4 - Western Europe

Summary

In this chapter we will consider, though far more briefly, the shaping of nationhood and nationalism among the principal peoples of western Europe in order both to provide a context and necessary comparison for England and to define the linkage between pre-1780 and post-1780 – to adopt Hobsbawm's date-line – within the long history of our subject. This will at the same time help provide an outline of the principal alternative European approaches to the political structuring of nationality.

The impact of English nationhood was felt both westward and eastward. Westward we have explored the effect of its direct export into Scotland, Ireland and America, and the very different ways in which this export was received in the diverse circumstances of these three countries. Eastward there was no direct export except to sixteenth-century Holland, but elsewhere its impact was in the course of time even more powerful. England's model, to some extent revamped in America, became in the late eighteenth century the example of the world's only seemingly thoroughly successful political-social system: stronger, more powerful, more expansive, more capable of harnessing the energies of its people at home, of building up colonies overseas, of transforming its own economy into new industrial directions than any of its possible rivals. Compared with a decadent Spain, Germany and Italy divided into a multitude of states, mostly very unprogressive, France betrayed into defeat after defeat by its autocratic bonds, Britain's advance from the relative insignificance of a century earlier to become the master model of modernity, political, economic and intellectual, was strikingly obvious.