Some of the basic features of nationalism in its East European context have already been touched on. It is time to indicate some of the factors which enabled nationalism to develop in this period.
The fact of Eastern Europe's ethnic and linguistic complexity is not, on its own, an adequate explanation for the rise of nationalism. Before the eighteenth century the number of different peoples and languages had not posed an especial administrative problem. In an age where literacy was confined to a small social elite, it was still possible to operate a rudimentary tax collection and legal system by means of traditional customs and a traditionally accepted lingua franca.
The Enlightenment changed all this. The diversity of peoples in each of Eastern Europe's states was on its own an obstacle to their rulers' attempts at enlightened reform. A more complicated and rationalised administration presupposed a common language. The expansion of education, to create a bureaucratic class capable of implementing enlightened reforms, also demanded a common language, since the alternative was a multiplicity of education systems in different languages. By the time serious efforts were being made to impose enlightened reform, however, the consciousness of possessing a different culture, rooted in one's own language, was more widely distributed among some East European peoples, or at least among their elites. Thus Enlightenment itself helped stimulate national consciousness by provoking a reaction against its homogenising aspects; the uproar in Hungary in the 1780s when Joseph II imposed German as the language of state is the clearest example of this.
What national consciousness meant in the eighteenth century, however, needs careful qualification, especially in Eastern Europe. Firstly, it is important to bear in mind that the cultural definition of a nation, in Eastern Europe, quite quickly assumed political overtones, just as political definitions of the nation in Western Europe almost immediately started applying cultural criteria such as language.4 Secondly, what passed for nationalism, to begin with, rested on an extremely narrow definition of what the nation was, or rather who belonged to it.
The German philosopher Herder, already mentioned, whose writings on the subject of nationality were widely read in Eastern Europe, was much influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other representatives of what has been called
Romanticism. Such thinking constituted a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, stressing instead the diversity, the mystery, the irrationality even, of nature, including human nature.
Herder's interest in the origins of human societies, and especially their language, led him to define a people (in German, Volk) in terms of its language, customs and history. For Herder nationality was a cultural quality possessed by each people as a result of its natural historical evolution; the term for him did not have political connotations. A nation (Nation), by contrast, in Herder's terminology could also be understood as something quite different: the totality of people living within a particular state, in other words a political concept. It is significant that Herder used the French word for this equation of 'nation' with 'state'; in doing so he was employing a usage of 'nation' no different from that current in Western Europe by the 1780s. Herder regarded nations (or states) as responsible for much of the unhappiness in human history. Nationality, however, was a positive thing, the natural expression of a people's inner 'soul', and mankind would be at peace only if all nationalities were free to cultivate their cultural identity. Each nationality should be free and none should have dominion over another.
Herder's emphasis on the historical origins of language, culture and the national (volkisch) identity of peoples was to give a powerful impetus to the development of nationalism, although Herder himself was hardly a nationalist but rather a humanitarian idealist. In particular Herder's condemnation of multinational states as 'patched-up contraptions' and 'lifeless monstrosities'5 which stifled the cultural development of their constituent peoples was to resonate throughout the nineteenth century. Herder was one of the first to single out the Slavs as a group of distinct peoples whose history and culture deserved to be studied and preserved.
The early reception of Herder's thinking, however, was a rather garbled one. Many of those who took up his ideas in the German lands and Eastern Europe failed to maintain his distinction between people, or nationality, and 'nation'. Instead the two terms with time became virtually interchangeable, to the point where the use of either 'nation' or 'nationality' was synonymous with the idea of a cultural community, identified primarily by language. This was largely a nineteenth-century development; yet clearly the identification of peoples such as the Slovaks or the Serbs as nations, despite their statelessness, originated in Herderian ideas. From the discovery that nations had a cultural uniqueness, it was but a short step to demanding that they should also enjoy a political autonomy.
In the meantime, however, the mantra of the nation had been adopted by certain classes of people in Eastern Europe in an equally political but much more exclusive sense. This was the class-based nationalism of the Hungarian and Polish nobility. In both the Kingdom of Hungary (including Croatia) and the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, political rights had long been exercised solely by this relatively numerous section of society. Nobles were happy to appropriate the new language of nationalism as an additional weapon in the defence of their traditional privileges against monarchical power. Yet for many years, well into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century, this noble nationalism was to pose as representative of society as a whole. Because nobles referred to themselves as the 'nation', they were not only accepted as such by outside observers but their values tended to be absorbed also by those few members of the middle class who were eventually allowed to play a political role. Certainly in the eighteenth century nationalism in these lands remained very much a gentry-led affair.
We can nevertheless see, by the late eighteenth century, a series of cultural awakenings which, however varied their origins, can be said to have laid the foundations for nineteenth-century nationalism. Indeed, nationalists have tended ever since to refer to these phenomena as 'national revivals', as a 'renascence', as if the nation had been there, dormant, all along. What all these awakenings involved, in reality, was the gradual application of Herder's insights to the study of the language and history of individual peoples, many of whom before this had no agreed, written language and very little in the way of recorded history. Everywhere, from the Baltic to the Greek world, the new interest in the historical roots of human societies began to prompt research into where Eastern Europe's peoples had come from, how their languages were spoken and how they were to be classified. The first dictionaries, grammars and in some cases alphabets were produced, followed by the first collections of oral poetry and folk tales and the first literary works.
This process of awakening depended heavily on the socio-economic development of individual societies and above all on the existence of an educated class. In the cases of Hungary and Poland—Lithuania, the nobility, as a class wealthy enough to command a private education, filled this role to some extent. Even here, however, the education of nobles was by no means uniform, and the establishment of schools for nobles was an important milestone in the creation of an educated class. Even more important was the establishment of universal educational systems in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1773 and the Habsburg Monarchy between 1774 and 1777. The aim of such reform was, of course, to maximise the efficiency of the state, but since the language of instruction at primary level was necessarily in the native tongue of the pupils, the result was to create for the first time a mass base of literacy, which was crucial to the spread of nationalism. Where no such educational system was in place, in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the spread of nationalism was correspondingly delayed. In these parts of Eastern Europe, the principal source of any sense of cultural identity at first could be only the various subdivisions of Orthodoxy: the Greek, Romanian and Serb Orthodox churches. These organisations, tolerated on both sides of the Ottoman— Habsburg border, constituted for most of the eighteenth century the only educated class of their respective peoples. The great exception, in the Ottoman domains, was the omnipresent Greek merchant class, a class which because of its foreign contacts, language skills and growing wealth was uniquely equipped to act as an importer of ideas from the outside world, as well as to finance Greek-language schools and publications.
Before the turn of the century, this tiny new class of educated East Europeans, whether nobles or clerics or the still minuscule urban middle class, had begun the process of self-discovery, which was to make the cult of the nation a dominant one in the next century.
World History
