Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815, to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. Attitudes were very different then from now. For the British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, one of the architects of the new Europe, Italy was no more than a ‘geographical concept’, and its unification as one state ‘unthinkable’.¹⁸ A German at the congress had much the same view about his own country. ‘The unification of all the German tribes in a single, undivided state,’ he said, was no more than a dream that had ‘been refuted by a thousand years of experience and ultimately cast aside . . . It is incapable of realisation by any operation of human ingenuity, nor can it be enforced by the bloodiest of revolutions; it is an aim pursued only by madmen.’ He concluded that if the idea of national unity gained the upper hand in Europe, ‘then a wasteland of bloody ruins will be the only legacy that awaits our descendants’.

¹⁹

The main aim of the Congress of Vienna was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about recreating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. ‘Spain and Portugal were restored under the former ruling families, Holland was enlarged by the former Austrian Netherlands, later to become Belgium, Switzerland was reconstituted, Sweden stayed united with Norway, and since the Pentarchy, the club of five major European powers, was unthinkable without France, the latter was left intact with its 1792 border.’²⁰

But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented, diffuse and powerless.²¹ Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were very disturbed by the so-called ‘Germanophiles’, who were determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord wrote to Louis XVIII from Vienna: ‘They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority. Allied with them are people from the universities, youngsters who have been primed with their theories, and all those who ascribe to German particularism all the sufferings that have been inflicted on the country in the course of the wars that have been fought there. The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan, their faith and their religion, they are ardent to the point of fanaticism . . . Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive? Who can say where a movement of that kind might stop?’

²²

At that point, in other words, the principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden – north and western Europe. The German-speaking lands, and Italy, were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural

nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order. One only has to look at the map to see why. ‘From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.’²³ No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become ‘mistress of the entire continent’.²⁴ For many, the minuscule Italian and German states guaranteed freedom. Although Italy and Germany were in a similar situation, in this regard, much of Italy was occupied by a foreign power (Austria in the north, the Bourbons in the south), and this too explains why modern nationalism began in Germany. In fact, the unification of Germany, and of Italy, were two of the seminal political events of the nineteenth century which – together with the Civil War in America – did so much to bring about the great industrial rivalry in the last decades of the 1800s, fashioning our modern world, but which also led eventually to the First World War, setting the stage for the calamitous twentieth century. How prescient Talleyrand was.²⁵