Adrian Hastings - The construction of nationhood. ethnicity, religion, and nationalism

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inherent, particularist, logic. Christian antisemitism was not significantly worse in Germany or Spain than in Poland or France. Both Catholic and Lutheran antisemitism were in the end subsidiary factors only, and in both Spain and Germany it was the race, more than the religion, of the Jews that guaranteed their persecution. Nothing, after all, could change their race, though religious conversion might mask it across a couple of generations and, of course, often did. It was that which threatened Iberian or German purity.

At this point German and Iberian nationalisms part course. German nationalism was shaped relatively little by religion except in the ways that every European nationalism was shaped by an underlying biblical vision of the world and the impact of the vernacular Bible which affected German Protestants so much more than German Catholics and, in consequence, encouraged in the former a greater commitment to Germanness. Apart from this, the country's division between Catholic and Protestant, and its remoteness from the front line with Islam, removed from it the principal religious factors discoverable elsewhere in the construction of a national identity. Only the otherness of the Jews remained as a pole for the shaping of one's own consciousness. Spanish nationhood, on the contrary, was shaped by its position on the frontier with Islam. Here religion was more continually decisive than for any other in western Europe, decisive through the character of the medieval wars which initially established it, decisive through the activity of the Inquisition in ensuring its continuance, decisive in the highly and narrowly religious ideal which became nationally normative. Spanishness and Catholicism, the Catholicism of Isabella, 'La Catolica', seemed for centuries inseparable and only a very agonised modern history would tear them, partially, apart.

If there is no clear geographical unit and no successful central state, what is a half-self-conscious nation, sharing a common language and literature, to turn to in justification of its claim to exist and, indeed, to be recognised as a uniquely important segment of humanity? The answer seems necessarily to he in a return to some myth of ethnic origin, a myth basically available in the self-history of almost every group. The sense of nationhood of most peoples distances itself from that myth because it is not needed any more and too gravely oversimplifies subsequent history. But it is almost always

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still there underneath, capable of being resurrected if necessary. The Serb case best reflects and amplifies the German. Pushed back and forth between Austrian and Ottoman Empires, they lacked a firm geographical base as much as until the nineteenth century any political status. The consequence has been intense preoccupation with the significance of ethnic origins of a thousand years before. Nineteenth-century Serbs now had the German example to turn to. Geographically, numerically, intellectually, the Germans have been Europe's central people. Once, trapped by the impact of French nationalism and frustrated by its own continuing political impotence, the Germany of the nineteenth century was persuaded by Herder, Fichte and others to resurrect an almost subliminal but intensely potent sense of blood nationalism, it was bound to be extremely influential for other peoples as a model in more or less comparable situations.

Most of the people, most of the time, are relatively little affected by the inner logic of the dominant nationalist model of their own countries. Hundreds of thousands of German Jews remained until the 1930s able to be loyal Germans, confidently at home in Berlin or Munich. It is extremely important to remind those who want to tie the Holocaust too narrowly to any intrinsic quality of German nationalism, that even under the pressures of the First World War the German consensus in favour of internal common sense and tolerance did not break down. No people turns naturally to the perpetration of genocide. 18 Genocide is a decision of politicians, whether in fifteenth-century Spain or twentieth-century Germany, Bosnia or Rwanda. Yet effective ethnic cleansing requires validation from religion, mythology or ideology if it is to mobilise a great many people willing to participate in all the horrors of mass murder with a moderately good conscience. An ethnically edged nationalism can best do the job of providing such moral cover. It may seem strange that a movement of the collective European mind which derived its origins from such things as a vernacular Bible, the jury system and parliamentary government, could be so transformed as to produce genocide, but an adequate theory and history of nationhood needs to be able to hold together within a single matrix of intelligibility such disparate realities.

A survey of European national identities seems to require the recognition of three large stages of development. The first is that of a

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mass of local ethnicities, many of them of a fairly unstable sort. Take Britain of the sixth to the eighth century. There are Scots and Picts and Britons, there are kingdoms in Strathclyde and Cumbria, Powys, Gwynedd, Cornwall; there are incoming Angles, Saxons and Jutes who then form a medley of other

kingdoms Kent and East Anglia, Lindsay, Northumbria, Mercia, the West Saxon. Later they are joined by Danes of various sorts and Normans. That is surely not a complete list. The continent is much the same. While there is a king of Kent and one of Lindsay, there are others of Soissons, Metz and Paris. Brittany, Burgundy and Bavaria all look at one time or another like independent politico-ethnic entities, yet none of them quite makes it into the national league. Some of these names quickly disappear, one or two survive indefinitely but it would, of course, be absurd to argue for any special continuity of identity between, say, sixthcentury Angles and the English of today, to the exclusion of all the other lines of ethnic, cultural and political descent. Picts and Jutes early disappear from the nomenclature but that does not necessarily make the contribution of their descendants less important. Little by little the development of one or two literary languages and large state formations diminish the complexity and fluidity of the map. As this happens a sense of something which we can properly call nationality and which medieval writers often did refer to as one of 'nations' emerged firmly and steadily. That is the second stage.

By the fifteenth century most of the main nations of western Europe can be seen to exist. People regularly spoke of them as such. They are precisely the same nations produced by nationalisms from the late eighteenth century on, according to the theorists of modernism. The correlation is so close that it would be absurd to regard it as accidental. Germans, French, English, Spaniards, Italians, Danes, Dutch, even small peoples like the Scots they are all firmly in place well before 1500. While the criterion was certainly not a primarily political one, but far more that of a people with a literary language of its own, it does seem to have been recognised that a nation should in some form or other have a government corresponding to its particular culture. As the Frenchman Claude Seyssel remarked in the early sixteenth century, 'All nations and reasonable men prefer to be governed by men of their own country and nation who know their habits, laws and customs and share the same language and lifestyle as them rather than by strangers.' 19 Custom and language

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shape the nation but government should follow suit. That seems the right way round, then and now.

Undoubtedly there were many peoples in Europe who continued to fall between rather than within such nations. They were still, essentially, the smaller ethnicities which had covered the whole continent six centuries earlier, even though in many of them there was now some degree of writing in their own vernaculars. Mostly small in size and in less economically developed areas, they were nevertheless being forced inside the circle of the nation closest to them. Brittany, Wales, Navarre and many others were neither fully distinct nor fully integrated. Some would survive to assert their own nationhood even if the likelihood of this must have seemed small at the time. Cornwall was fully integrated into England despite its different language, but Wales never would be. Surprisingly perhaps, some of the Germanspeaking groups in the foothills of the Alps were little by little differentiating themselves from Germany, despite a common language, and turning themselves into a Swiss nation. In this case a unique political and military experience proved of itself decisive. Just as English nationhood came to owe a lot to the long bow, so Swiss nationhood owed still more to the pike. In each case the combination of war with a rather democratic, common-man way of waging it proved extremely important in the business of nation-building. But I doubt whether many a fifteenth-century European observer would have included the Swiss in his list of nations.

To the north-west the Dutch are another interesting case. Their claim to be a distinct political nation is not so obvious and yet the Dutch do seem to have been accorded nation-status by the late Middle Ages. They had come adrift of the German hinterland, with a recognisably distinct language and a social history of their own: the building of the huge sea dykes, beginning on a large scale in the thirteenth century, proved as remarkably nation-building for the Dutch as the use of the bow and the pike proved so for English and Swiss. In each case it was the shared public responsibility of common people for activity decisively important for the state which proved nation-making. But the possession of a distinct written language mattered still more. The appearance in 1522 of a first printed Dutch New Testament, based on the Vulgate, following on a range of scriptural translations all across the later Middle Ages, may be the

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best proof that the Dutch were by then within the nation category despite the absence of any clearly corresponding state. They seem to have been recognised by others to be so. The national distinction between what is now Belgium and what is now the Netherlands did, however, come later, the division being dependent upon the politics and religion of the sixteenth century. The national divisions of twentieth-century western Europe are not precisely and irreversibly present in the fifteenth, but they are there for some 80 per cent, as they were not in the eighth.

Austria is worthy of special consideration, especially against Renan's famous question, 'Why is Holland a nation, while Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Parma are not?' 20 If not Hanover, why Austria? Austria was in point of fact just another bit of Germany and, traditionally, in the same constitutional position their two rulers were both Electors. Vienna might well have been claimed as Germany's natural capital. Yet, little by little, Austria became distanced from Germany, tied too closely to Slav societies to provide a specifically German leadership, a situation upon which Prussia successfully seized. Austria was no longer to be the leader of Germany, but was it not still a part by language, culture, ethnicity? On the principle of German nationhood, still not repudiated, the answer could only be in the affirmative. Probably very few Austrians in the 1930s really disagreed with the Anschluss, whether or not they cared for Hitler. It would seem that only in the last fifty years have the Austrians really become a nation of their own. By being so, they undermine the key determinant of German nationhood, as indeed do the Swiss. If one asks why Austria is a nation but Bavaria or Hanover is not, there is no ethnic, linguistic or religious reason. The vagaries of history, state formation and community consciousness have simply, and belatedly, made it so.

The case of Italy is also exceptional. An Italian national identity was recognised in the fifteenth century, yet its hardening had been held back precisely by the leading role Italy had taken in the culture, church life and economic development of previous centuries. Italian was for long less of a language recognised as a national tongue distinct from Latin than those north of the Alps. Indeed, Italian dialects were so diverse that the literary development of the Italian of Tuscany had little general impact, and that development was itself retarded by the anxiety of Renaissance scholars to stick to Latin.

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Again, the very prosperity of individual Italian cities, in this like German ones, had given them an independence which inhibited effective nation-forming developments. But, most important of all, there was the papacy, firmly ensconced back in Rome after a painful fourteenth-century period in France painful particularly for Italy. Rome was the obvious capital of Italy but it was also, even more obviously, the city of the Pope and the papacy could never be a merely Italian matter. Even in the nineteenth century Italian nationalism would be profoundly embarrassed about how it should relate to the Popes. In the fifteenth the political, international and religious importance of the papacy was such that it placed the construction of Italian nationhood in a category all its own.

Let us conclude this discussion of the late medieval nation with some remarks of two witnesses of that time. The first is one of the most cultured, well-travelled and brilliant of fifteenth-century Europeans, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who became Pope as Pius II in 1458. A novelist, a trusted civil servant of the Emperor of Germany and, for a while, even Bishop of Trieste, Enea was a Tuscan who was also, pre-eminently, a European. Writing in 1458, just before papal election, he was replying to German grievances against both the Roman See and the Italians who manned it. No, Enea replied, you may blame the Italians but not the papacy itself. Italians, he admits, are money-grubbers but they aren't alone in being so: 'You will never find a people who easily permit money to be taken out of their region. It is a common disease and spread equally over all provinces. For just as the Germans hate the Italians for this reason, so the Hungarians hate the Germans . . . The Poles have the same grievance, so do the Danes and the Swedes.' 21 Our second witness is an anonymous late fourteenth-century Englishman defending the translation of the scriptures into the vernacular to help people who are not learned but, equally, are not illiterate. For the ordinary literate, he argues, there should be 'bookis of her moder tongue, to Frensche men bokis of Frensche, to Ytaliens bokis of Latyne corrupte, to Duche men bokis Duche, to Englische men bokis of Englische'.22 One could multiply such quotations almost indefinitely. Admittedly, some of the nations mentioned then did not quite make it

later Lombards or Catalonians, for example. Yet such groups had already gone so far along the road of nationhood that five centuries later their claim to be such can still be seriously resurrected.

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Medieval historians seem to me increasingly agreed that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries national identities in western Europe had stabilised in a form, for the most part, that we take for granted still today and texts like the remarkable 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath make it clear that such national identities were expected to be a matter of government as well as of language and custom.

There remained, nevertheless, no very clear sense of just how the bond between nation and state 'gens' or 'natio' and 'regnum' was to be seen. It could be asserted emphatically in a struggle for liberation from foreign rule of the sort that engendered the Declaration of Arbroath or it could be recognised more philosophically by a writer like Claude Seyssel. Where England was far ahead of any rival already in the fourteenth century was in regard to developing structures of government which actually facilitated an on-going experience of being a nation-state. States existed of all sorts, shaped at the personal level of the prince by feudal and dynastic criteria which paid scant attention to anything very national. Yet this mattered less than we might think because societies were all ruled to such a large extent by their own accumulated law and custom rather than by kings or princes. The axiom of the thirteenth-century English lawyer Henry Bracton, 'rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege', provides a clue to medieval government everywhere. Even kings were meant to be ruled by the law. Law and custom, rather than the person of the prince, defined the kingdom and the nation with it. In consequence, as Susan Reynolds has insisted, the medieval idea of the 'community of the realm' closely resembles the modern idea of the 'permanent and objectively real nation'. 23 If Henry II was at once King of England and Duke of Normandy, that did not in any way equate the law of Normandy with that of England. The prince was, at least in theory, under the law of every province he had obtained dynastically or feudally. Each, then, was ruled in a way proper to itself. But in England the law, the administrative structure of the realm, and the whole pattern of government had been for centuries developing on lines which tended to produce a far closer integration of state and nation. If England is Europe's firstborn nation, it is not that it was ahead as Greenfeld thinks by the sixteenth century but by the tenth and still more by the fourteenth. There were plenty of recognisable nations

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in western Europe by the fourteenth century but only one nation-state and that was England.

While on the continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the main leading countries all moved strongly towards absolutist forms of government which effectively diminished the bond between nation and state by insisting that legitimacy depended upon dynastic correctness not the consent of the governed, in England that tendency was successfully resisted and the model of a parliamentary nation-state advanced all the more while proving its potency externally at the same time. Hence the gap between England on the one hand and France, Germany or Spain on the other was far greater in the mid-eighteenth century than in the fourteenth.

The third stage in the development of nationhood, misleadingly regarded by modernists as its total history, was that beginning in the late eighteenth century, when the collapse of the French monarchy, the cultural standard-bearer of a view of the state as legitimatised by something other than its subjects, opened the floodgates to revolutionary movements which were also nationalist. If the people legitimised the state, they must have an identity, a collective unity which precedes the state. They must, in other words, be a nation and states must then be nation-states. The revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, except in so far as they were socialist or Marxist, were almost of necessity nationalist. The British-American model underlying everything was a parliamentary model in which the authority of an elected body was supreme, and supreme because in theory at least it represented the nation that elected it. For the ancien régime the people in a state were simply subjects, an aggregate of the population of provinces ruled by that state. They needed no other principle of unity. For the new world of constitutional government, the very nature of government and of state legitimacy required an organic unity of its citizens which is what being a nation signifies.

The great French effort to turn the rural inhabitants of Brittany, Alsace, Provence and the rest into Frenchmen was the inevitable consequence. Basically it was for France a feasible enterprise because of the size and centrality of the Old French, the inhabitants of an enlarged Île de France, within what had become the kingdom of France. An existing state was convertible into a nation, even if it took over a century to do it. Russia could conceivably do the same,

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incorporating its Slav neighbours who shared not only a linguistic but also the same religious tradition. It is noticeable how different it was to try to incorporate Catholic Poles or Armenians from incorporating Ukrainians, most of whom were Orthodox Christians. The Russian enterprise was, then, comparable with the French, in that an enlarged, more self-conscious nation was compatible with the shape of a pre-national state, though in this case, of course, the state was still defining itself in dynastic and partially pre-national terms. It is one of the threads greatly complicating a history of nationalism and the nation in the modern

era though one rather little considered by its analysts that while the original thrust into nationalism was an anti-dynastic and democratic one, nevertheless, once the nationalist bandwagon was rolling, it could largely drop its democratic shaping and refashion itself in places behind a 'national' dynasty or populist movement. This could indeed be almost required where, having defined itself in ethnic terms, a nationalism had effectively to exclude large sections of the population of an area from full citizenship. While a territorial nationalism can consistently live with 'democracy' (or the semi-democracy more characteristic of liberal regimes in the nineteenth century), ethnic nationalism could seldom do so, given the mixed ethnic character of most of Europe and, indeed, of the world.

Outside France and Russia, nineteenth-century nationalism came up against the hard fact that the state system of the ancien régime was simply not convertible into one of nation-states. It had, on the contrary, to be dissolved. A united Italy and a largely united Germany were the main successors in nationalist terms. Otherwise the great dissolvent of the First World War was needed to give nationalist doctrine, now publicly upheld by President Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement, a chance to prove itself. Nationalism then came up against a second hard fact that the peoples of much of Europe were in reality not divided along the neat lines presupposed by a viable ethnic nationalism, but were, on the contrary, almost inextricably mixed together. They had, hitherto, never experienced, nor needed to experience, the ethnic cleansing Spain had for centuries imposed upon itself. The imposition of a nationalist logic, taken for granted in the era of Versailles, by western liberal pundits could only lead on to case after case of ethnic cleansing from the Jews of Poland via the Germans of the Sudetenland to the Muslims of Bosnia.

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The model of the nation-state which had appeared so fruitful, and even so liberal, in Britain, when 'pirated' across time and place, had been turned into a model of state and society both barren and intolerant. In the meantime the older model of political Europe, that of the Holy Roman Empire, a more or less confederate union of very diverse communities, had been wholly discredited and inevitably so, given that its final standard-bearer was as unimaginative as the Habsburg dynasty. In the old Europe, still clinging tenuously enough to the ideal of continuity with ancient Rome, entities like Bavaria, Croatia, Cologne or Venice did not have to prove themselves in national terms. They prospered through participating in a series of communities: local in terms of immediate government, national in terms of language and literary culture, but something much wider in terms of effective defence and a sense of intellectual community. Like most political systems, sooner or later, it decayed irretrievably, and it was somewhat inevitable if in many ways disastrous that a twisted version of the English model should come to replace it. There is a sad appropriateness in the coincidence in 1802 of some of Wordsworth's finest sonnets on the one side 'On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic', on the other the five deeply nationalist poems entitled 'England, 1802'. Venice, 'eldest child of liberty', had decayed until 'her long life hath reach'd its final day', while England where men still 'speak the tongue, that Shakespeare spoke; the faith and morals hold, which Milton held', remains 'a bulwark for the cause of men', the model of the future.

Inevitable as the nationalisation of Italy, Germany and eastern Europe could appear a hundred years ago, it cannot be the end of the story. Few people in Venice or Cologne can look back with enormous pride on their brief century of nation-statehood. It seems unsurprising that the Holy Roman Empire has now been resurrected in the European Community and resurrected because it is so obviously necessary and preferable to what has immediately preceded it. It is fitting that Jacques Santer, a Luxembourger, should be President of its Commission at the time that it is becoming an irreversible political structure replacing the dominance of nation-states, because Luxembourg represents almost the only significant survivor from the pre-national era. No one in their senses could regard Luxembourg as a nation any more than Rutland is a nation. Its existence has made no theoretical sense in an era of nation-states