossible to articulate in the existing categories of political thought prevailing in the region. The ideas of statehood, of independence and of sovereignty appear only as a result of a long and sophisticated evolution and having once appeared, they may disappear anew. The demand for “independence within the Habsburg realms” so often heard in 1848/1849 must have sound like a contradiction in terms to a generation of 1918. We perhaps may look deeper and understand that the very term independence was not at all clear. Legal historians stress that technically no Habsburg “state” existed before 1849, as the imperial title of Austria was not correlated to any territory but pertained only to the monarch personally. The monarch's title to rule varied from country to country: king in Hungary and Bohemia, archduke in lower and upper Austria, etc. Traditions of the Holy Roman Empire, of the German Bund, of various historic-political entities, in eternal conflict and symbiosis at the same time, may have been deprived of much of their importance by the bureaucratic centralisation of the Theresian-Josephine period, but did not lose their rooting in political ambitions and human loyalties and reappeared immediately with any liberalisation of the regime. I raise this point in order to stress that political loyalties were divided and a place for the very idea of one political loyalty that outbids all its rivals was non-existent; such an idea is, I assume, a necessary element of the concept of a sovereign nation-state.
If most of the Polish elites in 1815 seemed ready to believe that the Polish independence with the Russian Tsar as the Polish King was quite an acceptable and even natural solution, so the attitude of most of the Habsburg nationalities was analogous at least to 1849 (and, in fact, much longer, I believe).
Let us be fair: images of former glory surely mesmerized at least some readers of Palacký, Ludevit Štur or other national “awakeners”; and at least some of those enthralled by the (real or invented) history of their nation must have indulged in fantasies regarding the future return of old glory. Such patriotic fantasies should not be disregarded: their existence made possible the creation of new nation-states after 1918, and the mental maps influenced the political demands for various territories. The importance of these fantasies should not, however, be exaggerated. They were not part of political life and they were not even articulated in the language of politics. They were nothing more than distant images not taken seriously even by those who enjoyed them, and disregarded by their believers themselves if only any real possibility appeared for practical political action.
The above pages were not meant to demonstrate the identity of national and liberal ideas. In the Czech debates of 1880s and 1890s those who considered themselves intellectual heirs of Palacký – the Czech liberals, especially the so called Young Czechs – were the most zealous enemies of Masaryk. He, in turn, reproached them, and the liberal mentality in general, for misunderstanding the religious perspective of human existence.
Analogously, no one could claim that Polish messianism in its Romantic version belonged to the liberal movement. Liberalism seemed to the Romantics much too prosaic, bourgeois and colourless to win their sympathy. The very concept of rule of law seemed to them a dry formalism that restrained the possibilities of spiritual development.
In a similar way, the absence of a concept of independent nation-state is not in itself a sure indicator of a close connection between liberal and national ideas. A national movement that does not articulate clearly the necessity of a nation state may sometimes be much more antiliberal than one that does. At least some of the modern integral nationalisms in the early 20th century were directed much more against neighbouring ethnic groups than against the existing state system. They considered the representatives of “alien” nationalities (especially Jews and often Germans) living on what they perceived “their own” territory as the enemy much more menacing than a distant state authority.
Generally, however, the lack of a catchword of national independence facilitated the co-operation of liberal and national movements, as it made the national movement more prone to political compromises and implicitly acknowledged the wider political loyalty than the national one (i.e. towards the state).
My aim in the above pages has been to remind us of what is rather obvious: the central position of universalist attitudes in the 19th century national ideas.

4: Liberals, Nation Builders, and Problem of Centralisation

We may try now to outline, without pretensions for exactness, the connotations of the world “national” throughout most of the 19th century. Those who professed the idea designated with that term feared a menace from two sides. The first enemy was cosmopolitan, and that meant as a rule “conservative” and “aristocratic”. The “accused” was not reproached with preferring a wider and more universal loyalty than the national one; quite the contrary, the nobles were condemned for an egoism that ignored all the world exterior to their caste and sympathised only with nobles of various countries. A national idea, incorporating mutual sympathy between various oppressed nationalities, embodied the true cosmopolitanism, therefore was not narrower but wider and more generous than the “cosmopolitan” but socially circumscribed world of the nobility.
Another opposition to “national” was the “particular”. It included the territorial regionalisms as well as various forms of class egoism and corporate privileges from the inglorious times of “feudality”. The national idea of the 19th century perceived itself as gathering and uniting, not dividing and separating. The wide national community was to be opened before the eyes of provincial parishioners and the egoism of local interest was to be replaced by brotherly love, first for the members of one's own nation and than for all humanity. Fighting both “cosmopolitanism” and the “parochialism”, the national idea considered itself universal and perceived its enemies as various forms of particularism.
Such an understanding of “national” makes its harmony with “liberal” easy to grasp. Aiming at replacing local bonds with unitary state citizenship and estate privileges with equality before the law, the liberal idea could only embrace the national idea in the above understanding as its best ally. Liberalism, by its nature a somewhat “dry” doctrine, has found in the national idea a necessary supplement that has provided it with a capacity to arouse emotions, if not in the masses (historians are more sceptical now about the mass appeal of the national idea than a generation before) then at least in the intellectual elites. This should not be understood in a “cynical” way: I do not attempt to claim absurdly that liberals deliberately have chosen the national idea as a vehicle of their modernising ambitions. Their devotion to the national cause was obviously sincere. The affinities, however, may have helped a person with liberal leanings sincerely to embrace the national idea and vice versa: they could have made somebody sympathetic with national ideas a more or less probable potential sympathiser of liberalism.
All the more so, an obvious parallel recommended itself: rights of individuals could be augmented by implanting an analogous concept of national rights that can be claimed by nations as “collective individuals”. This was seen as logical development, not as adversary of the liberal doctrine.
Paradoxically, liberal influence on national ideas could sometimes result in making them more stiff, rigid and intolerant – also less “liberal” in the conventional sense of the term. The general conviction was that “progressive” equals “centralist”, so liberal elements strengthened the national movements' intolerance towards ethnic minorities on their territory. This conviction was even shared by many leaders of the small nationalities, which was one of the reasons why the postulate of independent nation states was so difficult to formulate. It was tempting, and perhaps even unavoidable, to see national movements in this perspective as obstructing progress and liberty; as the remnants of feudal particularities, as privilege analogous to privileges of estates and other corporations from the former epoch. The attitude of the Hungarian liberals before and during the Revolution of 1848 is the best example here: while preaching equality before the law and individual freedom for all the inhabitants of Lands of St. Stephen’s Crown, they declined to recognise any nation as a collective body, besides the Hungarian in the Hungarian lands. Thus, in Istvan Deak’s words, Kossuth could be “a liberal and a nationalist for whom the two ideologies were not incompatible”^[14]
Reading the sources, it is often quite difficult to say whether the enmity towards ethnic minorities or regional differences was pronounced on the basis of universalist progressivism or national feelings (it is enough to recollect the famous texts of Frederick Engels on the role of the Slavs in revolution of 1848 to see how difficult to disentangle is this mixture of progressive idealism and national prejudice). Usually such feelings of enmity or nationalism fuelled one other, although the national motive was rarely appealed to openly. Usually a universalist justification prevails, and this strengthens the alliance still more. Once again it is necessary to remember the reservation made above: of course national activists are not using universalist and progressivist phraseology in order to cover up their aggressive designs on other nations. Universalism is not a cover-up on a national ideology; throughout the greater part of the 19th century it is its essential component.
And so it came to pass, that for a great part of 19th century the word “national” was to became more or less synonymous with “liberal”. The combinations “national-democratic” or “national-progressive” abounded in the names of political groups all over the region, but even when they did not appear the term “national” alone was sufficient to arouse suspicions of liberal associations. Between 1848 and the 1870s it was, we may say, a “technical term” which – if uttered as a title of newspaper, a political catchword or name of a party – made the public aware that a group in question belonged to what may be imprecisely defined as the “liberal camp”.

5. The Test of 1848

The Revolution of 1848/1849 did not mark, as often assumed, the end of liberal-national co-operation. What is really fascinating in that epoch, is – I presume – not the strife, but the numerous and at least partially successful attempts at reconciliation. František Palacký's letter to the Frankfurt assembly is usually interpreted – correctly – as assertion of the Czech independent position against the German claims at dominance. At the same time, however, it is one of the most appealing entreaties for international co-operation and supranational statehood produced in the 19th century, which should not (for reasons shown above) be dismissed as mere political tactics.^[15]
This means that we cannot omit the Slavonic Congress in Prague in June 1848. While its importance for the nation-building of the Slav nations cannot be denied, its Austro-Slavic emphasis should also not be forgotten. More importantly, neither should be its attempts at bringing about a compromise between various Slavonic nationalities. Especially interesting, bearing in mind the future growth of mutual conflict, was the endeavour to negotiate a settlement between the Galician Poles and Ukrainians. After sharp debates within the “Polish-Ruthenian section” of the Congress, intellectuals taking part in the debates accepted a compromise that recognised the equality of two nationalities within the land and at the same time restrained from dividing Galicia into two separate provinces. It never was put into practice, and the politicians of both sides in Galicia disavowed the deal, but it shows that intellectual possibility of compromise was not yet closed.
We may also mention en passant the belated Hungarian nationality law from 1849, as well as attempts of Polish exiles in Paris to bring about a compromise between the Slavs and Magyars in revolutionary Hungary. Prince Adam Czartoryski's agent tried also to stimulate the Polish-Czech co-operation at the imperial Austrian diet in Kremsier [Kromeriz] in early 1849 (whereas Polish liberals from Galicia preferred the Germans, considered more progressive).
Speaking of the Kremsier Diet, we cannot miss the draft of the Austrian constitution elaborated there. This was an event without precedent, as representatives of the peoples of the Western (non-Hungarian) half of the Monarchy managed to come to terms one with another and agree on a solution that, while it completely satisfying nobody, was at least acceptable to all as a lesser evil, as it did not show undue favour to anybody. Its greatest asset was the fact that it was not imposed from above but rather negotiated. This asset was especially clearly seen from the perspective of sharp ethnic conflicts of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Liberal intellectuals, hoping for reconciliation, or mourning its impossibility invoked the 1849 constitution – perhaps not completely without reason – as the last chance of Monarchy, wasted by the short-sightedness of its ruling circles.
All this does not, perhaps, match the intensity of the ethnic conflicts of 1848-1849. As a rule, a naive “internationalist” standing of March 1848 soon gave way to enmity made all the more stronger as it was fuelled by disillusionment. Nevertheless, it is enough to have a look at the developments in the same region after 1918 to recognise the enormous change both in ideals and in practical behaviour. “Springtime of the nations” at least partially deserves its name and its later myth as epoch of brotherhood of free peoples and is, I believe, not completely groundless.

6. New Nationalism

A clear watershed in the history of national movements and ideas is marked by the quarter of century between 1880s and about 1910. All of the features of national movements that were identified above as characteristic for the most part of the 19th century were transformed into their very opposites.
First of all, new nationalism was exclusive. This was seen especially clearly in its attitude towards the Jewish question. Whereas the old national movement advocated assimilation, considering the Jews as not-yet-conscious members of the nation (not unlike peasantry), new nationalists considered them aliens who should be forbidden from joining the nation. Whenever the national leaders and liberal politicians in the 19th century uttered some anti-Jewish opinions, it was, as a rule, criticism of orthodox Jewry for its resistance against assimilation. The assimilated Jews were presented as examples to be imitated. With the new nationalism this attitude changed completely: now the assimilated were considered the enemy, all the worse because they were allegedly hiding their enmity under the mask of European culture. The orthodox were considered less dangerous.
Secondly, the new nationalism started to denounce modernisation. Through most of the 19th century national movements were, by and large, agents of modernisation, by the very fact of their centralist and inclusivist tendencies. In the early 20th century, in turn, the anti-Jewish exclusivism of the new nationalism implied distance to the idea of equality before the law. Dislike towards the “aliens” induced it to praise of “native” and “primordial” values, and criticise urbanisation and industrialisation as threatening the national spirit.
Thirdly, it was particularist. It proclaimed openly that the good of the nation should be the most important value, prior both to universal and individual matters.
Fourthly, it was aggressive. It renounced the faith, so central both to liberalism and to the “old” national idea, that particular interests are somehow harmonised by some “invisible hand”, be it of the Market, of the Providence, or of the Laws of Historical Development. In its place it introduced the Social Darwinism, understood as the essential inevitability of group conflict in which no mediation is possible (the former generation liked to talk about the “struggle of being” as well, but as a rule understood this struggle as a fight with forces of nature, with superstition and ignorance, and not with other human beings).
Last, but not least, it was a modern mass political movement with everything that this concept involves. Old “patriotic” groups were what Max Weber called Honoratiorenparteien; they were talking about the masses but they meant no more than middle-class. They were, in fact, informal groups gathered around periodicals and no more than dreaming about mass appeal. Their language was discursive, calculated to convince rather than arouse emotions; even if their favourite phraseology was often Romantic, it was a domesticated Romanticism devoid of existential questions, reduced to patriotic sentiment and dangerously close to Biedermaier. In art their aesthetics was that of neoclassicism and historism. New national groups, by contrast, changed – that was clear at the first sight – the style of communicating. Theirs was what Carl E. Schorske called “Politics in a new key”. In order to achieve widest possible support they consciously restrained the refinement of their arguments and emphasised the irrational features. Their aggressive demeanour was an element of this process.
Metamorphosis was gradual and the new national ideology took much from the old. First of all, it received a system of images and myths, patriotic stereotypes and historical heroes. Secondly, much connected with the above, it inherited a vocabulary, usually changing its meaning (as we saw with “struggle for existence” above). Then, it appropriated the network of connections, groups of followers and organisations. In case of the Poles in Galicia (which I studied in detail) this transfer can be clearly observed on the instance of such organisations as “Sokol” movement or “Towarzystwo Szkoly Ludowej” (Society of Popular Education, Polish equivalent of the Czech Matica Skolska or the German Schulverein). Established by the Gallicia liberals – classical exponents of the post-romantic model of national idea – as means of spreading their doctrine, these organisations, together with a few other, less important ones, were taken over by the “new” national democrats in the early 20th century.
The “new” national ideology turned openly against liberalism, accusing it of cosmopolitanism, egoism, materialism and neglect of national issues. The defensive strategies of the “old” liberalism were similar in the whole region: the first reaction was one of amazement and incredulity, provoked by the appearance of a new political current that considered itself a champion of national idea. That role liberals used to consider a central element of their own programmes. Then, the instinctive response was to disclose the falsity of the new impostors' claims and to prove their own (liberals') legitimate status as mouthpiece of national interests. This, however, turned out to be more difficult than it seemed and the “old” liberals were compelled to stress more and more the national element of their programme in order to document their patriotic credentials. Inevitably, however, they were bound to come to a certain point when the competition could not go further: this point was the appearance of a new attitude towards the Jewish question. Liberals, obviously, were assimilators; the new nationalists, obviously, were not. At the moment when the new nationalists proclaimed the exclusion of the Jews from the national community, their rivals faced a dilemma in which they had to take sides.
Either they imitated the nationalists, turned their backs on the assimilated Jewry that up to this moment had constituted so important a fraction of their supporters – and immediately lost their identity, dissolving themselves in a new, expanding nationalist movement. Or they stood by their old ideals, defended the assimilation and the inclusivist vision of nation, and retained their identity, paying for it with marginalisation and isolation in the world of the mass politics. Whatever decision was chosen, it marked the end of the old consensus of liberal and national ideals.^[16]
In order to see the full picture, we should add another possibility that stood before the “old” liberals, i.e. alliance with the social democrats. As this topic is not part of the present discussion, suffice it to say that the closer and closer connection of “post-liberal” intellectuals with the social democrats was a fact of the early 20th century. It was made possible on the one side by the renunciation of revolutionary aims by the socialists and the slow drift of the socialist movement towards Reformism, and on the other side by the relinquishing of the laissez-faire element by the liberals. This alliance, in the long run, led to results similar to the alliance with the nationalists: the liberals' identity was lost in the social-democratic movement.
Of course the “old” universalist national idea did survive the defeat, as did the liberal ideals; in inter-war Poland it was revived by the non-communist social-democratic movement. In the 20th century, however, it had to compete with the “new” nationalism as outlined above – but this is another story.

7. Conclusion: Nationalism, Determinism and Reason of State

I wrote this essay because I am more and more convinced that by covering all the national phenomena by one umbrella of “nationalism” the historians and other researchers make a mistake that seriously diminishes their analytical possibilities. Two currents of national thought which I tried to delineate were different: as different as, say, liberalism and conservatism or conservatism and socialism. These movements do have numerous common elements but that usually are not confounded by historians or political scientists, even if sometimes there may be some trouble with ascribing a person or group to a given current.
The national idea of the 19th century and the modern nationalism are not two variants of the same stream (unless in a very wide sense, that both of them are modern political concepts). The doctrine that considers nation as a value subjected to other, more universal values, should not be confused with one absolutising the nation and national identity. Were the bare fact that somebody recognises nation (however defined) as an important political category sufficient to make him nationalist, then the term would have almost lost its meaning for the history of the 19th century.
To avoid misunderstanding I would like to stress that the difference between the two movements is analytical, not ethical. I do not keep secret my sympathy to Romantic national idea rather than to modern nationalism, but I realise that the first could at times be intolerant and chauvinist. I only claim that the axiology was different; expansionism motivated by desire to spread universal culture and expansionism motivated by one’s own nation’s self-interest are two different concepts, not to be confused. The acceptance of different nature of the two does not, I believe, depend on researcher’s political opinions; indeed, some leaders of the nationalist movement stressed the difference as strongly as I do here.
Another problem with the present Anglo-Saxon usage of the term “nationalism” is that it encourages finalist views on the past. Historians are tempted to see the modern nation state as a final effect of national development that started sometime in the Enlightenment. While reading numerous books on the subject one is inclined to suppose that once somebody started to collect folk tunes or prepare a dictionary of some minor language, a road stood open to the ethnic cleansing and forced transfers of population. Few would dare to say something like the above openly, but milder instances of such teleological attitudes abound in historiography. Historians tend to ascribe radical political aims to cultural movements, and take for granted that ultimate (even if unstated) aim of each national political movement was independent nation state. The concept of “phases” of national movement, advocated by numerous otherwise excellent specialists, is especially blameworthy here, as it implies a single scheme of historical development (if not in the works of its creators, at least of most of their careless successors).
This teleological attitude is even more strengthened by tacit identification of “nation” and “nationalism” (present implicitly in the title of famous book by Ernest Gellner, to quote just one example). I see no reason to consider connection between these two concepts unavoidable, even if we grant for a moment the widest possible definition of nationalism. There is nothing illogical in somebody believing that humanity is divided into nations (a assumption that Gellner supposed to be a nucleus of nationalism) without considering nation a central political category, and without considering national loyalty more important than all the others. (Indeed, such may have been the case in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.) The existence of “nations”, even of “national identity”, does not need to generate any sort of nationalism, not to speak about the drift towards the nation state. It does not, but most of the historians confuse two terms and (perhaps unconsciously) looks for nationalist ideology whenever nations appear.
Bertrand Russell has written somewhere that most interesting in historian's work is to be able to observe such situations in the past when two or more ways seemed to stay open in equilibrium and only a small stress on one side turned the scale. I am not sure if it is really most interesting; but it seems certain that the historian has always to have in mind the non-realised possibilities.^[17] Numerous historians have stressed that no national development of any given nation was a historical necessity, but I would like to claim more. It seems to me that no “objective” or irresistible social forces worked in the 19th century Europe in the direction of monoethnic nation states. The strong pressure of “national awakening” and growing national movements pressed not for nation states, but for equality of nationalities (“Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten”). The “phases” theory sees a sequence here: national movements claim equality first, independence afterwards. In my opinion it would be much more fruitful and interesting to treat the both possibilities as an alternative, not a sequence.
In order to stress the essential dissimilarity between the old national idea and the new nationalism an attempt should be made, I believe, to outline the evolution of national ideas in a somewhat different manner from the one prevailing now. Looking for predecessors of the “new” nationalism we should not, I presume, turn to the Romantic national idea but to a much older doctrine: to the idea of the Reason of State.
Romantic patriotism was open and unequivocal enemy of the Raison d'etat. For Mickiewicz “self-interest” was a pagan deity whereas national idea implied sacrifice and mutual love and was contrasted with egoism, Machavelianism and cynicism of the old monarchies. New national ideology, by contrast, enjoyed to talk about national egoism, national interest, reason of state, prerequisites of geopolitics and eternal conflict. If somebody supports in the name of patriotism the alien elements in our society, such as Jews or Ruthenians – wrote in 1912 one of the leaders of the Polish nationalism – then “in the name of patriotism not regulated by reason of state one can destroy the roots of one’s own nation’s existence and future.”^[18] (this quotation illustrates three problems at once: the exclusivism of the new nationalism, its opposition towards the old “patriotism”, as well as its connection with the “reason of state”).
Of course the old idea of Staatsraison was not connected with nations but with “arcana imperii” – the modes of rule and techniques of retaining power, but it well suited to be adopted by the nationalists. The connection is all the stronger as the new national ideology in whole East-Central Europe relied heavily on German nationalism where the traditions of Staatsraison survived and were becoming more and more fashionable. It should be sufficient to mention the famous book of Friedrich Meinecke Weltbűrgertum und Nationalstaat (1908): as we know, the author shows how the old universalist patriotism of a Goethe, with its idea that humanity is an inherent part of the German national feeling (Es ist nicht deutsch, bloss Deutsch zu sein – it is not in a German way, to be only a German) gave way to the modern German nationalism, rational, scientific and devoid of sentiments.
So, historians would do well to present the early 20th century nationalism in the perspective of growth of idea of reason of state rather than in the perspective of changing national ideas. Ethnic nationalism aiming at a monoethnic state, and national principle aiming at equality in a multinational state are better understood as two conflicting principles of political order than as two aspects (or “phases”) of the same principle. I do not claim to have invented this opinion that was fairly common in the late 19th century and was accepted by some historians,^[19] but it seems to me that it has fallen into oblivion. This is pity, since it suits facts and helps understanding the past much more than the theory of all-embracing nationalism.
All this should end in a brilliant, witty and compelling proposal for reform of historical terminology. “Instead of using term “nationalism” for all the phenomena from Herder to our days, let us use such and such terms for this and such and such for that” – a reader surely has right to hear something like this after (s)he managed to come up to this page. I am afraid I am not gifted enough to fulfil this task. Besides, the terminology is only part of the problem. Andrzej Walicki, advocating the adoption of the Anglo-Saxon usage in the Polish historiography, stresses that the term nationalism should never be used without adjectives explaining its meaning.^[20] This is perhaps acceptable solution – we are now nominalists, most of us – provided it is borne in mind that “Romantic Nationalism” and “integral nationalism” are two separate currents not two specimens of one “nationalism” (in the same way as “socialist democracy” and “liberal democracy” before 1989 were understood as two different political systems and not as two samples of “democracy”.) On the other hand, this solution presupposes a constant vigilance on historian's part, not to confuse the two. I am not sure whether this is not too high an expectation.
In the Polish language, as in many others, there exists a clear distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Jerzy Jedlicki advocates retaining this dualism, arguing about essential difference between the two. Jedlicki is right stressing that – contrary to prevalent declarations – the English term “nationalism” is not at all a neutral technical term, and quite often assumes derogatory connotations even in works of professional historians. The belief that English usage is value-free is not well founded.^[21]
There is only one serious doubt here: the term patriotism has at least two meanings itself. It was, as is generally known, widely used in the 18th century and meant loyalty towards the patria, towards territory, not towards people (like in the German term Landespatriotismus). This patriotism was surely something other than patriotism of the Romantic generation. So the price for making the meaning of the term “nationalism” more precise would be making the term “patriotism” very vague.
How to decide? Writing in Polish I do not hesitate to follow Jedlicki's advice rather than Walicki's, and to write about patriotism of a Mickiewicz or a Mazzini as opposed to nationalism of a Dmowski or a Mussolini. Writing in English I would rather avoid to take a clear stance (as the readers of the present text have perhaps noticed). I attempt to discern between national and nationalist, writing about “national ideas” and movements through the 19th century and reserving the expression “nationalist” as a technical term for certain political movements that appeared early in the 20th century. Such terminological possibilities as “old” and “new” nationalism or (after H. A. Winkler) “left” and “right” nationalism^[22] perhaps deserve some reflection as well.
Of course I do not propose it as a general rule. I am not so self-conceited as to believe that this text may change generally accepted usage, but as I am convinced this usage is unhappy, I felt an inner necessity to speak my mind. I realise that it is an ungrateful task for a historian to defend traditional usage against the new; but I really feel that in this case the traditional narrow meaning of the term “nationalism” was much less misleading and confusing than the new, wide one. I can only hope that my essay may perhaps induce some readers to consider the problem once more.