This chapter begins to excavate a different conception of nations and nationality which cannot be grasped within a rigid base-superstructure modelling of Marx and Engels’ theory, and which owes as much to the democratic ideals of an older revolutionary discourse on the nation (Section 1.1) as it does to the authors’ ‘class-instrument’ theory of the state. The rudiments of this conception appear in Marx’s pre-communist writings. Here he treated the nation as a prescriptive concept, expressing an ideal of community based on democratic self-determination (Section 1.2). This concept was modified, but not abandoned, in Marx and Engels’ ‘materialist’ theory of history, where it was used to underscore the social and economic prerequisites for satisfactory forms of national community (Section 1.3). Its role in their action-guiding theory of politics, moreover, is essential to an understanding of Marx and Engels’ internationalist policies (Section 1.4). Each of these sets of ideas—the early political philosophy, the theory of history, and the theory of political action —was to have an important bearing on Marx and Engels’ analyses of specific national movements.

When the young Marx first began to use the terms ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, and ‘state’ in his own writings, he was working within a conceptual and political setting quite different from that which prevailed across the border in France, or across the Channel in Britain. Both of these countries were politically unified at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and both had experienced revolutionary upheavals whose authors used the vocabulary of nationality in a partisan way, calling for downward transfers of sovereignty from the monarch to ‘the people’ or their parliamentary representatives. Germany in the same period had neither political unity nor an indigenous tradition of revolutionary-democratic discourse on the nation. Germans who wanted to use imported elements of that discourse to criticize their own absolutist monarchies therefore faced two kinds of difficulty. First, the popular ‘nation’ to which they appealed was still splintered into dozens of separate states and municipalities. Conventional German usage, second, still treated ‘nationality’ as an attribute of sovereign states rather than of sovereign, self-governing peoples. The words ‘state’ (Staat) and ‘nation’ (Nation) were often used interchangeably in German, as they still are in English, to refer to a body exercising sovereign authority within established territorial frontiers. But whereas the identity of state and nation in English, American, and French revolutionary usage was effected by putting the popular nation first, and subjecting the state to its sovereign will, the dominant German convention respected pre-revolutionary priorities. In the political and legal idiom that prevailed in the first half of the century, Nation remained an essentially descriptive, conservative concept, referring either to a person’s place of origin or to the actual locus of sovereignty in established states.

Most German intellectuals had embraced the revolutionary ideal of popular sovereignty in 1789, and many hailed Napoleon as their long-awaited liberator from German tyranny and semifeudal backwardness. Before long, however, the events of the Terror and Prussia’s humiliating wars against Napoleon dealt a serious blow to both republican fervour and Francophile sentiment in Germany. The political vocabulary of the French Revolution was intellectually discredited and, in some German states, officially censored for several decades into the nineteenth century. In this climate a new, distinctively Germanic concept of the nation began to gain wide currency. The seeds of what is now commonly called the ‘ethnic’ concept of the nation had been planted in the last years of the eighteenth century in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder conceived the nation as an organically evolving community of language and culture, not of blood-ties. Although he said almost nothing about the politics of nationality, he offered a roseate, pluralist vision of a Europe wherein each nation would realize its unique national ‘nature’ in harmony with all the rest.¹ In the heat of the Napoleonic Wars, a host of later writers and polemicists abandoned Herder’s irenic ideals while retaining his romantic and particularist view of nationality. Common descent and language rather than acquired culture were increasingly seen as the foundations of national community, while the inward-looking ideal of national purity was invoked against foreign influences and Germans who welcomed them.

This early ‘ethnic’ concept of the nation postulated an entity deeper and wider than the state which, unlike the popular-revolutionary conception, could provide a ready-made basis for national unity: a nationality of language and blood shared by Germans living under different political roofs. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the political implications of the concept remained outstandingly vague. The founding fathers of ethnic nationalism did not present their doctrine as a blueprint for German unity, let alone for constructing nation-states throughout Europe. Far from treating nationalism as a substantial political programme, their main concern was to rid Germany of a crippling inferiority complex which had started to show during the eighteenth century—when the cultural, political, and economic achievements of France and Britain were widely seen as superior to those of Germans—and which developed into neurosis after the Napoleonic invasions. Nor did ‘ethnic’ nationalists adopt a clear doctrinal position vis-à-vis competing statist and popular-revolutionary concepts of the nation. In the writings of Fichte, Arndt, Jahn, and other Romantics, the ‘natural’ essence of German nationality was sometimes tied to authoritarian institutions and hierarchical social structures, giving the concept a markedly conservative bent.² At the same time, Romantic nationalists claimed to venerate the common people or Volk as the purest repository of national characteristics, and many of them claimed to be good democrats. Such claims look spurious when they are held up against a liberal understanding of what democracy means. The ethnic concept left little room for individuals to assert their cultural preferences, let alone to question the authority of institutions to which they were organically bound by birth and blood. But since political repression inhibited the growth of liberal democratic ideas in Germany after 1815, there were few sceptics bold enough to pour cold water on the ethniccollectivist alternative. In any case, the Romantics’ poetic and metaphysical panegyrics to Volk and Nation looked more welcoming to ‘the people’ than absolutist traditions.

While those traditions were eroded during the course of the nineteenth century, the persistence of authoritarian institutions in Germany helped to keep alive the older conservative-statist language of nationality. With their shared authoritarian grammar and organic metaphors, statist and ethnic idioms were easy to cross-breed. But the latter did not become the dominant strain in German discourse on the nation until the twentieth century. In Marx and Engels’ lifetimes the main threat to democratic aspirations in Germany still came from above, and particularly from the Prussian state’s ruthless suppression of its critics, not from literary or populist appeals to ethnic nationality. Nevertheless, the intermingling of statist and ethnic elements meant that anyone who wanted to discuss concrete political aspects of nationality soon found himself thrashing about in muddy conceptual waters. When the question of German unification was first put to serious pan-Germanic discussion at sessions of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, delegates were conceptually ill prepared to cope with the obvious next question: namely, whether the boundaries of the projected nation-state should be decided on ethnic or political grounds. The problem was not just that delegates disagreed among themselves over which criterion to use. Many ran the different options together in their own speeches, unable to say with any clarity whether they thought a united Germany should include German-speakers currently living under non-German governments, or whether it should simply incorporate most of the traditionally Germanic states qua states. This confusion was reflected in increasingly ambiguous uses of the terms relating to nationality. At the turn of the century, romantically inclined Germans had begun to use the term Volk to designate the unique, pristine qualities of an ethnic collectivity; but the word was still more commonly used to refer simply to ‘the people’ as distinct from the higher social orders and rulers of the state, in the sense of the Latin populus. The plural Völker could refer to various ‘peoples’ differentiated either by language, descent, and history, or by the political fact of living under separate governments. But ethnic overtones were appearing more and more frequently in arguments defending the traditional, monarchical state. As demands for German unity mounted, traditionalists began to show a preference for the good Germanic words Volk and Vaterland whenever these could fill in for the Latin-derived ‘nation’ or ‘patria’.

These developments did not go unopposed, but the emerging alliance between statist and ethnic concepts of the nation added to the polemical difficulties which faced critics of the German status quo. The 1830s and 1840s saw the growth of new radical movements among intellectuals, artisans, and industrial workers, especially in south-western Germany. These groups wanted German unification as much as anyone. But the question of redrawing national boundaries was, for them, inseparable from the question of which people and what kind of institutions were to be sovereign within the German ‘nation’. The new radicals and democrats harked back to the old revolutionary discourse imported from France, pitting a third concept of the nation against ethnic and statist arguments. This concept identified the sovereign nation with the Volk, not in the ethnic sense attached to the word by Romantic writers, but in the democratic sense which gave the ‘people’ authority to elect or dissolve their own governments. The revolutionary implications of this usage were clear so long as German radicals had only to confront conservative-statist concepts of the nation. To nominate the Volk as the Nation was to call for democracy and the end of absolutism, just as the peuple = nation equation had helped to topple the ancien régime in France. It proved less easy for radicals to differentiate their vocabulary, and hence their political position, from the discourse of ethnic nationalists. Some of them tried to draw the line by simply avoiding sentimental references to the ‘Vaterland’, already a shibboleth of both conservatives and Romantics. This strategy had respectable roots in the cosmopolitan declarations made in the late eighteenth century by classical writers like Goethe, Lessing, Schelling, and Schiller who had repeatedly denied that they had or wanted a Vaterland, knew of any duty to be a German patriot, or saw any political implications of nationality.³ The Vaterland-spurning convention had deeper sources in the French Enlightenment. Voltaire himself had asked his countrymen, ‘Who really has a fatherland [patrie]?’ His answer: ‘He only who has a share in the natal soil or other property … and a share in political rights, forms a member of the community, and he only has a fatherland.’⁴

By taking up this theme in their own polemics, the new German radicals registered their protest against the social and political inequalities which continued to exclude most people from the ‘community’ that Germany would be. They also identified themselves with the cosmopolitan tradition of the German Enlightenment, and expressed a willingness to follow foreign political models in their struggle for democracy in Germany. Marx’s earliest writings place him squarely in this third strand of German discourse on the nation. His commitment to the democratic-revolutionary concept of the nation predated his commitment to communism, and it continued to influence his later thinking on national issues. By locating Marx’s views in this context, we may form a clearer idea of what we can and cannot reasonably expect to find in his and Engels’ writings on nationalism.

We should not, first of all, expect those writings to display the conceptual precision and objectivity we have come to expect in contemporary theoretical discussions of national issues. Clearly defined concepts relating to those issues simply weren’t available in mid-nineteenth century Germany; and there was no such thing as a politically neutral, descriptive vocabulary dealing with the subject. All three of the national concepts I have just outlined were loaded with partisan meaning, even if their users were not always aware of their political implications. The issues at stake in discussions of nationality were far too large and overheated to allow for much disinterested analysis. And for radicals like Marx and Engels, whose democratic conception of nationality was constantly on the defensive against formidable statist and ethnicnational opponents, neutrality on the national question would have meant political suicide even if it was possible.

Once we recall that the ‘national question’ was a deeply divisive one in nineteenth-century Germany, it also becomes clear that we shouldn’t expect Marx and Engels to treat nationalism as a phenomenon that could be analysed independently of the particular political movements which invoked it. The discourse of nationality did not appear to Marx and Engels as essentially one thing used in different ways. It was to them, and I shall argue that it still is, several different things expressed through only superficially similar concepts and requiring different responses. Marx and Engels were aware of the political costs that would be incurred by a failure to keep those concepts separate, by allowing the Volk of ethnic nationalism to absorb the democratic ‘people’ and the Nation of the authoritarian state to soak up the ethnic nationality of the Volk. The career of nationalism in the twentieth century should make us equally wary of efforts to minimize differences between various concepts of the nation, in the interests of either political neutrality or explanatory simplicity.

We can, however, expect to find a set of concerns in Marx and Engels’ writings which are seldom brought to the fore in contemporary theories of nationalism. Because of their partisan involvement in the politics of nationality from the 1840s onward, and because their experience in Germany showed that rival nationalisms can do battle within the same nation, Marx and Engels were preoccupied with a question that deserves further attention today: in what conditions do virulent, exclusive, and authoritarian forms of nationalism win the domestic battle against democratic, cooperative definitions of nationality—and what kind of politics might reverse this outcome? The rest of this chapter looks at Marx and Engels’ early attempts to formulate and address this question.