Maarten Van Ginderachter and Marnix Beyen,eds,Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century

Reviewed by: Eric Storm, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Belgium is a good example of the failure of an elite-driven nation-building project directed from above. When the country became independent in 1830, its elites actively began to create and disseminate a national identity in the favourable circumstances of fast economic growth and a threatened national existence. According to the elite-driven cultural constructivist paradigm, which was dominant until recently, this should have been a huge success. But, in the end, it was not. As a consequence, the Belgian editors of Nationhood from Below argue that in order to understand the workings of the nation-building process during the long nineteenth century historians should pay more attention to the ‘popular impact of nationalizing policies’ (6). Although Eric Hobsbawm asked more than twenty years ago what the nation meant to ordinary people, we still know very little about ordinary people's appropriation of territorial identities.

In the first introductory section, John Breuilly discusses some of the conceptual problems that must be addressed when ‘writing the social history of nationalism’ (24). He especially argues for distinguishing motivational from structural nationalism. The rise of mass politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, increased the awareness of the nation as the main frame of reference. Even socialists, who in general strongly opposed motivational nationalism, accepted the national framework. Thus, while motivational nationalism posits the interest of the nation as the ‘objective of particular actions’, structural nationalism takes the nation merely as a ‘cognitive framework within which to perceive interests’ (34). Therefore, the masses do not have to become jingoistic (motivational) in order to accept the nation-state as the legitimate political authority (structural nationalism).

The most interesting part of the book consists of four historiographical surveys on Spain (by Fernando Molina and Miguel Cabo), Italy (Ilaria Porciani), Austria (Laurence Cole) and Great-Britain, France and Germany (Van Ginderachter). These contributions show that the top-down constructivist approach has recently been supplemented by a fast growing number of regional and local studies. Historians have also tried to study the popular responses to war, colonialism and migration and the role of workers, peasants, women and religion in the nation-building process. However, the main conclusion drawn in this section is that although recent case studies have sought to revise the existing image of a linear, top-down nationalist socialization process by focusing on the intermediating role of regional and local elites, we still have a very fragmented view of how the lower classes responded to the nationalist claims. And this remains the case despite the five detailed case studies presented in the second half of this book.

In fact, the articles in the last two sections – on the domestic and the external other – are rather conventional studies which mainly adopt a social history approach. Miika Tervonen looks at the ‘gypsy question’ in Finland, Saartje Vanden Borre and Tom Verschaffel study Belgian migrants living in Lille, Jean-François Chanet examines various strands of French patriotism during the Franco-Prussian War and Antoon Vrints is concerned with analysing the social tensions that emerged in Belgium during the First World War. In general, these authors analyse how different social groups identified themselves with the national community. In most cases they present some interesting clues about the nationalist attitudes of certain social groups. For instance, Vrints shows that since food shortages affected the Belgian towns much more than the rural areas during the German occupation, the urban population identified more with the nation state than their compatriots in the countryside. However, since in these case studies individuals generally do not enter the picture, the resulting image remains rather blurred.

The main exception to this is the article by James Brophy on popular nationhood in the German Rhineland during the first half of the nineteenth century. By using a wide variety of primary sources, such as folk calendars, popular songs and (newspaper and police) reports on liberty trees, charivaris and other forms of popular political agitation, Brophy presents a fascinating picture of some radical popular demands for (national) citizenship. However, these demands did not necessarily mean a call for German nationalism. Brophy points out that when Belgium celebrated its independence, workers and artisans from the neighbouring Rhineland area participated in the festivities and also claimed constitutional nationhood. As a result, Brophy concludes that ‘Citizenship ideals during the first half of the nineteenth century circulated as a transnational phenomenon in western Germany, without any definite state moorings’, and that ‘ordinary Rhinelanders encountered right-bearing citizenship as a portable skill set’ (163–4). In this way, the French – who had annexed the Rhineland between 1795 and 1813 – were not necessarily considered more foreign than the Prussians or Bavarians. In the end, however, it is not totally clear if we should interpret this democratic defence of the sovereignty of the nation without clear national boundaries as Breuilly's motivational nationalism. Nonetheless, except for this article, the reader seems to learn more in this book about nationhood from ‘in between’ than ‘from below’. Consequently, the book as a whole should be seen principally as an inspiring incentive for further research.