The module examines the intellectual and political processes behind the transformation of states into nation states in nineteenth-century Europe. Emerging from...

Nations, States and Empires in Transnational Perspectives (HIST0361)

The module examines the intellectual and political processes behind the transformation of states into nation states in nineteenth-century Europe. Emerging from the period of revolutionary turmoil after 1789 and two decades of brutal warfare under Napoleon, these new states were supposed to be homogenous in their ethnic and linguistic composition, and ideally, include all members of a national community in a single structure. This dramatic transformation of Europe’s political map was based on a teleological understanding of historical time according to which the formation of nation states followed the law of progress and modernisation. This process paid tribute to the role of national movements, most of which considered Europe’s established system of states to be anachronistic and lacking legitimacy. In their view, the formation of “modern” nation states represented an inevitable step in the historical development of Europe, which required a substantial redrawing of political borders and changed the ways in which people and states related to each other. National ideology introduced new notions of identity, as well as creating new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion within existing states. While this process dominated the so-called ‘age of nationalism’, there existed alternative models. Moreover, not all national movements aimed for independent statehood, especially in the Habsburg monarchy. Multinational empires, federal structures as well as cosmopolitan ideals offered alternatives to the formation of states solely defined on the basis of ethnic homogeneity. Combining historiographical debate with the analysis of selected primary sources, the course challenges orthodoxies that describe the formation of national states as the inevitable outcome of a natural process.