In 1848, Frédéric Sorrieu, a French artist, prepared a series of four prints visualising his dream of a world

made up of ‘democratic and social Republics’, as he called them. The first print (Fig. 1) of the series,
shows the peoples of Europe and America – men and women of all ages and social classes – marching in
a long train, and offering homage to the Statue of Liberty as they pass by it. As you would recall, artists of
the time of the French Revolution personified Liberty as a female figure – here you can recognise the
torch of Enlightenment she bears in one hand and the Charter of the Rights of Man in the other. On the
earth in the foreground of the image lie the shattered remains of the symbols of absolutist institutions.
In Sorrieu’s utopian vision, the peoples of the world are grouped as distinct nations, identified through
their flags and national costumes. Leading the procession, way past the Statue of Liberty, are the United
States and Switzerland, which by this time were already nation-states. France, identifiable by the
revolutionary tricolour, has just reached the statue. She is followed by the people of Germany, bearing
the black, red and gold flag. Interestingly, at the time when Sorrieu created this image, the German
people did not yet exist as a united nation – the flag they carry is an expression of liberal hopes in 1848
to unify the numerous German-speaking principalities into a nation-state under a democratic
constitution. Following the German peoples are the peoples of Austria, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,
Lombardy, Poland, England, Ireland, Hungary and Russia. From the heavens above, Christ, saints and
angels gaze upon the scene. They have been used by the artist to symbolise fraternity among the nations
of the world. This chapter will deal with many of the issues visualised by Sorrieu in Fig. 1. During the
nineteenth century, nationalism emerged as a force which brought about sweeping changes in the
political and mental world of Europe. The result of these changes was the emergence of the nation-state
in place of the multi-national dynastic empires of Europe. The concept and practices of a modern state,
in which a centralised power exercised sovereign control over a clearly defined territory, had been
developing over a long period in Europe. But a nation-state was one in which the majority of its citizens,
and not only its rulers, came to develop a sense of common identity and shared history or descent. This
commonness did not exist from time immemorial; it was forged through struggles, through the actions
of leaders and the common people. This chapter will look at the diverse processes through which nation-
states and nationalism came into being in nineteenth-century Europe.

The French Revolution and the Idea of the Nation

The first clear expression of nationalism came with the French Revolution in 1789. France, as you would
remember, was a full-fledged territorial state in 1789 under the rule of an absolute monarch. The
political and constitutional changes that came in the wake of the French Revolution led to the transfer of
sovereignty from the monarchy to a body of French citizens. The revolution proclaimed that it was the
people who would henceforth constitute the nation and shape its destiny. From the very beginning, the
French revolutionaries introduced various measures and practices that could create a sense of collective
identity amongst the French people. The ideas of la patrie (the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen)
emphasised the notion of a united community enjoying equal rights under a constitution. A new French
flag, the tricolour, was chosen to replace the former royal standard. The Estates General was elected by
the body of active citizens and renamed the National Assembly. New hymns were composed, oaths
taken and martyrs commemorated, all in the name of the nation. A centralised administrative system
was put in place and it formulated uniform laws for all citizens within its territory. Internal customs
duties and dues were abolished and a uniform system of weights and measures was adopted. Regional
dialects were discouraged and French, as it was spoken and written in Paris, became the common
language of the nation. The revolutionaries further declared that it was the mission and the destiny of
the French nation to liberate the peoples of Europe from despotism, in other words, to help other
peoples of Europe to become nations. When the news of the events in France reached the different
cities of Europe, students and other members of the educated middle classes began setting up Jacobin
clubs. Their activities and campaigns prepared the way for the French armies which moved into Holland,
Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy in the 1790s. With the outbreak of the revolutionary wars, the
French armies began to carry the idea of nationalism abroad. In the wide swathe of territory that came
under his control, Napoleon set about introducing many of the reforms that he had already introduced in
France. Through a return to monarchy, Napoleon had, no doubt, destroyed democracy in France, but in
the administrative field, he had incorporated revolutionary principles to make the whole system more
rational and efficient. The Civil Code of 1804 – usually known as the Napoleonic Code did away with all
privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and secured property right. This Code was
exported to the regions under French control. In the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany,
Napoleon simplified administrative divisions, abolished the feudal system and freed peasants from
serfdom and manorial dues. In the towns too, guild restrictions were removed. Transport and
communication systems were improved. Peasants, artisans, workers and new businessmen enjoyed a
new-found freedom. Businessmen and small-scale producers of goods, in particular, began to realise that
uniform laws, standardised weights and measures, and a common national currency would facilitate the
movement and exchange of goods and capital from one region to another. However, in the areas
conquered, the reactions of the local populations to French rule were mixed. Initially, in many places
such as Holland and Switzerland, as well as in certain cities like Brussels, Mainz, Milan and Warsaw, the
French armies were welcomed as harbingers of liberty. But the initial enthusiasm soon turned to
hostility, as it became clear that the new administrative arrangements did not go hand in hand with
political freedom. Increased taxation, censorship, and forced conscription into the French armies
required to conquer the rest of Europe, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of the administrative
changes.

The Making of Nationalism in Europe

If you look at the map of mid-eighteenth-century Europe you will find that there were no ‘nation-states’
as we know them today. What we know today as Germany, Italy and Switzerland were divided into
kingdoms, duchies and cantons whose rulers had their autonomous territories. Eastern and Central
Europe were under autocratic monarchies within the territories of which lived diverse peoples. They did
not see themselves as sharing a collective identity or a common culture. Often, they even spoke different
languages and belonged to different ethnic groups. The Habsburg Empire that ruled over Austria-
Hungary, for example, was a patchwork of many different regions and peoples. It included the Alpine
regions– the Tyrol, Austria and the Sudetenland – as well as Bohemia, where the aristocracy was
predominantly German-speaking. It also included the Italian-speaking provinces of Lombardy and
Venetia. In Hungary, half of the population spoke Magyar while the other half spoke a variety of dialects.
In Galicia, the aristocracy spoke Polish. Besides these three dominant groups, there also lived within the
boundaries of the empire, a mass of subject peasant peoples Bohemians and Slovaks to the north,
Slovenes in Carniola, Croats to the south, and Roumans to the east in Transylvania. Such differences did
not easily promote a sense of political unity. The only tie binding these diverse groups together was a
common allegiance to the emperor. How did nationalism and the idea of the nation-state emerge?

2.1 The Aristocracy and the New Middle-Class

 Socially and politically, a landed aristocracy was the dominant class on the continent. The members of
this class were united by a common way of life that cut across regional divisions. They owned estates in
the countryside and also townhouses. They spoke French for purposes of diplomacy and in high society.
Their families were often connected by ties of marriage. This powerful aristocracy was, however,
numerically a small group. The majority of the population was made up of the peasantry. To the west,
the bulk of the land was farmed by tenants and small owners, while in Eastern and Central Europe, the
pattern of landholding was characterised by vast estates which were cultivated by serfs. In Western and
parts of Central Europe, the growth of industrial production and trade meant the growth of towns and
the emergence of commercial classes whose existence was based on production for the market.
Industrialisation began in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, but in France and parts
of the German states, it occurred only during the nineteenth century. In its wake, new social groups
came into being: a working-class population and a middle class made up of industrialists, businessmen,
and professionals. In Central and Eastern Europe these groups were smaller in number till the late
nineteenth century. It was among the educated, liberal middle classes that ideas of national unity
following the abolition of aristocratic privileges gained popularity.

2.2 What did Liberal Nationalism Stand for?

Ideas of national unity in early-nineteenth-century Europe were closely allied to the ideology of
liberalism. The term ‘liberalism’ derives from the Latin root liber, meaning free. For the new middle
classes, liberalism stood for freedom for the individual and equality of all before the law. Politically, it
emphasised the concept of government by consent. Since the French Revolution, liberalism has stood for
the end of autocracy and clerical privileges, a constitution and representative government through
parliament. Nineteenth-century liberals also stressed the inviolability of private property. Yet, equality
before the law did not necessarily stand for universal suffrage. You will recall that in revolutionary
France, which marked the first political experiment in liberal democracy, the right to vote and to get
elected was granted exclusively to property-owning men. Men without property and all women were
excluded from political rights. Only for a brief period under the Jacobins did all adult males enjoy
suffrage. However, the Napoleonic Code went back to limited suffrage and reduced women to the status
of a minor, subject to the authority of fathers and husbands. Throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries women and non-propertied men organised opposition movements demanding
equal political rights. In the economic sphere, liberalism stood for the freedom of markets and the
abolition of state-imposed restrictions on the movement of goods and capital. During the nineteenth
century, this was a strong demand from the emerging middle classes. Let us take the example of the
German-speaking regions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s administrative measures
had created out of countless small principalities a confederation of 39 states. Each of these possessed its
currency, weights and measures. A merchant travelling in 1833 from Hamburg to Nuremberg to sell his
goods would have had to pass through 11 customs barriers and pay a customs duty of about 5 per cent
at each one of them. Duties were often levied according to the weight or measurement of the goods. As
each region had its system of weights and measures, this involved time-consuming calculation. The
measure of cloth, for example, was the elle which in each region stood for a different length. An Elle of
textile material bought in Frankfurt would get you 54.7 cm of cloth, in Mainz 55.1 cm, in Nuremberg 65.6
cm, and in Freiburg 53.5 cm. Such conditions were viewed as obstacles to economic exchange and
growth by the new commercial classes, who argued for the creation of a unified economic territory
allowing the unhindered movement of goods, people and capital. In 1834, a customs union or Zollverein
was formed at the initiative of Prussia and joined by most of the German states. The union abolished
tariff barriers and reduced the number of currencies from over thirty to two. The creation of a network
of railways further stimulated mobility, harnessing economic interests to national unification. A wave of
economic nationalism strengthened the wider nationalist sentiments growing at the time.

2.3 A New Conservatism after 1815

India and the Contemporary World Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, European governments
were driven by a spirit of conservatism. Conservatives believed that established, traditional institutions
of state and society – like the monarchy, the Church, social hierarchies, property and the family should
be preserved. Most conservatives, however, did not propose a return to the society of pre-revolutionary
days. Rather, they realised, from the changes initiated by Napoleon, that modernisation could strengthen
traditional institutions like the monarchy. It could make state power more effective and strong. A modern
army, an efficient bureaucracy, a dynamic economy, and the abolition of feudalism and serfdom could
strengthen the autocratic monarchies of Europe. In 1815, representatives of the European powers –
Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria – who had collectively defeated Napoleon, met at Vienna to draw up
a settlement for Europe. The Congress was hosted by the Austrian Chancellor Duke Metternich. The
delegates drew up the Treaty of Vienna of 1815 with the object of undoing most of the changes that had
come about in Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The Bourbon dynasty, which had been deposed
during the French Revolution, was restored to power, and France lost the territories it had annexed
under Napoleon. A series of states were set up on the boundaries of France to prevent French expansion
in future. Thus the kingdom of the Netherlands, which included Belgium, was set up in the north and
Genoa was added to Piedmont in the south. Prussia was given important new territories on its western
frontiers, while Austria was given control of northern Italy. However, the German confederation of 39
states that had been set up by Napoleon was left untouched. In the east, Russia was given part of Poland
while Prussia was given a portion of Saxony. The main intention was to restore the monarchies that had
been overthrown by Napoleon and create a new conservative order in Europe. Conservative regimes set
up in 1815 were autocratic. They did not tolerate criticism and dissent and sought to curb activities that
questioned the legitimacy of autocratic governments. Most of them imposed censorship laws to control
what was said in newspapers, books, plays and songs and reflected the ideas of liberty and freedom
temporarily World One such individual was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Born in Genoa in
1807, he became a member of the secret society of the Carbonari. As a young man of 24, he was sent
into exile in 1831 for attempting a revolution in Liguria. He subsequently founded two more
underground societies, first, Young Italy in Marseilles, and then, Young Europe in Berne, whose members
were like-minded young men from Poland, France, Italy and the German states. Mazzini believed that
God had intended nations to be the natural units of mankind. So Italy could not continue to be a
patchwork of small states and kingdoms. It had to be forged into a single unified republic within a wider
alliance of nations. This unification alone could be the basis of Italian liberty. Following his model, secret
societies were set up in Germany, France, Switzerland and Poland. Mazzini’s relentless opposition to
monarchy and his vision of democratic republics frightened the conservatives. Metternich described him
as ‘the most dangerous enemy of our social order’.

The Age of Revolutions: 1830-1848

As conservative regimes tried to consolidate their power, liberalism and nationalism came to be
increasingly associated with revolution in many regions of Europe such as the Italian and German states,
the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ireland and Poland. These revolutions were led by the liberal
nationalists belonging to the educated middle-class elite, among whom were professors, schoolteachers,
clerks and members of the commercial middle classes. The first upheaval took place in France in July
1830. The Bourbon kings who had been restored to power during the conservative reaction after 1815,
were now overthrown by liberal revolutionaries who installed a constitutional monarchy with Louis
Philippe at its head. ‘When France sneezes,’ Metternich once remarked, ‘the rest of Europe catches cold.’
The July Revolution sparked an uprising in Brussels which led to Belgium breaking away from the United
Kingdom of the Netherlands. An event that mobilised nationalist feelings among the educated elite
across Europe was the Greek War of Independence. Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire since
the fifteenth century. The growth of revolutionary nationalism in Europe sparked off a struggle for
independence amongst the Greeks which began in 1821. Nationalists in Greece got support from other
Greeks living in exile and also from many West Europeans who had sympathies for ancient Greek culture.
Poets and artists lauded Greece as the cradle of European civilisation and mobilised public opinion to
support its struggle against a Muslim empire. The English poet Lord Byron organised funds and later
went to fight in the war, where he died of fever in 1824. Finally, the Treaty of Constantinople of 1832
recognised Greece as an independent nation.

3.1 The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling

The development of nationalism did not come about only through wars and territorial expansion.
Culture played an important role in creating the idea of the nation: art and poetry, stories and music
helped express and shape nationalist feelings. Let us look at Romanticism, a cultural movement which
sought to develop a particular form of nationalist sentiment. Romantic artists and poets generally
criticised the glorification of reason and science. and focused instead on emotions, intuition and mystical
feelings. Their effort was to create a sense of a shared collective heritage, a common cultural past, as the
basis of a nation. Other Romantics such as the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)
claimed that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people – das volk. It was
through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation (volksgeist) was
popularised. So collecting and recording these forms of folk culture was essential to the project of
nation-building. The emphasis on vernacular language and the collection of local folklore was not just to
recover an ancient national spirit, but also to carry the modern nationalist message to large audiences
who were mostly illiterate. This was especially so in the case of Poland, which had been partitioned at
the end of the eighteenth century by the Great Powers – Russia, Prussia and Austria. Even though Poland
no longer existed as an independent territory, national feelings were kept alive through music and
language. Karol Kurpinski, for example, celebrated the national struggle through his operas and music,
turning folk dances like the polonaise and mazurka into nationalist symbols. Language too played an
important role in developing nationalist sentiments. After the Russian occupation, the Polish language
was forced out of schools and the Russian language was imposed everywhere. In 1831, an armed
rebellion against Russian rule took place which was ultimately crushed. Following this, many members of
the clergy in Poland began to use language as a weapon of national resistance. Polish was used for
Church gatherings and all religious instruction. As a result, a large number of priests and bishops were
put in jail or sent to Siberia by the Russian authorities as punishment for their refusal to preach in
Russian. The use of Polish came to be seen as a symbol of the struggle against Russian dominance.

3.2 Hunger, Hardship and Popular Revolt

The 1830s were years of great economic hardship in Europe. The first half of the nineteenth century saw
an enormous increase in population all over Europe. In most countries, there were more seekers of jobs
than employment. Population from rural areas migrated to the cities to live in overcrowded slums. Small
producers in towns were often faced with stiff competition from imports of cheap machine-made goods
from England, where industrialisation was more advanced than on the continent. This was especially so
in textile production, which was carried out mainly in homes or small workshops and was only partly
mechanised. In those regions of Europe where the aristocracy still enjoyed power, peasants struggled
under the burden of feudal dues and obligations. The rise of food prices or a year of bad harvest led to
widespread pauperism in towns and countries. The year 1848 was one such year. Food shortages and
widespread unemployment brought the population of Paris out on the roads. Barricades were erected
and Louis Philippe was forced to flee. A National Assembly proclaimed a Republic, granted suffrage to all
adult males above 21, and guaranteed the right to work. National workshops to provide employment
were set up. Earlier, in 1845, weavers in Silesia had led a revolt against contractors who supplied them
with raw materials and gave them orders for finished textiles but drastically reduced their payments. The
journalist Wilhelm Wolff described the events in a Silesian village as follows: India and the Contemporary
World In these villages (with 18,000 inhabitants) cotton weaving is the most widespread occupation …
The misery of the workers is extreme. The desperate need for jobs has been taken advantage of by the
contractors to reduce the prices of the goods they order … On 4 June at 2 p.m., a large crowd of weavers
emerged from their homes and marched in pairs up to the mansion of their contractor demanding
higher wages. They were treated with scorn and threats alternately. Following this, a group of them
forced their way into the house, and smashed its elegant windowpanes, furniture, and porcelain …
another group broke into the storehouse and plundered it of supplies of cloth which they tore to shreds
… The contractor fled with his family to a neighbouring village which, however, refused to shelter such a
person. He returned 24 hours later having requisitioned the army. In the exchange that followed, eleven
weavers were shot.

3.3 1848: The Revolution of the Liberals

Parallel to the revolts of the poor, unemployed and starving peasants and workers in many European
countries in the year 1848, a revolution led by the educated middle classes was underway. Events of
February 1848 in France had brought about the abdication of the monarch and a republic based on
universal male suffrage had been proclaimed. In other parts of Europe where independent nation-states
did not yet exist – such as Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – men and women
of the liberal middle classes combined their demands for constitutionalism with national unification.
They took advantage of the growing popular unrest to push their demands for the creation of a nation-
state on parliamentary principles – a constitution, freedom of the press and freedom of association. In
the German regions, a large number of political associations whose members were middle-class
professionals, businessmen and prosperous artisans came together in the city of Frankfurt and decided
to vote for an all-German National Assembly. On 18 May 1848, 831 elected representatives marched in a
festive procession to take their places in the Frankfurt parliament convened in the Church of St Paul.
They drafted a constitution for a German nation to be headed by a monarchy subject to a parliament.
When the deputies offered the crown on these terms to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, he rejected
it and joined other monarchs to oppose the elected assembly. While the opposition of the aristocracy
and military became stronger, the social basis of parliament eroded. The parliament was dominated by
the middle classes who resisted the demands of workers and artisans and consequently lost their
support. In the end, troops were called in and the assembly was forced to disband. The issue of
extending political rights to women was a controversial one within the liberal movement, in which large
numbers of women had participated actively over the years. Women had formed their political
associations, founded newspapers and taken part in political meetings and demonstrations. Despite this,
they were denied suffrage rights during the election of the Assembly. When the Frankfurt parliament
convened in the Church of St Paul, women were admitted only as observers to stand in the visitors’
gallery. Though conservative forces were able to suppress liberal movements in 1848, they could not
restore the old order. Monarchs were beginning to realise that the cycles of revolution and repression
could only be ended by granting concessions to the liberal-nationalist revolutionaries. Hence, in the
years after 1848, the autocratic monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe began to introduce the
changes that had already taken place in Western Europe before 1815. Thus serfdom and bonded labour
were abolished both in the Habsburg dominions and in Russia. The Habsburg rulers granted more
autonomy to the Hungarians in 1867.

The Making of Germany and Italy

4.1 Germany – Can the Army be the Architect of a Nation?

After 1848, nationalism in Europe moved away from its association with democracy and revolution.
Nationalist sentiments were often mobilised by conservatives for promoting state power and achieving
political domination over Europe. This can be observed in the process by which Germany and Italy came
to be unified as nation-states. As you have seen, nationalist feelings were widespread among middle-
class Germans, who in 1848 tried to unite the different regions of the German confederation into a
nation-state governed by an elected parliament. This liberal initiative to nation-building was, however,
repressed by the combined forces of the monarchy and the military, supported by the large landowners
(called Junkers) of Prussia. From then on, Prussia took on the leadership of the movement for national
unification. Its chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, was the architect of this process carried out with the
help of the Prussian army and bureaucracy. Three wars over seven years – with Austria, Denmark and
France – ended in Prussian victory and completed the process of unification. In January 1871, the
Prussian king, William I, was proclaimed German Emperor in a ceremony held at Versailles. On the
bitterly cold morning of 18 January 1871, an assembly comprising the princes of the German states,
representatives of the army, and important Prussian ministers including the chief minister Otto von
Bismarck gathered in the unheated Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles to proclaim the new
German Empire headed by Kaiser William I of Prussia. The nation-building process in Germany
demonstrated the dominance of Prussian state power. The new state placed a strong emphasis on
modernising the currency, banking, legal and judicial systems in Germany. Prussian measures and
practices often became a model for the rest of Germany.

4.2 Italy Unified

Like Germany, Italy too had a long history of political fragmentation. Italians were scattered over several
dynastic states as well as the multi-national Habsburg Empire. During the middle of the nineteenth
century, Italy was divided into seven states, of which only one, Sardinia-Piedmont, was ruled by an Italian
princely house. The north was under Austrian Habsburgs, the centre was ruled by the Pope and the
southern regions were under the domination of the Bourbon kings of Spain. Even the Italian language
had not acquired one common form and still had many regional and local variations. During the 1830s,
Giuseppe Mazzini sought to put together a coherent programme for a unitary Italian Republic. He had
also formed a secret society called Young Italy for the dissemination of his goals. The failure of
revolutionary uprisings both in 1831 and 1848 meant that the mantle now fell on Sardinia-Piedmont
under its ruler King Victor Emmanuel II to unify the Italian states through war. In the eyes of the ruling
elites of this region, a unified Italy offered them the possibility of economic development and political
dominance. Chief Minister Cavour who led the movement to unify the regions of Italy was neither a
revolutionary nor a democrat. Like many other wealthy and educated members of the Italian elite, he
spoke French much better than he did Italian. Through a tactful diplomatic alliance with France
engineered by Cavour, Sardinia-Piedmont succeeded in defeating the Austrian forces in 1859. Apart from
regular troops, a large number of armed volunteers under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi joined
the fray. In 1860, they marched into South Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and succeeded in
winning the support of the local peasants to drive out the Spanish rulers. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was
proclaimed king of united Italy. However, much of the Italian population, among whom rates of illiteracy
were very high, remained blissfully unaware of liberal nationalist ideology. The peasant masses who had
supported Garibaldi in southern Italy had never heard of Italia, and believed that ‘La Talia’ was Victor
Emmanuel’s wife!

4.3 The Strange Case of Britain

The model of the nation or the nation-state, some scholars have argued, is Great Britain. In Britain, the
formation of the nation-state was not the result of a sudden upheaval or revolution. It was the result of a
long-drawn-out process. There was no British nation before the eighteenth century. The primary
identities of the people who inhabited the British Isles were ethnic ones – such as English, Welsh, Scot or
Irish. All of these ethnic groups had their own cultural and political traditions. But as the English nation
steadily grew in wealth, importance and power, it was able to extend its influence over the other nations
of the islands. The English parliament, which had seized power from the monarchy in 1688 at the end of
a protracted conflict, was the instrument through which a nation-state, with England at its centre, came
to be forged. The Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland that resulted in the formation of
the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’ meant, in effect, that England was able to impose its influence on
Scotland. The British parliament was henceforth dominated by its English members. The growth of a
British identity meant that Scotland’s distinctive culture and political institutions were systematically
suppressed. The Catholic clans that inhabited the Scottish Highlands suffered terrible repression
whenever they attempted to assert their independence. The Scottish Highlanders were forbidden to
speak their Gaelic language or wear their national dress, and large numbers were forcibly driven out of
their homeland. Ireland suffered a similar fate. It was a country deeply divided between Catholics and
Protestants. The English helped the Protestants of Ireland to establish their dominance over a largely
Catholic country. Catholic revolts against British dominance were suppressed. After a failed revolt led by
Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen (1798), Ireland was forcibly incorporated into the United Kingdom in
1801. A new ‘British nation’ was forged through the propagation of a dominant English culture. The
symbols of the new Britain – the British flag (Union Jack), the national anthem (God Save Our Noble
King), and the English language – were actively promoted and the older nations survived only as
subordinate partners in this union.

Visualising the Nation

While it is easy enough to represent a ruler through a portrait or a statue, how does one go about giving
a face to a nation? Artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found a way out by personifying a
nation. In other words, they represented a country as if it were a person. Nations were then portrayed as
female figures. The female form that was chosen to personify the nation did not stand for any particular
woman in real life; rather it sought to give the abstract idea of the nation a concrete form. That is, the
female figure became an allegory of the nation. You will recall that during the French Revolution artists
used the female allegory to portray ideas such as Liberty, Justice and the Republic. These ideals were
represented through specific objects or symbols. As you would remember, the attributes of Liberty are
the red cap, or the broken chain, while Justice is generally a blindfolded woman carrying a pair of
weighing scales. Similar female allegories were invented by artists in the nineteenth century to represent
the nation. In France, she was christened Marianne, a popular Christian name, which underlined the idea
of a people’s nation. Her characteristics were drawn from those of Liberty and the Republic – the red
cap, the tricolour, the cockade. Statues of Marianne were erected in public squares to remind the public
of the national symbol of unity and to persuade them to identify with it. Marianne's images were marked
on coins and stamps. Similarly, Germany became the allegory of the German nation. In visual
representations, Germania wears a crown of oak leaves, as the German oak stands for heroism.

Nationalism and Imperialism

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century nationalism no longer retained its idealistic liberal-
democratic sentiment of the first half of the century but became a narrow creed with limited ends.
During this period nationalist groups became increasingly intolerant of each other and ever-ready to go
to war. The major European powers, in turn, manipulated the nationalist aspirations of the subject
peoples in Europe to further their imperialist aims. The most serious source of nationalist tension in
Europe after 1871 was the area called the Balkans. The Balkans was a region of geographical and ethnic
variation comprising modern-day Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro whose inhabitants were broadly known as the Slavs. A
large part of the Balkans was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The spread of the ideas of
romantic nationalism in the Balkans together with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire made this
region very explosive. All through the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had sought to strengthen
itself through modernisation and internal reforms but with very little success. One by one, its European
subject nationalities broke away from its control and declared independence. The Balkan peoples based
their claims for independence or political rights on nationality and used history to prove that they had
once been independent but had subsequently been subjugated by foreign powers. Hence the rebellious
nationalities in the Balkans thought of their struggles as attempts to win back their long-lost
independence. India and the Contemporary World As the different Slavic nationalities struggled to define
their identity and independence, the Balkan area became an area of intense conflict. The Balkan states
were fiercely jealous of each other and each hoped to gain more territory at the expense of the others.
Matters were further complicated because the Balkans also became the scene of big power rivalry.
During this period, there was intense rivalry among the European powers over trade and colonies as well
as naval and military might. These rivalries were very evident in the way the Balkan problem unfolded.
Each power – Russia, Germany, England, Austro-Hungary – was keen on countering the hold of other
powers over the Balkans, and extending its control over the area. This led to a series of wars in the
region and finally the First World War. Nationalism, aligned with imperialism, led Europe to disaster in
1914. Meanwhile, many countries in the world which had been colonised by the European powers in the
nineteenth century began to oppose imperial domination. The anti-imperial movements that developed
everywhere were nationalist, in the sense that they all struggled to form independent nation-states, and
were inspired by a sense of collective national unity, forged in confrontation with imperialism. European
ideas of nationalism were nowhere replicated, for people everywhere developed their specific variety of
nationalism. However, the idea that societies should be organised into ‘nation-states’ came to be
accepted as natural and universal.