The element of "consciousness" is all-important. There are, for example, members of the Finnish race scattered all over northern Russia, but they evince no consciousness of any kind that they are allied to the nationality which inhabits the country of Finland. Again, it is only within recent years that the Serbs and the Croats in the south-west corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have begun to realise that the only things which divide them one from the other are a difference of religion and a difference of alphabet; and now that the realisation of this fact has spread from the study to the market-place, we see the formation of a new nationality, that of the Serbo-Croats. The researches of historians and other learned men have done an immense deal to stimulate the development of nationalities during the past century, but they are unable of themselves to create them. The fact of kinship is not enough; community of language, customs, and culture is not even enough; to be a real nationality a people must be conscious of all these things, and not merely conscious, but sufficiently conscious to preserve them and, if need be, to die for them.
Now the interesting thing for us about a nationality is that it is always striving to become a nation. A nation, as we have seen, may be composed of several nationalities; but such cases are rare, and are due to peculiar geographical conditions, as for example in Switzerland and Great Britain, or to external pressure, as in Belgium, which have as it were welded together the different racial elements into a single whole. In general, therefore, a nation is simply a nationality which has acquired self-government; it is nationality plus State. "Ireland a nation," the warcry of the Irish Nationalist party, is a claim, not a statement of fact; Ireland will become a nation when its desire for self-government is satisfied. The case is instructive because it shows that it is not necessary for a nationality to become a sovereign State in order to be in the full sense of the word a nation. It is perfectly possible, as our Serb remarked, for several nations to form a single sovereign state; but as a general rule all such nations will be allowed to manage their own internal affairs. The self-governing Dominions of the British Empire and the Magyars of Hungary are nations, though they are subordinate to their respective imperial governments in questions of peace and war, treaty obligations, etc.
The real test of national existence is ultimately a sentimental one. Does the nationality inhabiting a given country regard the government under which it lives as a true expression of its peculiar genius and will? Does the State, of which it forms a part, exist by its consent, or has it been imposed upon it by some alien authority or nationality? Is it a territorial unity, or has it been split up into sections by artificial frontiers? All these questions must be answered before we can say of any nationality that it is also a nation. The "national idea," therefore, which has been one of the chief factors in modern history, is essentially an idea of development. Its root is the conception of nationality, that is of a people consciously united by race, language, and culture; and from this springs the larger conception of nationhood, that is of a nationality possessing its own political institutions, governed by its own consent, and co-extensive with its natural boundaries. As we shall see later, political development does not always stop at the Nation-State. Further growth, however, is extra-national in character; it may either take the parasitical form of one nation imposing its will and its "culture" upon other nations, or it may assume the proportions of that highest type of polity yet known to mankind, a commonwealth of nations freely associating together within the confines of a single sovereign State.[1]
[Footnote 1: See Chapter IX. for further treatment of this.]
§2. The Birth of Nationalism: Poland and the French Revolution.—With these general principles in mind let us now consider the national idea at work in the nineteenth century. Nations, in the sense just defined, have of course long existed in Europe. England, Scotland, and Switzerland are nations whose life-histories date right back to the Middle Ages. Joan of Are was a nationalist, and France has been a nation since the end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453. Spain became a nation a few years later by the expulsion of the Moors and the union of Castille and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella. Holland, again, acquired her national freedom in her great struggle against Spain in the sixteenth century. But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that nationalism became a real force in Europe, an idea for which men died and in whose name monarchies were overthrown. "In the old European system," writes Lord Acton, "the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers, and the administration was conducted generally without any reference to popular desires. Where all liberties were suppressed, the claims of national independence were necessarily ignored, and a princess, in the words of Fénelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding portion."[1] The State was, in short, regarded as a purely territorial affair; it was the property, the landed property, of the monarch, who in his capacity of owner controlled the destinies of the people who happened to live upon that territory. Conquest or marriage might unite in the hands of a single monarch the most diverse peoples and countries, the notorious case of the kind being that of the Emperor Charles V., who in the sixteenth century managed to hold sway over Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, and a large part of the New World.
[Footnote 1: History of Freedom, p. 273.]
The golden age of the dynastic principle was, however, the eighteenth century, and the long and tedious wars of that period were nearly all occasioned by the aggrandisement of some royal house. The idea of a nation as a living organism, as something more than a collection of people dwelling in the same country, speaking the same language and obeying the same ruler, had not yet dawned upon the world. Apart from England, Scotland, Switzerland, and Holland, no European nation had really become conscious of its personality as distinct from that of its hereditary monarch. And as we have seen, until nationality becomes keenly self-conscious, the national idea remains unborn. Only some great internal cataclysm or an overwhelming disaster inflicted by a foreign power could evoke this consciousness in a nation; and fate ordained that the two methods should be tried simultaneously at opposite ends of Europe. France, "standing on the top of golden hours," and Poland, crushed, dismembered, downtrodden—it would be difficult to say which of these contributed the more to the great national awakening in Europe.
Poland was the first and greatest martyr of the nationalist faith. By its constitution, which was that of an oligarchical republic with an elective king, Poland was placed beyond the pale of a Europe ruled upon dynastic principles. Its very existence was an insult to the accepted ideals of legitimacy and hereditary monarchy, and it was impossible for any particular house to acquire it in the honest way of marriage. This was particularly annoying to its immediate neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and Austria, all of whom had grown into great powers while Poland, torn by internal dissension, sank lower and lower in the political scale. It is significant that the earliest suggestion of partition came from Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was obliged to take Russia and Austria into his counsels, as he knew that they would never allow him to annex the whole country himself. Indeed, from first to last, the story of the Polish partitions is a good example of Prussian Realpolitik. At length, after much hesitation on the part of Russia and Austria, the Powers agreed among themselves in 1772 to what is known as the First Partition, whereby the three monarchs enriched their respective territories by peeling, as it were, the unfortunate republic on all its frontiers. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the whole disgraceful concern is that it did not appear in the least disgraceful, either morally or politically, to the public opinion of the age. Meanwhile Poland by a heroic effort converted herself in self-defence into a hereditary constitutional monarchy on the model of England. Prussia, playing the part of Judas, pretended to welcome these reforms at first and lent the Poles its encouragement; but when Russia took up arms on behalf of the Polish reactionary party, and the country turned to Prussia to aid it in defending the constitution, the treacherous Frederick William not only declined to do so, but began to send his troops to occupy Polish territory. The upshot was the further dismemberment of Poland known as the Second Partition (1793). "No sophistry in the world," writes Mr. Nisbet Bain, "can extenuate the villainy of the Second Partition. The theft of territory is its least offensive feature. It is the forcible suppression of a national movement of reform, the hurling back into the abyss of anarchy and corruption of a people who, by incredible efforts and sacrifices, had struggled back to liberty and order, which makes this great political crime so wholly infamous. Yet here again the methods of the Russian Empress were less vile than those of the Prussian King. Catherine openly took the risk of a bandit who attacks an enemy against whom he has a grudge; Frederick William II. came up, when the fight was over, to help pillage a victim whom he had sworn to defend."[1] After this the end came rapidly. The heroic patriot Kosciuszko headed a popular rising against Russia; but after a remarkable resistance to the combined forces of the three partitioning powers, the insurrection was finally suppressed in torrents of blood. The crowned bandits nearly quarrelled between themselves over the booty, but eventually in 1795 Austria, Russia, and Prussia signed a treaty which left nothing of Poland on the map at all.
[Footnote 1: Slavonic Europe, p. 404.]
The effect upon the subsequent history of the world of this crime against humanity, carried out by the three most absolute dynasties in Europe, was incalculable. "The annihilation of the Polish nationality has probably done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were first founded. To trace its effects in all their various ramifications would lead us a long way. It is sufficient here to notice that the destruction of Poland, like the destruction of Jerusalem, produced a "dispersion," and that as the Jews of the dispersion have discharged a peculiar office in the economy of the world as usurers and financiers, so, too, have the Poles of the dispersion as agents and vectors of revolution. In all the republican movements of the Continent the Poles have taken a leading part. They are to be found in the Saxon riots of '48; in the Berlin barricades; in the struggle for the Republic in Baden; in the Italian and Hungarian wars of liberation; in the Chartist movement, and in the French Commune. Homeless and fearless, schooled in war and made reckless by calamity, they have been the nerve of revolution wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune."[1] And what Mr. Fisher, in this passage, puts in a concrete fashion, Lord Acton has expressed with equal emphasis, if more abstractly. "This famous measure," he writes of the final partition, "the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. 'No wise or honest man,' wrote Edmund Burke, 'can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all countries at some future date.' Thenceforward there was a nation demanding to be united in a State—a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again; and for the first time a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust—that their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its right to constitute an independent community. Before that claim could be efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its opponents—before it gained energy, after the last partition, to overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt which previous disorders had brought upon Poland—the ancient European system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place."[2]