THE AWAKENING OF SUBMERGED NATIONALITIES



"In regions where half-animal men are living, let us establish schools, let us construct a railway, and tolerate a printing-press. Twenty years later national feeling will be born. After two generations it will explode if you try to suppress it. In this manner the national question is born out of the very nature of civilization."
When one sympathetic writer made this analysis and prediction, nationalist agitation had been going on in Europe for well-nigh a century. This was true not only among major peoples (French, British, German, Italian, Russian), for whom it served to create or consolidate first-class "national states." But it was also true among lesser peoples who sill remained in political and social subjection to others. It was especially true of those who, being preponderantly agricultural and hence "backward," were apt to be described by sociologists as "half-animal men."

I. Nationalist agitation everywhere

Since at least the 1820's and 1830's there had been hardly one of these latter peoples anywhere in Europe that had not had in its midst a galaxy of romantic intellectuals, resurrecting its folk speech, folk ballads, folk customs and costumes, celebrating in epic verse or ponderous tome its more or less mythical past, and founding little societies and schools, theaters and publishing houses, to spread its cult among the "masses". Railway construction (and wood-pulp paper) merely expedited the popular propaganda already under way. Nationalist agitation among "subject" or submerged peoples had almost invariably been directed, in first instance, toward cultural, rather than political, ends. And unless and until it turned to politics, disturbing public "order" and evoking legislative action in an existent state, little or no attention was paid to it by Europe at large.

Among Bulgarians, for example, nationalist agitation had been rife for some time before 1870, but few persons in western Europe knew any thing about it-or who the Bulgarians were-until the heralded disorders and massacres of 1875 and the resulting Russo-Turkish War. Likewise, Europe enriched its previous scanty knowledge of Catalans and Basques and their autonomist demands during the Spanish commotions of the early 1870's.

A. Russification

The haziest notions endured still longer about a people variously referred to as Little Russian or Ukrainian or Ruthenian. In the middle 1880's one learned from the public press that the Tsar was "Russifying" the Ukraine; and later, in 1908, one was startled to read of the assassination of the Polish governor of Galicia, Count Potocki, by a "Ruthenian" student. One recognized that nationalism was at work among "Ukrainians" and "Ruthenians," though one was not sure yet whether they were a single people, or two-or maybe three. In fact, developing nationalist activity thrust quite a variety of hitherto neglected peoples into the European limelight during the three decades after 1871. Russifying decrees of the Tsar's government publicized (and accentuated) the nationalism of Lithuanians, and Finns, and more vaguely that of other Baltic peoples as well as of Little Russians and White Russians. Within the Grand Duchy of Finland, political pressure of the Finnish-speaking peasants induced the swedish-speaking governmental class to concede statutory equality of Finnish with Swedish in the law courts, in the administration and in the university.

B. Particularistic nationalism in Norway

In Norway, also, a particularistic nationalism came to the fore with the increasing influence of the peasantry on the local parliament. For the Norwegian peasants, resentful of Swedish "aristocracy," backed those politicians who were most insistent on Norway's rights under the political Union with Sweden, just as they backed patriotic professors who were trying to break cultural ties with Denmark by substituting, as the country's literary language, and artificial synthesis of indigenous rural dialects for the Danish speech of the cities. The Norwegian parliament recognized the equality of the two languages and successively admitted the former to the schools. By the end of the century a loudly vocal element of Norwegian nationalists was punctuating denunciation of the Swedish Union with demands on Denmark for the "return of the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, and even with protests against Britain's retention of the Hebrides and Orkneys.

C. Provencal nationalism

A Provencal nationalism of a purely literary and cultural sort had been inaugurated by Frederick Mistral and six fellow poets with their founding of the Felibrige Society back in 1854. In 1876, the society, now much enlarged, elaborated its organization and propaganda for a "Provencal revival" throughout the French regions of Provence, Lanquedoc, and Aquitaine and the Spanish province of Catalonia. Then in 1892 a group of its members, headed by Frederick Amouretti and Charles Maurras, formally put forth a demand for Provencal autonomy within a federalized France, with which demand immediately concurred representatives of other recently born "regionalisms" - Breton, Corsican, and Basque.

The persons involved were not numerous and their prime loyalty was unquestionably to France, but inasmuch as they were mainly Royalist in politics and Catholic in religion, they were denounced by centralizing and anti-clerical Republicans as an insidious element of "reaction."

D. Flemish nationalism

In Belgium Flemish nationalism passed in the 1870's from intellectuals to the compact masses of the northern and western districts; and, entering politics in the 1880's, it helped to discomfit the liberals whose chief strength was among the French-speaking Walloons, and to put the Catholic party in power. In 1889 an act of parliament prescribed the use of Flemish in legal cases involving a defendant of that nationality; and another act, in 1898, made Flemish, equally with French, an official language of Belgium.

Beginning in 1887 there were monster Flemish demonstrations every July 11, the anniversary of French defeat in the medieval "Battle of the Golden Spurs"; and ;in 1895 the writer August Vermeylen, a disciple of Hegel and Max Stirner, initiated a left-wing "Activist" movement by his attack on ..Belgian tyranny." "All young and fighting forces," he wrote, "wrench themselves free from oppression, disregard law in so far as possible, and turn their backs on parliaments and democracies." Two years later a Flemish teacher at Ypres, in collaboration with a group of Dutch intellectuals, founded a Pan-Netherlandish League to emphasize and safeguard the essential oneness of Netherlandish language and "race" in Flanders, the Dutch Netherlands, French Artois, and South Africa.

One striking feature of the period's nationalist agitation, obviously, was that it affected and widely publicized a number of European peoples that had not previously been supposed to have national self-consciousness or political aspirations. Another of its features, even more startling, was its quickened tempo and fiercer manifestation among subject peoples already generally known to be nationalist (at least culturally)-Poles, Czechs, Irish, etc.

Nationalism of these peoples was magnified by their desire to emulate the recent successes of Germans, Italians, Magyars, and Balkan peoples, and then quickly aggravated and embittered by their being treated as inferiors and made the object of Germanization, Russification, or other repressive measures. Besides, they could now utilize the new popular journalism and in most countries the new democratic franchise (and constitutional guarantees of freedom of press, speech, and association) to give their grievances unprecedented airing and to create extraordinary difficulties for their "oppressors". From the 1880's it was. clear that nationalism among these peoples was not an affair of intellectuals or a class but that it represented a real mass movement.

E. Irish nationalism

Irish nationalism entered a new phase at this time. In 1879 the magnetic Charles Stewart Parnell, Anglo-Irish Protestant whose almost fanatical hatred of England he seems to have imbibed from his American mother, was drawing the Catholic Irish electorate into his newly formed "Nationalist Party" and collecting funds for it from Irish settlers and sympathizers in the United States, with the result that four-fifth of all the Irish members of the British parliament soon constituted a solid Nationalist phalanx in support of his demand for a separate Irish parliament.

Also in 1879, Michael Davitt, ex-peasant, ex-Fenian, and professional agitator, launched a "Land League," which speedily enlisted the bulk of Irish peasants in the cause of national agrarian reform. Neither Land League nor Nationalist parliamentarians employed conventional methods of the kid-glove variety. While the one incited to acts of physical violence against objectionable landlords or treated their land agents as it treated unobliging Captain Boycott, the other raised fracases at Westminster by heckling speakers, obstructing parliamentary business, and hurling inkstands.

Gladstone, having failed to quiet the agitation by the sedative of a Land Act, resorted anew to coercion, putting Ireland under martial law and jailing Parnell, Davitt, and several of their lieutenants. But coercion was a failure, too; it brought so many reprisals that only the stationing of the whole British army in Ireland could have coped with them. Finally, in 1887, Gladstone accepted Parnell's terms and agreed to sponsor Irish "home rule." Sponsor it he actually did that very year, and again in 1893; but both of his bills the British parliament threw out.

In the 1890's Irish nationalism was in a transitional stage. The Nationalist Party was weakened by the failure of the home rule bills, and still more by internal dissensions following Parnell's disgrace and death; and the Irish Land Purchase Acts which the Conservatives enacted stole much of the thunder of the Land League.

In the same decade, however, developments below the surface were shaping new and more radical ends for Irish nationalism. In 1893 Douglas Hyde inaugurated the "Gaelic League" for the preservation and extension of the native Irish language. In 1894 Sir Horace Plunkett founded the "Agricultural Organization Society" to promote cooperative enterprise and material well-being among the Irish farmers. In 1899, most momentous of all, there returned from the diamond mines in South Africa an obscure young man, Arthur Griffith by name, with an idea that Ireland, like Hungary, should not beg home rule or anything else of a "foreign" parliament, but rely on herself and her own powers of passive resistance to achieve full statehood. It was the conception of Sinn Fein.

F. Czech nationalism

Czech nationalism ran a course similar to Irish. Though Bohemia had the form of local self-government in a surviving semi-feudal diet, this body possessed few powers, and it had long been dominated by the province's German minority (the so-called Sudentens) , who collaborated most zealously after 1867 with fellow German nationalists in the Reichsrat at Vienna to maintain German ascendancy throughout the Austrian dominions. Opposition of the Czech majority in Bohemia (and Moravia) was intensified thereby; and as a mark of special resentment against the withholding from them of the national autonomy accorded to Hungary, their elected deputies absented themselves from the Reichsrat during the period of centralizing liberal ministries from 1867 to 1879.

With the succession of Count Taaffe's more sympathetic Conservative ministry in the latter year, the Czech deputies took their seats at Vienna. They comprised two nationalist groups: the "Old Czechs," led by Palacky's aging and conciliatory son-in-law, von Rieger; and the "Young Czechs," followers of the more youthful and radical Dr. Karel Kramar. Between them, they obtained some favors. Alongside the German university at Prague was established in 1882 a new Czech university. In 1883 the Czechs were enabled to secure a majority in the Bohemian diet, and 1886 local officials were obliged to use the Czech as well as the German language in the transaction of business.

Nevertheless, what the Czechs most desired-the restoration of a fully autonomous Bohemia-there were denied. The result was the electoral defeat of the moderate "Old Czechs" and the adoption by the reinforced "Young Czechs" of the disorderly methods of contemporary Irish Nationalists. Indeed the Austrian Reichsrat fared worse than the British parliament, for Czech obstructionists were ably seconded by deputies of numerous other disgruntled nationalities-Slovenes, Italians, Croats, Ruthenians, Rumanians.

The Austrian government retaliated in 1893 by placing Prague under martial law and suspending jury trial and freedom of the press in Czech territories. For two years this forceful repression continued, followed then by an ominous lull in Bohemia and new but unavailing protestations of friendliness at Vienna. Kramar was already advising the Czechs to expect deliverance by Russia, and Professor Masaryk was preaching a still more radical "realist" nationalism which should overspread Slovaks a.d well as Czechs and build, by war if necessary, a free and united Czechoslovakia.

G. Magyarization in Hungary

The subject nationalities of Hungary were less in the limelight during the period, mainly because the Hungarian electoral laws prevented then from using the parliament at Budapest, as the Czechs used the parliament at Vienna, to advertise their grievances and demands. This is not to say, however, that they acquiesced in the Magyarization which was inflicted upon them and which was far more repressive than anything felt by the Czechs. On the contrary the masses of Croatian, Serb, Slovak and Rumanian peasantry were now more determined than ever to hold to their respective national traditions and "rights" and more ready to accept the leadership of extremists. Incidentally it may be remarked that their intensifying nationalism had a sharp note of anti- Semitism in it, a reaction against the support which Hungarian Jewry gave to Magyarization.

H. Polish nationalism

Poles, distributed among three powerful states, were in a peculiarly difficult position. None of them was without the dream of a gloriously resurrected and reunited Polish state, but they differed as to how it might be realized. One group-rapidly diminishing-looked to Russia or Pan-Slavism to perform the miracle; another, to the Germanic Central Powers; while a third, skeptical about the early appearance of any messiah, urged self-reliance, a stimulated solidarity among Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Poles, and a vigorous campaign looking to the defense of a common national culture and the securing of provincial autonomy.

From practical necessity, Polish nationalism actually developed along the lines of this last program. In Prussian Posen it concentrated on opposing and countering, alike in parliament and in the countryside, the "Germanization" efforts and enactments of the time. In "Congress Poland" it reacted bitterly-about all it could do against the severer "Russification." In Austria, the Poles were happier. Here, where the imperial government wanted their help as a counterpoise to the hostility of other minorities, they escaped all cultural repression and virtually dominated the entire province of Galicia. Here, too, Polish nationalists from Posen or Warsaw were free to congregate with those of Cracow or Lemberg, and by speech and press to stimulate ever more militant Polish nationalism across the borders.

II. Conclusion

Those who predicted that the nationalism of submerged peoples would explode after two generations if the attempt were made to suppress it turned out to be right. About forty years after the start of Russification, Magyarization, Germanization, and other large-scale attempts at repression, nationalism did explode. As one looks back upon the nationalist agitation of subject peoples in the 1870's and 1880's, one is likely to be struck by the modesty of its demands and the patience with which, even under increasing provocation, it awaited their fulfillment.

The "home rule" for which the Irish Nationalists asked in 1879 was such a slight boon, and they asked for nothing else for so long! The Czechs of that time had no wish to smash the Hapsburg empire; they and the Croatians, and even more the Serbs, Slovenes, Slovaks, and Rumanians, thought in terms of a federalized empire under which they would cherish their particular cultures and practice national "home rule"; and, with an optimism perhaps infectious in the Danube basin, they long clung to that thought in the face of Austrian rebuffs and Magyar assaults. Even the Poles were long-suffering, and might eventually have been content with mere dreaming if they had been interfered with as little by Russia and Prussia as by Austria.

But this is idle speculation. Nationalism of great "successful" people was too strong and proud, too saturated with racialism and imperialism and a sense of "historic mission," to remain tolerant of lesser, submerged peoples. And these, taking their cue from their "betters," presently gave indications that they might become equally intolerant if they ever got the chance.

Only tiny Switzerland, perched high above the rest of Europe, offered practical demonstration of how, through sane federalism and real liberty, diverse nationalities could live together in amity and evince a common patriotism. Although no great power paid serious attention to the Swiss demonstration, Switzerland remained at peace when later the world was at war, and Switzerland outlasted the empires of Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Tsar.



Send questions and suggestions to Professor Gerhard Rempel, Department of History, Western New England College. Last Revised 12-18-95.