A few months ago, some friends and I read Friedrich Meinecke's wonderful Cosmopolitanism and the National State, originally published in 1907. The work is an intellectual history of German nationalism, running from the reaction to the French Revolution through Bismarck and German unification. The first half is of particular note, as it traces rival strands of nationalism (liberal and conservatism) through such figures as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Gotlieb Fichte, Adam Müller, and Karl Ludwig von Haller. The treatment of each thinker is sensitive, if not comprehensive. And on the whole the book serves as a wonderful guide to German theories of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Meinecke himself is a great German nationalist, as his later, more famous works make clear. I want to flag here a few themes I found striking from this book.
First, the role of the French Revolution in creating nationalism.
According to a common, Whiggish view of things, Western civilization has evolved (relatively linearly) from the more particularistic and tribal to the more universalistic and cosmopolitan. Of course, as with most Whiggish interpretations, that narrative isn't just simplistic, it's totally wrong. For Meinecke, it is clear that the eighteenth century is the century of individualism and cosmopolitanism. The nineteenth century, the century of nationalism.
The key event that sparks the transition from cosmopolitanism to nationalism is the French Revolution: "the French were the first to experience the desire for nationhood" (12). That much is clear if we think about the great trio of Revolutionary demands: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fraternity, in particular, stands out as a nationalist ideal. Not just a demand for universal brotherhood, the French Revolution was a call for the French People to exercise their sovereign right as a people to govern themselves. Thus, Meinecke claims, the French Revolution unleashed a liberal form of nationalism, a sense of the people's identity and destiny. Liberal nationalism is, ultimately, a commitment to self-determination and popular sovereignty.
Meinecke goes further, not simply periodizing an age of cosmopolitan individualism and an age of nationalism. He claims that it is "no coincidence" that an era dedicated to cultivating individual, moral personality should naturally give rise to appeals to natural character and greatness. He writes of this as a period of personal development, transitioning from a passive, vegetative state to an autonomous, moral strength:
The nation drank the blood of free personalities, as it were, to attain personality itself. It is of no consequence here that this modern individualism was divided in itself. Its one branch, deriving from natural law and democratically oriented, sought to achieve equal rights for all, while its other branch, aristocraticlaly oriented in an intellectual sense, sought to achieve the liberation and elevation of the best minds. Democratic individualism could use the idea of the nation to fight all violations of social equality, and the same idea enabled aristocratic individualism to empathize with the masses, perceiving the forces lying dormant in them and embracing an ideal image of the people, if not the people themselves. Whether or not individualism actually achieved all its goals was not as important as the fact that everything the free and creative personality did served the nation by making its total life richer and more individual (15).
The striving for individual self-improvement and development ultimately gives rise to a sense of national destiny and a demand for national greatness: "If the full consciousness of a great national community is once awakened and raised to an intense longing for national realization, then this longing is like a flood that pours itself into everything it can fill and is not satisfied until everything is nationalized that is at all capable of nationalization" (14).
The French Revolution's ideal of liberal nationalism lives on, Meinecke claims, in the thought of such thinkers as Ernest Renan (see my earlier post), and clearly we see its legacy in the great liberal nationalism of Woodrow Wilson.
This leads to the second theme of note: The contrast between liberal and romantic nationalism.
The kind of liberal nationalism embodied by the French Revolution is fundamentally focused on democratic self-government, popular sovereignty, and institutional autonomy. It is a form of political nationalism. The conservative reaction to the French Revolution produces a turn away from the political state, and toward the cultural nation. According to the revolutionary ideal, to be a part of the demos just means to be an active citizen engaged in the work of crafting a common life. But German conservatives reacting against Jacobinism grew increasingly disillusioned with the cheap, shallow, mechanistic vision of national life entailed by procedural appeals to popular sovereignty.
That wasn't just a consequence of reaction. For much of the second half of the eighteenth century, German theorists (most notably Herder) had attempted to vindicate organic, cultural personality. To be German was not simply to be a part of some institutional regime, but to belong to the German volk.
The problem with liberal nationalism is that "the nation was not much more here than a subdivision of humanity, a frame built out of abstract principles and without individual substance" (30). The popular plebiscite, in Renan's famous suggestion, was the ultimate institutional expression of liberal nationalism. But that brute, political, institutional vision has nothing to do with the true bonds of national identity. Paraphrasing Ranke (one of the figures he most favors), Meinecke writes:
The subjective element seems to be completely extinguished here, the element of the conscious will that usually has an important role elsewhere in the rise in the rise of modern national consciousness. The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply is, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to that nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination (205).
Liberal nationalism is tied to subjective understandings (institutionally expressed through the plebiscite) of the community as a political people. But it has nothing to say about a deeper identity of the cultural nation.
Edmund Burke articulated an influential version of this charge in his polemic against the French Revolution. At least as he was interpreted by romantic conservatives like Adam Müller and Friedrich Gentz, Burke:
struck the first decisive blow against conceptions of the state that the eighteenth century had formed on the basis of natural law and added elements to all speculation about the state that are permanently relevant. He taught us deeper respect and understanding for the irrational components of the life of the state, for the power of tradition, customs, instinct, and impulsive feelings (101).
The French path to national self-identity ran through the French Revolution and therefore the demands of liberal, democratic self-government. For France, the political nation came first. For Germany, on the other hand, a sense of nationalism emerged not from a history of political autonomy, but from a sense of a distinctive cultural patrimony and heritage. This sense of cultural Germanness would only become a full, political nationalism once united with the historic experience of the Prussian state:
The peculiar situation in Germany was that the only usable foundations for a modern state were not available in the German nation but in the Prussian state. However, this state alone could not supply the intellectual forces that it needed for its nationalization but had to take them from the wide spectrum of the German cultural nation (33).
Our third theme is Meinecke's critique of an excessively romantic, cultural vision of German identity.
Figures like Herder, Humboldt, Novalis, and Schlegel celebrate the German cultural nation. In its more eighteenth century variety (Humboldt), the German spirit represents the highest form of human achievement and individualism. The German intellectuals have discovered a romantic humanism that drives not just German national greatness, but the cause of humanity. Gradually, however, this vision grows more particularistic. Meinecke traces the increasing emphasis on German cultural personality as an end in itself. The German spirit is not merely the vanguard of the human spirit, but a valuable, distinctive person, a "macroanthropos."
Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define, but a key strand that Meinecke insists on is "the idea that the universe contains in itself an endless profusion of individualities and that its unity is not loosened or shattered by this but is instead strengthened by it, so that the universe is in itself an individual and a personality" (50).
Novalis and Schlegel (in addition to Schiller) are the key figures in this tradition. But Meinecke ultimately finds their emphasis on personality and culture excessively anti-political. While the nation is not merely a set of institutional forms, it also is more concrete (and powerful) than a vague, mysterious sense of spiritual identity.
One symptom of romantic nationalism's unserious naiveté is its tendency to idealize the culturally particularistic if anti-political social character of medieval Christendom. Novalis' 1799 essay on "Christianity or Europe" is of particular note. His love of the Middle Ages is simultaneously a love of particularity and universality. Schlegel's "Essay on the Concept of Republicanism" runs further, defending not merely a universal catholic state standing above and uniting a politically fractured Christendom, but a world state governed by the postulates of reason. His romanticism ultimately makes him more cosmopolitan than Kant!
For Schlegel, the Holy Alliance is the most plausible means of re-establishing an ideal of Christendom, one that acts in a powerful, united way while preserving cultural diversity and particularity.
Catholicism, Meinecke insists, is largely to blame for the unseriousness of this romantic, feudal nostalgia. For while Schlegel and Novalis consistently condemn the flatness of absolutist, French Revolutionary cosmopolitan rationality, they turn to their own version of an equally dangerous universalism:
The cosmopolitan Enlightenment had already had an ethical and—cum grano salis—religious substance. Romantic universalism, too, was ethical and highly religious. The ethos was fundamentally different in some respects, but Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers had a common enemy in what they thought was the unethical state of the ancient regime but what was in reality the power state in general (70).
In associating Catholic moral universalism with liberal cosmopolitanism, Meinecke follows Carl Schmitt, whose Political Romanticism is often cited. Universalisms of any sort are dangerously anti-political. They invoke an airy realm of reason, while inclining toward social and cultural forms of particularism divested of real political power. The romantics, humanists, and Catholics are ultimately too anti-statist.
One extreme version of this anti-statist commitment to Catholic moral universalism and radical particularism is the great reactionary Karl Ludwig von Haller. Haller is intensely critical of the modern state, which he credits to Hobbes and Rousseau. Modern liberal nationalism posits some kind of popular sovereignty as the ultimate basis of authority and legitimate power. But that is nonsense, Haller insists. It ignores the reality of rulers and ruled. Haller wishes to restore a medieval sense of direct, interpersonal hierarchy. He wants to do away with any public law conceptions of right, and to replace them all with direct claims of private law.
There is no such thing as a liberal demos capable of self-government, just as there is no such thing as a conservative, romantic cultural macroanthropos personality. According to Haller:
A prince's people are a scattered swarm of men, an aggregate of dependent or voluntarily subservient people with infinitely varied obligations; they have nothing in common except their common master, and among themselves they do not constitute a whole, a community (quoted on 166).
Like Novalis, Haller turns to the Catholic church as the great, universal institution that can stand above neo-feudal social institutions. It is the great check on Leviathan, on political absolutism:
But the church offered more than a cosmopolitan antidote to the cosmopolitan poison of the principles of 1789. Its universal authority and power, extending beyond nations and states, were also an effective barrier against the most dangerous enemy of the modern state and the modern nation. [Haller's] keen understanding of power and his protest against its uncontrolled development came together here once again. The patrimonial state had been destroyed by an expanding desire for power. New intellectual structures had been created that passed beyond that state and over the heads of individual rulers. First came the absolutistic power state, both permeated with the desire for inner coherence and clear separation from the outside world. In this way, the situation Haller complained of had arisen: 'The borders of states and nations are more sharply drawn than ever. Every nation wants to be alone in the world, so to speak. Everyone is isolated, cut off, separated from everyone else.' But this had not been the case when the church had had more significance. 'Were not the states within the church, so to speak, just as it was within them? ... Did it not, in a spiritual sense, cause the border between states and nations to disappear?' He thought that the church itself could once again take up its previous office of settling quarrels of the worldly potentates by its friendly and disinterested arbitration. He saw the church serving as a means of calming the waves of modern state and national life (168).
Haller rejects nationalism of all sorts. He embraces, instead, the "patrimonial state." Personal, aristocratic power produces humanity. Delegated or fictitious collective power becomes despotic. The church must stand above as a means of balancing patriotism and cosmopolitanism.
We see here how a decisive rejection of liberal nationalism can lead to perverse forms of anti-statism, on Meinecke's view. It is no accident that the Romantics and Catholics turned to theories of global federation or a new Christendom as an alternative to the French Revolutionary vision of nationalism built on popular sovereignty.
We can now reach our fourth theme: What does Meinecke favor?
The work traces the emergence of German, romantic, cultural ideas of nationhood as a reaction against the legal, democratic, popular-sovereignty idea of nationalism produced by the French Revolution. Meinecke welcomes that critique, but disparages the anti-statism, political naivete that comes out of neo-feudal, Catholic alternatives to liberal nationalism.
What he favors instead, is what he terms the "conservative idea of the national state" (180). While Haller's views took an extreme anti-political turn, he nevertheless built a remarkable circle of conservatives around him that Meinecke takes to have been far more sober about the realities of political power. Their main organ was the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt, which defined itself in opposition to the liberalism of the French Revolution. While sharing Haller's hostility to mechanistic, absolutist, political centralization, the circle began to embrace the national state as the most acceptable form of political unity. Their anti-revolutionary pluralism began to tie together with a more cultural, nationalistic vision of the organic, German state, championed by Savigny and others. As Meinecke puts it:
It is characteristic of this conservative idea of the national state that it rejects the consolidation of the cultural nation on principle, but that it regards the cultural nation as the fertile native soil in which varied political structures grow, both large and small but all showing genuine traces of the German spirit. We can take cognizance of the cultural nation only by the blossoms it bears in colorful profusion. The cultural nation itself, vitally productive, remains hidden in dark and impenetrable depths (181-2).
And he continues:
Not until this point had a concept of the state been available that could oppose the ideals of the liberal and democratic national state with meaningful national values. Political Romanticism could now play off the idea of the national spirit against that of popular sovereignty. Against the defined, autonomous personality of the nation it could set the imaginative concept of a total German nationality, which remained undefined and impersonal but which was still richly and mysteriously productive. ... The liberal idea of the nation state based its claim on the due rights and the will of the living nation; the conservative national idea based its claim on the national life of the past. Both ideas drew part of their strength from the great individualistic tendencies of the times, but the difference between them was that the one form of individualism was democratic and rationalistic, the other aristocratic and historicizing. The one valued the individual as the basic unit in society, state, and nation. The other valued the quality of individuality itself in the multitudinous forms of social, political, and national life. The one demanded equal rights for all in state and national life. The other assigned individuals particular functions within the state and nation according to the sphere of life in which they found themselves. The one saw the individual limited by the national will, which he in turn helped to form. The other saw the limits set by what the nation's previous generation had created. The one appealed to the consciously sovereign and controlling reason of the individual and of the whole society. The other traced the unconsciously functioning rationality of history back to the sovereign control of God. Both represented the vital interests of particular social classes; but both tried to elevate these interests tot he level of a universal ideal. The religious universalism of political Romanticism took its stand against the rationalistic universalism of the liberal concept of the state (183-4).
This turn away from cultural personality and toward a more definitive picture of the national state represents major progress, Meinecke thinks. Still, he fears that the extreme particularism, historicism, and culturalism of this conservative nationalism can still be insufficiently political. It contained "the seeds of a political quietism and relativism that could lame the head and hand for battle or action" (186).
Meinecke writes in the very beginning of the work that a nation state requires two things: Unity and Vitality: We demand "a unity replete with life and energy, not just a harmonic chord as such but the richest possible harmonic chord" (17).
The liberal national state secured unity. Its political centralization and absolutism create extraordinary, unified power, as the French Revolution made clear. But it retains a moral emptiness, a spiritual desiccation. The German cultural nation has spontaneity and vitality, it speaks not simply through institutions and centralized political forms, but through a cultural heritage.
Yet the cultural nation lacks power, even despite the theoretical improvements made by the Haller circle: the source of political error lay here ... in the belief that the political unity of the German nation could be created without giving the nation the firm contours of an autonomous state personality. We see here once more the important practical consequences of the fact that the German nation first felt and created her unity primarily as a spiritual unity, and we must also note again that it was a unity shaped by universalistic ideas and that recourse to such ideas diminished awareness of the realities of power (191).
The great synthesis, Meinecke argues, comes from Prussian domination of the German cultural community. From Prussia, Germany acquired a tradition of bureaucratized, statist power, but one that could be tempered by a German spiritual inheritance and thus distinguished from the democratizing tendencies of the French.
Ranke and Bismarck are the crucial theorists Meinecke embraces, here. Before them, even conservative nationalism remained too romantic:
Romanticism summoned up the spirits of the past against the despised rational and cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century, but because Romanticism itself was still rooted in that spirit, it retrieved something related to it from the past. Thus the ancient idea of a universal community of Christian states was revived, and the political aspect of Romanticism became cosmopolitanism with a religious-ethical character (229).
What Bismarck understood, however, was that "the only sound foundation for a major state ... is political egoism and not Romanticism. It is not worthy of a great state to fight for a cause that does not touch on its own interests" (225).
Ranke, Meinecke suggests, may be the most insightful theorist of this need to synthesize political power with cultural personality. His essay, "Politishces Gespräch" flips the primacy of culture over politics that characterizes earlier conservatives:
We no longer feel the strength of the nation forming the state, but rather the strength of the state forming the nation, the 'moral energy' at work in the state and emanating from it. The 'particular state' becomes the 'spiritual fatherland' of the individual; and the 'spirit of communal life' that accompanies us to the end of this discussion is a political national spirit, more limited but also clearer, better defined, and more personal in character than that 'mysterious power' we left behind in the profound depths. For the state, to be imbued with nationality is to be imbued with moral strength. ... Everything is drawn together, then, in the idea of the individuality of the great states, an individuality that emanates from their own unique and spontaneous life (211).
One is inclined to think that Meinecke is some kind of right-Hegelian, favoring a balance of the universal with the particular that ends up defending a powerful state. There's truth in that, I think. But he's a right-Hegelian of a decidedly historicist bent. He praises Hegel for seeing the importance of state power--a major improvement over romantic, culturalist conservatives. Hegel understands, also, "the national principle historically in that the intellectual legacy of the entire past of a nation constitutes a living force together with the nation's present and future demands" (199).
But Hegel's universalistic philosophy obscures his empirical, historical insight. He misses the value of particularity itself, and sees the nation in service of the whole: "Hegel's view led inevitably to depriving all historical individualities of their proper rights and making them mere unconscious instruments and functionaries of the world spirit" (201).
That disregard for the value of particularity in itself is what repelled Ranke, and what makes Hegel, ultimately, an enemy of deep conservatism.
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