The Rise of Nationalism in Europe
Visualising the nation; nationalism and imperialism
Interpret national allegories and explain how nationalism led to conflict.
Giving the nation a face. A king can be shown in a portrait. But how do you draw a nation? Artists personified it: they showed the country as if it were a person, usually a woman. She was not a real woman; she turned the abstract idea of the nation into something people could see. This is called an allegory: an idea shown through a person or thing.
Marianne and Germania. In the French Revolution, artists had already used women to show Liberty (red cap, broken chain) and Justice (blindfolded, holding scales).
- France: Marianne, a common Christian name, to suggest a people's nation. She carried Liberty's red cap, the tricolour and the cockade. Her statues stood in public squares, and she appeared on coins and stamps.
- Germany: Germania, wearing a crown of oak leaves, because the German oak stands for heroism.
Reading Veit's Germania (1848). Philip Veit painted Germania on a cotton banner to hang from the ceiling where the Frankfurt parliament met (the Church of St Paul). Her symbols (Box 3):
- broken chains: being freed;
- breastplate with an eagle: the German empire's strength;
- crown of oak leaves: heroism;
- sword: ready to fight;
- olive branch round the sword: willing to make peace;
- the tricolour of black, red and gold: the liberal-nationalists' flag of 1848, banned by the dukes;
- rays of the rising sun: a new era beginning.
In 1836 Veit had painted a Kaiser's crown where the broken chain is now. The change says: the nation is a free people, not a king's property.
Nationalism turns narrow. By the last quarter of the 19th century, nationalism had lost its idealistic, liberal-democratic spirit. It became a narrow creed: nationalist groups grew intolerant of each other and ready for war. The big European powers used subject peoples' nationalism for their own imperialist goals.
The Balkans: Europe's powder keg. After 1871, the most dangerous area was the Balkans: today's Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro. Its people were broadly called Slavs, and much of it was under the weakening Ottoman Empire.
- One by one, its peoples broke away, claiming they were winning back lost independence.
- The Balkan states were bitterly jealous of one another, each wanting more land.
- The great powers (Russia, Germany, England, Austria-Hungary) competed for control, along with their rivalry over trade, colonies and military might.
This led to a series of wars and finally the First World War (1914).
Nationalism spreads to the colonies. Meanwhile, peoples colonised by Europe began to resist imperial rule. Their movements were nationalist too: they fought to form independent nation-states, united by their struggle against imperialism. Each developed its own kind of nationalism, not a copy of Europe's. Yet everywhere, people came to accept that the natural way to organise a society is as a nation-state.
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