Shane Nagle. Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany: A Comparative Study from 1800 to 1932.

Abstract

Shane Nagle attempts two things at once. He looks at the role of historians in formulating ideas of national identity, thus placing their cultural production squarely in the middle of the political practices that we usually think of when we talk of nationalism. And he does so in a biculturally comparative framework, juxtaposing historians from Germany and Ireland. How will this book appeal to those who do not share its specifically Irish-German focus? Within a common European frame, the choice generates meaningful similarities and differences. Thus in Germany’s and Ireland’s trajectories of nation formation. Both countries began the century with the traumatic evaporation of a constitutional aegis. Ireland’s status as a kingdom in personal union with the English Crown, with its own parliament, was abolished as the country was merged into the United Kingdom in 1801; this in turn provoked ongoing resistance (Repeal of the Union, Home Rule, Sinn Féin, republican separatism). If Ireland had a lack of sovereignty, Germany after the Holy Roman Empire had a surfeit of it, with its plethora of states and statelets; the movement here was not toward republicanism but toward an empire redivivus. Yet both developments were deeply marked by national historicism; and in both cases, nationalism turned ethnically nativist—Nagle even suggests a provocative but arresting parallel between the “Irish Ireland” ideology and völkisch nationalism in Germany.