Nationalism

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the development and spread of nationalism affected Europe between 1815 and 1914 (Skill 5.B; LO B).
• Account for KC-3.3.I.F: how nationalists encouraged loyalty to the nation through romantic idealism, liberal reform, political unification, racialist appeals tied to anti-Semitism, and chauvinist justifications for national aggrandizement.
• Account for KC-3.3.I.G: how Zionism (a form of Jewish nationalism) emerged late in the century in response to growing anti-Semitism even as western European Jews became more socially and politically integrated.
• Account for KC-3.4.II.B: how a new generation of conservative leaders (Napoleon III, Cavour, Bismarck) used popular nationalism to create or strengthen the state.
• Account for KC-3.4.II.C: how the Ausgleich of 1867 created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary by recognizing the political weight of the Hungarian Magyar nobility.

Topic 7.2 traces the principal forms of nineteenth-century European nationalism. The unit's central claim is that nationalism became the dominant political ideology of the period and produced both the new political configurations of Italian and German unification and the late-century forms of racialist exclusion. Five principal forms organize the topic, plus the Zionist response to anti-Semitism.

Romantic-cultural nationalism. The early-nineteenth-century nationalism of KC-3.3.I.F's "romantic idealism" had its roots in late-eighteenth-century intellectual developments, especially the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder argued in Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-1791) and other writings that each nation (Volk) possessed a distinctive cultural character expressed in its language, folk traditions, music, and historical experience. The Grimm Brothers (Jacob, 1785-1863, and Wilhelm, 1786-1859) systematically collected German folk tales (the Children's and Household Tales, 1812-1815) and produced the comprehensive German Dictionary (begun 1838). Their work established the model of cultural-philological nationalism that influenced parallel folk-collection projects across Europe (the Finnish Kalevala compiled by Elias Lonnrot 1835; similar Slavic and Hungarian collections through the nineteenth century).

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) was the principal political voice of romantic-cultural nationalism. His Young Italy movement (founded 1831) combined Italian-nationalist political demands with romantic-republican religious-political vision. The Duties of Man (1860, expanded 1873) articulated his program: each person owes duties to the family, the nation, and humanity, with the nation as the necessary intermediate level between the individual and the universal. Mazzini's "Young" model spread to parallel movements: Young Germany, Young Poland, Young Ireland, Young Switzerland. Pan-Slavism (developed by Czech, Slovak, Russian, and Yugoslav intellectuals from the 1830s) extended romantic-cultural nationalism to the broader Slavic world; the Russian Pan-Slavist tradition (Mikhail Bakunin in his early phase, Nikolai Danilevsky's Russia and Europe 1869) eventually influenced Russian foreign policy in the Balkans.

Liberal-constitutional and unification nationalism. The mid-nineteenth-century liberal-constitutional form combined nationalist demands with parliamentary government and civil liberties. The Belgian liberal-nationalist movement that produced Belgian independence in 1830 (Topic 6.5) was an early example. The 1848 Frankfurt Parliament (Topic 6.6) attempted a liberal-constitutional German unification that failed when Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown. The Italian moderate liberals around Cavour pursued unification under the Piedmontese constitutional monarchy. The British Liberal Party under Gladstone supported Italian unification and Irish home rule on liberal-nationalist grounds.

The political-unification form is what KC-3.4.II.B captures: a new generation of conservative leaders — Napoleon III in France, Cavour in Piedmont-Sardinia, and Bismarck in Prussia — used popular nationalism to create or strengthen the state. Napoleon III combined Bonapartist plebiscitary politics with French national-grandeur themes (the 1859 war against Austria for Italian liberation; the Crimean expedition of 1853-1856; the Mexican expedition of 1861-1867). Cavour built an Italian coalition behind the House of Savoy through skillful diplomacy. Bismarck fought three wars (Denmark 1864, Austria 1866, France 1870-1871) that produced a unified German state under Prussian leadership. In all three cases, conservative monarchical statesmen captured popular nationalist sentiment for state-building purposes — a reversal of the early-nineteenth-century pattern in which nationalism had been a movement of opposition to dynastic conservative regimes.

The Habsburg compromise. KC-3.4.II.C: the creation of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary (the Ausgleich of 1867) attempted to stabilize the Habsburg state by reconfiguring the basis of national unity. The Habsburg defeat by Prussia at Koniggratz in July 1866 (Topic 7.3) had ended Austrian leadership of the German world and produced the political pressure for compromise with the Hungarian Magyar nobility. The Ausgleich (Compromise) negotiated by Foreign Minister Friedrich Beust and the Hungarian leader Ferenc Deak in 1867 transformed the Austrian Empire into a dual monarchy: two parallel governments (Vienna and Budapest) with shared foreign affairs, defense, and finance, and recognition of Hungarian autonomy within the empire. The arrangement held until 1918, when the empire dissolved at the end of the First World War. The Ausgleich was a partial solution to the Habsburg "nationality problem" — it recognized Magyar political weight but produced new tensions with the empire's other ethnic groups (the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, the Croats and Serbs in the southern lands, the Romanians in Transylvania, the Poles and Ruthenians in Galicia). The unresolved tensions contributed to the empire's eventual dissolution.

The racialist late-century forms. The late-nineteenth-century racialist nationalism that KC-3.3.I.F describes as "racialism with a concomitant anti-Semitism" emerged from a combination of factors: the post-1873 Long Depression producing economic anxiety; rapid Jewish urban-economic mobility in central and eastern Europe creating visible patterns that anti-Semites distorted; Social Darwinism (Topic 7.4) providing a pseudo-scientific framework for racial categories; and the political pressures of mass-democratic electorates seeking simple explanations for complex social changes. Three principal episodes illustrate the late-century racialist nationalism.

The Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) was the principal French case. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army officer of Alsatian origin, was convicted of treason in 1894 on forged documentary evidence and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana. Evidence of forgery emerged in 1896-1898 when Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, the head of French military counter-intelligence, identified the actual culprit (Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy). The army covered up the new evidence; the writer Emile Zola's open letter J'accuse...! (published in L'Aurore on 13 January 1898) charged the army with framing Dreyfus and produced extensive public debate. Dreyfus was retried in 1899, convicted again with extenuating circumstances, and immediately pardoned by President Loubet. The Cour de Cassation fully exonerated him in 1906 and the army restored him to active duty. The Affair divided France between Dreyfusards (republican-anticlerical-progressive) and anti-Dreyfusards (Catholic-monarchist-anti-Semitic) and shaped French politics until the First World War.

The German Christian Social Party and parallel Austrian movements were the principal central European cases. Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909), a Berlin court chaplain, founded the Christian Social Party in 1878 and combined Christian-social welfare-reform politics with explicit anti-Semitic agitation. The Austrian Christian Social Party under Karl Lueger (1844-1910) became the dominant political force in Vienna in the 1890s; Lueger was elected mayor in 1895 (the appointment was initially refused by Emperor Franz Joseph but confirmed in 1897). The 1879 founding of the Anti-Semitic League in Germany by Wilhelm Marr (who coined the term "antisemitism" itself) established the explicit racialist movement. The young Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna 1908-1913, later wrote in Mein Kampf that Lueger's politics had been a formative influence on his own.

Pan-Germanism and chauvinist nationalism formed the third element. The Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband, founded 1891) advocated German territorial expansion and the unification of all German-speaking peoples under the Reich. Similar chauvinist movements developed across Europe: the Action Francaise in France (founded 1899 by Charles Maurras), the British Imperial Federation League and similar organizations, the Italian nationalist movement (Italian Nationalist Association, founded 1910). KC-3.3.I.F's "chauvinism justifying national aggrandizement" describes these late-century currents that linked nationalist sentiment to imperial expansion and great-power competition.

Zionism as a Jewish nationalist response. KC-3.3.I.G: although western European Jews became more socially and politically integrated across the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged late in the century in response to growing anti-Semitism. Jewish emancipation across western Europe (in France in the 1790s, in Britain in the 1850s, in Germany in 1871, in Habsburg lands in 1867) had produced substantial Jewish entry into European professional, financial, academic, and cultural life. The late-century anti-Semitic movements above (Dreyfus, Lueger, the Christian Social parties) suggested to many observers that emancipation and assimilation had not produced the security European Jews had hoped for.

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was the principal Zionist organizer. Born in Budapest into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family, Herzl studied law in Vienna and worked as a journalist for the Viennese liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse. His coverage of the Dreyfus Affair as the Paris correspondent (1891-1895) profoundly affected him; the Paris crowds chanting "Death to the Jews" during Dreyfus's military degradation in January 1895 convinced Herzl that European Jewish security required a Jewish state. Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, published in Vienna in February 1896) articulated the Zionist program: a Jewish state established through international diplomatic agreement and organized Jewish migration. The First Zionist Congress at Basel (29-31 August 1897) founded the World Zionist Organization with Herzl as president and adopted the Basel Program declaring Zionism's aim "to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." The British 1917 Balfour Declaration and the post-First-World-War Mandate for Palestine (1922) gave the movement diplomatic standing. Herzl himself died of heart disease in 1904 at age 44, never having seen the practical realization of his vision; the State of Israel was proclaimed 14 May 1948.

Three sources framing the principal nineteenth-century nationalist traditions: Mazzini on the romantic-cultural model, Zola on the Dreyfus Affair, and Herzl on the Zionist response.

1. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for the principal forms of nineteenth-century European nationalism. Identify five forms (romantic-cultural, liberal-constitutional, political-unification, racialist, chauvinist) and provide one specific example for each.
2. (Causation) Account for KC-3.4.II.B: how did Napoleon III, Cavour, and Bismarck use popular nationalism to consolidate state power? Compare the three cases.
3. (Causation) Account for KC-3.4.II.C: how did the Ausgleich of 1867 attempt to stabilize the Habsburg state by reconfiguring the basis of national unity? Why did the arrangement fail to resolve the empire's other ethnic-political tensions?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.F: how did the late-nineteenth-century racialist-nationalist forms emerge? Cite the Dreyfus Affair, the Christian Social Party, and the Pan-German League.
5. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.G: how did Zionism emerge as a Jewish nationalist response to late-century anti-Semitism? Use the Herzl source and the Dreyfus Affair context.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.