How Did Nationalism Turn Culture into Politics?

The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History · Article 11

Nationalism did not transform nineteenth-century Europe simply because ancient nations suddenly awoke. Europe in 1815 was above all a dynastic world. The Habsburg emperor ruled subjects who spoke German, Hungarian, Czech, Italian and many other languages. German speakers belonged to dozens of states, while the Italian peninsula was divided among kingdoms, duchies, papal territory and Austrian possessions. Language, religion, law and political borders overlapped; they rarely formed a tidy national map.

What nationalism introduced was a new claim about sovereignty: a people sharing a history and culture ought not merely to obey a dynasty but should determine its political life as a nation. Yet there was no natural straight line from cultural affinity to state power. Languages had to be standardised, histories written, symbols circulated, boundaries of membership debated and political organisations created. Culture supplied materials; revolution, war, education and administration turned those materials into politics.

Revolution redefined “the people”

The French Revolution did not invent every national attachment, but it made the nation the bearer of sovereignty. The universal language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, uniform national administration, mass politics and conscription created an unusually direct relationship between ordinary people and the state. Defending the country could now be represented as the obligation of a community of citizens, not merely the business of a monarch's army. Napoleon's forces carried legal equality and administrative reform across much of Europe, but they also brought occupation, taxation and conscription.

That contradictory experience allowed nationalism both to inherit the Revolution and to resist French domination. Anti-French mobilisation in German lands or Spain could borrow the language of popular sovereignty and insist that a people should not be governed by foreigners. Nevertheless, the identity of that people remained uncertain. Local, religious and dynastic loyalties did not disappear overnight. A person might identify simultaneously with a town, province, church, ruler and larger cultural community. The growing political importance of nationality was the outcome of choices and institutions, not the natural destination of every other allegiance.

Nor did revolutionary citizenship produce just one kind of nationalism. It could support an inclusive political nation composed of equal citizens, but it could also encourage governments to demand linguistic and cultural uniformity. Revolutionary France removed internal privileges and standardised administration in the name of equality. To speakers of regional languages, however, uniformity might look like the authority of Paris rather than liberation. From the beginning, national equality between peoples could coexist uneasily with pressure for conformity within a nation.

Collecting folk songs also drew boundaries

Romantic thinkers resisted the image of human beings as abstract individuals without a past. They emphasised how language, memory and custom shaped human life. Collectors gathered folk songs; philologists compiled grammars and dictionaries; poets retold medieval legends; historians searched for national origins. Such work preserved cultural forms that might otherwise have disappeared. It also rearranged them. Which dialect would become the standard? Which stories belonged in the canon? Which past would count as the nation's past?

It would therefore be misleading to say that nations were pure fabrications. Languages, religious traditions and shared memories often had deep histories. Inheritances, however, do not interpret themselves. Cultural workers selected connections from overlapping materials, fitted local differences into continuous narratives and enabled people who would never meet to imagine themselves as members of one community. Expanding print markets brought readers together; newspapers made distant events shared concerns; maps presented uncertain cultural spaces as visually bounded territories.

This cultural construction possessed political potential but did not always begin with a demand for an independent state. Activists might first seek schooling, publication or administration in a vernacular language, or official recognition of a regional history. When rulers suppressed those demands, cultural rights became a question of who had authority to govern. When activists concluded that only state power could protect a national culture, autonomy, unification or independence moved onto the program.

The evidence also cautions against imagining a smooth progression. Folklore could be collected by loyal servants of a dynasty; speakers of the same language could prefer different states; bilingual people might resist being placed in a single category. Nationalists converted cultural ambiguity into political clarity, but the ambiguity never entirely vanished.

Schools and bureaucracies made identity routine

Nationalists challenged states, yet states also made nations. Censuses asked inhabitants to choose a language or nationality. Schools taught a standard language, common history and national geography. Armies placed men from different districts under common discipline. Postal systems, railways and uniform law connected local societies to a national space. Flags, anthems, monuments and public festivals supplied repeatable rituals for the political community.

These institutions could not simply erase difference, but they changed which differences mattered. Someone who spoke a dialect at home might learn the national language at school, be classified as a national citizen in the army and follow national politics in a newspaper. Rising literacy and mass publishing carried national languages beyond learned elites. By the later nineteenth century, governments often possessed far greater power than the early literary societies to define correct speech, public memory and loyal citizenship.

We should nevertheless avoid exaggerating the early popular reach of nationalism. Many movements in the first half of the century were led by students, lawyers, teachers, journalists and urban professionals. Rural inhabitants might care more immediately about land, taxes and religion than a distant program of national unity. Nationalism became mass politics only when organisers connected the imagined nation to practical interests, participation in institutions and experiences of war. It could spread from intellectual circles, but it needed social carriers and political opportunities.

The German question had no natural map

The German Confederation created in 1815 contained thirty-nine sovereign states, but a cultural Germany could not determine the form of unification. Austria contained a large German-speaking population while ruling many more non-German subjects. Incorporating the entire Habsburg Empire would make a united polity something other than a single nation-state; taking only its German territories would threaten the empire's integrity. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–49 struggled between a “Greater German” solution and a “Lesser German” state excluding Austria and led by Prussia. Its predicament showed that cultural criteria could not settle questions of territory and power.

Economic connections mattered as well. The Zollverein reduced commercial barriers among many German states and placed Prussia near the centre of economic integration. Economic integration, however, did not dictate a particular constitution or even make political unity inevitable. The eventual Lesser German settlement arose from Prussian state power, diplomatic calculation and war, as well as a liberal accommodation with monarchical authority. National language helped legitimise unity; armies and diplomacy fixed its boundaries and institutions.

Italy likewise demonstrates why culture did not automatically become a state. A literary tradition and the peninsula's geography offered a language of unity, while regional differences, papal authority, foreign rule and rival political projects persisted. Mazzini's republicans imagined a popular revolution; the Piedmontese monarchy pursued unity through diplomacy and limited war. Agreement on a nation concealed disagreements about who would govern it. The nation-state that emerged was one possible political settlement, not the inevitable expression of an already unanimous people.

National liberation could create minorities

Nationalism's most compelling promise was that people subject to foreign or imperial authority could become masters of their political future. Greek independence, Polish aspirations and national movements within the Habsburg lands could all invoke that moral principle. Europe's populations, however, were thoroughly intermingled. Any border was likely to include people who did not identify with the resulting state, while leaving some members of its titular nation outside.

The Hungarian movement of 1848 demanded independence from Vienna but confronted the claims of Croats, Romanians, Slovaks and Serbs within the Kingdom of Hungary. Czech national activists opposed German cultural predominance while fearing that a united Germany might absorb Bohemia. These were not incidental obstacles caused by nationalism's immaturity. They revealed its central problem: who may define the people, at what territorial level should self-determination operate, and what protects internal difference?

One civic conception described the nation as a community of shared laws and political institutions, open in principle to newcomers. A cultural or ethnic conception placed greater weight on descent, language, religion and inheritance. Actual movements generally mixed the two. States proclaiming equal citizenship might still use schools and administration to press for cultural assimilation; movements celebrating inheritance might welcome political allies from outside it. A simple opposition between a civic West and ethnic East consequently obscures more than it explains.

The problem was not that every assertion of national culture led to persecution. Many activists defended a suppressed language precisely to secure equality, and constitutional protections could make multiple identities compatible. The danger arose when one cultural definition claimed exclusive ownership of the state. Then a majority's liberation could become a minority's new dependence.

Intellectual history: does liberty require community?

Liberalism commonly began with individual rights, representative institutions and the rule of law. Nationalism answered that individuals did not act in a vacuum. Language made political discussion possible, historical memory fostered trust, and common identity encouraged strangers to accept public obligations. From this perspective, national self-government could be a condition of liberty: a people governed from elsewhere could not readily express its will through institutions it recognised as its own.

The same argument could be reversed. If the nation was imagined as an organic whole standing above its members, dissenters might be accused of betraying a common destiny. States could demand conscription, obedience or assimilation in the name of cultural survival. Nationalism made “the people” sovereign while giving extraordinary defining power to those who claimed to speak for it. The crucial intellectual dispute was therefore not whether culture and politics could be connected, but what rights and institutions should limit that connection.

Nationalism turned culture into politics neither because poetry naturally produces borders nor because every language conceals a waiting state. It did so by joining the revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty to Romantic accounts of historical culture and to the schools, armies and bureaucracies of the modern state. Its emancipatory force was genuine: it challenged dynastic privilege and foreign rule. Its exclusionary risk was equally intrinsic: once cultural difference became the sole warrant for sovereignty, plural societies were forced towards a neatness they did not possess. The most convincing answer is therefore neither that nations were simply discovered nor that they were arbitrarily invented. Inherited cultures were selectively organised, publicly contested and given state forms through political struggles whose outcomes were never assured.

Sources and further reading

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: the concepts, history and normative debates of nationalism
• German History in Documents and Images: nation, constitutionalism and confederation, 1815–1866
• German History in Documents and Images: the German Federal Act of 1815

Continue reading the series: The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History