Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves

The ideas of nation and nationality are entirely absent from the definitions of the State which can be found in the writings of the three great thinkers who first mapped out the new landscape of the modern political world.

To begin with Machiavelli, it is quite clear that the State was to him something different and distinct from the nation. The great rhetorical peroration of the last chapter of The Prince should not deceive us. Machiavelli was no 'nationalist' in the modern sense of the word. What he had in mind was the setting up of a strong political unit in Central Italy. This alone could secure the liberation of the Peninsula from its 'barbarian' invaders. Indeed, it may even be doubted whether Machiavelli conceived of the whole of Italy as a 'nation'. He rarely uses that word. The State was to him exclusively a matter of force. It may face greater odds when its subjects are not all of the same region and language (della medesima provincia e della medesima lingua). But such odds can be overcome by a skilful ruler. The Romans managed to do so, and, according to Machiavelli, the Romans were always right.

Hobbes seems to hold a very similar view. He frankly admits that when the 'right of governing' is in the hand of 'strangers', this may be the cause of 'great inconvenience'. But, he adds, such inconvenience ‘proceedeth not necessarily from the subjection to a stranger's government, but from the unskilfulness of the governors, ignorant of the true rules of politics.’ It would seem, therefore, that, by observing those rules, even men ‘not used to live under the same government, nor speaking the same language’ can be moulded together into a common bond of citizenship: ‘and this was it our most wise King, King James, aimed at, in endeavouring the union of his two realms of England and Scotland.’ Neither language nor ethnic homogeneity is mentioned in the list drawn up by Hobbes of the elements that constitute the State. This too is significant. Clearly, Hobbes's State is not a Nation-state.

Of our three authors, Bodin is the most emphatic in asserting the irrelevance of what we nowadays call the 'national' element to the existence of the State. Power, he believes, is the one and only requisite. ‘Wherefore of many citizens . . . is made a Conmonweale, when they are governed by the puissant sovereignty of one or many rulers: albeit that they differ among themselves in laws, language, customs, religions, and diversity of nations.’

The question, then, can only be put in the following terms: when, in what way, and for what reasons did State and nation come to be so closely linked together as to turn the principle of nationality into the ultimate principle of legitimacy in the modern State?

But this question presupposes another: what is meant by 'nation' and 'nationality'? And here further difficulties arise. For indeed, apart from the strictly technical meaning of 'nationality' in English and in some other languages (where it is also taken in a more restricted sense as merely equivalent to citizenship), we cannot but agree with those scholars who, in trying to unravel the concepts of nation and nationality, have warned us against all sorts of pitfalls which make those concepts most difficult to define. In the end, the only competent guides in the jungle of so many different meanings are the linguists and the historians. It is to them that we must turn for help.

Now most of these scholars would agree that, contrary to the opinion which was generally held in the nineteenth century, the concepts of nation and nationality are a comparatively recent product of history. There is no denying, of course, that national consciousness has much deeper roots, and that it was the result of a long and obscure process which takes us back to the very beginnings of our European community. It is certainly possible to find in the Middle Ages a clear awareness of the ethnical, linguistic, and, if we wish to call them so, the 'national' differences existing in Europe — provided we do not overlook the fact that the word 'nation' is used in medieval sources in a sense markedly different from ours. The suggestion has been made that a reference to such national distinctiveness can be found in very old expressions such as romanae nationis ac linguae; indeed, that one of the first assertions of the great divisions of Europe was the treaty of 887 which sanctioned the break-up of the Carolingian Empire inter teutonicos et latinos Francos.

But one point alone is sufficient to show how remote this awareness of a national difference was from national consciousness in its modern acceptation. The recognition of the diversities of language, of stock, of customs, did not lead, at any rate for a long time, to a denial of a higher unity, that of the Republica Christiana. Rather, such diversities were thought of as the natural differences within a large family, or as a distribution of functions and roles — even if particular 'nations' could claim that the task laid upon them was higher and nobler than that laid upon others, or that they were entrusted with a special mission, as was claimed by the French in the proud phrase gesta Dei per Francos. Perhaps the best illustration of this peculiar way of conceiving nationality is to be found in Dante. No one could possibly deny that Dante had a very strong national feeling. Italy stands out in his vision as a well-defined unit, with features, a language, a heritage of her own. But all his love for Italy did not prevent Dante from championing a supra-national political programme: the unity of the Empire, in which he was content to reserve for his country merely a privileged place. Dante's case is important, were it only because it provides further proof of the separation between the two concepts, of State and of nation, which we have already noticed in Machiavelli. Both Dante and Machiavelli, however different their reasons, seem to conceive the bond of nationality as something quite distinct from, perhaps even irrelevant to, the bond of citizenship, the political bond.

Nevertheless, it is precisely in the period which separates Dante from Machiavelli, if not indeed earlier, that the ideas of nation and State can be seen gradually converging towards closer ties. But perhaps, in order to understand this process correctly, it would be as well to avoid such terms altogether when referring to that stage. The Swiss historian Werner Kaegi has recently suggested that 'nations' in the modern sense would probably not have come into being in Europe but for the unifying, centralizing action of political power. The determining factor in our history was the existence of ‘centres of power’, not nationality. This is a bold theory, but it is borne out by the facts. France is the classic example of a nation slowly shaped by the patient work of a dynasty bent on securing, unifying, and rounding off as it were, ‘with a grandiose peasant mentality’, that ‘square plot of land’ — the precarré — which was the Kingdom of France. The job took eight hundred years to complete, but the result, at any rate for the French, was rewarding, and it still draws admiring comment from Frenchmen who in other respects are anything but friendly to the ancien régime. The case of England is both similar and different. Here the cohesive element was provided by Parliament, where what we call ‘England’ was forged. ‘Parliament, indeed,’ wrote Pollard, ‘has been the means of making the English nation and the English state. It is really co-eval with them both. There was, it is true, an England centuries before there was a parliament, but that England was little more than a geographical expression. It was hardly a nation, still less a state.’

No wonder then if, being itself partly a creation of power, national feeling was a weapon in the hands of those who actually held power and, by skilfully using it, laid the foundations of the modern State. Here again the process may have begun very early (‘early modern nationalism,’ says Professor Post, ‘arose, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the King's command’): but it is at the close of the Middle Ages that its main lines are more clearly discernible, and the ideas of State and nation come into direct contact. At the beginning of the modern era the ‘new principality’ undoubtedly knew how to make advantageous use of national consciousness; yet it also contrived to mould and to direct that consciousness to the pursuit of certain peculiar ends. ‘New princes’ unscrupulously exploited its dynamic possibilities: by doing so they also helped to bring into being that modern phenomenon, the Nation-state. To this process Machiavelli is a decisive witness. His sober realism never even contemplated the possibility of a complete unification of Italy. Yet he did not hesitate to advise his prince to appeal to Italian national sentiment: this, indeed, is the clue to the passionate rhapsody which concludes his otherwise cynical and bitter little book.

But that coincidence of State and nation which was unthinkable in Italy was being carried out, in Machiavelli's own day, in other parts of Europe. The sixteenth century, the time of the birth of the great Nation-states in Europe, was also the spring-time of European nationalism. England alone offers ample evidence on this point. Here, indeed, towards the close of the century, we are confronted with a real explosion of feelings that are at one and the same time political and national: for it is hard to say which plays a greater role, the pride of independence or the consciousness of unity. They are the feelings which find their highest expression in Shakespeare's immortal line: ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’ (Richard II, 1597) They were the outcome of many factors: England's geographical position, her comparative ethnic homogeneity, the breach with Rome, the religious Reformation, indeed even the menace from abroad. But above all they found both a pattern and a stimulus in the exceptional personality of that typical ‘new prince’, the great Elizabeth I, past-master in the art of channelling the growing nationalism of her subjects within the range of her crude power-politics, as well as of practising the most ruthless personal rule, whilst at the same time scrupulously respecting the most deeply rooted English political tradition, that which saw Parliament as the representative of the entire nation united round the Crown.

It might, therefore, seem rather puzzling that writers, such as Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes, should have passed over in silence so important an element as nationality in their definition of the State. But the puzzle can be explained when we remember that the convergence of State and nation, which had at least in part taken place in their days, was closely tied to the pursuit of a particular programme, and ultimately depended on the ‘will to power’ of the new princes and the new States. Any change in that programme, and the two concepts could again fall apart. This is what actually happened when from national unification the rulers of Europe embarked on territorial expansion and on power-politics pure and simple. New ideologies were called upon to provide justification of the State’s new course. The balance of power, dynastic succession, natural frontiers, all called a halt to the convergence of nation and State: for the balance of power, with its related theory of ‘compensations’, meant that ‘peoples’ could be bartered like flocks of sheep; while dynastic succession provided means for creating big multi-national units simply by the arts of diplomacy and marriage (tu felix Austria nube!); and the so-called natural frontiers, hardly ever corresponding to ethnical or linguistic boundaries, could not but lead to the inclusion of heterogeneous minorities inside the national State. Paradoxically, the idea of nationality seems to suffer eclipse at the very moment when the modern State was coming of age and the map of Europe was taking its familiar shape. Eighteenth-century statesmen neatly severed the practice of politics from nationalistic emotions. It was the century of Cosmopolitanism, the age of ‘reason’ and of ‘lights’. And yet it is precisely in this century that the process of unification and centralization of the Nation-state received new impetus, and that the principle of nationality burst forth with a force hitherto unknown.

According to a view which is still largely held on the Continent, the modern doctrine of Nationalism is closely linked to a vision of history which profoundly altered the traditional view of man's place in the world. As against the old conviction of the basic immutability of human nature, and more especially as against the old aspiration to stress uniformity and regularity in order to enunciate laws which should be universally valid for all places and all times, the focus of interest shifted to what is peculiar and different, to individuality as the pivot and culmination of all historical events. Cosmopolitanism would have been superseded by Nationalism for this very reason: because the nation is all that is unique in the life of a people, its language, its traditions, its past. Hence the doctrine of Nationalism is also usually seen as an offshoot of Romanticism, of that great spiritual revolution whose roots are to be found in the eighteenth century, but whose full impact was perceived only in the nineteenth.

To this interpretation many serious objections have been raised: I am here concerned with one only. The rediscovery of the past and the emotional appeal of uniqueness, which were certainly a feature of Romanticism, would not alone account for the birth of a new political consciousness, nor for the virulent explosion of a new kind of fanaticism, equal to, and perhaps even greater in vigour than, that shown by religious fanaticism in the past. Above all they would not account for the definite absorption of the principle of nationality into the notion of the State. In the most recently published study of State and Nation Professor Akzin has rightly cautioned us against the ‘shallow’ equation of Romanticism with Nationalism. Irrationalism, traditionalism, organicism, all the paraphernalia of the new philosophy which swept Europe at the turn of the century, did not necessarily lead to Nationalism, or at any rate they did not lead to Nationalism alone. In a certain sense the Holy Alliance was just as ‘romantic’ as Mazzini’s Young Europe: what divided them and set them against each other was a different conception of the nature and purposes of the State. Nationalism transformed nationality from an historical fact into a political ideology, into the one exclusive principle of legitimation of the State. In order to do so it was necessary to affirm not only that nations existed as separate and well-determined units, but that national unity was an ideal to be sought after and fostered, and that the only ‘good’ State was the Nation-state. Thus was the nation raised to a dignity it had never possessed in the past, or rather to a dignity which had been given a name in past ages, whenever there was a question of locating the ultimate focus of allegiance and loyalty, the highest good for which men could be called upon to sacrifice their life. The Romans had called it patria. The nearest equivalent in English is, I believe, not so much ‘fatherland’ as ‘country’. Consider how revealing daily language can be on that score. Not even the most ardent nationalist would ever speak of a duty to ‘die for the nation’. But there is no need to be a nationalist to admit the existence of a duty towards one’s own country, a duty which clearly indicates the attribution of a value to the Nation-state. Thus, as Federico Chabod [L’idea di nazione, 1943-1944] has admirably shown, it was the notion of patria or country which mediated between the idea of the nation and that of the State. Patriotism provided the emotional and sentimental halo which to this day surrounds the national State.

Like the idea of the nation and like that of the State, the idea of country has a long history and a respectable pedigree. Patria is an inheritance from classical culture. It is held out as the highest object of love in a number of famous writings which, like Cicero’s De Officiis, provided the mainstay of education in the West. Patriotism existed long before there were nations, let alone Nation-states. It was not unknown even at the time of the worst dismemberment of Europe. It gained new impetus from the reading of the classics as well as from the leadership of kings in the new States. But patriotism was not necessarily linked to national consciousness or to political allegiance, even though in at least some parts of Europe it came to be associated fairly soon with the latter. Pugnare pro rege et patria [Fight for king and country] was a familiar phrase in the Middle Ages; it has survived in English usage down to the present day. Not even personal loyalty, however, is an essential ingredient of patriotism. As always, Machiavelli’s attitude is revealing. His patria was Florence, the city-state. His new prince was a lonely figure, trusting only to the sword. Nevertheless, Machiavelli’s pages are filled with expressions of passionate love of country. Indeed, realist as Machiavelli certainly pretends to be, the emotion of patriotism carries evident weight in his work. His words to Guicciardini are often quoted: ‘I love my country more than my soul.’ The sweeping statement in the Discourses should also be remembered: ‘When the safety of the country is ultimately in question, there must be no thought of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of praise or ignominy.’ It is such statements as these, as I have pointed out, that turn Machiavelli's hypothetical imperatives into categorical ones. The safety of the country is the end and the justification of the State.

But once again the confluence may have been purely accidental. Here is a typical eighteenth-century writer, a citizen of what was at the time the biggest and most powerful State in Europe. What does France mean to him? ‘Un grand Royaume, et point de Patrie!’ [A great Kingdom, and no fatherland] (D'Aguesseau). Listen to another writer, closer to Italy in space if not in spirit: ‘II mio nome è Vittorio Alfieri: il luogo dov'io son nato, l'Italia: nessuna terra mi è patria.’ [My name is Vittorio Alfieri; the place where I was born, Italy; I have no country anywhere]. (Il Misogallo, 1789-1798)

For these men the ideas of State, nation, and country in no sense coincide. No State, however great and powerful, could provide them with a fatherland. The nation to which they belonged because they happened to have been born in it was not properly their country. Patria was that place only, that community, that 'State', where a man could find the things he truly valued. Hence, as the Grande Encyclopédie forcibly put it, patriotism has no place under the yoke of a tyrant. Hence also, as Voltaire gleefully concluded, one's country is wherever one lives happily and well. Ubi bene, ibi patria; just as the nation is the fruit of circumstance, and the State a conventional institution, so one's country is the result of a choice. Such was the message of the age of enlightenment, the conclusion against which Edmund Burke was soon to launch one of his most bitter attacks.

Yet it was precisely this emphasis on choice, on a judgement of value, which left the door open to portentous change. Burke might appeal to a very different notion of the State by defining it as a ‘partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.’ [Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790] There still remained the need to explain how that partnership could be ‘consecrated’, and for what reasons it should be the object of dedication and love. This is what the doctrine of Nationalism set out to do. And we shall never appreciate the tremendous importance of the French Revolution unless we realize that it was that revolution which gave the concept of nation an entirely new meaning, transforming it, as it were, from a mere product of history into a deliberate construction, a partnership not only of mores but of wills. This is the time when we witness the final coincidence of the three ideas we have followed throughout their erratic, independent course. ‘The nation becomes the country’, but it does so because the nation is the expression of self-determination, because the State no longer consists in the mere whim of the autocrat or in the consolidation of the interests of a few privileged classes, but in the sovereignty of the ‘general will’. Chabod is perfectly right in stressing that, even more than the French revolutionaries, the true proclaimer of the new doctrine was Rousseau. Rousseau may not yet have had before his eyes the clear and coherent picture of national character which the doctrine of nationalism outlined in the romantic age; but he certainly was the prophet of the new religion which was henceforth to dominate the modern world. Still more than the Social Contract, his advice to the Poles is significant on that score. Patriotism is the true way to salvation, for the individual as well as for the group. But patriotism is both pride of nation and love of liberty, self-assertion and respect for the law. The old adage ubi bene, ibi patria is here completely reversed. It now reads ubi libertas, ibi patria and ubi patria, ibi bene. A new world is dawning, where Democracy joins hands with Nationalism, and the State, hitherto the sum of cold calculations of power, gathers to itself a power hitherto unknown. For that power is no less than the outcome of a whole people's participation in those decisions which were at one time the privilege of the few.

Such, as I see them, were the reasons why nationality turned into one of the foremost grounds of legitimation in the modern State. And yet, in spite of the common background and the similarity of themes, there was soon once again to be a parting of the ways in this new world too. It was to come particularly as a consequence of the wholly different development of States and nations in the several parts of Europe, a difference which Sir Lewis Namier has very aptly emphasized. In those parts where amalgamation of State and nation had long been achieved, patriotism could find expression in a proud assertion of liberty, of the liberty won and sanctioned by means of free institutions which were held out for the admiration of the world. This may be said to have been the case with Britain, the ‘mother of Parliaments’; it certainly was the case with revolutionary France. ‘Ici commence le pays de la liberté’ read a placard once posted on the left bank of the Rhine. But where nations were still broken up into a multiplicity of political units, patriotism could not but take the shape primarily of a demand for unity and independence. The cause of liberty could wait. ‘Germany is no longer a State’, wrote Hegel in 1802: the supreme necessity, on which Fichte was to harp only a few years later in his Addresses to the German Nation, was that Germany should become one. In Italy, the priority given to independence over liberty was one of the most fateful choices of the Risorgimento. It may well have been one of the causes why free institutions were so precariously grounded in that part of the world.

But for the parting of the roads yet another reason can be given. To quote once again one of Chabod’s illuminating suggestions, there would seem to have been from the beginning two possible ways of conceiving the nation: one based on purely ‘natural’ factors, the other on ‘spiritual’ elements; the one on something given, the other on something desired. The first of these two conceptions may have begun by merely stressing linguistic and ethnical differentiation as the distinguishing factors of nationality. It ended by extolling the most dubious biological factors, blood and race. The second conception, on the contrary, was based on the recognition of the importance of the cultural bond. It stressed the necessity of active individual participation if the nation was to be a living, spiritual unit; indeed, in Renan's famous phrase, a nation is nothing but a choice, a plebiscite of every day. Such a conception of nationality is not necessarily conducive to antagonism and hatred. On the contrary, it may permit the possibility of reconciling national differences with the complexity of human civilization as a whole. This possibility should be taken into account before a final judgement is passed on what it is the fashion nowadays to call the ‘ideology’ of the national State.

Certainly this peculiar ideology, even when it is not openly disparaged or deliberately condemned, cannot but appear to modern eyes — at any rate in Europe — as a thing of the past. But one lesson can be learnt from the very sketchy analysis I have attempted to give of it. This is that the ‘State’ cannot be understood simply as a structure of power, nor justified only by the help of abstract philosophical theorems. Its legitimation is interwoven with historical elements and irrational, emotional factors. We often hear it said that the new, the supra-national State, which is invoked and longed for today by so many, will be the signal for the final disappearance of those nationalisms which have brought Europe to the brink of ruin. But one thing at least can be said with certainty. Whenever the new State arises and establishes itself as a working proposition, it too will need an ‘ideology’ on which to lean, a faith capable of kindling men’s imagination and warming their hearts. It will be essential, in other words, for this State to inspire men with a spirit of dedication as great as that inspired by the ‘old’ State, and for it to acquire in the eyes of its new citizens the value of a new and better communis patria.