CHAPTER IX - NATIONALITIES AND NATIONALISM

Summary

The years round about 1830 were momentous for the progress of a cause little regarded in 1815, the cause of nationality. About the same time the word ‘nationality’ was first used as a term with a special political significance. It was accepted by the Académie Française in 1835. In 1834 a Russian, Pletkov, spoke of it (Narodnost) as a new word of unclear meaning; it was rapidly becoming current in Czech and Italian and had for some time been known in Germany (Nationalität or Volkstum) and England. To define it was not easy. In the sixties the Frenchman Buchez commented that the word had had a prodigious success, although people did not know whence it came and perhaps because they did not know what it meant. And he added ‘It means not only the nation, but also the something in virtue of which a nation continues to exist even when it has lost its autonomy’. Political scientists have since essayed elaborate definitions, but it may well be that Buchez's vague formula is as good as any and that it was precisely because of its vagueness that the word had become so popular: ‘Each theorist, each party, each country was able to read into it what it wished, what justified its own aspirations.’ For liberals it implied liberty and a degree of popular sovereignty—thus Mazzini could speak of ‘the progressive principle which constitutes British nationality’; for conservatives the maintenance of native traditions and an established order of society; for others a community spiritually bound by a common heritage of language and culture or one linked by bonds of blood or a special relationship to a homeland.