The New Nationalism and the First World War

L. Rosenthal, V. Rodic, L. Rosenthal, V. Rodic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137462770
• eBook ISBN: 9781137462787
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The New Nationalism and the First World War is an edited volume dedicated to a transnational study of the features of the turn-of-the-century nationalism, its manifestations in social and political arenas and the arts, and its influence on the development of the global-scale conflict that was the First World War.

1

A Storm before the Great Storm: New Faces of a Distinctly Twentieth-Century Nationalism

Lawrence Rosenthal and Vesna Rodic

A new and aggressive nationalism, different from its predecessors in its thought, appeal and goals, emerged in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Earlier, nationalism seemed to stem from two related motivations. One was a sense of communal destiny, a conviction that atomized states that shared a common language and culture belonged together, represented a higher moral and political unity: a nation. German unification, the pulling together of dozens of political entities under the leadership of Prussia, is illustrative of this national destiny impulse. On the Italian peninsula, this sense of national destiny was accompanied by the second motivation: to be rid of foreign domination – rule by those not of the nation. This motivation, similar to what would come to animate movements of national liberation in the second half of the twentieth century, had had an earlier and revolutionary expression in the Greek War of Independence.

These were inward-looking nationalisms, focused on bringing political and geographical reality in line with a cultural imperative. The new nationalism of century’s end had both inward- and outward-looking dimensions. When the new nationalism looked inward, it was with a novel, quarrelsome and often confrontational attitude: those living inside the nation, but not judged part of the nation – culturally, linguistically or, now, racially – came to be seen as injuries to the very feeling of the national community. Tolerance for the presence of “Others” became a perishing value among the new nationalists. Intolerance could be expressed in assertions of superiority or in scapegoating – the “Other” responsible for the dysfunctions of the emerging modern world. Intolerance was finally an expulsive itch – the desire for what would come to be called “ethnic cleansing” a century later. At an extreme, the “Other” could come to be regarded as “the enemy within.”

The new nationalism engaged the fierce us/them group emotions – loyalty inwards, aggression outwards – that characterize human relations at simpler sociological levels like the family or the tribe. What was new was attaching these passions to the nation. This experiment demanded that what had traditionally been feelings directed toward discrete groups, usually no bigger than a city, now moved to something more abstract. A new, and often mystical, symbolism was required to encompass the new object, the nation, within the sphere of human passion, human worship. As Yuri Slezkine writes:

This combination of patriotism and progress, or the worship of the new state as an old tribe (commonly known as nationalism) became the new opium of the people. Total strangers became kinsmen on the basis of common languages, origins, ancestors, and rituals duly standardized and disseminated for the purpose. The nation was family writ large: ascriptive and blood-bound but stretched well beyond human memory or face recognition, as only a metaphor could be.¹

In its outward-looking dimension, the new nationalism was fully a movement of the age of imperialism – of the “great game,” the “scramble for Africa” and elsewhere, the enterprise of great powers. While the foremost aims of the engineers of empire were economic, imperialism’s publicists, theorists and practitioners trafficked in celebrations of national glory and adventure, connecting the nation to conceptions not merely of domination, but of a philosophical anthropology that insisted that domination and subordination made up the shared design in which both nations and individuals participated. The new nationalism offered, finally, a novel identity, a relation to the nation no longer as subject of or citizen of, but as child of. And the nation itself became the central protagonist in history, the agent of rising and falling fortunes.

Rationalism and its discontents

The new nationalism was the expression in politics of a movement, a zeitgeist, which would intrude into social thought and the arts at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. It was a movement that arose through profound antipathy to the conventional rationalism of the age. In his classic study of the rise and eclipse of the rational paradigm in social thought, Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes demonstrates what he calls the “revolt against positivism.” In politics, this revolt took the form of contempt for the rational, calculating “economic man” model of liberalism – or against the “scientific socialism” of Marxism.²

The key to understanding the emergence of the rational, positivist paradigm of the nineteenth century is the transcendent problem that both social thinkers and artists were confronting in Europe: the coming of the modern world. Men worked in factories according to rigid clock-based time schedules. Cities grew and not only fed the factories’ manpower needs, but introduced new problems of civil order, novel forms of delinquency and public heath considerations. “Progress” entered European culture as a concept almost palpable in the new environment: the conviction that the world was on a course of betterment through science and technology. Beyond the novelties of how men and women were now spending their days, and beyond the gathering conviction of progress, modernity seemed to bring with it in the form of rationality a new way of thinking – or the triumph of enlightenment thinking – that expressed itself in the organization of industrial enterprise; in how governments were organized and how they attempted to define and solve social problems; and in the rational, individualized problem-solving approach that people now seemed increasingly to require in order to move through their environments and through their life cycles.

Across intellectual traditions in Europe, social thought resolved into a characteristic way of coming to grips with the problem of modernity. It involved positing a model of what came before – traditional society – and illustrating how the modern differed. The key categories to illustrate this difference could vary from thinker to thinker, but the distinguishing element of the modern was invariably its reliance on rationality. For Marx, class conflict was the difference maker, and this conditioned both his “before” model, which he called feudalism, and his “after” model, the mighty machine of production which he called capitalism.³ For Auguste Comte, the “father” of a discipline, sociology, whose very existence owed itself to the attempt to try to theorize modern society, the modern, what he called the “positive” stage of human development, was heir to the “theological” and then the “metaphysical” stages of human history.⁴ For Max Weber, the greatest of all theorists of the modern age – which he identified as the age of “rational bourgeois capitalism” – the rise of bureaucracy as the model of modern social organization was indicative of the rational organization of modern society. Modern forms of both authority (“rational-legal”) and rational social action stood in contrast to the traditional forms that preceded it.⁵

For Weber the rational, technically ordered society was not without its profound drawbacks. He spoke of the “disenchantment” of the world and compared the situation of living in a wholly bureaucratized world to an “iron cage.” His concept of charisma, and of the transformative potential of charismatic authority, hinted darkly at what would prove to be rationalism’s vulnerable underside. But it was the rare theorist of the modern age who saw the rational as a veneer, a rationalization, masking something more primitive, more primary, something, as the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto put it, “non-logical.” First an engineer, then an economist, Pareto turned to sociology to explain why the verities of the “economic man” model did not pan out in the real world. Pareto came to argue that the rationality of the modern world, whether socialist or liberal, was but what he called a “derivation,” and that the controlling forces behind it and other ideologies were eternal “residues.”⁶

Hughes called this unseating of the rational “the discovery of the unconscious.” Here, certainly, the major theorist was Freud. Freud’s message was that the reliable-seeming substance and manners of civilization rested in fact on the successful suppression of lustful, desiring, potentially explosive instincts of which, as civilized people, we are only faintly aware – through dreams, through malaise, sometimes through slips of the tongue. What was more, the manner in which we came to suppress those instincts – to “sublimate” instinctual energy into the proper roles expected in work and family – relied on the same mechanism that gave rise to neurosis.⁷

Still, Freud was a fierce partisan of the need for repression to head off the unchecked primitive drives relentlessly generated within us by what he called the id. But it was among those who did not see the nonrational, the instinctual, as perils to be mastered, among those who celebrated those instincts, that the story of the new nationalism begins. These were the people, the artists, writers, fringe political activists we will see in this volume, men (almost entirely) who found the disenchanted modern world boring, contemptible, opposed to everything in human nature that was heroic, the stuff of grocers, not of great men and their followers. The heroic was to be found in authoritarian alternatives to parliamentary regimes. Or in art and literature that exalted national symbols or portrayed national super men. But above all the heroic was to be found in war.

The arts meet the modern

The idea of progress was accompanied by an overwhelmingly heightened sense of time. Modernity’s fast-growing urban crowds embraced the rapid replacement of older forms of expression. Newspapers became essential to keep up with the pace of modern society. Applied arts started to compete with the predominance of fine arts. Lithographs, cartes-de-visite and other mechanically reproduced images allowed for mass circulation, dwarfing the production of works inside an artist’s studio. The photograph started to rival its much-esteemed predecessor in the arts, the painting. The French poet Charles Baudelaire had summed up the challenge – and even the anxiety – of coming to terms with a fast-changing world when, in 1863, he defined modernity through its temporal criterion: “By modernity, I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.”⁸

Henri Bergson’s philosophy – immensely influential in the first decades of the twentieth century – attempted to redefine an individual’s way of experiencing time in the modern world. He rejected rationalism in favor of intuition as well as immediacy of experience. Intuition of the imagination, Bergson argued, provided the most immediate access to reality, which itself was best sensed through duration (la durée), as the work of memory uncovered the point of contact between consciousness and matter.⁹ His theory of time involved the relationship between perception and memory in order to define duration as perpetual change.

Interestingly, the image that, for Bergson, best captured the experience of duration through the work of intuition was that of the modern city. Exemplary of the experience of time in the modern era with its architecture, its multiple spaces and its crowds, the city itself could only be grasped indirectly. Its representation would best be accomplished through multiple images, all composing together an amalgamated sense of the real.

The emergent urban space, the metropolis, became the touchstone for coming to terms with the modern. The German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel captured the rise of the modern metropolis when he wrote: “If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a very long time.”¹⁰ For Baudelaire, on the other hand, city streets and their crowds provided the most fruitful source of inspiration – and, at the same time, the most powerful impulse toward a withdrawal inward. The act of “becoming one with the crowd”¹¹ yet being apart, of getting lost in a crowd yet becoming its invisible, contemplative member – these were the sensations that embodied the delights and complexities of Baudelaire’s influential ideal of the “flâneur.”¹²

Some artists responded to the anxiety induced by the changes in modern life by turning to artistic and literary avant-garde movements, which were of particular appeal to young poets and artists. Poets such as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Nerval, Corbière and Mallarmé saw themselves as the “accursed poets” (les poètes maudits)¹³ who, in the vein of Baudelaire, saw in their own poetic genius a curse, the very source of the rift separating them from modern society. Symbolist movements multiplied in European literature, music, visual and scenic arts.¹⁴ Such diverse artists as Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch attempted to capture fleeing images of reality through a refuge into the mystical, the ephemeral, even the fantastic. Writers such as Oscar Wilde, Rilke or Huysmans glorified youth as they embraced the artifice produced by the modern world, rejecting the previously triumphant cult of nature inherited from Romanticism. Many artists dealt with the novelties of modernity by turning to purely aesthetic questions. The art-for-art’s-sake movement, with Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater as its most notable advocates, rejected the idea that art should serve a social or moral purpose, or, for that matter, any purpose other than the exercise of art’s intrinsic properties.¹⁵

Nonetheless, many artists responded to the changing outlook of the modern world by turning to distinct moments of the past. The growth of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood¹⁶ in England, the exceedingly popular writings on the medieval period by the French historian Jules Michelet¹⁷ and the overwhelmingly present Gothic revival in European architecture are among some of the most notable examples. Fascinated by medieval culture, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists opposed their idealism to what they saw as the cold, materialist principle of independent observation and copying of nature exemplified by realism in literature and the arts. For them, the imitation of nature – which, for centuries before, was one of art’s central objectives – became not an end but a means, a way of expressing their visions of reality through individual freedom and all the idiosyncrasies of the work of the mind.

Yet, the industrialized metropolis did not solely host those who turned to the past for answers. For some, tradition was to be found not in the metropolis, but in regions far away from it, in the countryside or abroad. By the late nineteenth century, the appeal of the foreign and the exotic in the arts had reached its height. Colonial projects went hand in hand with the rapid developments in the arts. Like the medium of photography itself, photographic expeditions witnessed a boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. Photographers brought back to Europe images from the Middle East, North Africa as well as the F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. A Storm before the Great Storm: New Faces of a Distinctly Twentieth-Century Nationalism
• Part I: The New Nationalism and the (Re)building of Nations
• Part II: The New Nationalism and Shifting Notions of Tradition
• Part III: The New Nationalism at the Crossroads between East and West
• Selected Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index