Towards the Mass Nation: Nationalism, Commemoration and Regionalism

Abstract

Let us now turn from the conceptual and historiographical to the history of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the distinctive features of this period of European history was the transformation of nationalism into a mass phenomenon. As mentioned in the last chapter, in the early nineteenth century (at least before the revolutions of the 1840s) nationalism had in large part been the preserve of the educated middle classes. It was not until the last third of the century that the concept of the nation — with its constitutive notions of cultural authenticity, historicist growth and political self-determination — began to capture the imagination of the wider public and became a key mobilising force in the modern political arena. It was during this period of European history that nations became mass communities affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. If we wish to explain why both in 1914 and then again during the inter-war period, national solidarities proved on the whole superior to class solidarities, then part of the answer has to be sought in this transformation. This chapter discusses some of the causes and consequences of this transition, focusing mainly on western and central Europe. In the next chapter the focus will shift towards an exploration of anti-imperialist and (after the First World War) state-building nationalism in east-central Europe.KeywordsNational IdentityNational MinorityEuropean HistoryPrivate AssociationClosing DecadeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.