VII

THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITY

ON

NE principle for which this war was fought was the political and territorial independence of small nations. One of the first results of the war will be the conferring of independent statehood upon various national units which have been denied independence by the force of larger States. For more than three hundred years years the principle of nationality has had a steady growth. It has had its periods of progress and its periods of reaction, but the general current of the stream has moved steadily and irresistibly forward. The strong impulse toward separate national States preceded the great democratic movement, and, in a sense, is independent of the impulse toward self-government. In fact, as Thomas Hill Green has pointed out, the aspiration for national unity, which must precede the organization of the State on a sound basis, for the time being readily yields itself to direction by a dynasty. Indeed, the

first two centuries of the history of the national State system were passed under the general prevalence and domination of the dynastic principle. At the same time it is true that the desire for the separate self-determined national State has received a great acceleration with the spread of democracy. If men are really to govern themselves (as opposed to having the forms of democracy), they desire to be associated with other men with whom they can really co-operate. They must be in a group the members of which have points of likeness which greatly outweigh their points of difference.1

It is not an accident, therefore, that in the long struggle between centralized political organization and local self-government the increase in the number of men and women participating in government has led to a more and more insistent demand for the grouping into separate States of those who, because of race, or geography, or religion, or tradition, or the demands of trade, are conscious of a permanent, common interest. Viscount Bryce disclaims the ability to define nationality, and then gives this excellent picture of what we mean when we speak of it:

1 See especially C. J. H. Hayes, Political and Social History of Modern Europe; Robinson and Beard, The Development of Modern Europe; J. H. Rose, Nationality in Modern History.

But we can recognize it when we see it, and can in each case explain by the light of history how it comes to be what it is, the product of various concurrent forces, which have given to a section or group of men a sense of their unity, as the conscious possessors of common qualities and tendencies which are in some way distinctive, marking off the group from others and creating in it the feeling of a corporate life. Race is one of these forces, language is another, religion is a third, often of the greatest importance. A common literature-perhaps in the rude form of traditions and ballads in which those traditions are preserved, as in the songs of the Serbian people all these things count. The memories of the heroes who helped to achieve liberty for Switzerland, of the perils they faced and the victories they won, have been to its people a constant stimulus to national sentiment. Even stronger, in some countries, than recollections of glory have been the recollections of suffering, of sorrows endured, and of sacrifices nobly but vainly made.2

A short review of the development of some of the principal national States will easily prove how correct Viscount Bryce is. Austria-Hungary before this war was a State, but not a nation; Poland and Bohemia were nations, but not States; France and Italy were nations as well as States, but neither was racially homogeneous.

2 James Bryce, Essays and Addresses in Wartime, Chap. VII, P. 129.

The United States is a strong federal State, but because of the number of races from all over the world that make up its population it had been questioned whether it was really a nation. The ready acceptance of a universal military service law and the willingness of Americans of foreign birth and even of foreign tongue to die in France for what they believed the word America signified, may properly be said to have proved that America is a nation. The ancient States were not properly national States, although Athens, Sparta and Rome might well be called semi-national city-States. Neither the ancient patriarchal empires nor Greece nor Rome, however, welded their dependent populations into such homogeneous cultural groups as to enable us to say that they were the conscious possessors of common qualities and mutual interests or had that “will to live together” which Renan believed to be the ultimate test of nationality.3

Rome held the world in comparative order for several centuries, and the tradition of Rome profoundly affected government for many centuries following her fall. With the gradual breaking up of the Roman Empire, the Feudal System furnished but a rude and loosely knit

3 Cf. James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, Chaps. II and VII.

substitute for imperial order and authority. Out of the decentralization of the Feudal System, however, the forces of historical development ultimately produced a new and more advanced form of unified political organization—the modern national State. The vassal looked to his lord for justice and order. Clashes between feudal lords eliminated the weak and developed the strong and an overlord or king was produced. The beginnings of modern commerce and the accompanying rise of a middle class profoundly affected the political development of western Europe. The king began to have at his disposal an independent source of income, which enabled him to hire a loyal army and administrative organization and render himself independent of the feudal lords. Then the intermediate feudal lords disappeared and there was a direct rallying of the people about the king. If the people had enough traits in common, and were conscious of that fact, they became a nation. From the latter part of the fifteenth century to the present time this process of national development has been operating unceasingly.*

The history of France may be taken as an illustration of this process of nation-building. Charlemagne, in the eighth century, was King of

4 F. Oppenheimer, The State, Chaps. V, VI; W. Cunningham, Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects, Book V.