The notion of nationality featured prominently in mid-Victorian British debates on international affairs, as many British liberals and radicals felt involved with those peoples struggling for freedom under autocratic Continental governments.Footnote 1 After 1848, and especially with the unification of Italy from 1858 to 1861, the concept of nationality gained such salience in commentary on European affairs that even authors unsympathetic to the notion needed to react, to reckon with its ubiquity in debate. Conservative British commentators saw the idea of nationality as a clear threat, and in reaction to liberal and radical enthusiasm they deployed a range of arguments to discredit the notion.
This article is connected to previous work on nationality and patriotism in Victorian Britain, which has touched on the use of these concepts by Disraeli and by late Victorian conservatives.Footnote 2 What these works have omitted, however, is the mid-Victorian conservative reaction to the initial ascendancy of the notion of nationality.Footnote 3 With this the scholarship has missed a major problematization of nationality in British political thought. Liberal Victorians generally conflated a sense of nationality with patriotism, which the established scholarship has consequently emphasized or assumed as a feature of mid-Victorian political thought.Footnote 4 Conservatives, in their turn, came to affirm a sense of organic nationality and of the English national character during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.Footnote 5 The perception which arises of nationality in British thought is of a qualified acceptance, with initially liberals and later conservatives mostly evincing a self-assured incorporation of nationality into their world views, where it was placed in a position subordinate to and potentially generative of liberty and patriotism.Footnote 6 But this is only part of the picture. This article argues that British political thought displayed a wider range of reactions, more sceptical and anxious, to the increasing salience of the notion of nationality. In particular, it shows how mid-Victorian conservatives problematized the idea of nationality, warning their compatriots of its dangers to the peace and order of Europe, and to the liberty and patriotism of its peoples.
This important strand of mid-Victorian thought on international affairs has remained obscured for various reasons. The specialist literature on Victorian international political thought has overwhelmingly focused on liberal and radical perspectives, conservatives having been overlooked.Footnote 7 At the same time, general accounts of mid-Victorian political debate have a tendency to study Disraeli and assume that he summed up the conservative position. Disraeli was not a particularly representative figure, however, as Geoffrey Hicks and others have argued persuasively.Footnote 8 Moreover, in agreement with E. H. H. Green this article advocates “the importance of the ‘middlebrow’ in Conservative thought,” rather than a canon of exceptional individuals.Footnote 9 The opinions investigated here are consequently those of the conservative educated classes, as represented in the major conservative periodicals of the time.Footnote 10 These periodicals themselves have been neglected as a venue for political theorizing, treated instead as a location for partisan political posturing. While pre-eminent conservative periodicals such as the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine certainly had a partisan editorial policy, they also consistently published high-calibre reflective articles which helped conservatives formulate their reactions to political developments.Footnote 11
The composition of the conservative element of educated England changed markedly from the late 1870s onwards, which explains the final reason why the mid-Victorian conservative animosity towards nationality was mostly forgotten. Whereas these mid-Victorian conservatives saw nationality as an outside threat, the notion was slowly incorporated in the conservative world view from the 1880s onwards. As explained in the conclusion, the character of British conservatism changed in the 1880s, as a broad set of individualist liberals, generally committed to the principle of nationality, joined its ranks. This shift then fed into a broader change in the conservative view of society, emphasizing first organicism and then an organic nationalism. This new self-understanding of the conservative world view left no room for the memory of an earnestly felt rejection of the notion of nationality in earlier times.Footnote 12
The mid-Victorian conservative reaction to nationality had three parts. First, conservative commentators tried to marginalize the notion by reframing nationality as neither a valuable nor a fundamental aspect of political life. They spoke of the sentiment rather than the principle of nationality, with its referent lying in the imagination rather than in reality; they argued that national sentiment was not the main driving force behind the unifications of Italy and Germany; and they rejected the normative power of the principle of nationality. Second, conservatives identified the notion of nationality as a threat to the European order. Nationality increased aggression in international politics, by undermining the Vienna settlement and legitimizing foreign interventions; by fostering bids for hegemony over Europe; and by undermining the domestic stability of states. Third and finally, conservatives hoped to deflect the threat of nationality by making it an indictment of the liberals’ own world view, arguing that nationality was often incompatible with constitutional liberty and a proper patriotism.
Absent from this mid-Victorian conservative repertoire of argument was an invocation of the principle of legitimacy. This principle had never been favoured in Tory foreign policy, with both Castlereagh and Canning rejecting legitimist arguments when they were put forward by Continental powers.Footnote 13 It had appeared, however, within the broader conservative movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ultra-Tories of the late 1820s and early 1830s had generally taken a legitimist position in foreign affairs.Footnote 14 John Croker and Archibald Alison—two major conservative authors of the 1830s and 1840s—had proposed legitimism as a potential locus of stability when reflecting on the 1848 revolutions.Footnote 15 By late 1850s, however, there had been a generational shift among conservative commentators. The new set of authors, whose perspectives are discussed in this paper, still favoured the status quo in general and the established power in particular areas of unrest such as Italy and Poland, but legitimism had disappeared as a salient trope together with the previous generation.Footnote 16
REFRAMING AND MARGINALIZING THE NOTION OF NATIONALITY
Marginalizing nationality: nationality as a sentiment of the people
Conservative commentators attempted to marginalize the notion of nationality by downplaying its importance to international affairs. They did so in part by reframing nationality as not a trait of populations, but as a flight of fancy of the masses and of particular classes of persons. Nationality was not part of the core identity of a population; it was merely an idea flitting about certain people's imagination. Conservatives associated the idea of nationality with liberals and their particular perspective on the international sphere. Robert Patterson spoke of the liberals and their “pet principle of nationality,” and Robert Cecil characterized “Nationality and Free Trade” as “the doctrines of the Liberal party.”Footnote 17 Conservatives did not themselves discern a role for nationhood as an empirical fact rather than a notion held and furthered by particular parties—they viewed nationality as an idea, part of a rhetoric, with its referent lying in the imagination rather than in reality.
Most conservative commentators did recognize that the notion of nationality had increasingly gained currency since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Some of them, however, placed the concept in the realm of art and high culture, rather than of politics and general society. In the conservative periodicals, Italian feelings of local patriotism and nationality were, for instance, discussed primarily in articles dealing with recent Italian cultural output. In this way, conservatives portrayed the sentiment of nationality as involved first of all with the imagination of artists and authors—all the easier, then, to paint the principle of nationality as a delusion, without connection to reality, merely the “visionary vapouring” of idealists.Footnote 18
Conservatives also generally spoke of “the sentiment of nationality,” as compared to liberal talk of “the principle of nationality.”Footnote 19 For liberals the notion denoted first of all an ethical norm and was prescriptive. For conservatives the notion denoted only a certain emotional commitment. They, for instance, characterised of the “idea of German unity” as a “romantic,” “poetic notion.”Footnote 20 By framing nationality as a sentiment emerging from the imagination rather than reality, located in the realm of passion rather than reason, conservative authors hoped to imply that the notion was without legitimacy and without the compelling force enjoyed by the real interests of a country.Footnote 21
Following from this understanding of the sentiment of nationality as a passion, conservatives linked it primarily to the general populace, as opposed to statesmen. Conservatives mostly assumed, with Charles Lever, “that the upper and lower classes of society have nothing in common, and speak each in a different political language.”Footnote 22 Cecil observed that German authors, in trying to justify the German conquest of the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, employed two different discourses: one aimed at statesmen, focusing on treaty rights and obligations, and one aimed at the people in general, which played on the sentiment of nationality, or what Cecil termed “the language grievance,” which “has been kept chiefly for popular use.”Footnote 23 This characterization had the strong subtext that the former claims could be reasonable—even if they were not in the complex context of the Danish duchies affair—while the latter were merely an emotional appeal, without legitimate purchase in the first place.
While statesmen, in the conservative reading, did not subscribe to the sentiment of nationality, the notion could still influence them in their actions. Statesmen might either try to utilize the sentiment as a means to further their own objectives—as conservatives thought Cavour, Napoleon III and Bismarck did—or they could feel forced to pander to the passion present amongst their people—which conservatives at different times observed among rulers such as Napoleon III and the Tsar Alexander.Footnote 24 Conservatives lamented this influence, however; international politics, when properly conducted, would not bother with notions of nationality.
Marginalizing the role of nationality in the unifications of Italy and Germany
In reflecting on the unifications of both Italy and Germany, conservative authors accorded the notion of nationality little influence. They argued that nationality played a role not as a fundamental driving force of events, but merely as a superficial justification for all-too-common schemes of aggrandizement.
As the events of 1859–61 led to the unification of Italy, conservatives at no moment thought that a widespread Italian desire for national unification was propelling these events.Footnote 25 There was, indeed, no Italian national community which could spur unification on.Footnote 26 Frederick Hardman observed that the Piedmontese supported the war with Austria from deference to their king and possibly a detestation of the Austrians—the people did not understand or care about the notion of Italian independence, let alone unity.Footnote 27 In contrast, Matthew Arnold—and with him many other liberals—explicitly argued for the force of Italian nationality, based as it was in the shared history of glorious Rome.Footnote 28 George Swayne gently suggested that the appeal of the Roman classical heritage to educated Britons had resulted among them in an imagined vista of Italy “far brighter and more glorious than reality.”Footnote 29 Most conservatives were less tactful, with, for instance, Joseph Atkinson writing that “we deem Italian nationality, unity, or indeed, political independence, to be among those wild chimeras and alluring phantoms,” those “words . . . of delusion,” characteristic of demagogues rather than statesmen.Footnote 30
Their different thoughts on the causal force of nationality also led conservatives and liberals to assign a different significance to the treaty of Villafranca, in which France, without consulting its ally Piedmont, signed a ceasefire with Austria in which the latter retained some of its territories in Italy. Both conservatives and liberals thought that with Villafranca Napoleon III had effectively distanced himself from the realization of independence for Italy. Unlike conservatives, liberals took this as a reason to increase their support for the Italian cause. Support for Italy no longer implied support for France, and could thus be all the more wholeheartedly given.Footnote 31 For liberals Italian events had their own impetus, based on the ideals of Italian independence and national unity.Footnote 32 For conservatives, though, the liberals’ ethical ideals did not reflect a second impetus to events, but rather a mere sham structure of justification for expansionist actions. Events such as Piedmont's annexation of the central Italian provinces and its cession of Savoy and Nice were driven not by national sentiment but by Cavour's and Napoleon III's desire for aggrandizement.Footnote 33 Villafranca had not, as for the liberals, decoupled an admirable movement based on moral ideals from Napoleon III's initiatives of doubtful morality, but had rather shown the irrelevance of the moral ideal of the principle of nationality to the substance of international politics.
Similarly, in making sense of the unification of Germany from 1864 to 1871 conservatives envisaged only a minor role for the sentiment of nationality. Liberals regarded these events as revolving around the German “national cause,” the creation of “the unified nation for which Germans had yearned,” part of the broader telos of the international sphere.Footnote 34 Conservatives, in contrast, did not think that unification had been propelled by the sentiment of nationality. Political integration was not the inevitable outcome of events and was mostly driven by various forms of great-power competition.
Conservatives saw unification as an explicitly political project, resting on the twin pillars of German ambition and the threat of France to the minor German states.Footnote 35 Prussia's and Austria's patriotic desire for glory focused on having the sole, uncontested leadership of the German states. Bismarck did not “care one straw for German unity,” but was interested instead in the “ascendancy of Prussia in Germany, to the exclusion of Austria.”Footnote 36 The smaller German states also desired greatness, but, due to their limited power, could not achieve imperial glory without deferring to the leadership of a major state, such as Prussia.Footnote 37
The unification of Germany was emphatically not, in the minds of conservatives, the unification of an otherwise harmonious national community. Laurence Oliphant, who had travelled through Schleswig and Holstein during the crises of 1863–4, in which German armies defeated Denmark in a war over control of the duchies, emphasized repeatedly the dislike and distrust evident between Prussia, Austria and the local German states.Footnote 38 Cecil at this time considered disintegration “a far likelier” outcome for Germany than unification.Footnote 39 The threat of French conquest was needed to galvanize the process of unification. By giving the German states a stark, immediate choice between Prussian supremacy and French subjugation, the French declaration of war “precipitated” their unification under Prussian leadership.Footnote 40
Conservatives thus thought of German unification as fundamentally “the great drama of Prussian aggrandisement,” with Prussia “absorbing Germany” into its empire.Footnote 41 Liberals, in contrast, perceived the unifications of Italy and Germany as part of a natural development towards a Europe configured in accord with the principle of nationality.Footnote 42 Conservatives rejected this vision of progress, hoping to convince their audience that the sentiment of nationality was a marginal influence, a mere veneer for old-fashioned great-power politics and ambition for glory.
Marginalising nationality: rejecting the normative principle of nationality
Conservatives did not consider nationality a prescriptive concept and they consequently rejected the normative argument for particular state boundaries based on the principle of nationality. For many liberals, the principle of nationality prescribed what the proper boundaries of a state could be.Footnote 43 Commenting on the Prussian demand for the cession of Alsace and Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian war, Gladstone stated that annexation was only “justified . . . [if] the population be willing parties to the severance.”Footnote 44 Since the people of Alsace and Lorraine had no wish to join Germany, the demand for cession, Gladstone thought, was “repulsive to the sense of modern civilisation.”Footnote 45 Conservatives also argued that Prussia ought not to annex Alsace and Lorraine, but the basis for their arguments was different. Conservatives asserted that Prussia's demand for territory was ill-advised and short-sighted. They recognized that victory in war implied a right to territorial gain; there were “precedents . . . for treating cessions of territory as the natural prize of a successful campaign.”Footnote 46 Annexation was not, as for Gladstone and other liberals, a moral wrong because the people of Alsace and Lorraine did not want to be a part of Germany; it was instead a practical mistake.Footnote 47
More generally, conservatives did not consider claims for self-determination morally weighty. John Wilson, for instance, considered the idea of “what is termed . . . nationality, as the only legitimate basis of dominion” a ridiculous “extravagance.”Footnote 48 The prolific commentators Cecil, Oliphant and Patterson all distinguished between territorial claims based on history (established practice and treaty recognition) and on nationality (the territory where an imagined people resided). They took seriously the claims based on treaties, on “customary right” and “the history of actual practice,” and discussed them even if they rejected them, while they dismissed claims based on the principle of nationality as too absolute and essentialist.Footnote 49 A contingent commonality of customs or even language conferred no rights, held no normative power.
Most conservative authors, unlike liberals, simply did not perceive international affairs through the normative lens of the principle of nationality. Herbert Cowell remarked on “the redistribution of territory, which is sure to follow in the wake of a considerable war,” without any sense that this change in governing state could be inherently problematic.Footnote 50 This contrasted with the liberal belief that the territory of state and nation should coincide, or at least that territory was not to be transferred from one state to another without the wishes of its inhabitants being considered.Footnote 51 Since conservatives did not acknowledge the salience of the idea of nations, the latter's self-government was for them a non-issue.Footnote 52 Conservatives furthermore argued against nationality's significance for the unifications of Italy and Germany, and they rejected nationality as a prescriptive concept, taking precedence over the de facto arrangements of politics and implying a more ethical configuration of the European sphere.Footnote 53 Instead they were primarily concerned with the peace and stability of Europe.
THE NOTION OF NATIONALITY AS A THREAT TO EUROPE
Even as conservative commentators ridiculed the notion of nationality as a mere flight of poetic fancy, they warned of the dangers it presented to the established order of European international relations. The main role which conservatives discerned for the sentiment of nationality was as a spur to aggression. On the one hand, for people passionately caught up in the idea of nationality, the sentiment would function as an encouragement to war. The likely mismatch between the principle of nationality's normative order and the de facto configuration of Europe would imply territorial acquisition through military conquest. On the other hand, for people overtaken by a more general territorial ambition and desire for military glory, the principle of nationality functioned as an ad hoc justification available to legitimize, to audiences who subscribed to the principle, a course of conquest. In particular, conservatives worried that the principle and sentiment of nationality subverted the Vienna settlement and legitimized foreign interventions, fostered bids for hegemony over Europe, and undermined the domestic stability of states.
Nationality as a justification for military intervention: Italy and the Vienna settlement
During the 1850s, conservative commentators still viewed the 1815 Treaty of Vienna as the basis of European order and stability. By the late 1850s, they had become alarmed at the Treaty's possible disintegration, and they identified the principle of nationality as a particular threat to the treaty's normative force. British liberals seemed to privilege various sentiments of nationality over the Vienna settlement, which implied replacing the Treaty of Vienna with the principle of nationality as the ordering principle of Europe. Conservatives hoped to preserve the treaty system, in the context of new ideological and political realities, as a valuable legacy of great-power consensus and compromise.
In an 1862 article, Cecil defended the Vienna settlement against the attacks of liberal authors like Matthew Arnold. Arnold argued that the treaties of Vienna, “which took no account of popular ideas,” had actually ensured the instability of Europe “with their arbitrary distribution of the populations of Europe.”Footnote 54 Cecil disagreed vehemently with this assessment. He argued that the great powers had successfully “adjusted their differences at Vienna,” “so secur[ing] lasting peace to Europe.”Footnote 55 The aim of the Vienna settlement was to avoid another great war between the great powers, and in this aim it had succeeded admirably. Problems arose only when the domestic affairs of states became an issue in international politics. The principle of nationality, Cecil noted, functioned exactly to bring this pernicious state of affairs about—it even made the domestic configuration of states into the ordering principle of international affairs.Footnote 56 As a consequence, the principle of nationality made possible “interventions in the internal affairs of other nations on the plea of political sympathy” whenever an unscrupulous statesman wanted. It constituted “the real danger to Europe's future peace.”Footnote 57
In the Italian context in particular, conservatives thought that the invocation of the principle of nationality had allowed Napoleon III and Cavour to gain support and approbation among liberals for what was in effect a policy of military conquest and territorial aggrandizement.Footnote 58 As William Forsyth remarked on the implications of Italian events, “[Russell's] ‘Italy for the Italians’ is a captivating cry. It seems to express the sentiment of liberty with the force of a truism . . . [but it in fact implies] the right of one independent State to interfere and foment insurrection in the dominion of another.”Footnote 59 The notion of nationality, conservatives argued, fostered aggression and military interventions by making for confusion of the boundaries between the domestic and the international.
Confusion there was indeed in the debate on non-intervention, with liberals and conservatives having markedly different senses of where the boundaries between “inside” and “outside” were located. When discussing Italy as a political entity, conservatives used the existing states of Italy and their borders to demarcate the internal and external.Footnote 60 William Aytoun, discussing the internal disturbances in the Papal States early in 1860, portrayed the possible involvement of either Naples or Piedmont as external intervention, the thin end of a wedge which might lead to multiple great powers becoming involved.Footnote 61
Liberals’ affirmation of the notion of nationality led them to view Italian affairs as not intrinsically international, but primarily a matter of “local freedom and reform in the several states.”Footnote 62 Unlike conservatives, liberals had a tendency to think of Italy as a distinct realm. In January 1860 Gladstone was very concerned to prevent external, foreign intervention in central Italy, in the form of Austrian, Russian, or Prussian involvement. Only as an afterthought—a literal postscript in a letter to Russell—did Gladstone mention that Piedmont, too, was not to interfere in central Italy.Footnote 63 Liberals acted as if, morally speaking, the demarcation between the Italian nation and the rest of Europe, rather than the demarcations between existing states, was the salient distinction to make when considering the threat of external intervention in Italy.Footnote 64
As Piedmont meddled in and annexed first central and then south Italy, liberals argued that Britain should stand ready to protect this internal, progressive development of Italy against reactionary foreign intervention. Conservatives, lacking the assumption of Italian nationhood and endorsement of the principle of nationality, remarked rather incredulously that liberals fulminated against potential acts of external intervention, in order to safeguard a whole series of actual interventions in the affairs of other states on the part of Piedmont. Forsyth criticized Russell's position in the latter's October 1860 dispatch, arguing that “the Government had preached to Austria and France the doctrine of non-intervention as the one sole principle to be observed by the Great Powers in the question of Italy,” but that “in the opinion of Lord John Russell, this doctrine of non-intervention did not apply to Garibaldi or Victor Emmanuel . . . [who were] justified in interfering because he was an Italian patriot . . . an Italian king.”Footnote 65
Forsyth's rejection of the principle of nationality played a central role in his argument:
we cannot admit that Garibaldi was “a patriot fighting for the independence of his country,” unless we assume that there was no difference between a subject of Sardinia and a subject of Naples, because both were Italians . . . Will [Russell] venture to assert that community of language effaces distinction of country, or that, according to the doctrine of natural boundaries, geography is to determine citizenship and allegiance?Footnote 66
Forsyth subsequently argued for the priority of the established European order over the principle of nationality:
The question . . . is not as to the rights of subjects to resist, but the right of a stranger to interfere. But then it is alleged that Sardinia is not a stranger, because she is Italian; and that this gives her a title, which makes the case exceptional . . . we cannot admit that Sardinia alone . . . [is] to be held free from the obligations of international law.Footnote 67
For many liberals, including J. S. Mill, the principle of nationality was crucial to the logic of their position on intervention. Mill argued that when a government was foreign, like Austria in Lombardy, or depended on the support of a foreign power, like those of central Italy, then there existed a state of continual external intervention. Here Mill supposed the existence of a nationality and he considered this the entity which was to be sovereign, to decide on the configuration of its internal affairs without outside interference. The polities actually existing, let alone their governments, were secondary, and could only lay claim to a right to non-interference if they conformed to the wishes of their people.Footnote 68 Conservatives, in contrast, thought of the principle of non-interference as a simple injunction to respect the boundaries and accept the governments of the existing polities of the European sphere. By subverting this simple but powerful norm, the principle of nationality would, conservatives argued, throw Europe into conflict and disorder.
Nationality and the threat of hegemony over Europe
Mid-Victorian conservative commentators consistently argued that the notion of nationality was a primary enabler of military aggression in Europe. The exact content of this argument changed over the decades, however, to fit the changing realities of European international relations. During the unification of Italy, as Austria's treaty rights regarding the peninsula were widely ignored, conservatives cast the principle of nationality as a threat to the Treaty of Vienna and its politics of compromise and great-power consensus. By the mid-1860s, however, they felt obliged to acknowledge the demise of the Vienna settlement. Conservatives now argued, in reaction first to German unification and then to Russian belligerence, that nationality was a threat because it could easily excuse already powerful countries to expand further and seek hegemony over Europe. Conservatives thus attempted to delegitimize the novel notion of nationality by associating it with that classic bugbear of European international politics: a monarch or country's attempt at universal dominion over the Continent.
Patterson, Cecil, Dasent and Wilson, some of the conservative commentators who paid most attention to the role of nationality, thought of nationality as a new influence—“the modern sentiment of nationality”—but one which fitted well within the established narrative of countries making a bid for universal monarchy or European hegemony.Footnote 69 While the sentiment of nationality might in theory seem more constrained in its scope than these aims—even seem antithetical to them—in practice, these conservatives argued, the sentiment of nationality was effectively on the same continuum as the desire for European hegemony.
This was the role in which Patterson cast the principle of nationality in his discussion of Napoleon III's foreign-policy project. Patterson developed this argument through a direct analogy with the developments surrounding the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars: “Napoleon III revives the policy of his Uncle.”Footnote 70 The project of Napoleon III was different only in that these days one needed a justification—“a homage, however insincere, to public opinion”—to obscure a policy of territorial aggrandizement: “his Principle, ‘the sovereignty of the people,’ . . . is a mere mask for his ambition”; “in the principle of nationality . . . he finds a safe and potent lever for assailing the existing fabric of European power . . . to aggrandise France amidst the general disorder.”Footnote 71 The principle of nationality, Patterson argued, functioned first of all as an excuse for Napoleon III to destroy the Vienna settlement and gain European hegemony, after which he could reorder Europe to the glory and aggrandizement of France.
Conservatives perceived this possibility of nationalist passion leading to a project of hegemony over Europe most strongly during the 1870s, first in the pan-Teutonism of Germany and later in the pan-Slavism of Russia.Footnote 72 Wilson remarked that the exhortations in German debates for Germany to rule “wherever any vestige of that nationality is extant” were in effect “German claims to something like universal dominion.”Footnote 73 George Dasent worried that due to the dominant influence of the sentiment of nationality in Germany “the world . . . [might] see a repetition of the Napoleonic conquests.”Footnote 74 Here the German sentiment of nationality directly implied a bid for European hegemony. Wilson noted that this combination of German nationalism and the resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire was intellectually incoherent: “but the baseless fabric of an anachronistic vision.”Footnote 75 In practice, though, they were mingled without problem. This was the realm of ideas and emotion, after all, not reason. Cecil affirmed the same conclusion. The sentiment of nationality, he thought, revolved mostly around a wish for one's nationality to have hegemony over Europe.Footnote 76 Certainly, it was related to a notion of rightful territorial boundaries. For Cecil, however, as for Wilson, a crucial feature of this conception was the expansive character which it could assume.Footnote 77 In the end, pan-ethnic unity and universal dominion were similar goals in that both implied the creation of a vast empire through a series of major wars, resulting in the absence of any semblance of a balance of power in Europe.
For conservative authors, the notion of the balance of power held a strong normative force as the best means, long-established and its efficacy proven by nothing less than the Napoleonic wars, through which to preserve the order of Europe and prevent the hegemony of a single state. Conservatives perceived the principle of nationality undermining the norm of a balance of power, being proposed as an alternative ordering of European politics. In the context of German unification and Russian abrogation of the neutrality of the Black Sea, a leader writer for The Globe juxtaposed both principles and argued that the balance of power was still the best lodestone for international affairs. Its detractors argued, according to The Globe, that the ethical principle of nationality trumped the pragmatic considerations of the balance of power. It was unacceptable to prevent a state from expanding though “the natural concretion of kindred [races].” “But,” the Globe’s author continued, “what then? What is to prevent an empire of race from becoming an empire of conquest?”Footnote 78
Once a state had become the dominant power through national accretion, there would be no barrier left to stop it from expanding further and conquering its neighbouring small, independent states. And, the author noted, there was every reason to assume such a development: “We shall be told, of course, that we start from a mistake, because empires founded on nationality will respect nationality in others. But that is the purest assumption. Is it not characteristic of dominant races to assume they have missions?”Footnote 79 Allowing the principle of nationality to trump the balance of power—not stopping a state from expanding into a position of continental dominance, when such an expansion came through national accretion—would finally allow that anathema of European politics, a hegemonic state bent on universal dominion, to be realized. The organizing principle of international politics should, the author argued, first of all provide “security for the peace of the world [and] the liberty of nations [i.e. states].”Footnote 80 The balance of power, conservatives observed, had always secured Europe against both general war and universal dominion, and was still Europe's best guarantee of order, stability and independence. The notion of nationality, in contrast, was a threat to the order of Europe: the sentiment of nationality fostered the other bellicose passions, while the principle of nationality provided yet another excuse for wars of aggression and bids for European hegemony.
This second type of conservative argument against nationality was in tension with the first: the notion of nationality was imaginary, not a real driving force of international affairs, and the notion of nationality effectively threatened the peace and order of Europe. Conservative authors did not address this seeming contradiction; indeed, both strands sometimes appeared entwined in the same article.Footnote 81 In the most charitable interpretation, this was a paradox resulting from nationality's artificially created influence among the masses. The sentiment of nationality did not motivate the actual agents of international politics: statesmen, states and their institutions. It could thus, pace liberals, not have a positive force as a counterbalance to schemes of aggression. Quite the opposite: the sentiment of nationality was influential only when demagogues chose to utilize it as a justification for aggrandizement. At times, however, these same authors warned that statesmen would come to feel obliged to pander to nationalist passion, at which point the notion of nationality surely would have causal force, and the paradox indeed collapsed into a contradiction.Footnote 82
The sentiment of nationality as a threat to domestic as well as international stability
While discussing the role of nationality in international affairs, conservative commentators also presented the sentiment of nationality as a cause of domestic instability—whereas liberals affirmed the opposite conclusion. Many liberals perceived the principle of cohesion of society as present among the population, which was to “feel that they are one people,” a national community with a national character.Footnote 83 For conservatives, in contrast, cohesion lay not in a shared identity, but rather in a shared patriotic pride in certain institutions. People all had a vertical relationship with certain institutions, such as the Crown and the empire, rather than a horizontal relationship with one another.Footnote 84 A sentiment of nationality was not needed, and could indeed prove positively harmful, a cause of instability and strife. The inconvenient “new-born enthusiasm of nationality” could make for disloyal subjects domestically, and internationally for a neighbour intent on forcibly recovering “its” territory.Footnote 85 Domestic discontent and a foreign desire for revenge were possible without any sentiment of nationality, but the latter, conservatives thought, intensified and prolonged these passions, to the extent that certain territories could become a burden rather than a boon to the country.
The first problem which the sentiment of nationality could create for states was that of disaffected subject populations. These were a source of domestic instability and thus of state weakness. Conservative commentators observed this phenomenon in a variety of contexts, from discussions of the lack of vigour of the Austrian Empire to the future relationship between North and South after the American Civil War.Footnote 86 Oliphant in 1864 noted the troubles which Poland caused Russia, Hungary caused Austria and Holstein caused Denmark.Footnote 87 Commenting on Prussia's intention to annex the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870–71, Cecil was one of several conservative authors who argued that annexation would merely saddle Prussia with intractable problems—and that it was exactly the sentiment of nationality which made these problems intractable.Footnote 88
Cecil started with the observation “that the French sentiment is intense among the population.”Footnote 89 And while in previous times one could have expected the people to switch their allegiance to Prussia over time—these people had in the past been part of a (very different) Germany, after all, and were now staunchly French—with the modern sentiment of nationality, such a shift in loyalty was unlikely to take place.Footnote 90 Instilled by teachers and publicists, the sentiment of nationality ensured that any disaffection on the part of subject populations would linger, that their loyalty would persistently be in doubt.Footnote 91 Alsace and Lorraine would not, Cecil concluded, be a source of strength to Prussia, with its population restive and loyal to another state, and would even come to impair the governance of Germany as a whole.Footnote 92 The sentiment of nationality, conservatives thought, had made any conquest and annexation a decidedly less attractive proposition, and put firm constraints on the worthwhile extent of any polity.
The second problem which the sentiment of nationality could create for a state was that of a neighbouring country with a persistent desire to recover territories lost to it. The annexation of Alsace and Lorraine would, conservatives argued, guarantee Germany another war with France. The other peace terms were relatively inconsequential and quickly forgotten—ask only them and Germany could be at peace. But demand territory and a passion for revenge would simmer in France, leading to renewed conflict at the earliest opportunity.Footnote 93 Conservatives did not themselves affirm the indivisibility of a country's territory, but they did recognize that elements of the general populace, infused with the sentiment of nationality, would perceive their country's territory as such.Footnote 94 These people would consequently persist in looking for an opportunity to go to war and recover the lost lands.
Conservative commentators thus presented the notion of nationality as a threat. The sentiment of nationality caused instability in both the domestic and international realms, while the principle itself functioned as an excuse for varied forms of aggression in international affairs, from military interventions in the affairs of other states all the way to grand projects for hegemony over Europe.
NATIONALITY VERSUS LIBERTY AND PATRIOTISM
Finally, in addition to marginalizing the notion and painting it as a menace, conservative commentators hoped to deflect the threat of nationality by making it an indictment of the liberals’ own world view, by arguing that a commitment to nationality often hindered the advancement of constitutional liberty and a proper patriotic loyalty to institutions. Whereas liberals tended to assume that all these values were closely connected and that progress would be general across all fronts, conservatives countered that the sentiment of nationality and demand for self-determination could put the causes of liberty and patriotism in jeopardy—thereby implying that liberals, if they truly valued liberty and patriotism, would rescind their approval of the principle of nationality.Footnote 95 Conservative commentators admonished liberals that they sympathized only with groups arguing from “an ideal basis” and proposing “revolutionary measures.”Footnote 96 The principle of nationality was an absolute idea, could not admit the possibility of compromise, and consequently could not recognize or value established rights, incremental improvements in liberty, or a limited autonomy providing the institutional trappings of patriotism.
For conservatives, separatism was wrong because its patriotism involved the nation and with it the desire for self-determination. For the radically liberal British positivists, patriotism was admirable exactly when it involved nationalism. Harrison praised the moment among any people “when the lofty conception of nation first comes to supersede the narrower idea of clan or tribe.”Footnote 97 Varouxakis concludes that “the implication is that the Positivists . . . respected all patriotisms”—all patriotisms which were based in a focus on the people, on nationality, as this shift from the local to the national was what made them valuable.Footnote 98 Conservatives, in contrast, held that any patriotism which involved nationalism would quickly, in its focus on the nation and its self-determination, marginalize any concern for those institutions which conservatives considered the proper focus of patriotic sentiment.Footnote 99
Italy, Poland and the Danish duchies affair were the main debates where conservatives emphasized the perverse effects which striving after the principle of nationality had on the values of liberty and institutional reform. Conservative commentators invariably noted that the main obstacle to reform in Italy was not Austria, but “the wicked dogma of the extreme revolutionary party,” agitating for national independence, which left Austria no choice but repressive rule.Footnote 100 The principle of nationality also distracted people from more worthwhile endeavours, leading them to reject the authority of their de facto government and “dwell either in memory or imagination,” rather than pursue practical, local reforms of administration.Footnote 101 Cecil complained of the “obtuseness . . . [and] confusion . . . engendered by that strange mania for ideal nationalities which is the moral epidemic of the age, and which appears to have the power of overshadowing all substantial grievances.”Footnote 102 Conservatives considered the nationalist movement in Italy a distraction for its peoples at best, and the main cause of their repression at worst.
Patterson, Oliphant and Cecil all commented upon annexation, separatism and nationalist sentiment, in the context of the 1863–4 Polish question and Danish duchies affair. The tenor running through their arguments was that nationalists were too absolute in their demands. The separatists were wholly focused on independence and pursued this end at the cost of liberty, autonomy and the institutional trappings of their (erstwhile) polity, all the latter of which would be better realized if only the separatists could countenance compromise.
Conservatives thought that the established power, by virtue of being established, could expect to be reasoned with by disaffected parts of its population, rather than wholly rejected. Even if a territory had initially been “unjustly acquired,” Patterson argued—as Russia's Poland had been—after the conquering state had institutionally integrated the territory into the whole country, the conquering power “cannot be expected to cede it,” either to another state or to secession.Footnote 103 The problem with separatism based on the sentiment of nationality, Patterson argued, was that it could only conceive of independence as its end. If separatists were willing to grant their loyalty in return for concessions, then Russia could feel comfortable granting the occupied populace significant liberty, autonomy and the institutions which were the focus of the people's patriotism—in the case of Poland its Diet, army and fortresses. But since nationalist separatists did not care about the character or quality of government, only about the identity of it, “reconciliation becomes impracticable, and a cordial union . . . hopeless.” Separatists consequently forced the state into a choice between allowing the territory to secede and practising an “iron despotism.” The latter alternative was abhorrent, Patterson affirmed, but it was also “the natural consequence” of separatism; “what other course could [the ruler] follow?”Footnote 104
While Cecil and Oliphant were not as quick to absolve statesmen of censure over their repressive rule, they shared Patterson's assessment of the character of nationalist separatism—of its absolute aim and the counterproductive extremes to which this attitude led. Cecil remarked that the separatists in Holstein unequivocally rejected Danish rule, even when constitutional reform meant that Danish citizens would be “enjoying a liberty with which they are little acquainted” in the neighbouring German polities.Footnote 105 The sentiment of nationality cared not for the “reconciliation of conflicting interests . . . [or] attainment of constitutional liberty,” those proper “modest objects of desire.”Footnote 106 “How impossible it is,” Oliphant grumbled, “to devise a form of government which shall satisfy a people whose sole aspiration is separation,” since “unfortunately there is no amount of political liberty which will satisfy the sentiment of national independence, which is in most instances unreasonable . . . people would rather govern themselves badly than let other people govern them well.”Footnote 107
For conservatives, the crucial factor in matters of annexation and separatism was the emotional nature of the sentiment of nationality. This meant an absolutist politics with little scope for compromise or settlement, which would fail to further the values of liberty and patriotism. As a consequence, while conservatives were generally sceptical of the benefits of annexation, they also lacked sympathy for separatist or nationalist movements, let alone argued that ethics put these movements in the right.
Even effective secession and the granting of self-determination could, conservatives argued, be a curse for a people, rather than a blessing. Some people would be better off as safely part of an empire. Discussing the Ottoman Empire, conservatives argued that there were two goods which an empire provided and which would be lost were it to disintegrate. First, an empire had the role of ruling the various ethnic and religious groups living throughout its territory.Footnote 108 Conservatives predicted that these groups, if given free rein, would in fact harass each other more than the Ottomans oppressed them. The Ottoman Empire was all that stood “between its subject races and the fearful misery incident to a race-struggle and a religious war.”Footnote 109 Second, collecting multiple peoples in an empire made it possible to have a polity powerful enough to be independent. Conservatives here invoked precedent; Greece, Serbia and Romania had separated from the Ottoman Empire but had never really become sovereign states. And just like Serbia and Romania, conservatives argued, any newly created autonomous states in south-eastern Europe would fall under the domination of Russia.Footnote 110 Empire secured order and a certain independence, neither of which self-determination would provide.
Conservatives thus deployed two variants of a jeopardy argument against the sentiment of nationality and self-determination. One generally applicable argument entailed that the sentiment of nationality made it impossible for a people to retain, when part of an empire, those institutions valued by a “proper” patriotism. The other was aimed at liberals in particular and argued that the sentiment of nationality advanced at the cost of constitutional liberty. For the British Liberal Party, the conceit that they were the champion of constitutional liberty in Europe was a central tenet of their self-image and their political vocabulary.Footnote 111 Liberals generally assumed that constitutional liberty progressed in tandem with self-determination. Discussing the futures of Poland and Italy, J. S. Mill, for instance, stated that “nationality is desirable, as a means to the attainment of liberty” and that “liberty often needs nationality in order to exist.”Footnote 112 Conservatives tried to disprove this assumption and to imply that British liberal supporters of national movements were willing to sacrifice liberty and constitutional principles for the principle of nationality.Footnote 113 The liberals would either have to reconceive their role in Europe, relinquishing their identity as the champion of constitutional liberty, or, if they truly valued liberty, they would have to renounce the sentiment of nationality and the popular movements for self-determination. The abstract idea of nationality, conservatives argued, endangered the real, valuable achievements of liberty and patriotism.
CONCLUSION
Mid-Victorian conservatives positively disapproved of the notion of nationality—both of its reality, in effecting a detrimental homogenization of society, and of its idea, in providing many an excuse for war and in marginalizing the values of constitutional liberty and patriotic loyalty towards institutions. The only sense in which, some conservatives conceded, nationality was incontrovertibly present, was as a sentiment among parts of the people, merely providing demagogues with yet another strategy of justification for acts aimed at aggrandizement and martial glory. Conservative commentators thus perceived and presented the notion of nationality as a threat—a threat which they tried to deflect by pointing out how the principle and sentiment of nationality undermined not just the established international order, thereby fostering aggression, but also the ends of patriotism and of constitutional liberty, which the British liberal supporters of national movements professed to respect.
This strong animosity towards the notion of nationality was a distinct feature of mid-Victorian conservative opinion. This attitude faded from the 1880s onward, eventually to be replaced by a positive affirmation of nationality and the English national character. Why this sharp change, which has consigned the mid-Victorian conservative problematization of the notion of nationality to obscurity? Partly it was a side effect of a more general change in the character of British conservatism in the 1880s, and in particular of the sections of the intellectual elite who were its opinion-formers. Over the 1880s and 1890s the intellectual core of conservatism became an individualist position against idealist collectivism.Footnote 114 With this shift, a large tranche of centrist, individualist liberals (such as J.F. Stephen and Henry Maine) came to espouse a conservative position. These individualist liberals, writing primarily in the Saturday Review, had in fact been strongly committed to the principle of nationality during the mid-Victorian era, proposing the application of the principle to resolve conflicts and establish stability and order in Europe.Footnote 115 Over the last decades of the nineteenth century the conservative view of society evolved from a focus on traditions and established institutions to first an organicism and later an organic nationalism, until by the First World War the affirmation of British nationalism and the national character had become the mainstream conservative position.Footnote 116 These developments left little scope for the memory of the earnestly felt problematization of nationality by the conservative authors of mid-Victorian Britain.
