Romantic nationalism

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Brudeferden i Hardanger (Bridal party in Hardanger), a monumental piece within Norwegian romantic nationalism. Painted by Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand.

Romantic nationalism (also national romanticism, organic nationalism, identity nationalism) is the form of nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes, depending on the particular manner of practice, the language, race, culture, religion, and customs of the "nation" in its primal sense of those who were "born" within its culture. This form of nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the "top down", emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).


Brief history[edit]


The ideas of Rousseau (1712-1778) and of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) inspired much early Romantic nationalism in Europe. In 1784 Herder argued that geography formed the natural economy of a people, and that their customs and society would develop along the lines that their basic environment favored.


Romantic nationalism formed a key strand in the philosophy of Hegel (1770-1831), who argued that there was a "spirit of the age" or zeitgeist that inhabited a particular people at a particular time, and that, when that people became the active determiner of history, it was simply because their cultural and political moment had come. Because of the Germans' role in the Protestant Reformation, Hegel (a Lutheran) argued that his historical moment had seen the Zeitgeist settle on the German-speaking peoples.

In continental Europe, Romantics had embraced the French Revolution in its beginnings, then found themselves fighting the counter-Revolution in the trans-national Imperial system of Napoleon. The sense of self-determination and national consciousness that had enabled revolutionary forces to defeat aristocratic regimes in battle became rallying points for resistance against the French Empire (1804-1814). In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum, or "folkhood", was coined in Germany as part of this resistance to French hegemony.



Nationalism and revolution[edit]

In the Balkans, Romantic views of a connection with classical Greece, which inspired Philhellenism infused the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), in which the Romantic poet Lord Byron died of high fever. Rossini's opera William Tell (1829) marked the onset of the Romantic Opera, using the central national myth unifying Switzerland; and in Brussels, a riot (August 1830) after an opera that set a doomed romance against a background of foreign oppression (Auber's La Muette de Portici) sparked the Belgian Revolution of 1830-1831, the first successful revolution in the model of Romantic nationalism. Verdi's opera choruses of an oppressed people inspired two generations of patriots in Italy, especially with "Va pensiero" (Nabucco, 1842). Under the influence of romantic nationalism, among economic and political forces, both Germany and Italy found political unity, and movements to create nations similarly based upon ethnic groups would flower in the Balkans (see for example, the Carinthian Plebiscite, 1920), along the Baltic Sea, and in the interior of Central Europe, where in the eventual outcome, the Habsburgs succumbed to the surge of Romantic nationalism.[1] In Norway, romanticism was embodied, not in literature, but in the movement toward a national style, both in architecture and in ethos.[2] Earlier, there was a strong romantic nationalist element mixed with Enlightenment rationalism in the rhetoric used in British North America, in the colonists' Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution of 1787, as well as the rhetoric in the wave of revolts, inspired by new senses of localized identities, which swept the American colonies of Spain, one after the other, from 1811.



Romantic nationalism inspired the processes whereby folk epics, retold legends and even fairy tales, published in existing dialects, were combined with a modern syntax to create a "revived" version of a language. Romantic nationalists expected patriots to then learn that language and raise their children speaking that language – as part of a general program to establish a unique identity. "Landsmål", which is the foundation of a form of Norwegian used by 10% of the population, mostly in western Norway, was the first language to follow this program, and it was joined by modern Czech, Slovak, Finnish and later by Hebrew as nationalizing languages. Katharevousa Greek was constructed as a form of Modern Greek drawing on classical Greek morphology and vocabulary in an attempt to purify the existing demotic Greek.

The linguistic processes of romantic nationalism demanded linguistic culture models. Romantic historiography was centered on biographies and produced culture heroes. The modern Italian of Risorgimento patriots like Alessandro Manzoni was based on the Tuscan dialects sanctified by Dante and Petrarch. In English, Shakespeare became an iconic figure (though not a modern linguistic model).

Folk culture[edit]

"'Good evening, uncle!' said the boy". A drawing by John Bauer on Swedish folklore




Many artists and writers also drew on their native countries folklore and folktunes for their own work to express their nationalism.

National epics[edit]

Main article: National epic




Claims of primacy or superiority[edit]

At the same time, linguistic and cultural nationality, colored with pre-genetic concepts of race, bolstered two rhetorical claims consistently associated with romantic nationalism to this day: claims of primacy and claims of superiority. Primacy is the claimed inalienable right of a culturally and racially defined people to a geographical terrain, a "heartland" (a vivid expression) or homeland. The polemics of racial superiority became inexorably intertwined with romantic nationalism. Richard Wagner notoriously argued that those who were ethnically different could not comprehend the artistic and cultural meaning inherent in national culture. Identifying "Jewishness" even in musical style,[7] he specifically attacked the Jews as being unwilling to assimilate into German culture, and thus unable to truly comprehend the mysteries of its music and language. Sometimes "national epics" such as the Nibelunglied have had a galvanizing effect on social politics.





Twentieth century political developments[edit]

Frog Tsarevna, by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1918.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Romantic Nationalism as an idea was to have crucial influence on political events. Following the Panic of 1873 that gave rise to a new wave of anti-Semitism and racism in the German Empire politically ruled by an authoritarian, militaristic conservatism under Otto von Bismarck and in parallel with a wide revival of irrational emotionalism known as Fin de siècle (also reflected to a degree in the contemporary art movements of symbolism, the Decadénce movement, and Art Nouveau), the racist, so-called völkisch movement grew out of Romantic nationalism during the last third of the 19th century, to some extent modelling itself on British Imperialism and "the White Man's Burden". The idea was that Germans should "naturally" rule over lesser peoples. Romantic nationalism, which had begun as a revolt against "foreign" kings and overlords, had come full circle, and was being used to make the case for a "Greater Germanic Empire" which would rule over Europe.

The nationalistic and imperialistic tensions rising high between the European nations throughout the irrational, neo-Romantic Fin de siècle period eventually erupted in the First World War. After Germany had lost the war and undergone the tumultuous German Revolution, the völkisch movement drastically radicalized itself in Weimar Germany under the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and Adolf Hitler would go on to say that "the basic ideas of National-Socialism are völkisch, just as the völkisch ideas are National-Socialist".


Because of the broad range of expressions of romantic nationalism, it is listed as a contributing factor from everything from the creation of independent states in Europe, to the rise of Nazi Germany. As an idea, if not a specific movement, it is present as an assumption in debates over nationality and nationhood even today, and many of the world's nations were created from principles drawn from romantic nationalism as their source of legitimacy.

See also[edit]


  2. ^ Oscar Julius Falnes, National romanticism in Norway, 1968.
  6. ^ The section "III.Early National Poetry" of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21) begins "By far the most important product of the national epos is Beowulf...
  7. ^ Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik 1850.

External links[edit]