Vantage Points

History is always seen from some vantage point. It was as true of nineteenth-century Scandinavianists as it is of Scandinavians of today that the past is adapted to the sense of self. Scandinavianists saw history through a Scandinavianist lens that matched the Scandinavianist future they envisaged. The same is true of Scandinavians today, who have adapted their understanding of the past to match their perceptions of self. The consequence is that the histories of Sweden, Norway and Denmark are narratives about the origins and development of the three Nordic nation states. As a result, contrary to nineteenth-century Nordic historiology, today’s histories of the Nordic countries are seldom Nordic.Footnote 1

Nordic historians have, of course, not ignored the fact that, for most of their thousand-year history, the Nordic nations have formed unions. Nevertheless, they have made the nation states into the framework for their narratives. Histories of the Swedish-Finnish union (1249–1809), of the Danish-Norwegian union (1380–1814), of the Kalmar union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (1397–1523), of the Swedish-Norwegian unions (1319–1343 and 1814–1905) and of the Danish-German unitary state (1460–1864) have almost always involved the idea that they would sooner or later be doomed to downfall to make way for the nation states of today. Such downfall is seen as fortunate, since the dissolution of the old polities during the Napoleonic Wars saved the Swedes and the Finns and the Danes and the Norwegians from traumatic national separation. In their national histories, historians reflect an international tendency to associate nation states with liberty, equality and progress, while empires are seen as retrograde and repressive.Footnote 2

Not surprisingly, such historical perceptions have left their mark on views of political Scandinavianism. While unions cannot be written out of history, in broad accounts of the nation’s past it has been easier to omit Scandinavianism or to write it off as an interlude on the way towards the nation state. The same picture can be seen when we look at research into national identity in Scandinavia. In a Danish context, Scandinavianism is as good as absent, and when it appears it is described from a purely Danish perspective. In Norway, Scandinavianism is seen as an elitist project that met with no popular response, but it has been treated in greater depth than to the south of Skagerrak. National identity has not received the same attention in Sweden as in Norway and Denmark, but it is striking that, in works about Swedish national identity in the first half of the nineteenth century, Scandinavianism is given no mention. On the other hand, Scandinavianism features prominently in Bo Stråth’s standard work on the Swedish-Norwegian union. For all its strengths, however, the book perpetuates the master narrative.Footnote 3

In research studies of political Scandinavianism, we find once again a methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism denotes historians take the nation for granted and project it back as the unit for historical interpretation. The consequence hereof is a conceptional overstretch, selection bias, the misinterpretation of the governing bodies of the past and the conflation of culture with identity. It is telling that the three most important works about Scandinavianism are written about Swedish Scandinavianism, Norwegian Scandinavianism and Danish Scandinavianism. Its pan-national aspect has been understood as something national. The issue with histories written to date relates not only to their perspective but also to their periodisation. In Denmark, the majority of major studies of Scandinavianism have focused on the years leading up to 1848. This was a period in which Scandinavianists had limited influence and when the political situation in Europe was scarcely favourable for uniting a state, whether it was Italy, Germany or Scandinavia. The same tendency could also previously be seen in Norway. The Swedish-Norwegian union, however, has forced Norwegian and Swedish historians to address both Swedish-Norwegian union projects of the period and their shared monarch’s activist foreign policy in the 1850s and 1860s. This has made it impossible for Norwegian and Swedish historians to write the history of the period’s Swedish-Norwegian foreign policy without involving Scandinavianism.Footnote 4

Periodisation, ignorance and the trends of historiology have meant that plans for a Scandinavianist revolution in Denmark before, during and after the Second Schleswig War (1864) are by and large unknown, and in the history books they are conspicuous only by their absence. History has been organised in such a way that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, and it has been possible to reject political Scandinavianism in accordance with these countries’ narratives of peaceful and national democratic consensus. This runs like a leitmotif through the master narrative of the war from the first work on the subject (in 1900) up until today’s reference works, reviews and historiographic research. The master narrative of political Scandinavianism is a story of a project that failed because it had to fail.Footnote 5

The Scandinavianists were young, immature utopians, while their political opponents—the anti-Scandinavianists—appear as clear-sighted proponents of Realpolitik. When it comes to describing Scandinavianists and their ideology, certain words recur like mantras: ‘dreams’, ‘dreamers’, ‘reveries’, ‘daydreams’, ‘delusional expectations’, ‘amateurs’, ‘politics of illusion’, ‘fairy tale politics’, ‘fairy tales’, ‘wishful thinking’, ‘lofty idealism’, ‘blind to realities’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘castles in the air’, ‘fantasies’, ‘ravings’, and ‘undergraduate delusions of grandeur’. Terms such as these have been woven into a narrative of banquets, songs, speeches and toasts that never led to action. At least not politically. Even though the language used has softened in recent years, in conjunction with a reappraisal of cultural Scandinavianism, the traditional approach to the political movement has neither been abandoned nor altered. Many current researchers continue to see Scandinavianism as a movement restricted to students, romantic dreamers and amateur politicians who, having stared too deeply into the punchbowl, built a castle in the air that collapsed as soon as it was confronted with political realities.Footnote 6

This master narrative exerted virtually total scientific domination. Inside the borders of Scandinavia, it is hard to find even one counter-narrative, and the few international writings on the subject repeat the view of liberal ‘dreams of a union’. Those works that present an alternative view are written by historians who have devoted all or parts of their working lives to understanding the phenomenon—historians such as the Swedes Einar Hedin, Hans Lennart Lundh and Åke Holmberg, the Dane Erik Møller and the Norwegian Jens Arup Seip. This book is deeply indebted to them. However, the perspective we have adopted is more Scandinavian than theirs, for their point of departure remained their individual nation state. In this sense, the book can be seen as part of a new wave of research into Scandinavianism. This wave started in Norway and moved on to Sweden before arriving in Denmark, and it has been characterised by this transnational approach. What all these historians have in common is that they took the Scandinavianist movement seriously.

Our work is distinctive from theirs, however, on three points. This new revisionist wave has placed particular focus on cultural Scandinavianism, on the Scandinavian public sphere and on Scandinavian cooperation. This has meant a conscious movement away from earlier researchers’ concern with politics towards a focus on culture. At the same time, there has been a broadening of the time frame, which has traditionally been limited to the period from about 1830 to 1864. This new research is attempting to focus on cultural and the practical Scandinavianism that succeeded—not on what failed.

Given this starting point, it is hardly surprising that political Scandinavianism occupies only a limited place in this research and that where it is touched upon we find the master narrative intact. We take a different approach. We do not wish to focus on what has survived and can be made to fit victorious national histories. We have wanted to write the political history of Scandinavianism using the rich materials to be found in the archives. We do not wish to see political Scandinavianism solely from a Scandinavian perspective but to study it in a European context. This is closely linked to the third point on which this work is distinctive. Our aim is not restricted to affirming that Scandinavianism is comparable to German and Italian movements towards unification. We wish to go further and compare Scandinavia with Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe and to introduce Scandinavianism into discussions of European politics and nationalism in the nineteenth century.

The Master Narrative

That research so far has been tendentious is not the same as saying that all its arguments are wrong. If a new narrative is to be taken seriously, it must address the arguments that have been traditionally employed to explain why Scandinavia was not unified in the nineteenth century. The most common argument used to explain why Scandinavianism never succeeded as a political project is that its ideology was vague, its aims unclear and its appeal and its dissemination only marginal. The movement was split into factions and encountered significant opposition. Scandinavianism was on a weak footing in Sweden, weaker in Norway, while in Denmark it was a cloak for Danish nationalism. The project was handicapped by cultural differences, ancient hatreds and rivalry between Norwegian, Swedish and Danish nationalism and was hampered by limited communication and by being restricted to an elite group of academics, officials and other members of the bourgeoisie. According to this narrative, then, there was no Scandinavian public sphere and no support from ordinary people.Footnote 7

This view is partially supported by a narrative that makes use of vivid language to paint a picture of a youth movement fired by romantic dreams, which in its utopian longing for a united Scandinavia tried to tear down the existing structures in its pursuit of a promised future. This view is based on a perception that, like cultural Scandinavianism, political Scandinavianism arose out of a romantic picture of the world. Scandinavianism and its politics have, therefore, be interpreted as a romantic utopia. This is particularly true of Denmark, where it is linked to the catastrophic war of 1864.Footnote 8

According to this master narrative, political Scandinavianism also lacked support from the Great Powers and the necessary political, military and economic resources. Its argument is based on three premises. The first is that unification of Scandinavia threatened to block the Russians in the Baltic Sea. For this reason, Russia would never have been able to accept Scandinavia’s unification. The second is that, since Denmark’s loss of the Scania region in the seventeenth century, the Great Powers had resisted any power being in possession of both sides of the Oresund strait and thereby controlling the Baltic Sea. The third premise is based on a comparison between Scandinavian, German and Italian nationalism. Such parallels are widespread but rarely explained in any depth. The conclusion, however, is that Scandinavianism was doomed to fail, since Sweden, as Scandinavia’s principal power, lacked the resources of Prussia or Piemont and the strength of German or Italian nationalism. It is worth considering whether Sweden was, indeed, weaker than Piemont and if the alleged weaknesses of Scandinavianism were particular to it or are to be found in other national movements of the nineteenth century. To answer this question we need first to understand what nationalism was in nineteenth-century Europe and what Europe was at the time.Footnote 9

The Nationalist Principle

When historians have described Scandinavianism as a fuzzy ideology, they are right.Footnote 10 And if, in 1882, the French philologist Ernest Renan could pose the question ‘What is a nation?’ the reason was that in the nineteenth century there was little certainty as to what a nation was or should be. Ideological and political fuzziness was the rule not the exception in the Europe of the time. Terms such as ‘Germany’, ‘Italy’ and ‘Poland’ had reference only to vague concepts in the first decades of the nineteenth century and were often far more pluralistic and complex than they have been made out be by subsequent historians.Footnote 11

In the nineteenth century, ideas about nations traversed all borders and challenged the existing order. The radical apostle of democratic nationalism, the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, was an incarnation of the political nationalism of the time. In 1831, he created Young Italy, which was succeeded in 1834 by Young Europe, which was the inspiration for Young Poland, Young Germany, Young Switzerland. These created a model for national movements across the continent. Their political programmes were closely related, and they saw the nation states of the future as part of the development of world history, in which absolutist empires would be replaced by a brotherhood of nations. This is the context in which we should see the liberal movements of Scandinavia, in which national liberal Danes were called ‘Young Denmark’, Swedish liberals ‘Young Sweden’, Norwegian students ‘Young Norway’ and Scandinavianists ‘Young Scandinavia’. An awareness of this larger European phenomenon can clearly be seen in the Scandinavianist literature.Footnote 12

Few ideologies had greater significance for Europe in the long nineteenth century than nationalism. The majority of researchers regard nationalism as a modern invention that arose out of the wars and chaos that followed the French Revolution. There is no consensus as to how the ideology should be understood and defined, since the concept is ambivalent and the research field divided. However, the majority support in some form or another Elie Kedourie’s classic definition, which claims that nationalism is,

a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It […] holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.Footnote 13

In abbreviated form, this means that nationalism is, to quote Ernest Gellner, ‘a political principle requiring that the political and the national entity should be congruent’, or, even more briefly, ‘one nation, one nation state’. According to Kedourie, the nationalist principle led to a new form of politics, which trumped existing treaties, dissolved loyalties and legitimised actions. The normative perception of nationalism is characteristic what has been called the first debate on nationalism between Kedourie and Gellner in the 1960s. Especially, the former saw national as an ideology attracted to extremes and gave rise to aggression and chauvinism. This widespread understanding of nationalism is regarded as being adequate to cover the last two centuries.Footnote 14

The Nation in the Nineteenth Century

Most current forms of nationalism align with the nationalist principle, and similarly it is not hard to find examples of nationalist violence. The former is not surprising as the study of nationalism was not professionalised until after the Second World War where nation states had become the norm. The question is, simply, whether this view, built as it is on the experiences of the twentieth century, is well-suited to understanding the experiences, expectations and reality of the nineteenth century. Students of nationalism have often failed to see that not all nineteenth-century nationalists were striving for a nation state.Footnote 15

Scandinavian historians are correct in saying that Scandinavianism had associations with romanticism. However, as this was true for nationalism across the whole of Europe, it is difficult to use romanticism as an argument to explain the failure of Scandinavianism. For nineteenth-century romantic nationalists, the nation was at heart a cultural community. The nation state was not necessarily an aim in itself but, on the contrary, a means that could be used to realise and protect the nation. Whether the nation state was desirable or achievable depended on circumstances, and it is therefore better to regard nineteenth-century nationalism as a movement that culturally promoted the nation and politically strove to achieve or maintain autonomy and national cohesion.Footnote 16

It is important to add that autonomy is not necessarily identical with full national sovereignty. Moreover, the degree of autonomy should often be understood in the context of what was seen as possible and desirable as we shall return to in a later chapter. In contrast to today, the nation state in the nineteenth century represented an exception in a Europe comprising multinational empires and composite states. The few nation states of the time, such as France, Spain, Great Britain and Switzerland, had been created over the centuries out of various different nationalities. Another difference is the political positioning of nationalism. The romantic nationalism in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was in many cases developed by conservative artists and academics who often opposed the political ideals in which the French Revolution was rooted, but, as a political phenomenon, for most of the nineteenth-century nationalism was placed either on the left wing or at the centre. The explanation was simple. The right wing took as its starting point the monarchic principle and royal sovereignty, while the centre and the left wing sought the sovereignty of the people which, in multinational empires, was inevitably synonymous with nationalism. Political nationalism and democratisation often went hand in hand in the nineteenth century. This was not achieved without conflict. In contrast to today, where democracy is linked with peace and stability, the democratisation of Europe was anything but peaceful in a Europe dominated by multinational and dynastic states.Footnote 17

But what was a nation? Whom belong to it? Where was it to be found? What power should it have? Such questions had no clear answers. Almost all national borders were disputed, and there was no consensus about how they should be drawn up. Most German philosophers, philologists and intellectuals were in agreement that the nation should be understood on the basis of language. The language formed the way in which the nation thought and spoke, and it was the link that connected people across time, space and generations. Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland (1813) tells us that the German nation extends as far as the German language can be heard. The reality was a complicated one in a Europe in which many languages were not standardised, where the transition between dialect and language was fluid, and where languages were often closely related.

Things were not made easier by the fact that many people spoke several languages or that language and identity did not go hand in hand. Italian-speakers in Dalmatia could identify themselves just as well with a Slavic, Austrian or Illyrian nation as with an Italian one. It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that nationalists in ethnically mixed provinces should seek the nation’s historic borders. This was a view that played simultaneously on the nation’s historical rights, its dynastic hereditary claims and on international treaties, which—contrary to the principles of nationality—were accepted by conservative powers such as Russia and Austria.

Over and above cultural and historical delimitation there was also the idea of natural borders. French nationalists envisaged a France framed by the Rhine, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the Alps. The same idea is to be found in Lied der Deutschen (1841), where Germany extends from Maas in the Low Countries to Memel on the Baltic and from Etsch in northern Italy to the Little Belt in Denmark. Natural borders were also linked to considerations of security policy and strategy, since the nation also constituted a single defence community.Footnote 18

In some fortunate cases, cultural, historical and natural borders coincided, as in the case of Norway, but this was far from always the case. This created problems not only between the nations but also internally within them. This was true not least of Germany, where discussions about being German and of where a German nation state should lie, dominated the whole of the nineteenth century. Proposals for a future Germany varied between a Kleindeutschland with a population of between 32 and 45 million, and a Grossdeutschland with 70, 80 or 100 million. While a lesser German solution would be a true nation state, a greater Germany would be more multinational. Whether people desired the one or the other was not determined only by perceptions of nationality but also by whether they wished to have a state dominated by Prussia or Austria, and especially by whether the state should be Protestant or Catholic. German nationalism, like Scandinavianism, was marked by a host of contradictions that made it anything but clear-cut.Footnote 19

The Threshold Principle

Liberal nationalism of the nineteenth century is best understood on the basis of Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘threshold principle’. What can perhaps best be descripted as a realist theory of nationalism. For Hobsbawm, nationalism and the creation of nation states were two sides of the same coin, but in contrast to many others he recognised that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the nationalist principle was restricted to those nations that either had created or could create large states.Footnote 20

The roots of the threshold principle were already planted before the French Revolution, when the greatness of a state was measured by the size of its population, its prosperity and military power. In short, nineteenth-century Europe fits neatly into what political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has called ‘offensive realism’. Central to any given state is its own survival. As realists see it, the world is anarchic. As there is no central authority, fear becomes a prime motivator. Consequently, the ‘overriding goal of each state’ becomes ‘to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states’. Therefore, ‘the fortunes of all states—great powers and smaller powers alike—are determined primarily by the decisions and actions of those with the greatest capability’. Capability is mainly understood by Mearsheimer as military capability; however, this is in general determined by the states resources that is its economy and the size of its population.Footnote 21 To this material analysis one would be wise to add the importance of organisation and political and military competence. Prussia, for example, was from the outset not rich in resources, hence it success cannot be explained in purely material terms.

Like most ‘realists’, Mearsheimer is focused on struggle between the great powers for dominations as they shape international politics. However, it is worth noticing that the impact of the power politics of the larger states very much affected small and medium-sized states as it resulted in either their demise or their loss of territory and independence. The best example is the three-way partition of Poland, which struck fear into the hearts of Europe’s smaller states until far into the nineteenth century. Given national interests, however, this was simply a stage in a rational process. It was the state’s duty to ensure the prosperity and welfare of its people, and this could be better achieved by a large state than by a small one. A state that lost a province also lost a proportion of its resources and, by extension, of its capacity to look after the needs and interests of its people.Footnote 22

This realism in the realm of international relations that the nationalists of the nineteenth century took on as received wisdom from the monarchs of the previous century, but they combined it with another ideology and a new philosophy of history in a Europe that had undergone massive change after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. According to this Darwinian thought process, small states did not have the necessary political, military, economic or cultural resources to survive or to make a positive contribution to historical development. This meant that autonomy would be restricted to large states. Few researchers have taken account of the threshold principle, but it harmonises well with many studies of the period’s European nationalism and pan-nationalism. The threshold principle should not be regarded as a universal theory of nationalism but as a fundamental understanding of the politics, society and history that characterised nineteenth-century liberal nationalism. According to the philosophy of the time, the aim of every individual was to be independent, which was a precondition for being free. Liberalism was based on the idea that all citizens of a society should enjoy common rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, which should be guaranteed by a constitutional state. On the other hand, political rights such as the right to vote and the eligibility to stand for election were restricted to those who were financially and socially independent and who possessed the necessary intellectual capacity to make enlightened and unbiased decisions.Footnote 23

In the nineteenth century, nations and states were conceived either as being analogous with the individual or as organically linked. According to the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the state was a precondition for the individual’s ability to realise his/her freedom. This raised the state above the individual. It comes as no surprise, then, that Europe’s liberals demanded that nations possessed the required capacity if they were to be independent states. For many liberals, the nation state was a necessary but not a sufficient requirement for political autonomy. The nation also needed to possess the political, economic, cultural and military wherewithal that were needed to survive. In other words, the rights of small nations were restricted since they had only limited opportunities to attain independence. Something resembling a carte blanche was reserved for the five great powers.

In the same way as Europe’s liberals had difficulty establishing whether an individual had the capacity required to be accorded political rights, so there was no consensus as to where the threshold for a state should be set. Territory and population meant something, but a narrow focus can soon lead to misunderstandings. In the 1850s, China had a population of 420 million and Russia 70 million, but from an industrial, military and educational point of view they were far inferior to France and Great Britain with their populations of 36 and 27 million respectively. The size of a nation should, therefore, be seen in the same way as liberalism’s individual view of capacity—namely, as a question of resources in a broader sense.Footnote 24

The nation state was a community of resources. Without sufficient resources, the nation would not be able to develop, contribute to progress or survive in a Darwinian world order, a notion which towards the end of the century was given a brutal expression by the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who divided nations of the world into the living and the dying. The living nations were those that were large and strong, that were industrial, economic and military leaders, while the dying were weak and poor and would be swallowed up by the strong. This way of thinking could be found across the whole of Europe, but it was particularly prominent in the larger nations, which saw human development in history as an evolution towards ever greater and more sophisticated cultures. For British and French liberals, even states such as Belgium and Portugal could be too small, while the term Kleinstaaterei captures the idea among German liberals.Footnote 25

Economics became Nationalökonomie with states as the principal players. This was particularly true of Germany. Friedrich List was one of the architects behind the establishment of the German customs union in 1834. For him, only nation of sufficient size could create national economies that were able to develop the nation and the course of history. Economics and politics went hand in hand. In other words, Prussia used its dominance in the German customs union to increase its influence over the smaller German states and as part of its security policy in relation to France. Similar thoughts were to be found across the rest of Europe, where economic liberalism was combined with the thought of economic competition between nations. This led to an economic nationalism—as in Italy, where economic propaganda attempted to pave the way for a national market, a customs union and an infrastructure that would bind the peninsula together. In that sense, the size of a nation was also measured against its economy, its production and its material resources.Footnote 26

The threshold principle can be seen as an expression of a Marxist thought process, whereby it is material conditions that create the foundations for political ideas. But the principle was also highly prevalent among the higher intellectual echelons, where the significance of size was linked to ideology, norms, existential ideas and the history of philosophy. For among the large nations, size was inextricably linked with ideas of greatness. Size, or greatness, was not measured only in material or territorial terms but also in the nation’s culture, history and values. ‘Spiritual’ and physical greatness were often seen as congruent, however, since the more expansive framework that went with their size enabled the flowering of the spirit.Footnote 27

Smaller nations, fearing for their existence, struggled to be given a basic recognition of their rights and autonomy. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had described external recognition as a nation’s first and absolute right and he saw autonomy and external independence as its highest honour. Larger nations did not need to fear for their existence. Their attention was focused to a greater extent on honour, prestige, dignity and greatness. The nation’s honour could require it to go to war.Footnote 28

This normative and cultural dimension to international relations is very much lacking in realist account. Hence, while realism may help us understand some cases of nationalism and pan-nationalism better it does have some shortcomings as a descriptive theory. As Ute Frevert has argued, power and honour have been interconnected concepts within international relations ever since a diplomatic vocabulary was developed in the early modern period. However, two things changed in the nineteenth century. Firstly, the honour of a state was no longer just an extension of that of a prince. Honour was transferred to the people as politicians increasingly spoke of national honour. Secondly, the state’s (or rather the nation’s) honour was no longer a purely diplomatic matter played out in audience chambers and the correspondence between the capitals of Europe. National honour and the violation of it had become a question that was discussed in public and debated in parliaments and newspapers.Footnote 29

In short, the insult of a state had now not only become an insult to all citizens of a nation, but also a public attack on the prestige of that nation that required satisfaction to avoid the humiliation of the nation. Prior hurting a state’s dignity or attacking the prestige of a prince could lead to war as in the case of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In his editing of the infamous Ems telegram, Bismarck took advantage the French sense of national pride. The Prussian minister president deliberately omitted all the courtesies that King William’s had used when he declined the French request to give an assurance that no member of his family would again be a candidate for the Spanish throne. Hence, while the king did take French prestige into consideration, Bismarck deliberately did not. The Prussian statesman’s ulterior motive was that he wanted to force the hand of French emperor into declaring war on Prussia to defend the honour of France. The planed worked and perfectly served Bismarck’s political ends as it led to the unification of Germany under the auspice of Prussia.

What is worth noting is that the ramification for insulting the honour of the prince were now transferred to the nation. Following Nobert Elias and Georg Simmel, Frevert claims that modernity resulted in an increased societal sensitivity towards public shaming in the nineteenth century resulting in a growing fearing of national degradation. However, honour and prestige were concepts that were hugely dependent on the size and the power of the state or nation. While this was nothing new, the importance of size in international relations became formalised in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars with the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the allied council in Paris (1815–1818) and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.Footnote 30

The divisions that existed in Germany and Italy prior to unification meant that the response pattern of German and Italian nationalists lay between that of the small and the large nations. On the one hand, they feared external interference. On the other, they felt that their nation did not enjoy the international prestige and recognition that their size merited. Division weakened the nation, but its unification would at one in the same time ensure its independence, its ability to defend itself and its honour, dignity and greatness. Unification would secure the respect and recognition from other nations that they lacked—a recognition that, again, lay at the heart of the nation and of its citizens’ self-respect.

The Knell of Small Nations

Hobsbawm believed that the threshold principle was a political factor from 1830 to 1880. It is doubtful whether this can be delimited so precisely. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that its political significance was greatest during this period, when the continent was convulsed by German and Italian wars of unification. According to the Economist’s chief editor, Walter Bagehot, they created a feeling that ‘the knell of small nations has sounded’.Footnote 31

If, however, we wish to understand the principle, we need to look at the ways in which the French Revolution and in Napoleonic Wars had altered Europe. The French Revolution had equated nation, people and state. This created the impression that everyone belonged to a nation, and that loyalty to the nation was elevated above every other loyalty. The new ideology was most firmly rooted in the middle classes, which saw an enlightened bourgeoisie as the core of the nation.Footnote 32

In the wake of the revolution came two decades of constant upheaval, change and violence. Old dynasties fell, new ones appeared, the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, republics came and went, small and medium-sized states disappeared, new states arose, and the borders of large states were insecure. This unrelenting stream of unpredictable change and military events created a new political and historical consciousness. Those who had experienced these revolutionary events were in no doubt that the world that they had been born into was a far cry from that in which they now lived. Hegel wrote that the world had been struck by a bolt of lightning that changed everything and heralded a new era.Footnote 33

The sense of change was reinforced by the industrial revolution, which brought modernisation to the world in real earnest. From the 1820s and over the decades that followed, steamships, railways and the telegraph altered even perceptions of time and space. The world shrank, while time accelerated. Political military, industrial, technological and economic revolutions transformed not only how people lived but also the language they spoke and their relation to the world around them. Experiences of the past and expectations of the future were torn asunder. This created, on the one hand, a hitherto unknown melancholic relation to the past. On the other hand, these changes meant that the future was an open book as never before. For when, on the surface, the development of history seemed to be characterised by random chance, there was no longer only one future. There were many. This created the possibility for many political ideologies with a range of opinions about the direction of history.Footnote 34

These ideologies partially replaced the religious worldviews of former times. It was the human race itself that determined progress. This opened up new ways of thinking about society, which once again promoted instability in the European states, since new ideologies challenged the existing order. That history now was seen as a collection of unique events did not mean that it lost its significance. It meant a new focus. History meant change, and what mattered therefore was to chart its underlying patterns, as Hegel attempted, while unpredictability and lack of experience broadly speaking led to inflated expectations among those Europeans who were politically aware.Footnote 35

The idea of progress was by no means new. On the contrary, it was closely associated with the western notion that history had a purpose. According to Enlightenment thinking, this took place in phases, progress being seen as a gradual development in the struggle between the forces of light and darkness. It was all about the progress of civilisation in world history. This changed with romanticism, as progress became associated with ever greater freedom—a freedom that was realised through a complex historical process in which contradictory forces were neither unambiguously good or evil. World history was developing dialectically through unavoidable conflicts between ideas and forms of society towards ever greater harmony and understanding in larger and more complex units. This thought process involved seeing history moving away from small and uncivilised polities, which would give way to larger and more highly developed states. Confrontation between forms of government, nations and races was an inevitable part of that process.Footnote 36

The central players developing the philosophy of history of the time were nations and states, each of whom had its own particular characteristics and role in the movement of world history. States and nations were locked in never-ending competition. From a Darwinian and dialectical point of view, standing still was dangerous, while unity, growth and expansion were the best ways to secure a role in the further development of history. According to German philosophy, independence and liberty could only be achieved and preserved through a constant struggle. This made war a logical extension of politics. In The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) Fichte wrote that the ‘war of all states’ was ‘of great significance for History: it is this, almost exclusively, which introduces a living and progressive principle into History’. In the same manner, Hegel saw war as the spirit of world history and peace as the blank pages of history. This meant that the future was seen with a mixture of hope and horror. On the one hand, it involved expectations of progress and freedom, while on the other—at least for some—it led to an inevitable process of expansion in which small nations had to be sacrificed on the altar of history. This meant that a nation’s security and power became central to the nationalism of the time. What gave a nation the right to its own state was the conscious ability to conquer. In other words, wars created nation states.Footnote 37

Survival of the Fittest

In 1864, Herbert Spencer combined his own ideas about society, economics and race with Darwin’s theory of the development of the species. The result was a Darwinism whose essence was, in the phrase coined by Spencer, ‘the survival of the fittest’. Human beings and nations were in a never-ending struggle for existence similar to animals in nature, where only the fittest survived. Spencer’s thinking reflected a tendency of the time that was not restricted to liberalism. It was also to be found among radical thinkers such as Mazzini, communists like Marx and Engels and conservatives like Lord Salisbury.Footnote 38

The view of war as a driving force in the development of history towards ever larger states provoked in smaller nations and states an understandable anxiety about their own demise. The idea that, for smaller nations, fear might drown out hopes for the future has played little part in the larger narrative about Europe in the fourteenth century. Here the focus is often on those larger states whose existence was never threatened. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, however, gave many Europeans good reason to be fearful. The emperor and his bureaucracy had transformed the continent in the name of civilisation and progress. Hardly anywhere, and especially what Michael Broers has established as Napoleon’s ‘inner empire’, had been spared their attempts to reform and rationalise legislation and political entities.

It is hard to say how many states disappeared. The question is only made harder to answer by the fact that it is hard to both define and identify independent polities in medieval and early modern Europe. According to Charles Tilly there were 1000 independent polities in the fourteenth century and 500 in the sixteenth century. Prior to the French Revolution, in the holy Roman Empire alone there were 314 territorial states and cities and 1475 immediate imperial estates. After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) there were a little more than 60 states in Europe, a number that was further reduced by the wars of unification in Italy and Germany, the result being a continent with around 25 states. Fear was not reserved for smaller states. It was also in evidence in Germany and Italy.Footnote 39

There was a difference, however. While smaller nations feared for their existence, German and Italian nationalists were fearful that division would mean foreign domination. Only a state that was large and strong had the capacity to ensure the nations independence and prevent a repetition of the Napoleonic Wars and national humiliation. This view was not restricted to nationalists but was shared by conservative statesman in the German states. This was true of Prussia, where expansion and political and economic dominance in northern Germany since the Napoleonic Wars had been a means to bolster security for itself and for Germany against France.Footnote 40

For smaller nations, a Darwinian logic applied, which found expression in history’s inevitable alternatives—expansion or extinction. Expansion could only happen through the unification of a nation or through a union with closely related peoples. Here, the driving force was often a military threat from without, which made states combine into federations, confederations or personal unions—as in Switzerland, USA and Germany. After the Napoleonic Wars, fear was only reinforced by the way in which larger nations viewed their smaller counterparts. Small, highly developed nations could justify their existence, but they were the exception.Footnote 41

Whereas prominent British and French political thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, such as the conservative Edmund Burke and the liberals Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Constant had had a critical view of imperialism, the great minds of the post-Napoleonic period, such as the liberal British politician and philosopher John Stuart Mill and the French diplomat, historian, and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, held a very different view of empire. They saw their civilisations as superior and hence it was only in the interest of the ‘inferior’ to become a part of their respective empires.Footnote 42

These thoughts, however, were not confined to an overseas expansion, but also to be applied on the European continent. The John Stuart Mill voiced a common belief when he wrote that smaller nations should submit themselves to being assimilated into large and more developed nations.

Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race, the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity of French power—than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.Footnote 43

For Mill, this meant that the borders of a state were not necessarily identical with that of a nation. A state or federation could, in principle, contain several nationalities, but this required that the nations were related so that their individual features could be mixed and constitute a new shared identity.Footnote 44

The reason that men of the calibre of John Stuart Mill were able to see the assimilation of nations as being unproblematic was that it was understood in nineteenth-century notions of nationality that Europe was made up of different races—including Latins, Germans and Slavs. It was politically significant that nations of the same race were ostensibly capable of being unified, and this was an idea reflected in the potential futures imagined by politicians of the time. But neither races nor nations were regarded as equals. The nations of the world were weighed and measured according to the progress they had made, and they were divided into a hierarchy with the European nations at the apex. Such distinctions did not only justify European expansion, for this was a hierarchy that also applied among European nations. The European axis ran from a civilised and liberal western Europe on the one hand to a more barbaric, despotic and backward eastern Europe on the other. But there was also a distinction between a free but primitive northern Europe and a cultivated but absolutist southern Europe.Footnote 45

This view of the political landscape was reinforced during and after the revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic Wars. German nationalists regarded their culture as dominant and believed that a united Germany was a magnet that would attract other closely related nations. On the other hand, many people regarded the Slavs as a subordinate race without the capacity to create states.Footnote 46

Russia was the major exception. The country terrified other Europeans. This was not only on account of its size but also because the Russian empire extended over two continents. The idea was widespread that historical developments would lead to a contest between civilisations involving race wars. Russia’s role after 1815 as the gendarme of Europe added to both the hate and the fear among Europe’s liberals, democrats and socialists.Footnote 47

The idea of hierarchy amongst nations was however, not confined to Great Britain or to liberal philosophers and politicians such as Mill. The notion was common across the continent, and it spanned both philosophical schools and political ideologies such as Hegelianism, Marxism, radical democratic republican nationalism to reactionary racists. Hegel famously distinguished between ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’ nations. In his Philosophy of Mind, he wrote:

In the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve itself as such. A nation with no state formation, (a mere nation), has strictly speaking no history, like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.Footnote 48

The quotation is important for two reasons. Firstly, it seems to affirm the classic modernist notion of nationalism as a political principle that requires that the political and the national entity should correspond. Secondly, it clearly creates a hierarchy amongst nations. The latter notion was adopted by Marx and Engels, who distinguished between barbarian and civilised nations, large and small nations, peoples with or without states and peoples with or without a history. In their view, small nations without a state and without history ought to be swallowed up as quickly as possible by larger more civilised nations.Footnote 49

These views were clearly expressed by Engels in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung during the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849. Engels clearly distinguish between the historic nations (Germans, Poles, and Magyars) and the non-historic nations (Czechs, South Slavs, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Transylvanian Romanians, and Saxons) of the Habsburg Empire. The former had not only a history of statehood. According to Engels, they also had a positive predisposition of revolution. The latter, on the other hand had no history of statehood and they were all counter revolutionary. In short, they had no place in unfolding of history and were by their very nature doomed to extinction.Footnote 50

While Marx prior to 1848 had seen nationalism as a relic of the past, he changed his mind in the wake of the revolutions. He now saw German and Italian unification nationalism as an integral part of bourgeois ideology as the unification of Germany and Italy would lead to larger markets. In these cases, nationalism was a building block of capitalism and industrial development and as such served the progressive development of history. Slavic nationalism and the nationalist movements of minor nations, on the other hand, served the opposite purpose. If successful, they would create smaller markets, slow down economic development, and hamper industrialisation. In short, as only larger nations made economic sense nation states need to be of a certain size. For the same reason, Engels and Marx support the claims of German nationalism on Schleswig as Germany was a larger and more progressive nation than Denmark.Footnote 51

An explicitly racial element was added to this mode of thinking by writings of the reactionary Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. In his 1853 essay on the inequality of the human races, the French diplomat created a hierarchy amongst nations according to their racial purity, hereby creating a ‘raciology’ that was given credence by the introduction of scientific ideas of natural selection. Gobineau’s racial theory was combined with Darwin’s theory of evolution by the British biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel who saw history as a struggle between races that shaped many works of history and social science in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 52

Even Giuseppe Mazzini believed that there was a hierarchy of nations. Larger nations such as Italy, Germany, Poland and Hungary deserved independence and ought to dominate smaller nations who had no history. Nor could the communists claim to be free of such thinking.Footnote 53

This way of thinking reflects the elitist view of nationality to be found particularly among larger nations. A sense of national identity was dependent on the understanding of the educated and financially well-to-do urban elite. It was they who felt the need for a common language, not the rural peasantry, whose homeland might be circumscribed by their local patois. This was one of the reasons why German nationalists could make a claim on areas in Poznan, Bohemia and Schleswig, despite Germans making up a minority. The German nation and its culture occupied a higher civilisational stage.Footnote 54

The nationality principle should not, as the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold wrote, be acted upon too quickly or taken too far, as this would inhibit advantageous unions and disadvantage large states on which the future of civilisation was dependent. Seen in this light, it is hardly surprising that, in his view of the future, Mazzini saw Europe as consisting of 11 nation states or federations of the necessary size and historical background and with populations with closely related languages and cultures. According to this, the Scandinavian countries ought to be united. The same should apply for Germany and Holland, Spain and Portugal, Greece and Bulgaria and Hungary and Rumania.Footnote 55

Matthew Arnold put the views of many intellectuals into words. Small nations would inevitably be attracted by larger nations in their neighbourhood until they fused or became absorbed. Belonging to a larger state would ensure that both the individual and the nation acquired the dignity that small nations lacked. The thinking that was circulating among the public of the larger nations influenced political debate in smaller and medium-sized nations and states. This may explain why many Slav nationalists of the period showed no desire for nation states but, striving to achieve greater autonomy within existing empires, looked towards federations and personal unions or made plans for a form of Pan-Slavism.Footnote 56

It should be noticed that this tendency towards merging nationalism and pan-nationalism with federative within especially Austro Slavism had a clearly dynastic element to it that made it compatible with constitutional monarchism. From a present-day perspective the latter feature may seems backwards looking. However, from a mid-nineteenth-century perspective this was what gave it realism. It should be noticed that the same feature was prominent within Scandinavianism and Italian and German unification nationalism post-1848. The nineteenth century was not only a century of nationalism, but as stressed by Dieter Langewiesche also were much a century of monarchism.Footnote 57

The Czech historian and politician František Palacký, who is often referred to as ‘the father of the Czech nation’, is a good example of this. As Hans Kohn wrote in his classic study of Pan-Slavism: ‘he [Palacký] was convinced that the time for small states had passed and that mankind was being driven towards the creation of very large political and economic units. Therefore, federalism became, besides liberalism, a dominant political idea of his life. A small people like the Czech could exist only in union with others, not by power but on the strength of its intellectual and moral achievements’.Footnote 58

Kohn’s summary of Palacký views is a perfect example of the threshold principle as voiced by a member of a smaller nation. However, it should be noted that Palacký federalist views and his stress on intellectual and moral achievements is a far cry from the more belligerent expressions of the principle that became the norm after the failed revolutions of 1848–1849 in many political circles across Europe. According to Kohn, ‘the roads to a supra-national definition solution were still wide open. They were blocked by Bismarck’s victory in the German civil war [e.g. Austro-Prussian War] of 1866 which deepened the difference in outlook and structure between the West and the illegitimate heir of the Holy Alliance’.Footnote 59 The events of 1866 were not only important to the course of Pan-Slavism, but, as we show in Scandinavia and Bismarck also to the demise of political Scandinavianism.

Nationalisms

Not all European intellectuals subscribed to the threshold principle, and nor did it dominate all forms of nationalism before 1880. Greek, Belgium, Irish, Serbian, Sicilian and, to a certain degree, Hungarian nationalism predominantly subscribed to the idea that even small nations could create states. But even here, separatist nationalism was not unambiguous. Hungarian nationalism wanted to retain the Lands of the Crown of St Stephen (Hungary). The establishment of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815 can be seen as an expression of the threshold principle, Belgian separation in 1830 was no historical necessity, while Sicily did indeed end by becoming part of a united Italy. To begin with, Serbian nationalism did not strive for independence but for autonomy, while it later became closely associated with various forms of Pan-Slavism. It is worth noting that liberal nationalists in Lombardy, Bohemia and Moravia had no desire for a national state. The aim was either to as secure or to achieve regional independence by being part of a larger state or federation. As in the case of Yugoslavia, however, Pan-Slavists did manage to create a Czechoslovakia after the fall of the empires.Footnote 60

We can see, then, that the threshold principle was not simply an intellectual exercise. It was a political principle with consequences. Two of the leading experts in nineteenth-century nationalism, John Breuilly and Joep Leerssen, have argued that pan-nationalism and unification nationalism were each a variant of the other. That nationalism and pan-nationalism is difficult separate is also seen in the writings of other scholars. Some suggest that pan-nationalism should downright be seen just as nationalism or as an extension of nationalism. In the case of Russia, the line between Russian and Pan-Slavism is indeed blurred. The current war in Ukraine, however, may serve as case in point of nationalism and pan-nationalism can clash as most Ukrainians are not susceptible to the Kremlin’s interpretation of Pan-Slavism. As we shall see below, Scandinavianism was by some Scandinavians seen as a natural extension of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian nationalism, while other Danes, Swedes and Norwegians saw Scandinavianism as a threat to their nation.Footnote 61

Despite their self-evident similarities, pan-nationalism and unification nationalism have been treated in very different ways in historiography. One explanation that springs immediately to mind is that history is written in retrospect. Unification nationalism created a German and an Italian nation state and a United Kingdom of Great Britain. This has meant that what has been passed down here is a national German, Italian and British version of history that necessarily concerns itself with the success of nationalist movements. In the same way, international research has had to address itself to Germany and Italy, which created two of Europe’s largest states.

Pan-nationalism has been approached differently, not least in having attracted limited attention. There has not been any full-length comparative study of it since the Cold War. The question is, therefore, how we should understand pan-nationalism and how it distinguishes itself from unification nationalism. Louis L. Snyder is one of the few historians to have studied pan-nationalist movements. Snyder defines them as politico-cultural movements that seek to increase and promote solidarity between peoples that are linked by a common or related language, culture, historical tradition or geographical proximity. In this, pan-nationalism differs from other forms of nationalism by trying to unite several closely related nations.Footnote 62

On the surface of things this ‘objective’ definition of pan-nationalism seems reasonable. However, as pointed out by the historian Alexander Maxwell it does raise the question: ‘How similar must historical traditions be to qualify as “the same”? How much cultural similarity suffices? How kindred must the language be?’. The same could be said about nationalism in general, but most add that pan-nationalism has a supra-national element to it that makes it differ from nationalism. Pan-nationalism is per definition a nationalism that crosses borders between different states. This element is, according to some researchers, the reason why pan-nationalism has often failed as a political movement, while others have pointed out that their aims were unclear or unrealistic. The problem with this approach is, quite simply, that borders between nations and related peoples were far from clear in nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, many cases of nationalism entailed unifying a nation spread across different states. Historians and students of nationalism tend to take the national projects that succeeded for granted, while pan-nationalism is either ignored or written off.Footnote 63

In that sense we may even speak of a methodological nationalism within nationalism studies. Methodological nationalism is as George Vasilev writes:

[T]he unexamined ontological and epistemological choices brought to bear on the analysis. If those choices are a mere reflection of surrounding ideological forces emanating from nation-states, then the analysis has been compromised before it has begun. The hierarchies of common-sense informing judgments on who are relevant agents to give voice to (ontology) and what is relevant information to include (epistemological) privilege nationhood ahead of other ways of being social and political.Footnote 64

The fact that pan-nationalism was apparently doomed to fail was not as clear to its adherents at the time as it has been for the historians since. Hence, as John Breuilly has suggested it could be that we should understand pan-nationalism primarily as retroactive category. That is unification nationalism is a successful pan-nationalism, whereas pan-nationalism is a failed case of unification nationalism. If we see nationalism purely as political ideology, as Breuilly, this makes good sense. Moreover, it can explain why the kleindeutsche Lösung to the German question is seen as German nationalism, while the Austrian oriented großdeutsche Lösung in the nineteenth century and after the First World War or the Anschluss of 1938 by some are seen as pan-nationalism as pointed out by Maxwell. However, the definition ignores the cases of cultural pan-nationalism that have been more or less successful even if political failures. The Norwegian historian Ruth Hemstad, for example, argues that Scandinavianism is just such as case. Moreover, the prefix ‘pan’ cannot solely by seen in retrospect terms as it was clearly used by self-declared Pan-Slavist in the nineteenth century.Footnote 65

Nonetheless, a well-balanced assessment and comparison between pan-nationalism and unification nationalism should take three things into account. First, the underlying principle was the same, the threshold principle. Both in the cases of unification nationalism and pan-nationalism we see the combination of cultural ideas of a collective identity and a pursuit of power in order to secure the survival and independence of the nation and/or state. Secondly, the transition between the two was fluid, since it was unclear at the time what and who belonged to a nation. Thirdly, the aims of pan-nationalism were not always fuzzier than those of unification nationalism.Footnote 66