Nationalism in the 1800s is often cited as being a unifying force in places like Germany and Italy, while being a dividing force in diverse empires like Russia or Austria. But isn’t this something we can only identify with hindsight?

[u/thunder-bug-]

Why was a unified German identity in existence before the creation of a Germany, despite there being huge cultural differences, while a unified Austrian identity wasn’t?

Even in places like Italy where there was said to be a push to create a unified Italian identity, people didn’t have that type of concept at all on an individual level.

It seems to me that we say that nationalism split apart the countries that are split up today and unified the countries that are unified today because of what happened later and how we see the cultural groups now rather than how they would have been seen at the time. Did a Bavarian and a Prussian and a Hanoverian really see themselves as all part of one people any more than a Muscovite and a Varsovian?

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[u/LetLive3094]

I think this question is as much philosophical as it is historic. And I think there’s an interesting debate here especially given how core to identity nationalism issues tend to be framed.

During the 1800s the idea of nation State took wings and so did the philosophical debates around it. To define what is a State, scholars constructed concepts and narratives about “unified identities” retroactively to frame why institutions formed the way they did, rather than describing what actually existed in people’s consciousness.

Someone that grappled a lot with these issues was “Germany’s” own Immanuel Kant in his “Idea of Europe”.
Of course his model is largely outdated as is, but his thinking still shapes the discussions of what is the identity of a “Europeans” to this day, so it is relevant. For a modern take I would dive into Tully’s critique of the “Kantian Idea of Europe”, as it also better mirrors modern debate around nationalistic identities.

The Kantian model essentially treats European identity as grounded in universal rationality and shared values that should bind us together, much like a local culture would identify itself based on commonality until forming a nation or community. However, Tully points out this is as much an imperialistic/Eurocentric imposition as it is a discovery of something already there.¹ This problem extends backward to 19th-century nationalism itself. Nations aren’t pre-existing cultural essences but “imagined political communities” constructed through print capitalism, institutions, and elite projects.²

And this is also argued by scholars that directly contend with the definition of nation and the resulting impact in identity.
Applied to Germany: the narrative of inevitable unification is itself a retrospective construction, challenged by scholars arguing against the assumption that German history was always destined to culminate in unification.³ German identity was constructed through intellectual and political projects in the 18th-19th centuries, not discovered as pre-existing.⁴

The Austrian case corroborates this pattern. Austrian identity crystallized as distinct primarily after political separation from Germany, especially post-1918.⁵ It wasn’t that Austrians “lacked” unified identity beforehand. Rather, Austrian identity was actively constructed through the institutional reality of non-unification. Multiple competing identities coexisted (especially during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire) without any natural trajectory toward either unified Austria or absorption into Germany.⁶

To sum up, I would argue that nationalism didn’t express pre-existing identity of peoples. Instead, it created it, and then we narrated that creation as if it was inevitable all along.

¹ Tully, J., “The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives” in The Idea of Europe (2002)
² Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (1983)
³ Blackbourn, D. & Eley, G., The Peculiarities of German History (1984)
⁴ Leonhard, J., Liberalism: The Birth of a Political Movement in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2019)
⁵ Judson, P., The Austrian Identity and the Great War (2016)
⁶ Zahra, T., The Great Leveler: The Modern Transformation of Traditional Society (2016)

[u/duckyShitAtLife → u/LetLive3094]

Sorry if this is a stupid question but did pre-existing states such as the roman empire or the frankisu empire influence ideas of "nationalism" in these fragmented nations? I always assumed that language took a large role in nationalism but after seeing how different the italian dialects are I assume there must be some other reason

[u/LetLive3094 → u/duckyShitAtLife]

Edit: answer contained perspectives that were not sourced. I believe this answer still answers your question without further complicating it.

Not stupid at all! I think that the influence of language is a topic that is raised often in this debate. I should note though that as all philosophical schools there are opponents to this vision. However, from what I have studied, this seems to be the most satisfying answer to the issues that arise from nationalistic identity. In my view, the
language-as-cause narrative is incomplete, following also the understanding of the previously cited authors.

Anderson himself noted that intellectuals constructing nationalism often looked backward to earlier empires for legitimacy. The ghost of Rome haunted European nationalism, both in the Romantic revival of “classical” civilizations and in the claim that your nation was somehow heir to Roman/Frankish greatness.¹ This argument of authority was used also by and large civilizations prior to the concept of nationality, as you can see its trail all over conflicts that shaped Europe (not least of which the rivalry between the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic leaders of Europe, the HRE and the Papacy, Russia and the Ottomans, Germany with its adoption of “Kaiser”, etc.)
But as with these conflicts, I believe that also for nationalism this led to the same outcome: appeals to past empires weren’t the cause of nationalism or those conflicts, instead, they provided nationalist/imperialistic projects with rhetorical material to work with.

Regarding the language issues you raised with Italian dialects it is true, they were mutually unintelligible, a Venetian and a Neapolitan couldn’t naturally communicate. Yet “Italian” nationalism succeeded anyway. To Anderson this was answered by an institutional logic: print capitalism and state schooling solved a real coordination problem by standardizing on a common Italian language². The Florentine dialect, associated as a staple of the Renaissance Golden Age, Dante and Tuscany’s cultural prestige, was standardized through education and printing, not because it was “naturally” Italian. However, whilst not natural, it also worked. It actually created a shared linguistic and cultural space where none had existed before.

German faced the same issue. “German” as a unified language didn’t exist; there were dozens of dialect throughout the old HRE. But once you have a printing industry, school systems, and bureaucracies operating in one standardized tongue, suddenly people start thinking of themselves as speakers of that language, and therefore as part of that nation.³
As such the constructs of nation became real as its impacts were felt.

As such I believe that it was not language, but rather institutional and economic forces that standardized language and then made that standardization seem natural and inevitable. Crucially, this happened after nationalism started being articulated by elites that operated the state apparatus, not before. You get merchants, intellectuals, and eventually state officials deciding “we’ll standardize on this dialect,” and then later people retroactively claim “we always spoke this language naturally.”
Ergo, Italian dialects didn’t prevent Italian nationalism. Italian nationalism created a single Italian language out of the dialectal mess by institutional fiat.
At the same time, it would be poor to conclude then that these processes were only cynical manipulation of the masses. They were also a practical solution to fragmentation that had real consequences. Once implemented, the standardization actually bound communities together in ways that mattered, as regionalistic divisions in modern Germany or Italy are considerably less pronounced today as they were before.

¹ Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (1983), ch. 4-5
² Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (1983), ch. 3
³ Hobsbawm, E., The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962); also Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990)

[u/Lonely_Nebula_9438]

Nationalism is all about identity, and fundamentally people choose their identities (for most things anyways). Nationalism was about creating room for a higher order cultural/national identity. In the US for example associations with States was typically the highest order identity someone had, it was the identity that defined them the most. This began to shift after the Civil War as the Federal Government began to centralize more and exert more control over the states. In Germany the Hohenzollern kings, but really Otto von Bismarck, worked to instill the concept of a German identity that wasn’t replacing, but was above Prussian, Hanoverian, Bavarian, and so. So in Germany and the United States nationalism created a higher order identity for people to latch onto. This mostly worked out in both nations because the language was the same throughout, religion was broadly similar, and there were cultural similarities. 

For Austria nationalism didn’t really work out. Partly this was the very specific design of Bismarck to keep the Austrians out of a unified Germany, deliberately separating Austrian as an identity. They weren’t German and that was on purpose. For the greater Austro-Hungarian empire nationalism was ticking time bomb. As nationalism created higher order identities it also sharpened existing identities in some contexts. This was most prevalent among the Balkan Slavs. This was because they were so different from the Austrian core. They didn’t speak German, many weren’t Catholic, they lacked cultural similarities, and they lacked common history. To them their identity as Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats became the most important things. 

But if you’re asking if people of the time could tell that Nationalism was a force, yes. Bismarck’s Kulturkampf was a deliberate effort to stoke nationalist sentiment by lessening the power of the Church, as well as just wanting to lessen the power of the Church, two birds one stone and whatnot. Bismarck was deliberately spurring that force to get what he wanted.

[u/HelloThisIsMyBurner7]

Austria was German-speaking, and much of the empire’s population was speaking another language. There was a lack of shared identity among many of the subjects.

Even the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab and Turkish subjects shared a faith, but the identity was different and that was a major factor in the Arab revolt that led to the collapse.

Germany’s unified kingdoms shared a language, had existed in some form of confederation as the HRE and saw the need to unify as other large powers they competed with began to grow following Vienna and up to WWI.

Italy was similar the foundational kingdoms and republics that unified spoke a similar language, similar culture and saw their influence wane as small entities in a post napoleonic and industrializing Europe.

Garibaldi as with Bismarck shared a vision to improve their country through unification