From Which Groups Did European Nationalist Movements Draw Their Greatest Number Of Supporters?

European nationalism

English language Puritanism and nationalism

The starting time full manifestation of modern nationalism occurred in 17th-century England, in the Puritan revolution. England had become the leading nation in scientific spirit, in commercial enterprise, and in political thought and action. Swelled past an immense conviction in the new age, the English language people felt upon their shoulders the mission of history, a sense that they were at a dandy turning point from which a new true reformation and a new freedom would start. In the English revolution an optimistic humanism merged with Calvinist ethics, and the influence of the Bible gave class to the new nationalism past identifying the English people with ancient Israel.

The new message, carried by the new people not only for England but for all humankind, was expressed in the writings of the poet John Milton (1608–74), in whose famous vision the thought of liberty was seen spreading from U.k., "celebrated for endless ages every bit a soil most genial to the growth of liberty," to all the corners of the earth.

Surrounded by congregated multitudes, I at present imagine that…I behold the nations of the earth recovering that freedom which they so long had lost; and that the people of this island are…disseminating the blessings of civilization and freedom amid cities, kingdoms and nations.

English nationalism, so, was thus much nearer to its religious matrix than afterward nationalisms that rose after secularization had made greater progress. The nationalism of the 18th century shared with information technology, all the same, its enthusiasm for liberty, its humanitarian character, its emphasis upon private rights and upon the human customs as above all national divisions. The rising of English nationalism coincided with the ascent of the English language trading centre classes. Information technology found its terminal expression in John Locke'due south political philosophy, and it was in that class that it influenced American and French nationalism in the post-obit century.

American nationalism was a typical product of the 18th century. British settlers in N America were influenced partly by the traditions of the Puritan revolution and the ideas of Locke and partly past the new rational interpretation given to English liberty by contemporary French philosophers. American settlers became a nation engaged in a fight for liberty and individual rights. They based that fight on current political thought, peculiarly every bit expressed by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. It was a liberal and humanitarian nationalism that regarded America equally in the vanguard of humankind on its march to greater liberty, equality, and happiness for all. The ideas of the 18th century found their first political realization in the Proclamation of Independence and in the nascency of the American nation. Their deep influence was felt in the French Revolution.

French nationalism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had prepared the soil for the growth of French nationalism past his stress on pop sovereignty and the general cooperation of all in forming the national will (the "general will"), and besides by his regard for the common people as the true depository of culture.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, cartoon in pastels past Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 1753; in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.

Courtesy of the Musée d'Fine art et d'Histoire, Geneva; photo, Jean Arlaud

The nationalism of the French Revolution was more than that: it was the triumphant expression of a rational faith in common humanity and liberal progress. The famous slogan "Liberty, equality, fraternity" and the Announcement of the Rights of Human being and of the Denizen were thought valid not but for the French people but for all peoples. Individual freedom, homo equality, fraternity of all peoples—these were the common cornerstones of all liberal and autonomous nationalism. Under their inspiration new rituals were developed that partly took the place of the old religious feast days, rites, and ceremonies: festivals and flags, music and poetry, national holidays and patriotic sermons. In the most varied forms, nationalism permeated all manifestations of life. As in America, the rising of French nationalism produced a new miracle in the art of warfare: the nation in arms. In America and in France, citizen armies, untrained merely filled with a new fervour, proved superior to highly trained professional armies that fought without the incentive of nationalism. The revolutionary French nationalism stressed gratis individual decision in the germination of nations. Nations were constituted past an deed of self-determination of their members. The referendum became the instrument whereby the will of the nation was expressed. In America every bit well equally in revolutionary France, nationalism meant the adherence to a universal progressive idea, looking toward a common future of freedom and equality, non toward a past characterized by absolutism and inequality.

Napoleon's armies spread the spirit of nationalism throughout Europe and fifty-fifty into the Middle East, while at the same time, beyond the Atlantic, it aroused the people of Latin America. Merely Napoleon'southward yoke of conquest turned the nationalism of the Europeans against France. In Germany the struggle was led by writers and intellectuals, who rejected all the principles upon which the American and the French revolutions had been based as well as the liberal and humanitarian aspects of nationalism.

The 1848 revolutionary wave

German nationalism began to stress instinct confronting reason, the ability of historical tradition against rational attempts at progress and a more than just social club, and the historical differences between nations rather than their common aspirations. The French Revolution, liberalism, and equality were regarded every bit a brief aberration confronting which the eternal foundations of societal order would prevail.

That German interpretation was shown to exist imitation past the developments of the 19th century. Liberal nationalism reasserted itself and affected more and more than people: the ascension middle class and the new proletariat. The revolutionary wave of 1848, the year of "the spring of the peoples," seemed to realize the hopes of nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, who had devoted his life to the unification of the Italian nation by autonomous ways and to the fraternity of all complimentary nations. Though his immediate hopes were disappointed, the 12 years from 1859 to 1871 brought the unification of Italia and Romania, both with the help of Napoleon III, and of Federal republic of germany, and at the aforementioned time the 1860s saw cracking progress in liberalism, even in Russia and Espana. The victorious trend of liberal nationalism, still, was reversed in Germany past Otto von Bismarck. He unified Germany on a bourgeois and disciplinarian basis and defeated German liberalism. The German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine against the will of the inhabitants was contrary to the idea of nationalism equally based upon the gratuitous volition of humanity. The people of Alsace-Lorraine were held to be German language by allegedly objective factors, preeminently race, independent of their will or of their allegiance to any nationality of their choice.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini, item of an oil painting by Luigi Zuccoli, 1865; in the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan.

Courtesy of the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan

In the second half of the 19th century, nationalism disintegrated the supranational states of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman sultans, both of which were based upon prenational loyalties. In Russia, the penetration of nationalism produced two opposing schools of thought. Some nationalists proposed a Westernized Russia, associated with the progressive, liberal forces of the rest of Europe. Others stressed the distinctive grapheme of Russia and Russianism, its independent and different destiny based upon its autocratic and orthodox by. These Slavophiles, similar to and influenced past German Romantic thinkers, saw Russia as a future saviour of a West undermined by liberalism and the heritage of the American and French revolutions.

Twentieth-century developments

Ane of the consequences of World War I was the triumph of nationalism in central and eastern Europe. From the ruins of the Habsburg and Romanov empires emerged the new nation-states of Austria, Republic of hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Those states in turn, withal, were to be strained and ravaged by their own internal nationality conflicts and by nationalistic disputes over territory with their neighbours.

Russian nationalism was in part suppressed afterward Vladimir Lenin's victory in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over the one-time empire of the tsars. But the Bolsheviks also claimed the leadership of the world communist move, which was to become an musical instrument of the national policies of the Russians. During Globe War II, Joseph Stalin appealed to nationalism and patriotism in rallying the Russians against foreign invaders. After the war he plant nationalism one of the strongest obstacles to the expansion of Soviet power in eastern Europe. National communism, as information technology was chosen, became a divisive force in the Soviet bloc. In 1948 Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, was denounced past Moscow as a nationalist and a renegade, nationalism was a stiff factor in the rebellious movements in Poland and Hungary in the fall of 1956, and subsequently its influence was also felt in Romania and Czechoslovakia and again in Poland in 1980.

The spirit of nationalism appeared to wane in Europe after Earth War Ii with the establishment of international economic, military, and political organizations such as NATO, the European Coal and Steel Customs (1952–2002), Euratom, and the Common Market place, afterwards known as the European Economic Community and then as the European Customs. Simply the policies pursued past French republic under Pres. Charles de Gaulle and the problem posed past the division of Federal republic of germany until 1990 showed that the appeal of the nation-state was yet very much alive.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nationalism/European-nationalism

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