Theme two: Democratization and nationalism in Europe.
Participants and abstracts.
Theme coordinators:
Dr. Eric Storm (Leiden University)
[email protected]
Dr. Maarten Van Ginderachter (University of Antwerp)
[email protected]
Participants:
1. ‘In the Shadow of the State. Nationalization, Democratization and Cultural Homogenization
in Spain (1875-1922)’, Ferrán Archilés, University of Valencia.
2. ‘The 1918 Election and the Fall of the Irish Parliamentary Party’, Martin O’Donoghue, National University of Ireland.
3. ‘Contested Majorities? Democratisation, Nationalism and the State 1870-1920’, Brian Girvin,
University of Glasgow.
4. ‘The Spatial Politics of State-Building after Civil War: the Case of Prussia, 1866-1920’, Jasper
Heinzen, University of York.
5. ‘Beyond microhistory: On Curating between Democratisation and Nationalisation’,
Chrystalleni Loizidou, The London Consortium.
6. ‘Democratization in Croatia-Slavonia and the Decline of the Habsburg Empire’, Branko
Ostajmer, Croatian Institute of History.
7. ‘Mass Meetings, Popular Opinion & Democracy. A Comparison of Two Nationalist Gatherings
in Amsterdam, 1881-1899’, Anne Petterson, Leiden University.
8. ‘Political Culture and the Driving Forces of Democracy – the Emergence of Finland 18701920’, Matti Roitto and Petri Karonen, University of Jyväskylä.
9. ‘Time-Scales of Agency: The Politics of Class and Nation in Late Nineteenth-Century Romania’, Andrei Sorescu, University College London.
Introduction
From the last quarter of the 19th century, European societies gradually democratized and were thoroughly transformed by mass politics. Nationalism was deeply involved in this process and the subsequent nationalization of the masses has generally been presented as an almost linear process that
was intimately connected to the widening of the suffrage and the general modernization process. As
a result, it has been studied primarily as a top-down process in which the new voters had to be edu-
cated to become good and patriotic citizens. Consequently, the nation-building process began to
target wider strata of the population. This became visible in education, in celebrating national holidays, erecting statues, organizing large scale commemorations, in a new interest in folklore, but also
in more concrete efforts to include the lower classes into the nation, such as the founding of choirs
and excursionist associations, initiatives to revive traditional arts and crafts, public housing initiatives
and the construction of garden cities, which all received a rather pronounced nationalist veneer.
The relationship between nationalism and democratization in the period 1870-1920 is thus largely
taken for granted and has hardly been problematized or analysed explicitly. However, it is clear from
many recent case-studies that the relationship between democratization and nationalism/nationbuilding was far from unidirectional, while it is also doubtful whether the nationalization of the
masses merely was a top-down process.
Some of the questions this workshop wants to tackle are:
- to what extent has democratization impacted on nationalist movements?
- how was nationalism imbricated in the extension of suffrage or of social legislation?
- does democratization necessarily imply a larger role of nationalism as a means of involving more
citizens?
- do state and sub-state nationalisms have similar relationships to democratization?
- to what extent was the political emancipation of workers, farmers and women accompanied by a
growing national awareness?
Abstracts
Archilés, Ferrán (University of Valencia)
[email protected]
In the Shadow of the State. Nationalization, Democratization and Cultural Homogenization in Spain
(1875-1922)
This paper seeks to analyse the interrelation between the nationalization dynamics promoted by the
State and those ones coming from below. The analysis of the period of the Spanish Restoration
(1875-1923) allows to propose an alternative interpretation to the theses that have emphasized the
weakness of the nationalization process in contemporary Spain. The article proposes the centrality of
the nationalization dynamics arising from civil society but developed within the framework established by the State. This paper is focused on linguistic homogenization (in Spanish) and on the creation of an integrated public sphere as the two key aspects in the study of the processes of cultural
homogenisation in Spain. Tensions between cultural exclusion, democratization and nation-building
were developed but never closed in Spain under the period of Borbonic Restoration.
O’Donoghue, Martin (National University of Ireland)
[email protected]
The 1918 Election and the Fall of the Irish Parliamentary Party
This paper examines the fall of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the 1918 general election by
discussing how democratic and nationalist developments interacted with the party’s decline.
Although the IPP predated the Irish revolution and has often described as the first oathbound modern political party, nationalist Ireland under British rule could appear to be a one party
state with many uncontested constituencies returning IPP candidates from the 1890s through to
1918. While the party has been credited with politicising an entire generation of Irish nationalists by
engaging them at local level, those who were not members of interest groups associated with the IPP
had no vote at conventions and therefore no influence over the candidates chosen for parliament. In
1918, political engagement was expanded when the electoral franchise was increased to include
adult male suffrage and women over thirty years old. Although this paper does not repeat the argument that it was simply new voters who elected Sinn Féin (the scale of its victory undermines such a
reductive approach), it is argued that the IPP was in many ways overtaken by a new phase in the
democratic development of Irish politics. In this paper, the members of the Sinn Fein party which
displaced the IPP in 1918 are juxtaposed with the IPP members in terms of age, occupation and place
of residence to ask to what extent 1918 represented an electoral revolution enfranchising and electing new and previously excluded sectors of society.
Developments in Irish nationalism also undermined the IPP. Its leader John Redmond was
committed to devolved Home Rule government within the Empire and encouraged enlistment in the
British Army in the First World War. However, recent scholarship has shown that Redmond’s personal loyalty to the Empire was not necessarily shared by the all his supporters. The 1916 Rising then
won many people over to a more radical nationalism as the IPP was discredited by failed attempts to
secure Home Rule in its aftermath. The mass mobilisation against conscription in 1918 further
strengthened Sinn Féin and by the end of the War, it demanded a republic rather than a home rule
government within the Empire. Sinn Féin also promised to abstain from Westminster, establish a de
facto Irish parliament and state at home and campaigned on appealing to the Paris Peace Conference.
This paper accordingly argues that although events such as the rebellion in 1916 were crucial,
the case of the Irish Party also reflected the confluence of developments in nationalism and democratisation across Europe. The IPP and its attachment to the catch cry of home rule proved ill-quipped
to deal with the growth of democratisation and the demand for rights for small nations emerging in
the post-War world. The achievements of the IPP and its legacy to Irish democracy were both significant and the domestic factors which led to its demise unique; nevertheless, it was not a coincidence
that its decline coincided with significant nationalist and democratic developments in Europe.
Girvin, Brian (University of Glasgow)
[email protected]
Contested Majorities? Democratisation, Nationalism and the State 1870-1920
Democratisation in Europe challenged the existing state system, its territorial integrity and the possible legitimacy of democratic (i.e. majoritarian) outcomes. The state system in 1870 rested on predemocratic foundations and continued to privilege the existing institutional and territorial extent of
the state. It was assumed by most that representative institutions would apply at the state level and
that democratic majorities would decide within that context.
This was unproblematic in homogeneous states; it posed a more serious challenge to multinational states such as the United Kingdom and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This paper seeks to
explore the tensions between state, nationality and democratisation within the UK, while placing the
question within a wider comparative context. The UK was comprised of four distinct nations in 1870:
the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. The English comprised approximately 80 per cent of the total
electorate by 1900 and could if this was required impose its policy or political will on the other nationalities. Within Britain, the relationship between England, Scotland and Wales provide flexible
enough to accommodate the distinctive national character of the two smaller nations. This was particularly relevant in Scotland which maintained separate church, educational and legal institutions
within the Union of 1707. Majoritarian outcomes were considered legitimate by the electorates in
Scotland and Wales because of a shared political culture and sensitivity on the part of the state. One
consequence of this is that nationalism as a political movement had little support or appeal during
this period.
The situation in Ireland was quite different. Catholic Ireland became nationalist during the
period of democratisation that preceded 1870 and its political culture expressed a distinct and separate set of values through its nationalism. By the 1880s the main nationalist political party was the
dominant party in Ireland outside the north-east and its leaders claimed to speak for all those who
lived on the island. This posed a challenge to the majoritarian system at Westminster as Irish representatives were always in a minority (in this sense similar to Scotland and Wales). However, the Irish
party then and subsequently claimed that as Ireland was a distinct nation, it could not be constrained
by a majority in Westminster if a majority of the Irish electorate voted for its programme. The key
point of conflict to be examined in this paper is the democratic claim made by both the British state
and by Irish nationalists that they represented the ‘true’ majority on constitutional issues. This led to
a further response by Unionists generally but especially in the cohesive north-east: their representatives claimed that Irish nationalists could only speak for Irish nationalists and not for Irish Unionists.
The implication here is that each nationality could construct a majority within its nation and territory
and that this had to be respected, notwithstanding majorities in the island or the state. The paper
will assess these claims and counter claims in the context of an irreconcilable clash of nationalities by
the early twentieth century.
Heinzen, Jasper (University of York)
[email protected]
The Spatial Politics of State-Building after Civil War: The Case of Prussia, 1866-1920
In Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s celebrated novel about the Risorgimento in Sicily, The Leopard
(1958), one of the mail characters proclaims at the outset that ‘if we want things to stay as they are,
things will have to change’. The story goes on to investigate the hidden depths of this oxymoronic
statement by describing how the adjustment of Sicilians to their assimilation into Italy masked the
persistence of older, deeper allegiances. For the eponymous protagonist the true pacemakers of life
are not governments but the atmosphere, climate, and landscape of the country: ‘Those are the
forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied
invasions’.
Lampedusa’s insights bear powerful testament to formative yet impalpable socialising influences that have co-existed uneasily with nation- and democracy-building in Europe. It is an axiom of
political geography that landscapes are not the sum total of their physical attributes but rather possess what one of the discipline’s leading representatives in the late nineteenth-century, Paul Vidal de
la Blanche, termed ‘personality’. That landscapes compromise a multiplicity of ‘signs’ that are open
to semiotic contestation did not discourage diverse institutions and groups in the classical age of
modernity from engaging in a ‘politics of space’ to inscribe their values on geography, especially
when the illusion of spatial permanence helped forge a sense of sameness during dramatic ruptures
in people’s lived experience. Complementing recent scholarship on political violence in modern European history, my paper proposes to explore the tensions that emerged between local, regional,
state, and national identities in the wake of forcible regime change. To do so, I will adopt a long-term
approach centred on a case study of the Prussian province of Hanover. This region lends itself to such
an undertaking because the defeat and subsequent annexation of Hanover at the hands of Prussia in
the German War of 1866 necessitated not only a popular reconfiguration of spatial allegiances,
whose dynamics add to our understanding of the complex interplay between local and national identities in the Kaiserreich, but my talk will also highlight the neglected cultural ramification of civil war
in German nation-building. For decades monarchs and statesmen at the tops as well as pedagogues,
museum-curators, and other activists at the grassroots strove to bring the conflictual politics of space
inherited from the preunification period into alignment, but the replacement of the monarchy by
Weimar democracy at the end of the First World War re-opened old controversies. I will argue that
even though the invocation of spatial terms like Heimat (‘homeland’) and Stamm (‘tribe’) served to
suggest the same kind of ethno-geographic permanence that Lampedusa claimed for the Sicilian
character, the way in which contemporaries used and abused such categories of space were in fact
contingent on the political system in place, as became apparent during the transition from monarchy
to democracy in 1918.
Loizidou, Chrystalleni (The London Consortium)
[email protected]
Beyond Microhistory: On Curating between Democratisation and Nationalisation
This paper brings media-theoretical, curatorial, and art-historical considerations to the discussion of
the relationship between democratisation and nationalism. It builds on a body of research that investigates the role of nationalizing “invented traditions” (Hobsbaum, 1992) construed through megaevents and national exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th century (e.g. Roche, 2000; Dibley, 1997;
Tenkotte, 1987; Greenhalgh, 1991; Grever & Waaldijk, 2004).
In the late 19th century, the introduction of a type of parliamentary democracy in Cyprus by
the British colonial administration launched the Church of Cyprus (an institution with a long and
complex history of political survival) into a process of transformation and conflict. The conflict, an
ecclesiastical crisis that can also be thought of as the first mass political / electoral campaign in Cyprus, lasted for 10 years. It played out between a conservative, relatively secularist faction, and a
nationalist faction backed by the local intelligentsia and the bourgeois merchant class, who were also
the main stake-holders in the nascent local print industry. The campaign involved gathering support
from the Greek-speaking intelligentsia internationally and forwarded a type of Cypriot Greek nationalism, led by the Church, and feeding into a long-standing Greek-Turkish and Christian-Muslim conflict that is still relevant today.
This paper focuses on the role of the arts in this particular conflict, as well as the notions of
culture that were deployed by the educated bourgeoisie through “curatorial” processes that are to
be seen, arguably, as not quite top-bottom, nor bottom-top. The paper considers how these curatorial processes included commercial but also nation-building applications of early 20th century eth-
nography, how they made use of dramaturgy and literature as mass educational media, and how
they set-up large-scale commemorative rituals as quintessential political events, in order to project
lasting, prescriptive definitions of democratic citizenship.
Reaching beyond its Cyprus-specific micro historical framework, the paper attempts to think
through the overlapping development of democratisation and nationalism in connection to the arts’
power to produce national communities, or new “publics”, by making use of the Habermasian notion
of the public sphere, as well as reworking Lefebvre’s perspective on the dual reflection and generation of social consensus through the use of public commemorative works.
Ostajmer, Branko (Croatian Institute of History)
[email protected]
Democratization in Croatia-Slavonia and the Decline of the Habsburg Empire
By signing the Hungarian-Croatian Settlement in 1868 the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia received
limited statehood with local autonomy, which was maintained unchanged until the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918.
Although the settlement guaranteed the statehood which, for example, was not given to Bohemia, in Croatia-Slavonia prevailed the impression that this agreement enabled the Hungarian domination on the ground of Croatia-Slavonia.
Leading political circles of the Monarchy and the Emperor Francis Joseph himself did not look
with favor on questioning of the state organization established in 1867 and 1868. By the early 20th
century, parliamentary elections were won by the People’s Party (Magyarons) who advocated
maintenance of the Hungarian-Croatian state union and believed that it provides plenty of opportunities for economic and cultural progress. However, electoral successes of People’s Party were primarily the result of restrictive election law that was based on the tax census and education and provided direct voting rights to approximately only 2% of the population. The party was supported by
the administrative authorities, as well as by a significant part of the economic and financial elite
which – out of conviction or out of interests – opposed to the destabilization of the Monarchy.
In such circumstances, demands for democratization of political life had become a regular
point in the programs of Croatian opposition parties and remain till the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. Assuming that broader strata of the population was anti-Hungarian oriented, most of Croatian
opposition parties saw in the expansion of the electoral rights a precondition for changing the balance of political forces in Croatia and directing future of Croatian lands towards greater autonomy
within the Monarchy, or even towards complete separation out of the Monarchy and eventual unification into a new South Slavic state union.
In 1910 electoral reform was carried out and the number of electors increased from about 45
thousand to 190 thousand (approximately 6 and a half percent of the overall population). This reform
showed that strong political party which would truly support Croatian-Hungarian Union was no longer possible. The leading political power in the decade before the First World War becomes the Croatian-Serbian Coalition which was also forced to recognize the Hungarian-Croatian Settlement as a
basis for the Hungarian-Croatian relations.
This paper aims to analyse a reflection of democratization on the political life in Croatia and
Slavonia, and in particular on weakening of those political forces which supported the maintenance
of the Croatian-Hungarian Union within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Relationship of the Croatian
national idea and the Yugoslav idea will also be researched, and the author will try to answer the
question of how the strengthening the Yugoslav idea in the early 20th century affected on destabilization and the final collapse of the monarchy.
Petterson, Anne (Leiden University)
[email protected]
Mass Meetings, Popular Opinion & Democracy. A Comparison of Two Nationalist Gatherings in
Amsterdam, 1881-1899
The development of modern national identities, starting in the late eighteenth century, has often
been described as a one-way process. In both the Netherlands and abroad the elitist creation of national narratives and ‘invented traditions’ – that were subsequently disseminated amongst the people – has been the main focus of research. Most of these monographs are not interested in “the people”, other than passive recipients of the elitist nation-building agendas. My paper tries to steer away
from this top-down approach at modern nationalism and aims to consider the lower social classes as
actual actors in the process of democratizing the nation. For practical reasons, I will focus on the case
of (presumably) the first nationalistic mass meeting in the Netherlands. This meeting took place in
Amsterdam, March 1881, for the purpose of supporting the first Boer War (1880-1881) in SouthAfrica. In my paper I will analyse the relation between the public, speakers and (competing) organizing committees. How did nationalistic political styles and participation change when ‘the masses’
came into view? And, to what extent could we characterize those nationalistic mass meetings as
democratic? Shortly after the meeting in Amsterdam, the press started talking about the importance
of ‘the people’ and ‘popular opinion’ (‘volksopinie’), and – although still very limited – reproduced
the reactions of the audience in their newspaper reports. This last practice shows the start of a new,
and more democratic, view on popular politics. The preservation of the popular participation through
the newspaper reports also offers the opportunity to ask some questions about possible sources for
studying nationalism ‘from below’ and reconstructing the agency of the – often faceless – majority of
non-elite people. In order to trace the effects of a changing political context during the 1880’s and
1890’s (e.g. the introduction of the modern party system, extension of the right to vote), I will compare the 1881 meeting to another mass meeting in favour of the Boers at the turn of the century. In
the period of the second Boer War (1899-1902) the use of populist rhetoric became more common.
The national emotions of the public were more fervently channelled by the authorities as well. For
instance, at the second meeting, but also during the visit of President Paul Kruger to Amsterdam in
1899, and in popular media, we can discover some fine examples of early crowd control. This leads to
the conclusion that nineteenth century mass nationalism was, like so often described, a very popular
phenomenon, but not necessarily democratic in itself.
Roitto, Matti and Karonen, Petri (University of Jyväskylä)
[email protected]
[email protected]
Political Culture and the Driving Forces of Democracy – the Emergence of Finland 1870-1920
National frameworks are often considered to be the defining factor in the development of what has
come to be known by the umbrella concept of “modern democracy”. Though several distinctive features exist in democratic political systems and political cultures, there exist a number of factors that
are, to some extent, universal. As a sum of both external and internal factors, these could be described as the driving forces of democracy. They can be summarized as (i) political culture, (ii) geopolitics, and (iii) economics – though this last driving force is not the focus of this paper.
Instead we consider the case of Finnish democratization from the perspective of the development of political culture and we claim it had roots already in the particular historical, context before independence was achieved. Furthermore, we argue that it was very much part of a larger international or transnational context that did not merely concern the destiny of Finland; and these elements filtered into the political culture of the emerging nation.
Political culture(s) and the process(es) of democratization have been the focus of much previous academic research. However, the history of such in the smaller northern states of Europe has
been somewhat neglected. For instance, Finland and Sweden, considered by many to be democratic
successes, are perhaps worthy of closer study for their differences as much as for their similarities.
The political culture behind the democratization of Finland distinguishes the country from
other European examples in a number of ways. The context was not simply national and also had a
long trajectory in the past. Finland shared a common background (cultural and political) first and
foremost, with Sweden, and to some extent with Russia. Indeed, between 1809 and 1917, Finland
was an autonomous Grand Duchy of Imperial Russia. And because both Russia and Sweden had geopolitical influence, this also shaped Finnish political culture.
We argue that for example some of the characteristic internal elements in the case of Finland have been part of a constant negotiation process, which has allowed for certain developments
from below, such as being able to establish Finnish-speaking vernacular systems and structures of
governance both during and after 400 years of Swedish and Russian rule. The tradition of valuing
legality/constitutionalism and fairness were ideas shared by the elites in power and the people.
Meanwhile, the external elements relate for instance to the geopolitical context of being a borderland area, and the equally shared notion of the Other, especially of being different to Russia, culminating in the attempts to russify Finland in the late 1890s and early 1900s. This sense of otherness,
also actively used for political ends, combined with the tide of nationalism that was growing
throughout Central Europe, and contributed to a sense of Finnishness that was then actively built
upon. These factors became crucial in what was to become Finnish political culture and democracy in
the age of nationalism, yet within a transnational framework.
Sorescu, Andrei (University College London)
[email protected]
Time-Scales of Agency: The Politics of Class and Nation in Late Nineteenth-Century Romania
The purpose of the present paper is to problematize the way in which the contradictory convergence
of nationalism and exclusionary census vote was negotiated in late nineteenth-century Romania. In
the Romanian case, the peasant majority was simultaneously exalted as ‘the nation’ itself, yet excluded from politics in the here-and-now, on grounds of immaturity. The type of agency immanent to
belonging to the ethnos clashed with the class-based suffrage restrictions which promised democracy in an unspecified future only. As such, the issue is of determining how the timescale peculiar to
projects of gradual inclusion into full political citizenship meshed or clashed with that of having always-already belonged to a national community. If the rights derived from either kind of belonging
could be subsumed together under the heading of ‘the political’, was said category divided against
itself in the nineteenth-century? Or, did a deeper logic reconcile inclusion and exclusion in the hereand-now? The fact that nineteenth-century actors themselves noted the contradiction and perceived
it as ‘political’ makes an exploration of contesting ideological discourses necessary.
This issue shall be approached with reference to the emergence of democratic, agrarian politics from below towards the end of the century, focusing on their press output as primary sources.
Such political and cultural groupings rallied against the liberal-exclusionary paradigm, openly attempting to exploit its basis aforementioned contradiction. As such, our discussion shall consider the
language of agency common to all groups competing for legitimacy, in the context of parallel, paternalist state-sponsored attempts to engage the emerging rural intelligentsia. Furthermore, a growing
rhetoric of blaming peasants in Romania proper for being less effective than neighboring kin-folk
under foreign rule in bettering their fate is a now-forgotten instance of the entanglement between
nineteenth-century nationalism and calls for democratic emancipation. To this, we shall also touch
upon the transnational connection of early Romanian agrarianist democrats’ transforming the victorious – later victimized – Boers into symbols of resistance against class aggression.
It is our contention that in order to explore how a liberal-exclusionary and a national-inclusive vision of the peasantry coexisted, a common denominator under the aegis of ‘agency’ may be
fruitfully applied. Both discursive stances, we stress, had something to say about the context and
form of human violation and its temporally situated effects, and it is precisely this nexus that was
open attacked by Romanian democrats. As such, the broader methodological point is that we must
use the category of ‘agency’ as an exploratory concept, so that we may more fully historicize notions
of ‘capacity’, beyond the few debates in which laws enshrined their prescriptive force.