|
|
|
|
National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
6. The Emergence of National-Sovereign Identity: Revolutionary Nationalism and Reaction
The bane of stable international systems is their nearly total inability to envision mortal challenge. The blind spot of revolutionaries is their conviction that they can combine all the benefits of their goals with the best of what they are overthrowing.
—Henry Kissinger
All French persons are placed in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. Young men will go off to battle; married men will forge arms and transport provisions; women will make tents and clothing and serve in the hospitals.
—Declaration of the Montagnard Convention (1793)
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy
And planned to bring the world under a rule
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.—William Butler Yeats
The first crises of legitimacy of the old (territorial-sovereign) regime were to come before the end of the eighteenth century. It was to begin in the periphery with a colonial challenge to the claims of territorial sovereignty with the 1776 declaration of the sovereignty and independence of Britain’s North American colonials. It was to continue on the continent with the crisis of the old regime in France, and much of the rest of Europe to the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter will therefore be predominantly concerned with the events between 1789 and 1848, which Hobsbawm has appropriately termed the “age of revolution.” 1
The French Dual Legitimation Crises: Ressentiment and National-Sovereign Identity
Recall that in chapter 4 we saw that the rampant absolutism of the French monarchy had deprived the French nobility of their ancient class identity as quasi-feudal legislators and rulers of the French nation. Absolutism had instead reduced them, in some cases, to the status of royal patrons, and in other cases to a purely ornamental status, as courtiers and royal sycophants, highly dependent upon royal patronage. Their class identity and solidarity did not dissolve in the face of their increasing irrelevance in the governance of the French nation, however. They saw the Crown’s penchant for ennobling the wealthy bourgeois as a more direct threat to the status and legitimacy conferred upon them by their ancient bloodlines. This affront served as an adequate grievance to redirect their class identification with the French Crown and state into a primary allegiance to other members of their class. In order to meet the twin threats of the absolutist tendencies of the Crown, and the incursions of the wealthy bourgeois class into its ranks to its identity and status, the French nobility had begun to redefine and reorganize itself to construct a new, firmer basis for its identity and status. 2
If the “virtue” of nobility based upon blood lineage would no longer be recognized, the French aristocracy would apply their wealth and leisure to the creation of a new barrier against bourgeois incursions into their ranks. Thus, as Greenfeld argues:
In the eighteenth century the [French] aristocracy appropriated education as a quality peculiar to it. It redefined itself as a cultural elite...schooling became a necessary condition for success in high society...the importance of the Court decreased proportionately....Talent became a ground for ennoblement. Middle-class intellectuals mixed with grands seigneurs in salons and academies. They enjoyed comfortable incomes and could marry into respectable circles. They were pampered by generous pensions and “cultivated” by noble admirers: 30 percent of Rousseau’s correspondents, 50 percent of Voltaire’s, came from the nobility....Authors, it was said, acquired “a kind of nobility.” The definition of intellectuals as an aristocracy was not entirely new...Against another intruder, however, the nobility stood firm. While it came to recognize culture as ennobling, it would not yield to money. Money could buy nobility, but it could not buy social acceptance. 3
Thus the newly educated aristocracy of birth became augmented with an “aristocracy of merit,” and intellectuals who were “cultivated” by their aristocratic patrons formed an affinity with their patrons. Greenfeld points out that even Rousseau, who has come down in the annals of political philosophy as the great democrat, had himself formed such an affinity. It was Rousseau who had said “ ‘The best possible government...is an aristocracy.’ ” But in an aristocracy of merit “...the wisest should govern the many.’ ” 4 These flights into the utopia of the philosopher-king were, however, overshadowed in the work of Rousseau by the legitimacy of the true seat of post-dynastic, post-territorial sovereignty. This is the general will. 5
But it is not the Rousseauian vision of the sovereignty of the state, lodged in the general will, that alone provided the ideological basis of an emerging French nationalism in the French aristocracy. Nor was it elite or mass alienation from the atomizing capitalism of the vulgar rich, or their use of the profits of this mode of economic organization to arrogate unto themselves the noble titles that had been the birthright of the French aristocracy. The sources of French nationalism, as it emerged in infantile form in the middle of the eighteenth century, were by no means purely endogenous to French domestic society, and it is here that Greenfeld provides her greatest contribution to our understanding French nationalism.
As the eighteenth century progressed, the “Anglophilia” of the French intellectual elite that had been evident in the admiration of the English constitution, articulated in Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois, “gradually gave way to Angolophobia.” 6 The gradual decline of French stature and fortune on the international stage after the death of Louis XIV, the humiliating defeat at the hands of the British in the Seven Years’ War, and loss of vast colonial possessions at its conclusion, had contributed to a fierce ressentiment of Britain among the French elite. Greenfeld attributes the term ressentiment to Nietzsche, and later development and definition of the concept to Max Scheler. She suggests that “ressentiment refers to a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred (existential envy) and the impossibility of satisfying these feelings.” 7 It is an essential concept in her explanation of the development of, respectively, English, French, Russian, German, and American nationalisms.
It is worthwhile to pause here to unpackage this concept a bit further, with Greenfeld’s assistance, and to situate this concept in the context of my theoretical framework, elaborated in chapter 2. I have earlier argued, with Habermas, that a “legitimation crisis” results in a society when powerful societal members “feel their social identity threatened.” In response they revise their “interpretive system” to revise their group identity and “through this group identity assert their own self-identity.” 8 Greenfeld’s application of the concept of ressentiment to the legitimation crisis that Habermas develops is particularly useful in understanding the cognitive origins of national collective identity. Though she does not invoke Habermas, her argument strongly reflects his.
The adoption of a new, national identity is precipitated by a regrouping within or change in the position of influential social groups—a crisis of identity, structurally expressed as “anomie”—which creates among them an incentive to search for and, given the availability, adopt a new identity. The crisis of identity as such does not explain why the identity which is adopted is national, but only why there is a predisposition to opt for some new identity. 9
Quite. So why does this new identity crystallize as national identity?
The fact that the identity is national is explained...by the availability at the time of a certain type of ideas, in the first case a result of invention, and in the rest of an importation...national identity is adopted because of its ability to solve the crisis...where the emergence of national identity is accompanied by ressentiment, the latter leads to the emphasis on the elements of indigenous traditions—or the construction of a new system of values—hostile to the principles of the original [in the case to follow, English] nationalism. 10
As French intellectuals and nobility looked about them at the close of the eighteenth century they saw much to fear and loathe in Britain. They had been mortified by the results of the Seven Years’ War, and pined for vengeance against the British. As Greenfeld suggests, the educated classes in France were enthusiastic supporters of the French efforts in support of the American War of Independence. Lafayette was greeted as a conquering hero upon his first return to France in February of 1779. Primary source material abounds to illustrate both the contemporary French enthusiasm for humiliating Britain, and their cognitive dissociation of the British nation with the principles of liberalism and progress, which they saw as engendered by the American Revolution. 11 Moreover, the loathing of the French intellectuals, noble or not, of the bourgeoisie vulgaire had led them, with the assistance of the work of Mably, to despise Britain as “[a] capitalist society, a nation that was unjust, avaricious, venal, corrupt, and dominated by commercial interests...[thus]...no fit model for France.” 12
Thus the thrust of Greenfeld’s argument is that the revolution would never have been possible without the disaffection of the nobility, their move toward reconstituting themselves as a cultural elite in the face of their political irrelevance on the absolutist state, and without the ideology of national collective identity, which sprang from the resulting French Enlightenment, and from ressentiment of Great Britain, the principle rival of France. The ideology of nationalism had sprung from the French nobility and the intellectual elite, not from the bourgeoisie, who later appropriated the revolution. Greenfeld makes it clear that she regards the French bourgeoisie as scarcely being in a position to conceptualize, let alone create and effect, a social revolution. Again, for Greenfeld the French bourgeoisie “consisted of a middling sort of people, smart enough to recognize a good opportunity. The elite forged and armed the middle classes with weapons it had not much use for itself.” 13
The force of Greenfeld’s argument is, however, predicated on her assertion that the relative decline of the international status of France vis-à-vis Britain “was at best of secondary importance for the middle-class nationalism, and it was much less fueled by wounded pride and a desire to get even [than that of the aristocracy].” 14 This argument is certainly plausible, given the evidence she has presented that the aristocracy and intellectuals had their own reasons to despise capitalist Britain. But she goes on to immediately admit that unlike the elites who developed and articulated the concept of national-sovereign identity, lodged in the people, that “bourgeois who remained bourgeois rarely articulated their views, we know much less about what they really thought.” 15 One potential pitfall of accepting this argument without comment is that we really have very little historical or documentary insight into how the French bourgeoisie felt about the Revolution as it was being prepared, as the written records that they have left to us most often are limited to the balancing of sums of money in their ledgers.
It is not my intention in this discussion to advocate the adoption of Greenfeld’s explanation of the development of the notion of national-sovereign identity in France over competing explanations. Greenfeld clearly takes pains to refute the contentions of theorists as diverse as the Marxist Barrington Moore to the French aristocrat Tocqueville that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. 16 Skocpol, conversely, has argued that the fiscal crisis resulting from the disastrous French war debts ushered in the revolution, and that any contribution resulting from French class struggle (which implies the existence of a French bourgeois class identity) was a product of this crisis. 17 Yet, as Greenfeld points out, there is little documentary evidence of this from the pens of the contemporary French bourgeoisie. Michael Mann’s recent persuasive explanation contains elements of all of these explanations, in his neo-Weberian, multicausal IEMP model. 18
Classes were not “pure” but also were defined by ideological, military, and political forces. The Revolution became bourgeois and national, less from the logic of development from feudal to capitalist modes of production than from state militarism (generating fiscal difficulties), from its failure to institutionalize relations between warring elites and parties, and from the expansion of discursive ideological infrastructures carrying principled alternatives. 19
What I should like the reader to take away from this brief development of the Revolution and the national-sovereign identity that resulted from it is an understanding that (1) the legitimation crisis that spawned the Revolution had sources that were both internal and external to French society. (2) The sources of this legitimation crisis were cognitive and material, ideational (agential) and structural. (3) Those who argue that the crisis of legitimacy of the ancien regime might be explained largely with recourse to sources internal to French domestic society must contend with the fact that the development of the specifically national-sovereign identity of the new regime can not be explained without reference to factors external to domestic society, such as competition with England. Finally, (4) the power of the French bourgeoisie and the idea of the French nation arose simultaneously. This last observation is a pattern that will become familiar.
It is, however, far too simplistic to suggest that French nationalism arose as a response to English nationalism, or that the French nation was constructed to place France on par with the British nation which had so wounded the Frenchman’s self-esteem within his collective self-identification. French nationalism and French nationhood did not arise as a necessary consequence of a remorseless “socialization” mechanism, weeding out dysfunctional modes of state organization with the obdurate purpose of an automaton. France did not shed absolutism to defeat Great Britain, or to become America. France developed national-sovereign identity because the territorial-sovereign identity of the absolutist Bourbon monarchy had become, through external defeat, internal fiscal crisis, and domestic exclusivity, too shabby an overcoat to clothe the talent, energy, and ambition of the self-aware people of all classes that the territorial-sovereign state had misused.
Yet it is not at all clear that the idea of the French nation had been internalized by all, or even the majority, of Frenchmen as Louis and his queen mounted the scaffold on a cold January’s day in 1793. National-sovereign identity had surely existed in France, by Greenfeld’s account, by the middle of the eighteenth century among the educated elite. Yet it is not difficult to envision an alternative demise of the Bourbon monarchy without it. I will give Douglas Johnson the last word regarding the causes of the Revolution.
There should be no problem in understanding the Revolution. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the government of France ceased to function. There was no revolutionary party; there was no revolutionary opposition; there was no revolutionary situation; there was no accumulation of crises which exploded. There were many features which made government more difficult. Some of these were in the realm of ideas, which undermined the traditional authority of an anointed king. Some were in the nature of hard facts, such as inflation and rising expenditure. Some were in the nature of accident, such as bad harvests. Some were in the nature of circumstances, such as the presence of a young and well-intentioned king who drew attention to problems and ills which he was unable to solve. And some were to be found in the fact of innovation, when Frenchmen found themselves, for the first time, englobed in a parliamentary assembly and involved in a situation that created confrontation, dispute, attitudinization and division. And out of all these features, the French nation emerged. 20
Yet it was a specifically national-sovereign identity that emerged. Johnson’s observations capture the dynamic and unpredictable interplay of social and political agency and structure required to delegitimate and topple a political regime, and in this case, a social order as well. National-sovereign collective identity may not have been the cause of the Revolution, but it was clearly a consequence of the Revolution, and of the subsequent reaction of the crowned heads of Europe to the more than figurative decapitation of one of their own.
Territorial-Sovereign reaction to the New Regime: The Conflict of Territorial-Sovereign and National Sovereig Principles
So much has been written about the events surrounding the French Revolution that I will radically minimize further narrative description of the event itself. What will interest us are the enormous consequences for French society and domestic institutions and particularly for European international relations, of the passing of sovereignty from Louis XVI to the French nation in 1789.
The social and political institutions of the French state were completely and continuously transformed by the new legitimating principles of the French nation. The post-Revolutionary French civil order and government were to undergo several well-studied transitions between the formation of the National Assembly from the Estates General in 1789 to the declaration of the Second Republic in the Concert period. The Revolution produced a series of regimes. The French state was governed as a constitutional monarchy from 1789 through 1792, until Louis’s execution. A Jacobin dictatorship ruled for the following two years as the Terror decimated leading lights of the French Enlightenment, such as Condorcet, those who had worked to overthrow the Girondists, such as Marat, and finally leaders of the Committee of Public Safety such as Danton and Robespierre. This was followed in turn by the thermidorian reaction, the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, and finally the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, which followed the defeat of Napoleon.
Whatever might be said about the imperfect state of the French nation-building project at the time of the First Republic, the immediate and repeated transformation of French civil institutions indicates that the cognitive and political negation of the old regime in France was completed quite early in the life of the new French civic order. 21 The National Assembly, while Louis still drew breath, was predominantly concerned with struggling for power with him in a domestic context, and with attacking the principles that legitimated his reign. Foreign concerns were initially quite low on the Revolutionary agenda, and thus French national-sovereign identity lacked an external focus for a time. As Paul Schroeder suggests in his recent and monumental study of the period between the close of the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution of 1848; “Only from about mid-1791 did the spirit of nationalism, aroused and mobilized by the revolution, become clearly visible, initially more in domestic affairs.” 22
Lacking a direct threat, the National Assembly initially made no moves to threaten other European states with republican revolution by force of French arms. Neither did the vast majority of Louis’s brother monarch’s expend much effort to assist him, frustrating an effort by the Swedish king Gustavus III to organize his rescue. The French national sovereigns of the National Assembly, and the territorial sovereigns in the rest of Europe, appeared to gaze upon one another without serious concern for a time. Yet Schroeder provides us with a passage that provides the link between the domestic and international consequences of the creation of national-sovereign identity in a system dominated by territorial sovereigns.
Just as the Revolution fundamentally changed domestic politics, so it changed the nature and rules of the international game. Its new revolutionary political language and culture, in defining the state as the highest incorporation of the popular will...dramatically raised the stakes of domestic politics, making the central issue that of who truly represented the people’s will and had the right to govern by its name and authority. Those who fought and lost in this contest for representing the popular will...were by implication...not part of the people but its enemies, traitors to the Revolution and the fatherland [read nation]...In a similar way, the Revolution presented a challenge to the whole legal and conceptual basis of international politics. Instead of international claims and transactions being argued and fought out on the basis of treaties and legal rights, the popular will was now to be the decisive factor. This vastly increased the potential for international conflict, magnified uncertainties, and elevated quarrels over concrete interests into struggles over fundamental principles and world views. 23
Thus the same principles of national-sovereign identity that legitimated the transformation of the French domestic civil order, which Isser Woloch has analyzed so rigorously, presented an intrinsic challenge to the legitimacy of the international order dominated by states which possessed territorial-sovereign identity. This illustrates my assertion, implicit in Figure 1, chapter 2) that the transformation of collective identity from territorial-sovereign to national-sovereign identity resulted not only in a necessary change in the institutional forms of collective action, but also in a challenge to the legitimating principles of the territorial-sovereign international system. Yet clearly France had not yet succeeded in transforming these system legitimating principles. The question of whether national-sovereign or territorial-sovereign principles would prevail would be contended for decades to come. This contention was to begin immediately upon the French National Assembly’s articulation of national-sovereign principles of international conduct in the Assembly’s assertion of French national sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine.
The rights of the Bishops of Speyer and Trier, conferred by their positions as Herrschaften of the Holy Roman Empire, came into direct conflict with French claims that “their rights base upon popular sovereignty transcended those based upon treaties.” 24 This challenge was monumental and potentially lethal to the small German princes and clerics without resources to oppose the French national Leviathan. Again Schroeder captures the issue in language sufficiently trenchant to quote at length.
The French concept of an exclusive sovereign authority exercised by a single government over a clearly defined territory clashed directly with their life-principle, that of Landeshoheit (territorial supremacy rather than sovereignty)....Sweeping away feudalism might be the way to consolidate revolutionary France; it would destroy Germany, and could undermine much of the rest of Europe....quarrels with greater powers were bound to arise, for France’s new principles gave it new powerful weapons of territorial expansion. Louis XIV had had to find or invent legal justifications for his annexations; France now could claim any territory where the people, or any group it chose to regard as the people, proclaimed its allegiance. 25
This passage emphasizes my earlier suggestion that it matters a great deal to what or whom people in a polity give their allegiance. That which they regard as a legitimate source of domestic and international political authority defines them as a polity. Schroeder’s analysis suggests that the principles of national-sovereign identity create as many or more problems as they solved for the international system. National collective identity problematizes, at a minimum, the issues of minorities, territory, migration, and state integrity and security. Unhappy ethnic, linguistic, religious, or otherwise delineated minorities are tempted toward secessionism in the hope that a powerful nation will assist them in separating from the state to which they are attached. National-sovereign identity problematizes the issue of title to land as dynastic and territorial-sovereign legal claims are delegitimated. Ethnic and minority migration is encouraged in such an environment, creating the problem of refugees. The integrity, identity, and security of polyglot states is problematized when the legitimating principles of such a state face a national-sovereign challenge. Easy and peaceful means by which to resolve these problems are difficult to identify. 26
What Schroeder identifies here, in his discussion of the manner in which French national-sovereign principles challenged territorial-sovereign principles and patterns of international conduct, is the kernel of what would become, in the reign of Napoleon III, the “principle of nationality.” This would ultimately be more fully articulated by Woodrow Wilson as the principle of “national self-determination.” Charles Tilly has recently generated a very short but valuable analysis of the principle for its use “as justification for political action.” 27 Consider his elaboration of these principles as justifications for political action in the context of Kratochwil’s observation that norms, rules, and principles, provide, not “causes” but “reasons for action.” 28 Tilly suggests that the principle operates as follows.
Schroeder argues that the conventional account of the origins of France’s revolutionary wars, in which France’s doctrines spurred fearful neighboring countries to counter-revolution, is far too simplistic because many of these states were too small and divided to decide together on such a course of action. The great, conservative, monarchic powers were, in any case, making their own incursions in violation of accepted, traditional legal props to the legitimacy of revolutionary France’s smaller neighbors. Yet Schroeder reminds us that:
Still, the fact remains that by its doctrines the French Revolution challenged every state in Europe whose existence rested less on power than on the old traditional legal order, most of whom (the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy) were France’s neighbors. 30
Yet France had not moved to generate external subversion or made any threatening moves toward its neighbors in 1791. Problems began to emerge when it was learned that Louis and Marie Antoinette, virtual prisoners of the National Assembly, had been agitating through their private channels for a war of restoration in which Austria and other outside powers would intervene, invade, and restore the Bourbon monarchy to the throne by force of arms. A member of the Girondin party was in charge of the foreign ministry at the time, and the Girondins began courting war with Austria as a means to utterly overthrow the monarchy by laying bare the fact that Louis was plotting with foreign powers against the French nation. 31 Schroeder recounts how revolutionary France and the dynastic regimes to the east finally blundered into hostilities owing to an inept and agitated French diplomacy. The blunder was compounded by Austrian insensitivity to the anticlericalism and principles of national sovereignty now prevailing in France with the Austrian “demand that France return Avignon and Venaissin to the Pope” and “demands for assurances about the royal family and a monarchic constitution” 32 . In the hyper-charged atmosphere of French revolutionary struggle, and to a National Assembly which had already wrested sovereign authority from the captive Bourbon monarchy, “Austria’s proposal waved a red flag before the Gallic bull.” 33 The National Assembly declared war on the Austrian Emperor on April 20, 1792 and nearly a quarter century of uninterrupted European general warfare began. Five months to the day after the French declaration of war the artillery of a French national army halted an Austro-Prussian advance into northeastern France at Valmy.
It is worth pausing to mention here that Stephen Walt has recently provided a rather sophisticated and nuanced, multivariate realist account of the causes of the French war of 1792 in which he describes the conflict as a result of the dynastic ambitions of other powers, a struggle for power within France and a series of miscalculations by both sides. 34 Walt provides ample and persuasive evidence that, just as Schroeder suggests, the revolutionary and republican character of the new French regime did not in itself immediately impel the conservative dynasts of Europe to launch a war of restoration to strangle the new regime in its cradle. He also provides quite valuable analysis of the reasons that both revolutionary and old regime states misperceive one another’s strengths and weaknesses, enhancing the potential for armed conflict through misperception of both intentionality and capabilities. But he ultimately shies away from attributing any direct causal significance to revolutionary ideology as a cause of war for either the revolutionary regime or for the ancien regime foe. He focuses his analysis on “misperceptions” that are “reinforced by ideology” 35 Thus revolutionary ideology, and the novel social identities that they articulate, are relegated to the status of unintentional causes of conflict in Walt’s analysis. If these ideologies are so difficult to identify as causes of conflict, it appears strange that they generate such tangible strategic consequences when conflict comes.
Early Strategic Consequences of National-Sovereign Identity
The Battle of Valmy was unspectacular as a military engagement in itself. It was a set piece artillery dual, involved at most 70,000 troops on both sides and resulted in at most 500 casualties on both sides. More men had died of dysentery in the two weeks leading up the battle. Yet Goethe, who witnessed the battle, summarized its significance with the pronouncement that “Here and now a new epoch in world history has begun and you can say that you were there.” 36 Goethe’s utterance was recalled by him years after the event, and may well be a case of prophesy ex post facto. If so, we might forgive him for imagining he had said this at the time, because the events immediately succeeding the Battle of Valmy accomplished all that Goethe allegedly claimed that the battle would. Upon halting the Austro-Prussian advance at Valmy, a French force to the south crossed the Imperial frontier ten days later.
The day after Valmy, the newly elected National Convention abolished the monarchy; two days later, Year 1 of the new republican age began. Over the next few weeks, decrees flowed from Paris promising aid to the cause of liberation everywhere. In the first months of 1793, following the trial and execution of Louis XVI, France went to war with most of Europe. 37
The French forces Goethe had watched fought a professional combined Austro-Prussian army to a halt, and which were so soon to charge through the frontiers of the German states allied with the Hapsburg Empire, were already armed forces of a new kind. While the French National Assembly had left their eviscerated monarchy in titular command of the French armed forces, it had abolished the purchase of commissions in the army by the nobility and wealthy bourgeoisie in order to curb the “adjuncts of feudalism.” Promotion in the army was now predicated on “talent (demonstrated aptitude on examination or in performance) and merit.” 38 As a result of the subsequent rapid rate of resignation and/or emigration of royalist officers, remaining junior officers were promoted rapidly, and noncommissioned officers received commissions. Woloch relates that between 1791 and 1792 more than 70,000 new rank-and-file soldiers had enlisted. In comparison with the old royal army, he argues that the ranks of the new revolutionary army were comprised of soldiers who were “younger...less experienced...[but]...more socially heterogeneous more attuned to the new patriotism. Many of the regulars...understood that they too were citizens.” 39
This identification of the rank-and-file soldiers with the regime for which they fought, and the self-identification of the soldier as citizen—endowed with rights under the law wholly equivalent to those of his officers—had significant consequences for the motivational attributes of the troops. It permitted an expansion of the tactics and conduct of warfare that were possible relative to the tactics and maneuvers that might be practiced with the mongrel, largely mercenary forces of territorial-sovereign states.
In a similar fashion, Barry Posen has recently argued that the French mobilization of an engaged, motivated, citizen-soldier resulted in a transformation in the conduct of warfare between 1792 and 1815. The involvement of the French people was crucial, and for the first time the armies of France were comprised mainly of Frenchmen. The absence of the requirement to pay high wages to professional warriors allowed France to field larger armies than were possible under the old regime, and to replace battle casualties with levies on the French populace. The motivated French troops were capable of longer maneuvers at greater speeds, and the troops could live off the land without fear that forage parties would inevitably desert. 40
Michael Mann has recently argued that Napoleon was able to harness French national sentiment to a military hegemonic project.
He exploited the revolutionary national ideals of citizen-officers in France and in client “sister-republics,” giving them careers, autonomy and initiative....Bonaparte harnessed ideological to military power, enhancing the “immanent morale” of citizen soldiers, especially among lower officers and noncommissioned officers. This further alienated his old regime enemies....Not merely an external realist enemy, he [Napoleon] also appeared to incite class and national subversion in their realms. This war brought ideologies and the specter of a new social order....He mobilized militarily the economic power conferred by Europe’s agricultural revolution, linking it to officer morale....He linked officer morale, agrarian surpluses, and divisional tactics and mobility into a distinctive campaign strategy. 41
Posen notes that the establishment of literacy as a criterion for promotion had obvious salutary effects on the quality of the French officer corps. He also asserts that there is good evidence that officially disseminated political propaganda contributed to the élan of the troops as well as “a rise in the self and group-imposed standards of performance and sacrifice” 42 among the troops. In light of these observations Posen argues, quite correctly I believe, that “nationalism increases the intensity of warfare, and specifically the ability of states to mobilize the creative energies and the spirit of self-sacrifice of millions of soldiers.” 43
It is much more difficult to argue, however, that “it [nationalism] is purveyed by states for the express purpose of improving their military capabilities.” 44 It is problematic to reduce the dissemination of national identity to the status of a state-sponsored prop to the function of state security. Posen does cite Greenfeld’s argument that ressentiment against Britain was a factor in the development of French nationalism after France’s defeat in the Seven Year’s War, and that it was also a factor in the development of German nationalism after the Prussian defeat by the forces of Napoleonic France at Jena. 45 To his credit, Posen is quick to limit his claims with the assertion that “[t]he purpose of my argument is not to deny the influence of other political, social, and economic phenomena on the development of nationalism” 46 but it is problematic to suggest that “nationalism can be expected to persist wherever the military security of states depends on mass mobilization.” 47 This argument tends to reduce nationalism and its dissemination to an artifact of the structural neorealist notion of systemic socialization. This is the observation that the units of the system are socialized by the political structure of the system to replicate the behavior of the successful units. 48 We can credit this observation without reducing the transmission of nationalism throughout the international system to a consequence of socialization.
I will return to criticism of what Lapid and Kratochwil have described as this “appropriative” neorealist endeavor in chapter 7 when I develop the birth of the German Empire in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. For the moment, let me counter Posen’s assertion with the observation that with the exception of Britain, no nationalized “units” or states were to be found among the members of the Fourth Coalition, which finally defeated France in 1815. Napoleonic France finally fell not to mass mobilization armies that replicated the nationally motivated forces of revolutionary or Imperial France, but as a consequence of two factors resulting from sustained warfare. The first of these is the political unity of the largely still territorial-sovereign members of the Fourth Coalition, who had finally achieved a political consensus regarding how the peace would be established and preserved. 49 The second factor was Napoleon’s insensitivity to the limits of his nation’s capacity to sustain conscription at the rates he required to reverse the misfortunes that befell him on the battlefield in 1813. This insensitivity caused Napoleon to miscalculate his mobilization capacity in light of the favorable reports he was receiving regarding the extent to which the French people had been finally habituated to conscription, as the result of an all out assault on insoumission (draft evasion) that had begun in 1810. He therefore snubbed coalition overtures for a peace. As Woloch’s analysis reveals:
Confident of replenishing his man power, Napoleon rebuffed the coalition’s peace overtures and resumed the struggle while ordering new levies of unprecedented size on the class of 1814 and on prior classes. By grotesquely overtaxing the remarkable conscription machine that his administration had created, the emperor shattered it completely in the course of 1813....Accelerated, expanded and repeated levies everywhere jolted the accustomed patterns of life, which had already adjusted themselves to the rhythms and routines of the regime’s normal conscription demands. 50
Thus Woloch argues that had Napoleon sought seriously to negotiate a peace at Dresden or Prague in 1813 he would have most likely at the least remained “master in his own house.” Instead he made impossible demands on his conscription apparatus and lost all. 51
Let us return briefly to Posen’s argument that the Fourth Coalition had to develop mass mobilization armies to defeat those of Napoleonic France. While Prussia, for example, did make belated attempts to organize patriotic resistance to defeat Napoleonic France beginning in 1813, the Landwehr militia that was created from the Prussian citizenry was nevertheless a “pale imitation of the French citizen army.” 52 It is also true that though the Landwehr acquitted itself well in the final campaigns between 1813 and 1815, the Prussian state reacted against the notion of citizens in arms after the peace in an attitude captured by the suggestion of the Prussian minister of police that “[t]o arm a nation means to organize and facilitate rebellion and sedition.” 53 Mann does argue, in mild support of Posen’s argument, that owing to pressure from professional officers, the Landwehr was indeed retained as a reserve force in the Prussian order of battle. Subsequently, however, according to Mann, “[t]here developed a Lutheran Prussian-German national identity, linking religious and national sentiments to loyalty to a strong state.” 54 What Posen’s analysis does not capture is the fact that in relatively religiously and ethnically homogeneous Prussia, all of the elements of a uniquely Prussian national identity—Lutheranism, German language and ethnicity, the strong state, not to mention ressentiment against a belligerent France—were already present before the Prussian Crown acceded to a limited arming of the citizenry.
It is not at all clear that limited moves toward a Prussian citizen-soldier contributed to the development of a German, or even parochial Prussian nationalism as much as this move implicitly recognized the pre-existence of these sentiments among the populace. Historian James Sheehan has recently argued that:
If Prussian troops were more effective in 1813 than they had been in 1806, it was because they were better trained, better equipped, and better led, not because they had been suddenly infused with national passions....Prussia in 1813, like Austria in 1808, did try to harness patriotic passions behind its military efforts...But, while Frederick William’s proclamations of February and March 1813 had evoked the folk and fatherland as values around which Prussians should now rally, the king made clear that he was speaking to and about “my folk,” the patriotic subjects of the Prussian Crown, not the cultural community of Germans so important to Arndt, Jahn and others....The Volk’s role in its own “liberation” was at best a minor one. Napoleon was defeated by regular armies, not patriotic poets and quaintly attired gymnasts. 55
Moreover, if the Prussian state is really thought to have cultivated national sentiment for security purposes to the extent that Posen suggests, it is difficult to understand why Friedrich Wilhelm IV spurned the German Imperial Crown that was offered him by the German people after the upheaval of 1848. One might expect that he would prefer to rule an imperial superstate and a huge tract of German Central Europe, and command the combined armed forces of this territory, than remain the sovereign of Prussia alone, if the “imitate-or-die” socialization mechanism of neorealist theory is really the ultima ratio even of state security behavior in this context. Yet Friedrich Wilhelm disdained to receive either sovereignty or purview over these territories and their “capabilities” precisely because he did not believe that there existed, or should exist, a German “nation” with authority to offer any of this to him. In April 1849, once again in command of Prussia after the anxious upheaval of 1848, he rejected the German Imperial Crown offered to him by a delegation of the Paulskirche Parliament as a “hoop of mud and clay hung about with ‘the carrion stench of revolution.’ ” 56 Shulze mentions, to be sure, that Friedrich Wilhelm might have also been concerned that Austria might not have stood for such a move. Hapsburg imperial claims to suzerainty over many German states still had not been withdrawn. Though neither had they been withdrawn in 1870 when Austria did acquiesce to the formation of a German Empire under the leadership of Prussia. But in 1849 territorial sovereignty yet prevailed in Prussia. Rather than grasping the opportunity to employ an emerging pan-German national collective identity to found a pan-German Empire, a king of Prussia offered studied insults to these national aspirations in a manner calculated to explicitly deny the legitimacy of anything resembling national-sovereign identity.
Structural realists might argue that Friedrich Wilhelm’s action was in part a consequence of fear of war with Austria. It is difficult, however, to argue this was a major rationale in light of the observation that Friedrich Wilhelm knew that he could have relied upon his ability to draw military resources for such a war from a larger ensemble of German states than he later actually employed to defeat Austria less than twenty years later, in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Moreover, such an assertion requires the analyst to ignore all of the abundant evidence resulting from Bismarck’s interaction and correspondence with Friedrich Wilhelm, that the notion of Germany meant nothing whatever to the latter even upon the founding of the German Empire twenty-one years after the King of Prussia first spurned the Crown of an Imperial Germany. In light of these observations, Posen’s recent analysis may well accomplish its modest stated objective of convincing us that his argument that seeks to explain the transmission of nationalism with recourse to the neorealist socialization mechanism alone is “plausible,” given the security requirements of nineteenth-century states for mass mobilization armies. Nevertheless, in view of fuller accounts and unexamined variables, his analysis does not persuade.
Concert: A territorial-Sovereign Interlude
With the close of the Napoleonic Wars and the peace resulting from the Congress of Vienna the victorious governments of Europe settled down to take stock of the upheaval they had suffered for more than two decades. All students of international politics recognize that the resulting Concert and Metternich’s construction of the “Vienna system,” in which regularized problem-solving meetings of the victorious monarchs addressed threats to the peace of Europe, gave the continent an extended peace lasting more than forty years after the Vienna peace of 1815. Robert Jervis, in seeking to answer the question of how such cooperation was possible “under anarchy” from a rational choice, game-theoretic perspective, argues that:
the concert was characterized by an unusually high and self-conscious level of cooperation among the major European powers. The states did not play the game as hard as they could; they did not take advantage of others’ short-run vulnerabilities. In repeated plays of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, then, each state cooperated in the expectation that others would do the same. Multilateral and self-restrained methods of handling their problems were preferred to the more common unilateral and less restrained methods. 57
Kissinger has recently observed that subsequent to the founding of the Vienna system Europe enjoyed a period of unprecedented and uninterrupted peacefulness that lasted until the Crimean War, forty years later. There would be no general war for an even longer period. Unlike his intellectual progenitor, Morgenthau, however, Kissinger does not attribute the success of the Concert, or the founding of the Holy Alliance of 1815, to the “institutionalization” of allegedly moral principles that Morgenthau saw as underlying the notion of the balance of power. 58 Kissinger evokes Morgenthau’s reactionary utopia in the sense that he argues that the Concert period was so peaceful, indeed because: “the continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values. There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one....The balance of power reduces the opportunities for using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force.” 59
Unlike Morgenthau, however, Kissinger also points to reasons for this success that help us to perceive that it was the post-Napoleonic domestic institutional structure of Europe that enabled this sense of shared values to manifest itself in effective diplomacy and cooperative policy. Kissinger argues:
But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical foreign policy issues...For nations simply do not define their purpose as cogs in a security system. Security makes their existence possible; it is never their sole or even principal purpose. 60
Thus for the duration of the Concert period, it appears that the will-to-power was subordinated to the domestic security requirements of territorial sovereigns to be secure from the domestic upheaval and Jacobin revolutionary threats that most of the surviving monarchs of Europe laid squarely at the feet of the national-sovereign doctrines of a now defeated French foe. The best way to maintain security was to fall back on and defend the territorial-sovereign identity of the old order in Europe and the “principle of legitimacy” that sustained that order. Osiander makes it apparent that the statesmen who labored to construct the peace at the Congress of Vienna clearly understood that they could no longer take for granted the compliant assent of the European masses to their public actions, in a continent whose lowly had been awakened and sensitized by the emergence of national collective identity in France.
As a result, despite all the endless festivities celebrating the post-Napoleonic restoration, the peacemakers were in a precarious position. Napoleon was gone, but “the revolution” had only gone underground. Dance as they might, the political order that the plenipotentiaries represented was under mortal threat from current and ultimately unstoppable social developments. The genie of populism was out of the bottle and nothing could put it back in. All of the main negotiators sensed this. 61
As a consequence, the Congress negotiators put together a settlement that played to domestic opinion at home, while taking advantage of the proclivity of war-weary European masses to blame Jacobin democracy for two decades of war and suffering in establishing the new consensus principles of the postwar European domestic as well as international social orders. Few of the statesmen who pulled together the peace at the Congress of Vienna had a smaller wish to see a resurgence of republican government or ideology in France, or anywhere else in Europe, than the French representative, Talleyrand. It was he who suggested the principle of dynastic legitimacy as a postwar legitimating principle for a domestic social order that would be capable of defending itself against future and resurgent assaults by Jacobin ideologues. Metternich, representing the court at Vienna, and Castlereagh, representing Britain, quickly acceded to Talleyrand’s suggestion and helped him to defend it throughout the negotiations.
Because the fixation with dynasticism was so much based on wishful thinking, the underlying fallacy went unchallenged. Talleyrand believed, or wanted to believe, that dynastic legitimacy was an essential safeguard for stability. In his view, stability could only be ensured in the long run if, in each state, power was transferred from one individual to the next in a manner that did not give rise to internal quarrels. 62
Kissinger suggests that Metternich, similarly, identified peace with “legitimate rule” after the Napoleonic War. He “sought to institutionalize the values he considered ancient” 63 and took advantage of the religious, dynastic passions of the Russian Czar Alexander to forge in turn the Holy alliance among Prussia, Russia, and Austria and the Quadruple alliance, which added Great Britain to the mix of the defenders of the old order. Actually, at this time, the ideas of liberalism and republicanism had gained so much currency throughout Europe that a return to simple dynastic legitimacy as a legitimating principle of European social order was no longer possible. In recognition of this it was modified, argues Osiander.
A different, simpler concept soon prevailed, namely that only monarchical rule was legitimate. This came to be called the “monarchical principle.” With it went a concomitant rule of monarchical solidarity—meaning that, if kingship was in danger anywhere, all rulers had a duty to intervene to uphold it....This new reactionary conception was one that all the great powers rallied to. 64
Metternich’s maneuver of channeling Alexander’s religious vision of a Holy Alliance of anointed monarchs into formal political and military alliances, predicated on monarchical legitimacy, reinforces Osiander’s observation.
While they were anxious to re-establish European social order and political legitimacy on a monarchical basis, the statesmen negotiating this new order with Alexander were more than slightly bemused by the religious and dynastic anachronisms that Alexander proposed as the legitimating principles of the postwar European order. Castlereagh, for example, had mirthfully referred to the Holy Alliance as a “ ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.’ ” 65 Metternich, however, sought to avoid crisis in the future by moral consensus predicated by the assertion “that the ideological danger posed by the revolution outweighed their strategic opportunities” 66 and indulged the Czar in order to cement alliances between rulers committed to “legitimate rule.” These monarchs agreed in solemn treaty language to act only in concert with one another. Thus the domestic imperative of territorial-sovereign identity reasserted itself and the wagons were circled to hold at bay the liberal and republican “barbarians at the gate.”
The vested interest which they [Concert territorial-sovereigns] developed in the survival of their domestic institutions caused the continental countries to avoid conflicts which they would have pursued as a matter of course in the previous century...[for example]...Had Prussia sought [earlier] to exploit German nationalism, it could have challenged Austrian pre-eminence in Germany a generation before Bismarck...[but the Prussians]...refrained from pushing their advantage because it ran counter to the dominant principle of maintaining the status quo. Austria, seemingly on its death bed after Napoleon’s onslaught, was given a new lease on life by the Metternich system, which enabled it to survive for another hundred years. 67
But while the “principle of legitimacy,” in Kissinger’s lexicon, or the “monarchical principle,” in Osiander’s lexicon, emerged from the Vienna congress and animated the actions of the Concert, I am certainly not arguing that this principle constituted a return to the dynastic-sovereign, or Augsburg system that had even pre-existed Westphalian territorial sovereignty. This is not at all the case. Rather than constituting a return to Augsburg, the Concert of Europe constituted a return to Westphalian territorial-sovereign identity and practice in self-consciously dynastic clothing. This clothing was donned to cover a rather embarrassingly naked rule by the forces of reaction, now triumphant over the prostrate republican ragamuffins. Yet for many reasons that the next section of this chapter will uncover, the Vienna weavers of the gown of “dynastic legitimacy” were, irrespective of their intentions, industrious tailors to a naked emperor. At this date, as Osiander reminds us:
the concept of dynastic legitimacy is best described as a rather impressive red herring. Talleyrand was fooling himself (but he was not the only one). Dynastic legitimacy could not be a factor of stability [at this date]. The premise was wrong: it was not because there were dynasties that the pre-revolutionary order had been stable, it was the existence of a stable, hierarchical social order, in which political authority presupposed high rank owed to birth, that encouraged the development of the dynasties. 68
Osiander’s objection nicely illustrates one of the major theoretical premises of this book. Institutional forms of collective action (dynasties in this case) result from the legitimating principles of social orders (political authority as a birthright). Construction of institutions, however, will not guarantee their legitimacy. Declaring something to be so will not make it so. Extreme insularity of decisionmaking by societal elites is required for this to be the case. Decisionmaking by elites in the Concert period was extraordinarily insular by the standards of today’s national-sovereign perspective. Decisionmaking was sufficiently insular to permit the “conspiracy of princes” from which the Concert was constituted to function—admittedly to the benefit of the peace of Europe—for nearly half a century after the Congress of Vienna. It was not, as we shall soon see, sufficiently insular to reestablish the unchallenged “dynastic” or monarchical “territorial” sovereignty that had pervaded European notions of legitimate social order from the early sixteenth century. Too many chinks had appeared in this armor. By 1870, the chinks would be opened widely enough for the sharp instrument of national-sovereign collective identity, reforged in the intervening decades, to administer a mortal blow to the Concert and its pretense that it constituted a Holy Alliance of Christian princes.
State Penetration and Economic Transformation: The Road to 1848
The period between the Congress of Vienna and the Revolution of 1848 was a time of rapid social and economic change throughout much of Europe, and not least in what was to become Germany. All of this rapid change portended a new legitimation crisis of the old regime which had been reconstituted and propped up with the brace of monarchical legitimacy. Society moved rapidly into new patterns of socioeconomic relations which existing institutional arrangements could only obstruct. Social identities were of ancient classes and stations of life were being rapidly destroyed and reconstructed and, as my theoretical developments suggest, institutional forms of collective action and governance were increasingly incapable of manifesting the newly emerging social identities of broad tracts of the European populace.
The period saw rapid growth in population. The population in Prussia alone increased 87 percent between 1816 and 1865 and was attended by massive migration from the country to the cities, and between rural areas as well. 69 In 1816 less than two percent of the Prussian population resided in Berlin, and no more than four percent in the eleven Prussian cities with populations from 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. This had doubled by 1849, and more than a quarter of Prussia’s population was to be found in towns with populations greater than 2,000 inhabitants by this date. 70 These patterns were repeated throughout the German-speaking states of Central Europe in this period.
As the cities were experiencing rapid population growth and the incursions of market forces into the familiar patterns of ancient guild privilege, the state began to increasingly take an interest in municipal affairs, and urban autonomy was rapidly eroded by both state and economic forces. The cities now became mere administrative units of the state. The guilds also steadily lost power to the state’s regulatory power and the Prussian guilds were soon mere “economic associations rather than expressions of corporate identity and instruments of social control.” 71 Proprietorship began to replace residence or guild or corporate privilege as the means of acquiring citizenship in a municipality. As Sheehan argues: “By making property the sole criterion for active citizenship, the Prussian law cut away the special rights, privileges, and liberties with which cities had once determined who could belong and who could not.” 72 The combined influences of state and market penetration of urban society had significant implications for urban identity commitments. Both of these forces were integrative in the sense that they reduced the insularity of municipalities and demolished the particularistic attributes of their local power structures. They were also constitutive of new forms of identity inasmuch as they attended a redefinition of citizenship as a commodity acquired with the acquisition of capital. Coupled with advances in technology and communication, such as the escalation of steel production and the development of railroads, they also created the “basis of a German common market...[though] not [yet] a German national economy” as the market coupled with the state constructed the Zollverein customs union to expand transregional trading arrangements. 73 And as one analyst has suggested, this arrangement cannot be explained by the classical rational-choice theoretic assertion that Prussian hegemony was being exercised to provide a stable trading regime. 74
Rural social relations were no less transitional in this period. Land reform in Central Europe proceeded at a pace negotiated between noble resistance and the inexorable state penetration into traditional rural life. Peasant emancipation developed sufficiently to slowly evince a change from the ancient “personal Herrschaft to state authority” in the countryside. 75 Noble resistance was intense in Central Europe and the state was forced to compromise continuously at the expense of the peasantry. When Prussian land reform finally came, the elimination of personal servitude of the peasantry came with it, but noble claims to compensation resulted in the conversion of these services to cash payments. Now while the peasants had the legal right to purchase land, very few could afford to do it. Landowners quickly converted to hired labor and the short-term result was roughly equivalent to the result of mass migration from the rural areas to the cities, namely a “growing population of landless agricultural laborers, who were now totally at the mercy of the market.” 76
One permanent and quite progressive change had occurred in this process, however. While the landed nobility retained enormous wealth, power, and privilege, the social basis of this power had changed. The power and prestige of the Central European “German” nobility no longer “flowed from their pedigree and person, but few could doubt that their power and privilege depended on the state.” They were thus “transformed from an autonomous Stand into a regional elite” and as a result “the Standesherren struggled to define a position between sovereignty and citizenship...nobility was [now] seen as a temporary inhibition to economic progress and social emancipation, the doomed residue of a declining order.” 77
Noble class identity remained intact in Central Europe during this period nonetheless. Sheehan notes that the Herren survived the demise of the Herrschaft so well that an 1833 visitor to Prussia wrote home that society was well divided into “the vons and the non-vons,” and this was so precisely because of the relationship of the “vons” to the monarch who remained “the state’s symbolic center and ultimate source of authority.” 78 The status of the German nobility was increasingly mediated through the authority of the state. The status of the German nobility was now a claim, and no longer an institutional fact that recalled only longstanding tradition to substantiate it. This status now had to be defended. It was no longer constitutive of the social order. As Sheehan reminds us of this period, their “status became what Weber would call an effective claim...[which]...is not a condition of a possession or a fact of life; a claim must be made, it requires action and can be granted or ignored.” 79
Under the new conditions of social and economic life, in which the function of the extraction of societal resources was increasingly privatized, and one’s political standing was increasingly juridically predicated on effective proprietorship, the claim of the nobility to social status was likely to be ignored if the claimant lacked wealth and property, and to be granted if the claimant possessed these. In the absence of property, office (another commodity now mediated through the state) helped buttress effective claims to social status of many of the less well-to-do among the German nobility.
In the German states the army was the traditional place for claimants to social status to make their claims effective. The vaunted reforms of the Prussian army of which Posen has recently written—in making his case that nationalism was cultivated by states to enhance the effectiveness of their armed forces—had not taken hold in Prussian society. 80 While in the initial enthusiasm for reform at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars nobles had constituted a “bare majority” of officers in the Prussian army in 1818, only fourteen percent of Prussian officers above the rank of colonel lacked a “von” in their name by 1860. 81 Posen acknowledges a period of “reaction” that made itself felt in the Prussian armed forced between 1815 and 1870. Yet he argues that “Landwehr officers were chosen from the local elite and included many members of the middle class.” 82 How many? Either Posen overstates this case, or more likely the Landwehr was so small a component of the armed forces that Prussia actually relied upon for its defense that the bourgeois component of the Landwehr officer corps dissolved into insignificance when these forces were aggregated with the regular army. If Sheehan’s statistics are reliable, there were very few non-noble officers in the Prussian army at mid-century.
What is most important for our purposes is that the new social landscape, molded increasingly by the forces of capital and of the state, had great causal significance for the reconstitution of social identities within European society. In the German case, state penetration and the increasing reliance of the nobility upon office rather than noble title to buttress a claim to social status, had slowly transformed this class identity into corporate identity. The titled soldier was “likely to be an officer first and an aristocrat second....both the army and the bureaucracy [another noble preserve] developed their own ethos and corporate identities.” 83 While this may be taken as evidence of the “uneven” nature of German modernization, inasmuch as noble elites helped the Crown to preserve traditional values and institutions, it is also clearly the case that power, wealth, and status no longer coincided as they had in the past. A noble title certainly enhanced the prospects and chances of an aspirant to these social tools, but the nobleman was no longer excused from the burden of competing with “non-vons” for what had once been his birthright. In this sense, the nineteenth-century German nobility “were a product of their age, not a residue of pre-modern times.” 84 The “empire of civil society” was claiming what had been the legacy of (even the German) nobility as one of its first trophies in the struggle to remold the social order into its own likeness.
The British were well ahead of Central Europe in this process. In spite of the serious economic deprivation felt in the country in the aftermath of the war and the violent and repressive measures taken to suppress reaction to it, the British people had been alienated by the Jacobin terror, and associated extreme democratic views with the regime of the erstwhile French enemy. This tendency insulated British political institutions from serious revolutionary threats during this period. Michael Mann refers to the period from 1815 to 1832 in Britain as a period of “reform, not revolution.” 85 While governments of the German-speaking states on the continent were accommodating the rising urban bourgeoisie with citizenship based on proprietorship, and penetrating rural society by accommodating the peasantry with legal emancipation and subordinating the rural nobility to the state, the British state was making a series of accommodating moves of its own.
One of these moves was in recognition of the loyalty with which British Catholic subjects had served in the wars, and in recognition of the problems that juridical discrimination against Catholics was creating in the governance of an increasingly rebellious Ireland. With the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829, “[t]he old regime abandoned its Protestant soul as well as potent segmental controls over the souls of its subjects.” 86 The other major concession involved the move to enfranchise small-property owners to buttress their loyalty to the regime and remove from them any source of temptation to ally themselves with the occasionally rebellious masses. Mann argues that “[h]aving abandoned absolutism, the particularism in major government departments [Whiggism], then a hieratic church, the [British] regime had no principles left.” Significantly, it no longer felt that it needed any principles other than to enfranchise and thus co-opt and remove from opposition any significant component of the forces of capital. What came next was a coup which constructed, in Britain, the edifice of the emerging “empire of civil society.”
It [the British regime] also recognized the contributions of the petite bourgeoisie to Britain’s rising prosperity. Britain could now dominate the world through free trade backed by economic government. The petite bourgeoisie had a property stake in the nation. It should no longer be excluded—provided it broke with the “populace.” So...the rulers looked to detach the petite bourgeoisie from the mob....Property—whatever its source, lineage, or patronage—was to rule the nation....the state had changed from particularism and segmentalism, centered on the king in Parliament, to universalism, centered on a capitalist class-nation. 87
This pattern of slowly but inexorably enfranchising increasingly more humble and less substantial possessors of capital as a means to ensure domestic stability occurred more slowly on the continent, but may be seen as a pattern characteristic of the century. Most often these maneuvers were not intentional nation-building projects, but tactical concessions designed to permit a ruling class still committed to a territorial-sovereign structure of identity and interests to hold on to power. When these tactical concessions did not come quickly enough for the peoples that state penetration—and the civil associational networks required for the development of capitalist production relations—had imbued with a nascent “national” collective identity, troubles came and upheaval followed.
And so trouble came to Central Europe by mid-century. The trouble was the culmination of what Mann suggests were the four great “crystallizations” of society resulting in capitalism, militarism, liberalism, and nationalism which had all been institutionalized in the half century between approximately 1770 and 1820. And thus Mann is at pains to point out that “classes and nations rose together, structured by all four sources of social power.” 88 Militarism had dominated the life of Europe for more than two decades and the wreckage left in its wake had made such an impression on all Europeans that we might expect that the experience of the war alone could well have induced the average European to take an interest in public affairs in the ensuing peace. But early-nineteenth-century Europeans were not dealing with the consequences of the militarism of the past alone. The had also seen the “growing involvement of the state in social life—as tax collector and policy-maker, educator and employer, regulator and patron.” 89 Thus the steady increase of popular interest in public affairs in the ensuing decades is not surprising. The period witnessed the growth of civil society. The state-as-educator had enhanced discursive literacy and created a demand for more political news in the press. As a logical consequence of increasing state penetration into society, people developed an increasing self-identification with the state, and with the political process. “Slowly...Germans created the intellectual systems and associational networks upon which participatory politics could be based. As a result, the character of public life was fundamentally altered.” 90
The Revolution of 1848: The question of Citizenhip and Sovereignty
But in German Central Europe, the conservative social residue that attended the nobility’s retention of social status, through the acquisition of state office, had attenuated the move toward nearly unlimited social mobility through the acquisition of capital, as had occurred in Britain, where peerages were readily created for those with the price of entry. The Hanoverian rulers of Britain had acceded to a constitutional rule of a capitalist nation and prized above all other qualities in the men they recruited to head their governments the capacity to balance the ledgers of the government. The dynastic rulers of Prussia and Austria had not come to their thrones with the understanding that they would subordinate their sovereignty to a constitution. They might buy off the peasantry at the expense of their nobility, and increase noble dependence on the Crown for the status left to them in the bargain, but they would not accede to the limitations of their sovereignty and power by any constitutional device without dire exigency. This attitude had lent German society a conservative cast residual of the old order, and it pervaded social and institutional domestic life.
Thus as capitalism transformed economic life and created a German bourgeoisie, this bourgeoisie lacked both the courage of its convictions required for the advancement of bold claims of its own, and the fear of lower orders required to encourage it to advance claims on behalf of these orders to fuller participation in civil and political life. The German bourgeoisie was a very ideologically and politically timid class relative to, for example, its British counterpart. Here we have some evidence with which to credit the claim that Mann has recently made that, contrary to what Marx believed and argued, class organization does not emerge directly from the relations of production. The bourgeoisie are “more likely to choose segmental than class organization....Political organization by classes also has specifically political causes involving the institutional particularities of states.” 91 Thus when the consequences of militarism and emerging capitalism raised the ire of the petty bourgeoisie and laboring masses “[these masses] claimed civil citizenship to freely protest political economy, and when protest was ineffective, they demanded political citizenship.” 92 But unlike the British case, the protesting classes found no allies in the German bourgeoisie. Not yet in any case. German liberalism during this period was limited-franchise liberalism. Many German liberals, who were themselves in a minority position in their countries, did not wish to extend the franchise to wage laborers, apprentices, small farmers, or shopkeepers, let alone women or servants. German bourgeois liberalism was very insecure indeed. No Rousseauian vision of the general will pervaded it, therefore no governmental responsibility to accede to the wishes of the general will was implied. 93 In order to rectify this situation, the common people were required to voice their protest in much more emphatic terms than had been required for these classes to gain civil and political citizenship in Britain. Their voice may be heard in the events attending the Revolution of 1848.
At the very time that the growth of the participatory impulses of the peoples of Central Europe were escalating, changes in their leadership were yielding disappointing results. In Austria the death of the Emperor had brought an idiot to the throne in 1835. At the time that Metternich was dealing with Austrian reaction to the fall of the Bourbon monarchy in 1830 that had been restored by the Congress of Vienna a scant fifteen years previously, he suffered the emboldenment of the Austrian political opposition with the accession of the highly “mentally deficient” Ferdinand who “could do no more than sign his name.” 94 In Bavaria, King Ludwig had made it quite clear that he was far more interested in the arts than politics and had left the day-to-day administration of the affairs of the Bavarian state in the hands of the reactionary von Abel, who was hardly the man for the times, and proceeded to systematically alienate progressive opinion in Bavaria. 95 The accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Prussia in June of 1840 lead to initial hopes that the new reign would be progressive. These hopes were quickly dashed and discontent was seen in Prussia as well.
Radical liberal opinion demanded universal suffrage, an armed domestic militia, the equalization of educational opportunity, reform of the tax system, the abolition of residual social privilege, and structural transformation of the civil service to enhance the possibilities of its service as a vehicle of upward mobility. The steady and stubborn refusal of governments to move on this agenda swelled the ranks of the opposition in the climate of insecurity engendered by rapid economic change during the period. By the 1840s the opposition included, according to one sympathetic contemporary, “everyone with talent, all free and independent spirits, in short, the entire third estate.” 96 Yet these disaffected persons constituted only a small minority of the populace, until economic recession deepened the crisis. According to Hagan Schulze:
This multiform national opposition received its explosive charge from the growing impoverishment of the society and economy. Pauperism in all its misery, essentially due to the Malthusian consequences of overpopulation, had come to the fore....The frequently horrendous poverty was exacerbated by the changing social structure, shifting from an artisan to an industrial base. Whole sectors of artisan production, in particular domestic manufacturing, were unable to meet competition from cheap factory products—inhuman hours of work, child labor, starvation wages and scarcely imaginable living conditions were the result. 97
But while economic distress is easy enough to identify as an impulse to social protest, upheaval, and even revolution, why did the 1848 revolution manifest itself as a nationalist movement and result in nationalist demands? Why did the Prussian peoples press an imperial German Crown upon Friedrich Wilhelm in the immediate aftermath of the upheaval, and call together with other Germans the all-German Frankfurt Parliament with the task of drafting an all-German constitution? One reason was that the intellectual energy behind the 1848 revolution was, unlike the French Revolution, in large measure provided by the German bourgeoisie. 1848 came at a time when “nationalism was an expression of bürgerlich emancipation...an ideology of modernization.” 98 The creation of an all-German state was desired, among other reasons, because the national state was seen at this time as an essential precondition for economic modernization and competitiveness by the bourgeois classes.
The deepening economic crisis and fatuous inactivity on the part of German, Central European governments in response to it, coupled with news from abroad that Louis Philippe had fled Paris in the face of the proclamation of the Second Republic, radicalized peoples whose expectations had, by this time, been disappointed long enough. Still the upheavals of 1848 began in a manner which did not threaten the recalcitrant absolutists of Central Europe in any way. The early demonstrations were led by moderate liberals and were characterized by “[d]ignified processions, carefully drafted petitions, respectful audiences with the ruler.” 99 But the volume of protest quickly escalated.
A massive protest in Vienna on March 13 demonstrated to Metternich how anachronistic had become the insular decisionmaking he had for decades accustomed himself to, and upon which the Concert system he had helped found in 1815 depended. One of the demands of the belligerent mob that had gathered outside the Landhaus that day in Vienna was Metternich’s resignation. Within twenty-four hours he had drafted his resignation and fled Vienna with his wife and with money borrowed from the Rothschilds. 100 On the 15th the Austrian Emperor abolished censorship and promised to convene a constitutional assembly in hopes of placating the crowd. On the 17th Friedrich Wilhelm promised to abolish censorship of the Prussian press, to reconvene a united Prussian Landtag, to reform the German Confederation, and to accept a constitution for Prussia. Unfortunately Prussian troops fired on demonstrators on the 18th and the barricades went up in Berlin. Unrest had become insurrection. The most economically threatened professions, journeyman artisans and craftsmen, manned the barricades with the most zeal. Friedrich Wilhelm responded to the demands of Militär zurück by the end of the day and ordered the withdrawal of the troops from the capital. On the 19th the proud King of Prussia was forced to stand in respectful silence as the bloody bodies of the victims of the revolution were carried by in solemn procession. 101 For a moment in the middle of the nineteenth century, proud territorial sovereignty bowed in solemn and fearful acknowledgment of the civic citizenship upon which the liberal variant of national-sovereign identity is constructed. As Mann reminds us, this civic expression took on an even more national character in 1848 in the polyglot Hapsburg Empire.
The Revolution of 1848 was a Europe-wide movement for civil and political citizenship led by whichever social classes lay just below the existing political citizenship line....But in more confederal regimes this came packaged with “national” issues, as we saw in Germany. As revolution spread to more confederal Austria, it acquired more territorial, provincial, and “national” organization—which led to easily the most serious fighting of 1848. More than 100,000 persons were killed in the Austrian revolutions. 102
It was precisely the confederal character of Austria that forced German nationalists to abandon the Grossdeutsche model of a future German nation, in which the incorporation into the German nation of necessity required incorporation of its non-German elements, in favor of the Kleindeutsche model under Prussian leadership. The ethnic and “national” passions released in Hapsburg Austria by the events of 1848 went a long way toward deciding the issue of the borders of a future all-German state for the German nationalists who participated in the revolution in Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and elsewhere. The construction of such a state was a clear goal of the men who had extracted so many concessions from German princes, and who had gained a commitment to allow organized discussion of a united German Empire from an intimidated Friedrich Wilhelm in Prussia.
Almost as soon as the revolution had been “won,” however, cracks in the edifice of the German “nation” that was to result from it could be readily discerned. One problem was that the economic depression continued, and no pronouncement of a suddenly pliable prince could alleviate the suffering that had helped to spark the upheaval. In essence: “People wanted Fressfreiheit not Pressfreiheit [sic], ‘freedom to feed,’ not ‘freedom to read.’...The lower orders’ persistent restlessness [after March 1848] frightened and infuriated the moderate [liberal] opposition. ” 103
The continued popular unrest may have “infuriated” the moderate opposition, it also intimidated the Bürgertum, or bourgeoisie, as a whole. They wanted “law and order” restored, and an end to the unrest, almost at any cost. In this they had developed a common cause with the monarchy. They were pleased to have extracted participatory citizenship for themselves from the Crown, but were not willing to extend it to the lower orders whose restless and violent proclivities in the continuing economic difficulties threatened their own safety and property. Thus the moderate and radical opposition began falling out with one another, and gave great cheer to the momentarily intimidated conservative elements of society, not the least the monarchy, in the process. Thus though the crisis of legitimacy of the old order had come and gone, the revolution had difficulties in consolidating, in new institutional forms, the gains it had won through spirited political action because:
Once the initial victory over the old order had been won, the victors started to fight among themselves about whose vision of the future should triumph...Popular violence could still disrupt local institutions, force concessions, and create disorder, but it could not provide the basis for a new social or political order. 104
The reason it could not do so was because victorious liberals of various stripes could not resolve the question of the identity of the new “sovereign.” Political citizenship had been won. National-sovereign identity of a sort had been forged, but two crucial questions remained unresolved that left the specific features of this identity hazy, and consequently, for the moment, inoperable as a form of sovereignty which could be effectively institutionalized, and in whose name effective political action could be exercised.
All victorious participants in the 1848 revolution recognized that the nature of sovereign identity was changing, and that the territorial-sovereign “they” were becoming a national-sovereign “we.” The question of precisely who “we” referred to in the pan-German “national” context was still contended and clouded by pre-existing territorial, institutional, and social class divisions. Sovereignty predicated on tradition and privilege was giving way to sovereignty predicated on citizenship, but who had become a citizen was still unresolved. Moderate liberal Prussian property owners might be prepared to accord this citizenship, in the hoped for all-German state, to moderate liberal Saxon or Bavarian property owners, but not to Prussian shopkeepers or artisans. The second question was less and issue of class identity than of ethno-linguistic and institutional identity. Others might be willing to enfranchise the petty bourgeoisie, but could not resolve the territorial segmental issue of who was to be included in the German nation. What institutional form could properly manifest this newly emergent, pan-German national collective identity? The Prussian state appeared to be the only vehicle to receive the national-sovereign identity that was being generated, but once Friedrich Wilhelm refused to accept the Imperial German Crown from the hands of those whose heads bore no Crown, this new, half-formed national-sovereign identity could not be readily institutionalized without better definition. It would be provided with better definition within a quarter of a century and the ultimate architect of German national-sovereign identity would be the arch-conservative Prussian Junker Otto von Bismarck. Such an irony as this is difficult to contrive for the purpose of constructing fictional entertainment, and appears to be possible only within the consistently bizarre chronicles of factual history.
Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise
The chapter has assisted in illustrating a number of my earlier theoretical suggestions. It has shown how the legitimation crisis of the old regime in France emerged from the transformation of elite social identities and ultimately resulted in the emergence of national collective identity in France, quickly followed by a transformation of the institutional form of French collective action from a territorial-sovereign to a national-sovereign form. With reference to the work of Liah Greenfeld, I have illustrated how the social identities of the French nobility had been threatened by the rigorous absolutism of the French Crown, inducing the French nobility to adopt a new social identity. In response, they redefined themselves as a cultural elite and abetted in the development of an anti-regime ideology that delegitimated the aristocracy of birth upon which the territorial-sovereign, absolutist social order was founded, instead legitimating an aristocracy of merit upon which notions of popular sovereignty were founded. These popular-sovereign ideas, joined with ressentiment against Britain, ensured the new legitimating principles of the new regime would be national-sovereign principles.
The legitimation crisis which set off this territorial-sovereign to national-sovereign system transition, beginning on the continent with France, had both domestic and international sources and consequences. The sources of the legitimation crisis were both cognitive and material, both agential and structural. French national collective identity may well have emerged in tandem with an incipient French bourgeois class identity, but the ideological formation and legitimation of the popular and national-sovereign element of these identities was largely provided by disaffected elites. The causally significant transnational dynamic that solidified a specifically national collective identity was what Greenfeld calls ressentiment against Britain, not a systemic socialization mechanism compelling France to emulate Britain. The social identities of the French people had transcended and thus consequently dispensed with the territorial-sovereign, absolutist state. Their will-to-manifest national-sovereign identity was reflected in their subsequent demolition of the territorial-sovereign, absolutist institutions and reconstruction of a prolific number of domestic social institutions which reflected popular and national-sovereign principles.
While French national-sovereignty was initially quite quiescent internationally, the old regime statesmen of Europe had soon discovered that French national-sovereignty constituted an intrinsic challenge to the legitimacy of the monarchical, territorial-sovereign domestic and international order. The contended issue of whether national-sovereign or territorial-sovereign principles would prevail proved a source of decades of violent conflict in Europe and the periphery. The emergence of French national-sovereignty altered the rules of international engagement in asserting that the popular will overturned territorial sovereign legal rights, treaties, and juridical bases for international claims. This increased uncertainties, elevated disputes over interests into disputes over principles, and enhanced the potential for international conflict. Significantly, almost ironically, the new national-sovereign legitimating principles provided their promulgators with new bases for territorial expansion.
The emergence of national-sovereign collective identity created a number of new sources of potential conflict in the international system. Extraterritorial expressions of allegiance to a people with shared language, culture, or history—or simply a shared vision of social and political organization—became potential bases for the advancement of irridentist territorial claims, or conflictual secessionist movements. National-sovereign identity problematized ethnic, linguistic and cultural minorities, territorial integrity and security, migration, titular claims to dynastic lands, and the integrity and identity of polyglot states. Territorial-sovereign legal claims were delegitimated and peaceful resolution of disputes became more difficult in the absence of consensual knowledge regarding systemic legitimating principles. Norms developed from national-sovereign legitimating principles would later acquire the characteristics of assertions of positive rights which could be employed to legitimate political action. Tilly has stipulated these rights regarding domestic and international political autonomy, territorial states for distinct, homogenous peoples, exclusion of “others” from benefits and membership, struggle for autonomy by extraordinary means, and external, consensual assistance of these struggles.
Immediate strategic consequences of national-sovereign collective identity emerged at Valmy and were executed by contemporarily novel mass-mobilization armies. These were larger in size, more heterogeneous in social composition, superior in motivation and tactical innovation, and lower in cost than the elitist and mercenary forces of their territorial-sovereign monarchical adversaries. Nationalist fervor could now be harnessed to military operations and could exploit class and ethnic divisions within opposing forces and states. But it does not follow that mass mobilization and the national collective identity that engendered them were transmitted throughout the old regime, territorial-sovereign states of Europe to compete with the novel French force. National collective identity and its strategic consequences are not reducible to an artifact of a posited structural realist socialization mechanism in the international system. The behavior of the Prussian Crown was widely at variance with that predicted by structural realist socialization mechanisms. The Prussian monarchy disdainfully declined the pan-German Imperial Crown (and consequently, potentially declined to lead a quite instrumentally useful German superstate) offered by the Paulskirche Parliament in 1849. The Prussian monarchy later brought the country to constitutional crisis rather than accept an expansion of the citizen militia with a term of service less than required to eradicate their liberal and civilian impulses.
During the territorial-sovereign interlude between the defeat of Napoleonic France and the Revolution of 1848 my analysis suggests that reconstruction of institutions predicated on old regime principles will not guarantee their continued legitimacy. The Vienna attempt to reconstruct domestic and international social order with old regime legitimating principles had a number of theoretically relevant consequences. First the concert was held together not only to ensure a balance of power but, in Kissinger’s words, the “shared values” of the old regime statesmen. Thus maintenance of the domestic and international social order obviated opportunities to engage in territorial-sovereign status competition. In order to extend the life of the territorial-sovereign social order, old regime statesmen were required to reconstruct the territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests. To stabilize it they had to pacify it and expunge from it the norms of war that had earlier developed naturally from the systemic legitimating principle of raison d’état. Thus insularity of decisionmaking during the concert period might have been sufficient for the formulation of a “conspiracy of princes,” but was clearly insufficient to continue to permit state behavior consistent with an unchallenged exercise of absolutist territorial-sovereign will.
A new legitimation crisis of the social order was brewing throughout territorial-sovereign Europe during the concert period as well in response to the forces of state and market penetration of traditional society. These forces rapidly reconstructed individual and collective social identities and their relationships to the state. In the urban centers these forces were integrative for social identities, demolishing the social bases of urban particularism and fostering a redefinition of citizenship as a commodity to be gained or lost with the transfer of capital. In the rural areas these forces slowly eroded the authority of the Herrschaft and transferred peasant allegiance to collective identification with the state. Noble status was increasingly no longer constitutive of the social order but had to be defended.
First in Britain, and later nearly everywhere, the territorial-sovereign state became increasingly anxious to enfranchise and co-opt increasingly lower strata property owners to ensure their participation in the projects of the state, and uncoerced access to their capital. Thus, as Mann argues, classes and nations rose together. As state penetration into social life increased, and increasingly lower socioeconomic strata of society were enfranchised, so increased the self-identification with the state of the newly created citizenry, radically altering the character of public life, and ultimately demolishing the insularity of old regime decisionmaking.
But this franchise was to be granted only in the third, or as late as the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century for the vast majority of the denizens of central Europe as the absolutists who reigned there were induced to subordinate their territorial-sovereign wills to a constitution only after the threat to their regimes posed by the Revolution of 1848. This will be developed more fully in the next chapter. The revolution had emerged as a nationalist movement with nationalist demands as it was intellectually the product of the German bourgeoisie who regarded their pan-German nationalism to be an expression of bourgeois emancipation. While Britain had already acceded to the constitutional rule of the capitalist nation, central European monarchs responded minimally with limited-franchise liberalism. The timidity of the German bourgeoisie—their fear of enfranchising bourgeois of less exalted status than themselves—abetted this anemic monarchical response. Thus the life of the territorial-sovereign institutional form in central Europe was extended by the inability of the central European bourgeoisie to consolidate a new institutional form to house its expressed will to manifest its social identity. This was so even while the legitimation crisis of territorial-sovereign legitimating principles had come and gone. This was so even in the midst of the emergence of national collective identity and the expression of the principles of national sovereignty connoted by the convening of the Frankfurt Parliament. The victorious liberals allowed their revolution to remain unconsolidated by a new institutional form as debate over this form brought to the surface a lack of consensus among themselves regarding the identity of the new sovereign.
Endnotes
Note 1: See E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962). Back.
Note 2: I rely upon the work of Liah Greenfeld for much of this discussion. See Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, pp. 145&-;88. Back.
Note 3: Ibid. pp. 148–49. Back.
Note 4: Ibid. p. 175. Note that both Rousseau and his cultured, aristocratic patrons had much to draw upon from classical Greek philosophy as a source of inspiration for their vehement loathing of the “vulgar rich.” Consider, for example, just a brief sample of the argument for the philosopher-king from Plato’s Republic, in response to a query by the trusty Adeimantus: “you spoke as astonished that philosophers are not held in honor by their country...it would be far more astonishing if they were...he is right in calling the best sort of philosophers useless to the public; but for that he must rather blame those who make no use of them. It is not in the natural course of things for the pilot to beg the crew to take his orders, any more than for the wise to wait on the doorsteps of the rich; the author of that epigram was mistaken. What is natural is that the sick man, whether rich or poor, should wait at the door of the physician, and that all who need to be governed should seek out the man who can govern them; it is not for him to beg them to accept his rule, if there is really any help in him.” The Republic of Plato, F. M. Cornford (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 196. Back.
Note 5: For a most useful and readable scholarly edition of this work, see Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (eds.), Rousseau’s Political Writings, J.C. Bondanella (trans.) (New York: Norton, 1988). Rousseau’s essay “On Social Contract or Principles of Political Right” is found on pp. 83–173. Rousseau ultimately dispenses with the notion of aristocracy, either by birth or merit, in his sixth chapter “On Monarchy,” pp. 128–32. Back.
Note 6: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 178. Back.
Note 8: All quotations from these two sentences are found in Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, pp. 3–4. Back.
Note 9: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 16. Emphasis in the original. Back.
Note 10: Ibid. pp. 16–17. Emphasis in the original. Back.
Note 11: A wonderful source of some of this material is Claude Manceron, The Age of the French Revolution, Volume Two: The Wind From America 1778–81 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). See especially pp. 76–84. Back.
Note 12: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 180. Back.
Note 16: See Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, pp. 40–110, and Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1955). Back.
Note 17: Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, pp. 174–80. Back.
Note 18: In Mann’s historical sociology, the causally significant sources of social power are ideological, economic, military, and political (thus IEMP). See Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II, pp. 1–22. Back.
Note 19: Ibid. p. 167. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 20: Douglass Johnson, “The Making of the French Nation,” in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (eds.), The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 47–48. Back.
Note 21: See William H. Sewell Jr., “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” in Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 169–98. See especially Woloch, The New Regime, p. 13. Woloch appears to take Eugen Weber to task (see Woloch’s fn. 2) for overstating the extent to which French nation-building was incomplete until the Third Republic; the major argument of Weber’s book. See Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.) Back.
Note 22: Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 67. Back.
Note 23: Ibid. pp. 70–71. Back.
Note 24: Ibid. pp. 71–72. Back.
Note 26: For a brief and useful discussion of most of these issues see Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, pp. 52–53. Back.
Note 27: Charles Tilly, “National Self-Determination as a Problem for All of Us,” Daedalus, 122 (3) (1993), p. 29. Back.
Note 28: Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, p. 69. Back.
Note 29: Charles Tilly, “National Self-Determination as a Problem for All of Us,” p. 29. Back.
Note 30: Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, p. 73. Back.
Note 34: Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 62–74. Back.
Note 36: James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 222. Back.
Note 38: Woloch, The New Regime, p. 383. Back.
Note 40: Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” pp. 92–93. Back.
Note 41: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 272. Back.
Note 42: Ibid. p. 95. Here Posen quotes from John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–94 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 283. Back.
Note 43: Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” p. 81. Back.
Note 45: Ibid. Posen cites these arguments of Greenfeld in fn 13 and fn 48 of his article, pp. 86 and 96 respectively. Back.
Note 48: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 74–77. Back.
Note 49: See Schroeder’s important argument in Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, pp. 445–516. See also Paul W. Schroeder, “The Vienna System: What Made it Work?” Presented at the 36th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 25, 1995, p. 12. Back.
Note 50: Woloch, The New Regime, p. 420. Note that in addition to his own primary source research, and his previous work on this topic, Woloch relies upon the work of Alan Forrest and J. P. Bertaud in his development of his arguments regarding the limits of even republican and nationalist conscription. See also I. L. Woloch, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” Past and Present, 111 (May 1986): 101–29; Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society During the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); J. P. Bertraud, The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 51: Woloch, The New Regime, p. 424. Back.
Note 52: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 242. Back.
Note 55: Sheehan, German History, p. 386. Sheehan’s references to Arndt and Jahn refer to the contemporary popularizers of German nationalism Ernst Moritz Arndt and Turnvater Jahn. The former was a polemicist and poet, inspired in large measure by hatred of the French and the latter ran a consortium of gymnasiums which drilled young men in rigorous paramilitary exercises, complete with paramilitary uniforms, and in pan-German nationalism. See Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, pp. 360–78. See also Louis Snyder, German Nationalism: The Tragedy of a People, Extremism Contra Liberalism in Modern German History (Harrisburg: Telegraph Press, 1953). A comprehensive study of Arndt is found in Alfred G. Pundt, Arndt and the Nationalist Awakening in Germany (New York: AMS, 1968). Back.
Note 56: Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 1763–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 75–76. Back.
Note 57: Robert Jervis, “From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation,” in Kenneth A. Oye (ed.), Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 59. The most extensive developments of the application of the prisoner’s dilemma game to international relations theory may be found in Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963) and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Back.
Note 58: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 210–15. Back.
Note 59: Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 79. Back.
Note 60: Ibid. pp. 79–80. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 61: Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990, p. 190. Back.
Note 63: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 84. Back.
Note 64: Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990, p. 221. Back.
Note 65: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 83. Back.
Note 67: Ibid. pp. 84–85. Back.
Note 68: Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990, p. 222. Back.
Note 69: Sheehan, German History, p. 458. Back.
Note 71: Ibid. pp. 487–92. Quotation is found on p. 491. Back.
Note 73: Ibid. pp. 502–3. Back.
Note 74: See Timothy J. McKeown, “Hegemonic Stability Theory and Nineteenth Century Tariff Levels in Europe,” International Organization 37 (1) (1983): 73–91. Back.
Note 76: Ibid. pp. 474–75. Quotation is found on p. 475. Back.
Note 77: Ibid. pp. 481–83. Back.
Note 79: Ibid. pp. 505–6. Back.
Note 80: Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” pp. 95–99. Back.
Note 81: Sheehan, German History, p. 507. Back.
Note 82: Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” p. 103. Back.
Note 83: Sheehan, German History, p. 508. Back.
Note 85: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, pp. 120–29. Back.
Note 88: Ibid. p. 214. Again, for Mann, the sources of social power are ideological, economic, military and political, thus his IEMP model. Back.
Note 89: Sheehan, German History, p. 588. Back.
Note 91: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 221. Back.
Note 93: Sheehan, German History, pp. 599–600. Back.
Note 94: Ibid. pp. 628–29. Back.
Note 96: Ibid. pp. 635–37. Quotation is found on p. 637. Back.
Note 97: Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism, p. 68. Back.
Note 98: Heinrich August Winkler, “Nationalism and Nation-State in Germany,” in M. Teich and R. Porter (eds.), The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 182. Back.
Note 99: Sheehan, German History, p. 660. Back.
Note 100: Ibid. pp. 663–64. Back.
Note 101: For lucid and detailed accounts of these events of March 1848 see Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism, pp. 3–32, Sheehan, German History, pp. 657–69, and Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 20–30. Back.
Note 102: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 339. Back.
Note 103: Sheehan, German History, p. 669. Back.
Note 104: Ibid. pp. 670–72. Back.
Email this citation